Mona's 440 Club - dancing at the Lesbian Bar

Found, folded into an American thriller from the Donald Rudd collection of detective fiction, this napkin - a memento of Mona's 440 Club generally credited as being the first lesbian bar in the United States -'Where Girls Will be Boys.'

James R. Smith's San Francisco's Lost Landmarks (2004) says the following about Mona's:

Mona's 440 Club was another [club] that took advantage of the city's tolerance and tourism. Opening in a Columbus Street basement in North Beach in 1936, Mona Sargeant's tavern quickly hit the travelsheets as a place "where girls will be boys." The first openly lesbian club, Mona's female waiters and performers wore tuxedos and patrons dressed their roles. Within a couple of years, Mona's moved to 440 Broadway and took the address as part of the club's new name, Mona's 440 Club. Great entertainment, first local and later national talent, made a night at Mona's an event.

At Mona's in the 1940s

 Straights loved the opportunity to rub elbows with openly gay patrons, posing for pictures with them when possible. Gladys Bently, the great African-American cross dressing diva, sang the blues to an enthusiastic audience during the World War II years. Known alternatively as "America's Great Sepia Piano Artist" and the "Brown Bombshell of Sophisticated Song, " the 250-pound Bently exuded sexuality. Mona's introduced a generation to the lesbian lifestyle in a proud manner.

After 26 years, Mona's was closed and replaced by Ann's 440 Club at the same location... [mid 1950s] More good info in this piece Before the Castro: North Beach, a Gay Mecca

Stephen Tennant - a note on a scrap of paper

Found - a scrap of paper from a book on America maritime history - this note by the eccentric /decadent writer and artist Stephen Tennant (1906 -1987.) He often used pages of books for notes, poems, rants and observations. He made many hundreds of pages of notes for his projected novel Lascar; A Story of the Maritime Boulevard but it remained unfinished at his death. He produced a few slim volumes and some superb drawings. The writer mentioned is anonymous but being rich and eccentric and talented ST knew many writers including Willa Cather, Siegfried Sassoon (a former lover) V.S. Naipaul (a neighbour) and W.H. Auden (who praised one of his poems.) The scrap reads thus:-

There is no element or trait in human nature that a writer can ignore - But to give prominence to the Noble profound, to the calm, the wise, the Beautiful- the exquisite, the sacred is surely his proudest need? June 1976 S T

But he is no prude or evader of odious things.

Design for a cover for 'Lascar'

'Ah, Marseille, - c'set le Vrai.'
A writer said this a propos my novel Lascar.

Stephen Tennant's possessions were dispersed in a big Sotheby's sale at his home Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire in 1987.

This was bought there in a van full of books. Some of the books appeared to be scented, some had letters loosely inserted including one from Willa Cather. The catalogue itself

is sought after, at Ebay a copy recently made £100 although it is not uncommon...

ST with David Hockney at Wilsford Manor

Reverend E. E. Bradford / Love in Earnest (Norfolk)

A rare photograph of the Reverend Doctor E. E. Bradford, devotee of 'Lads Love', posed outside his very humble Fenland church at Nordelph near Downham Market, Norfolk. Alas, admirers of such gay poetic classics as Passing the Love of Women and The Romance of Youth, failed to save the structure, built in 1865, which Pevsner dismissed in less than two lines as 'E.E. with a fleche between nave and chancel.'

In 2010 it was demolished, seemingly with hardly a protest, which is a great shame. Thankfully, the Rectory survives.

