Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The London Novels by Colin MacInnes Absolute MacInnes. T he hero of Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes does not have a name, nor does he need one. For he is an emblem more than a character of that phenomenon of the 1950s, the teenager. An emblem of that supposedly classless class of youth as consumer and pioneer of style and 'cool', making his debut in British literature by way of MacInnes's second novel, now to be staged half a century later, in an adaptation by Roy Williams at Hammersmith's Lyric Theatre. MacInnes was the decadent chronicler of 1950s Notting Hill, a restless, volatile neighbourhood which was home to one of the UK's biggest West Indian immigrant communities, and the scene of notorious race riots in August 1958. Openly gay when homosexuality was still an illegal taboo, MacInnes revelled in what he saw as the impoverished area's exuberant exoticism. Absolute Beginners was the first novel to capture the city's emerging youth culture, its lustful, teenage adventure dovetailing into MacInnes's sexualised idolisation of black life in Notting Hill and climaxing with the riots that seared the neighbourhood. Nowadays known to many only by way of Julien Temple's almost universally derided film of 1986, Absolute Beginners and MacInnes's preceding book City of Spades, achieved cult status after their publication, and were the first to chronicle, for a white audience at least, the culture of the new immigrants to London. Compared by critics with JD Salinger's classic Catcher in the Rye, Absolute Beginnners is an attempt to create a sort of literary British James Dean - an antihero with no apparent demands on his time and no worry where the next ten bob is coming from as he rebounds across Notting Hill, with a keen sense of style but little sense of agency, from encounter to encounter with hustlers and pimps, fellow teenagers and a girl he takes pornographic pictures of. As he despairs of Britain after the riots, it is only the arrival of a group of 'grinning and chattering' West Indians that persuades him to stay - 'I flung my arms around the first of them, who was a stout old number with a beard' - promising them 'We're all going to. have a ball!.' MacInnes's hero does all this with a self-conscious but aimless self-assurance: 'He is MacInnes's fantasy figure, really, not a real character at all,' says the author's friend Francis Wyndham. 'I'm just not interested in the whole class crap that seems to needle you and all the tax-payers,' the teenager tells some 'pre-historic monster' of an adult, with a 'cool' snobbishness which MacInnes's companion on many of his Notting Hill sorties, the late Professor Richard Wollheim, compared to the 'Sang Froid' of Baudelaire's Dandy as he cruised through Fin-de-Siecle Paris with a similar sensibility, or lack of it. The stucco - nowadays pristine - was invariably peeling in those days when Notting Hill really was Notting Hill. The portals through which young professionals now set out for work or greet their dinner guests were then framed with rows of doorbells, each sounding in a dingy flat behind parchment-like paintwork. On those doorsteps up and down which automatous young men from Foxtons nowadays trot to show another 'stunningly appointed' apartment, children, their friends and parents used to chat and play the day away, a kaleidoscope of people - black, poor white, bohemian white or Spanish. These were the streets where I grew up, to which I have returned, though they are changed almost beyond recognition, where my father died last month and my mother still lives. My earliest memories were of 1958: 'nigger-hunters' pouring out of Ladbroke Grove station, and my young mother scolding a group of teddy boys kicking a black boy at Holland Park tube - 'What on earth do you think you're doing?' - in response to which, amazingly, they sloped off. Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement, with its brazen swastikas, had headquarters on Princedale Road. I remember someone trying to back a lorry into it, missing, and hitting poor Mr Benton's shoe shop instead. We used to play at the bomb site where the Kensington Hilton now stands and on the walls - after the white mobs laid waste to black Notting Hill, fire-bombing and brick-throwing wherever they heard the sound of bluebeat - were painted the letters KBW: Keep Britain White. Mostly, though, Notting Hill got on well with itself; the racist rioters came from without our crazy-paving of an urban village. It was, for the most part, desperately poor. It was the domain of slum landlord Peter