Dog Days In Soho: One Man's Adventures In Fifties Bohemia [Paperback]

Given Francis Bacon's often visceral subject matter, the phrase 'dog's breakfast' applies appropriately to this slim volume of biography/personal memoir/fiction around which the presence of the artist circles like a predatory shark.

The biographical element follows the entrance into the small world of Soho bohemia of the late fifties by a naval deserter by the name of Josh Avery. Richardson meets Avery as an older man, the step father of a school friend, and becomes intrigued and then a bit obsessed by his tales of drinking and fighting and fornicating his way around the Soho demimonde. At first, Avery appears an almost heroic figure, having struggled through a childhood and adolescence of mistreatment and neglect and ending up in a children's' home during the war. He enlists in the Navy, but eventually jumps ship and is apparently magnetically drawn to the anarchic milieu of artists, drunks and `rough trade' that populated the likes of the Gargoyle club ('London's only bohemian rendezvous') and the 'French' pub.

Avery was most definitely a hanger on, mainly for booze, a bed and board, in that order of priority. He lacked any real talent and he seems to have been largely undiscriminating about who he was willing to accept the necessities of life from in return for very little other than a propensity for violence. Daniel Farson, the author of `The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon', was the first to pick him up, apparently with the aim of bedding him, but Avery drew the line there and their relationship went through a stage of physical assaults by Avery on Farson before Avery absented himself and shacked up with a woman instead. Farson is the villain of the piece in this story, insofar as Richardson implies that he was looking for revenge on Avery for refusing his advances and may even have grassed him up to the police, resulting in his arrest and court martial from the Navy.

Eventually, having gravitated back to Soho following his detention for desertion and sunk even further into a degraded existence, rejected by his erstwhile drinking cronies, Avery achieved a sort of redemption, first by forming the violent trois in a menage with the Empsons, literary critic William and hell raiser Hetta and subsequently living a rustic idyll with the mother of Richardson's school friend, before dying as the result of too much booze in his early sixties.

Within this straightforward narrative of Avery's life, Richardson weaves elements of his own autobiography, as a jobbing property journalist, with clear aspirations of a more fulfilled literary career. Sensitive to the spirit of a place, he 'sees' the presence of departed previous occupants of the properties he writes about, whether it be Thomas de Quincey searching the 19th Century Soho streets for the prostitute who saved his life, or the more recently deceased members of Bacon's circle, such as Henrietta Moraes, who posed for a number of Bacon's unflinchingly nihilistic portraits.

It is Moraes who provides a further link between Richardson and Avery, a link that stretches the credibility of the personal narrative and which I assume constitutes the fictional aspect of the book. Whilst meeting with his editor, Richardson sees the editor's secretary and is struck immediately by her resemblance to Henrietta Moraes. Despite her obvious lack of interest, he pesters her for a meeting. When the tone of his messages to her become abusive, he realises he has gone too far, but she responds, suggesting they meet in a Limehouse pub that may have been mentioned in Dickens and on the same Street that Bacon inhabited when trying to escape his own Soho purgatory. The denouement of this story is not pretty and involves Richardson sustaining the sort of beating that Avery was either handing out or on the receiving end of many times, at the end of an extended boozing session. Unfortunately the outcome is contrived and lacks veracity, appearing to contain more than an element of wish fulfillment.

As with many of these Soho tales, the dark star is Bacon, but his connection with Avery, although significant, is insufficient to sustain an entire book and many of the stories of the outrageous behaviour of the other protagonists have been retold many times before. Nonetheless, it is through Bacon that Avery achieves a minor and less than complimentary form of immortality, as the subject of a painting in which he is rendered as a feral dog amidst a mercilessly shadowless environment.

Whilst Richardson has a nice ear for an appropriate bon mot at times, the thinness of new material and the sense that neither Avery nor Richardson himself have anything new to tell us means that the value of this work will be inversely proportional to the extent of prior knowledge.

Josh Avery lived the Soho life to the full - and this is his story.
Looking back across a sobering half-century, some things are clearer now than they once seemed, seen through that woozy Soho smog of cigarettes and alcohol. Was all that brilliant, garrulous life simply rushing headlong towards dismal death? The talent destined only for oblivion...?

Of all that extraordinary crew, only Francis Bacon's name was destined to endure and the canonized modernist hears no relation to the man one bumped into in the Gargoyle. It's hard now to explain exactly what that little knot of narrow streets once meant -- and how on earth to account for a character like Josh Avery?

That's the question Nigel Richardson seeks to answer as he sets out in search of the glittering ghosts of a Soho past which proves as elusive as a Dean Street lamp-post at closing time. The result is a truly remarkable book: half biography, half novel, but wholly compelling and entirely unforgettable.

Synopsis: Nigel Richardson first met Josh Avery when he was a boy, but it was only much later that he got to know him well. Richardson was fascinated by the rich fund of anecdotes of Avery's life in and around the post-war Soho demi-monde that included Daniel Farson, William Empson, George Barker, Henrietta Moraes, John Minton - and, most notably, Francis Bacon. Richardson was never quite sure if the stories were true or not - and the obituaries when Josh died made the same point, while revealing tantalising glimpses of stories still untold. But it seemed not to matter. In Dog Days in Soho Richardson has woven a life of Josh that might be true in every detail, or might not. Employing the same technique as in his highly acclaimed Breakfast in Brighton, he has produced a book which captures the essence of a time and a place now gone. It is a magnificent achievement.

About the Author: Born 1957, educated Christ's Hospital, Reading University. Works as a journalist, currently deputy travel editor of the Daily Telegraph.

I read Breakfast in Brighton in one sitting, and was so taken aback by it that I feared my next Nigel Richardson book simply couldn't compare. How wrong I was. Dog Days in Soho is even better.

I won't rehash the story here, but suffice to say he conjures up a beautiful, melancholy, fascinating part-fictional part-biographical rendition of that glamorous and seedy London nightspot in the 60s through the eyes of his friend's stepfather, who was for a brief time one of the faces on the scene. I envy anyone who hasn't read this yet, and selfishly deplore anything less than a five star rating. The description of one of the photos of his subject enjoying a laugh with his old friends in one of the pubs moved me to tears. Utterly unmissable - Mr Richardson, please, please, please write another!