Bradford was a genuine eccentric of English letters, who published his innocuous verse, not imagining, or perhaps not caring, if it provoked loud laughter from the likes of Oxford sophisticates like Betjeman and Auden , to name but two. Actually, in 1935 Betjeman visited the poet, then aged 75. He found a lonely, 'saintly' man, isolated for want of a car, a modernist who believed in sexual freedom and birth control, but who was also fond of ritual. Betjeman’s recorded impressions of the man showed sympathy for his predicament:-

Vicarage hall, dark, grim…Terribly poor. Bradford hurried out of room in dressing gown.’ Quite safe in here, only other side of house is falling. I’m not bothered’. High voice, like Cottam’s. Talks a lot and v. fast. Sit on hard kitchen chairs. I sat by fire in arm chair. .likes conversing in French…Various reproductions of Tuke and Millais’ ‘Princes in the Tower’. Pictures everywhere. All very neatly docketed…

Bradford died in 1944. It’s a wonder that no-one has written a biography. Stephen Fry lives just a few miles away. Not a busy man, perhaps he should give it a go. [ETH]

Brian Howard to the Duchess (on Rex Whistler)

Signed letter sold in 2010. Brian Howard poet, journalist, socialite, 'failure'. Found in a book from the Gilmour estate.

2pp. About 80 words to 'Dear Mollie' (ie  Mary ('Mollie') Montagu Douglas Scott, Duchess of Buccleuch) on her notepaper - Boughton House, Kettering dated May 1957. It is loosely inserted in a used copy of Laurence Whistler's book on his brother Rex Whistler (Art & Technics 1948) presented to her mother by her daughter Caroline (later Lady Caroline Gilmour.) The letter reads - 'Caroline might be faintly amused to know that when Laurence was compiling this book he wrote to me to for the complete text of my poem about Rex. In one's forgetful, selfish way, I didn't reply - so these weak little lines, this miserable quatrain is all that posterity will receive. The unhappy thing is that the complete (underlined) poem wasn't a bad literary portrait of Rex. Love, Brian.' BH has initialled the relevant 4 lines in the printed text.  LW does not name Howard in the text  but refers to him merely as 'a clever friend (who) drew his character in words...' The poem begins with the lines 'Laughter in the bedroom...' Letter sold with book which is sound but somewhat bumped. Brian Howard letters are seldom encountered.

When a copy of the Whistler book (not rare) shows up again we will post the missing lines.

21/7/13 Sure enough a copy has shown up and the lines read:

          Laughter in the bedroom,
          in the bar-too,
          in the ballroom--
          But the laughter is an urn.

Not exactly The Waste Land but to his brother Laurence the lines catch Rex's character at about 21-- the way in which  he was 'subtly detached' from his 'great gaiety'. He writes 'Rex's smile was immensely amused, as only a thoughtful man's may be..'

Self portrait by Rex Whistler

Oscar and the Oxford bullies

T. Earle Welby (1881-1933) is an almost forgotten writer, columnist and character. He is at present unknown to Wikipedia although Bill Greenwell writes about him at his blog about the New Statesman competition.  It's odd that this should be his only memorial as he was somewhat right wing and hostile to democracy.He enjoyed conversation, and was known for a mannerism whereby he used a sideways movement of his hand for emphasis, which, since it was often associated with his reminiscence of India, was described by a wit as 'the Calcutta Sweep.' His collection of literary essays has a review of a memoir by the actor manger Sir Frank Benson who was at Oxord with Oscar Wilde. Welby writes:

Oscar Wilde, a contemporary at another college, was, (Sir Frank) tells us, so far from being in those days 'a flabby aesthete' that only one man in that college was physically his match. Four raggers having decided to wreck his rooms, Wilde knocked down three, picked up the fourth and carried that vainly struggling enemy to his rooms, piled up all his furniture on top of the poor wretch, and then invited a crowd which had changed its allegiance to celebrate the triumph in the wines of that parsimonious creature. Excellent! and, disapproving of those who engage in horseplay with ass-sense, were I capable of tampering consciously with the sacred text of Peacock I should comment :

'The wines of beasts provide our feast, 

And their overthrow our chorus.'

But, and alas! it is very evident Sir Frank Benson thinks that if Wilde had kept to throwing hefty men downstairs he would have written something better than that matchless play, The Importance of Being Earnest, which is at once the perfect comedy of manners and the perfect parody of the comedy of manners.