Rachman, into which immigrants moved during the 1950s because it was cheap, and bohemians because it was interesting. Many of the latter wanted to take the blacks' part, so much so that the Kensington News ran the headline, 'Will too many do-gooders pave the path to Notting HELL?', a phrase later deployed by Rachel Johnson to describe a rather different social stratum. All around us was this mosaic of artists and hard-working black mothers, their men in trilby hats, and prostitutes at whom to gawp while on a bike ride. Later came the hippies, the Frestonia commune and Hawkwind; camera lights to film Blow Up around Mr Wimbourne's hardware shop; while across Ladbroke Grove, on the mainly black side, the Rio cafe into which I self-consciously tiptoed occasionally became the Mangrove restaurant, and All Saints Road the shebeen and dope-dealing capital of London, under the hammer of the police. To this world, as long-term visitor, came Colin MacInnes, whose half-sister Kate Thirkell used to drive me to school with her son Robert. MacInnes came to look hard, to take part, to drink, pick up boys, locate his restless self and write books now acclaimed as masterpieces. 'What Colin did,' says his friend broadcaster Ray Gosling, 'is this: while Alan Sillitoe and people rediscovered the English working class, Colin alone spotted two other things: that the kids were taking over and that the future was multicoloured.' MacInnes's heritage and life have been narrated in a biography by Tony Gould, who met him when literary editor for New Society. He was great- grandson of Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and a relative of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. He lived an itinerant early life, growing up in Australia and touring Europe. But feeling his estranged Englishness, he more or less settled in London, though rarely with fixed abode; he inhabited a demi-monde fuelled by alcohol in the French House pub and Muriel's Colony Club in Soho, occasional drugs in the East End and, above all, an obsessive, strange relationship with black Notting Hill. 'It's essential, I think,' Gould tells me, 'to understand Colin's view of race in sexual terms. But it wasn't just sex. He was one of the few people who saw what was happening, who saw the immigration and wanted to bring it to people's attention. He was writing before the days of political correctness, and could do so in a certain way. He could ask the question, "How is one to distinguish between an African and a West Indian?" and answer in language to describe black people you just couldn't use now.' When lawyer, broadcaster and writer Darcus Howe arrived from Trinidad in 1961, he 'made straight for Notting Hill', devising a scheme of flitting from digs to digs around Westbourne Park Road for free before the rent man arrived. 'Maybe once a month you'd have the money to go to Roaring Twenties in Carnaby Street,' he recalls, 'but for regular entertainment, every weekend was a shebeen - bottles in someone's flat, young men wanting to dance until the sunlight was in our eyes at nine or 10 in the morning. The girls were Australian, Swedish, whatever - it was black men and white girls - mine was Italian. That's how it was.' Howe adds: 'I remember MacInnes. He was a sexual predator; he made a pass at me when I was working at the Mangrove, and I told him to fuck off. A fiver was a lot in those days and he paid at the top end. That's how he was seen by the hustlers - give him what he wanted behind some dustbin and take the money. But I've always felt quite generously towards him. He came with a clean slate, no limitations. What did rankle me, though, was when MacInnes realised I was a Latin scholar from Trinidad - he just couldn't see that in me. It was all very imperious; I was just another hustler to him.' Not all West Indians in Notting Hill were living on a diet of sex, drugs and dancing; my memories are of Sunday best suits, children playing cricket with a wicket chalked on a wall and women in smart frocks and hats pushing prams up Ladbroke Grove or buying vegetables in Portobello market. 'Oh no,' says Howe, 'MacInnes wouldn't have been interested in any of that. He wouldn't have had a clue about the West Indian woman. It was all about men, black men.' MacInnes's relationship to black men was one of fascination and attraction, but not necessarily through a sense of common humanity. Indeed, his stereotypical view of blackness as sexually exotic seems, according to some accounts, to entail objectification. George Melly tells a story: 'Colin brought some black boy into Muriel's and told him to stay by the bar and shut up.