**Welby is included in The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations for this piece from his culinary book The Dinner Knell : '"Turbot, sir," said the waiter, placing before me two fishbones, two eyeballs, and a bit of black mackintosh…'

Le Matelot (London restaurant run by a psychiatrist) 1955

A review of the Le Matelot restaurant found in Bon Viveur's London & the British Isles (Dakers, London 1955). Bon Viveur was a pseudonym for Fanny Cradock and her husband the fly-whiskered Johnny. They later became celebrity TV chefs. The use of the word gay at the time tended to indicate merry, jolly, insouciant, zany etc., although the restaurant went on into the 1960s (possibly later) and is referenced at The Lost Gay Restaurants site. The girl in the coral jeans and exposed midriff sounds distinctly modern and the whole scene described might be something out of the 1961 Tony Hancock movie The Rebel. The owner roaming the restaurant in horns is not something you see in current London eateries.

LE MATELOT

You will either be enchanted by this small restaurant or embarrassed. It is unique. The proprietor, Dr. Hillary James, is a psychiatrist by day and a restaurateur by night.

On Christmas Eve he wears horns. We keep a regular date there on Christmas eve now. The staff are young, gay, inconsequential and yet highly efficient and courteous. But Le Matelot is informal. Witness,the extremely pretty young Miss who, on our first visit, plonked down our ratatouille, remarking casually, ‘mon Dieu quel Plonk' (anent the garlic). This same nymph, wearing coral jeans, exposed mid-riff, holly in her fair curls and mistletoe in her buttonhole, nonchalantly removeda champagne cork, poured the wine (not for us - we dislike drinking champagne all through a meal) and tossed the cork back down the restaurant to a colleague in a South American hat, a printed silk blouse and a pair of somewhat startling pants. ‘Corky,’ he said - quite untruthfully, as he smelled the cork. Then both grinned at the contented customer and continued to carry in dishes _ of Avocado Vinaigrette (3s.), Coquilles St. Jacques (3s.), Corn on the Cob (zs. 6d.), New England Grilled Gammon with Sweetcorn (6s.), Poulet Henry IV (5s.), superb Stilton cheese (2s. 6d.), and Dames Blanches (2s.) for the sweet-toothed.

It is a delightfully uninhibited, scatty little place, brimming with custom, canopied with fish-nets, discreetly lit and gay, gay, gay, in our stuffed shirt old town. We hope you’ll like it as much as this year’s crop of B.V. recommended regulars.

Name: Le Matelot

Address: 49, Elizabeth Street, S.W.1

Tel.No.: SLOane 1038

Proprietor: Dr. Hillary James

Hours of Opening:

Luncheons (Monday to Friday): 12.30 to 3 p.m.

Dinners: 7 to II p.m.

Saturdays and Sundays: Dinners only

Licensed for the sale of Wines

Leigh Fermor on Gathorne-Hardy

This obituary for minor Bloomsburyite Eddie Gathorne-Hardy fell out of a book by his sister Anne Hill (of Heywood Hill) Trelawny's Strange Relations (Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley 1956) and was presented by her to Alan Ansen, the Athens based writer and member of William Burroughs literary circle.  The obituary article on EGH was written for The Times by Patrick Leigh Fermor (a xerox with inked notes by Anne Hill.) It appears not to have been published and is an excellent example of Paddy's great prose:

It would be said of no-one but Eddie Gathorne-Hardy that he belonged with equal fitness to the pages of White's Natural History of Selborne and the Satyricon of Petronius. Further analogies, with correct instinct but a few decades too early, could be sought in Valmouth and South Wind, but found to a split second in date, mood and intention in Vile Bodies, and though the brief intemperance of his Oxford days and the scrapes and festivals of the young and the bright in the 'twenties London gave him an aura which never quite faded, it was a figure of strong intellectual substance and authority that vanished from the scene on June 18th.

From the Library of Guy Burgess

Sold on eBay in late 2008 (price unrecorded but circa £180)

Algernon Cecil. British Foreign Secretaries, 1807 – 1916: Studies in Personality and Policy (London: G Bell & Sons, 1927)

This remarkable survival is the copy of Algernon Cecil’s 1927 book about British foreign secretaries owned by the infamous Cambridge spy Guy Burgess. The front free endpaper bears the inscription: ‘Guy Burgess / Eton 1929’. Burgess was seventeen or eighteen and preparing to take up his place at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Inconspicuous enough at first glance – a plain, dark blue hardcover without dustwrapper, a little worn about the edges – the book harbours a wealth of fascinating annotations in the hand of the young intellectual. There are many sentences in the book which Burgess has placed a pencil line under or alongside, such as the observation that Canning, foreign secretary during the Napoleonic Wars, ‘[as] he had a difficulty in understanding the value of a code amongst nations, so he had a difficulty in understanding the obligations of code amongst men’. Elsewhere, Burgess notes well the observation that the Earl of Clarendon (1850s foreign secretary) ‘betray[ed] himself by a kind of fatalism rather than a fund of resourcefulness [so that in the end] he proved somehow unable to take control of the situation, with the inevitable result that it took hold of him’. It is indeed remarkable that the vast bulk of Burgess’s annotations involve criticisms if not outright damnations of character.

There are also, at the bottom of some pages, Burgess’s own thoughts where he is moved to agree or disagree with the author.

John Banting letter

Letter to the critic Raymond Mortimer from the artist John Banting (1902 -1972) from his White Rock Gardens, Hastings address (undated but late 1960s.) Discussing a high society book by Daphne Fielding and life in general. The book was almost certainly Emerald and Nancy: Lady Cunard and Her Daughter. (1968)

Dear Raymond and Paul – it is so reassuring (and so daunting) that you both look so splendid  still. I feel my face sliding with pink jowels but do not resent my filleted clown's nose (it is a change from the old one I had and bewildered strangers.) I hated the extracts from the book about Lytton – I hate all the necrophiliac messes.  They are not history they are gossiping provincial suburban muck.

Portrait of Nancy Cunard by John Banting

I am impatient for your review of Daphne's new book about the haute monde (and incidentally the 'weird' Nancy** whom we both loved). I refrain from boring you with my silly feelings about it – but all the anecdotes (fascinating -but who really cares that  the Prince of Wales thought that "cold salmon was common?" )  The complete exclusion of politics  and the arts is unfortunate for Daphne and places her upon a silly old fence as a gossip columnist.  Her several wild letters to me (never met her) are far better and one day she may make a book instead of trivial memoirs. She is just too commercial. She could be really good.

I feel ashamed to be amused by them  –  O Fuck I feel ashamed to be alive anyway. Please accept  (wishfully)  many enormous  paintings - of  all periods - and vast volumes and heavy chandeliers of Golconda diamonds (no crystal trash) pigeon blood rubies on rings and so on. And so many variegated regards John X

** Nancy Cunard, socialite, poet and rebel - a close friend. He shared her outrage at racial prejudice and stayed with her in Harlem, New York in 1932 and contributed to her Negro Anthology (1935).
He accompanied her on a three month visit to Spain during the Civil War (Oct. - Dec. 1937).

Francis King

Francis King (4 March 1923 - 3 July 2011), acclaimed novelist, poet, critic and editor. President Emeritus of International PEN and appointed  CBE in 1985. He came out in the 1970s and wrote his autobiography 'Yesterday Came Suddenly' in 1993, after the death of his long-term partner.

3 photos of him with his cat in London by the US photographer Miriam Berkley. The envelope is dated 1991. The Daily Telegraph obituary said 'he was naturally reticent, concealing his inner turbulence from friends who saw only a witty and equable companion with exceptionally good manners.