Metroland by Julian Barnes

Growing up during the early 60s in the Middlesex suburbs, Chris and his friend Toni snigger at the Bourgeois world surrounding them and vow never to be that complacent themselves. Their time at City of London School is spent performing épats on unsuspecting shop salesmen and commuters, while wondering about the unsignposted life ahead of them and sex.

Chris later finds himself in Paris in 1968, researching in the Bibleotheque National for a post-grad paper on theatre and avoiding his fellow ex-pats, although his tone is mellowing a little:

I’d even, by this time, stopped sneering at my exhausted compatriots who clogged the cafés around the Gare du Nord, waving fingers to indicate the number of Pernods they wanted.

Lodging in the XIXe arrondissement, he’s at least in possession of a good drinks cupboard:

I was lent a flat up in the Buttes-Chaumont (the clanking 7-bis Métro line: Bolivar, Buttes-Chaumont, Botzaris) by a friend-of-a-friend. It was an airy, slightly derelict studio-bedroom with a creaky French floor and a fruit machine in the corner which worked off a supply of old francs kept on a shelf. In the kitchen was a rack of home-made calvados which I was allowed to drink provided I replaced each bottle with a substitute one of whisky (I lost money on the deal, but gained local colour).

The daily trudge through documents at the library is tiring stuff, and young Chris finds the lure of the nearby hostelries too much to resist:

...exhausted by the sight of mass scholarship in action, I’d knocked off early for a quick vin blanc cassis at a bar in the Rue de Richelieu which usually competed with the library for my presence. This wasn’t inappropriate: the atmosphere here was strongly reminiscent of the Bib Nat itself. The same soporific, businesslike attention to what was in front of you; the quiet shaking of newspapers instead of book pages; the sagely nodding heads; the professional sleepers. Only the espresso machine, snorting like a steam engine, insisted on where you were.

And sitting at a chair nearby is a delightful Breton girl reading Lawrence Durrell. He fumbles an introduction, buys her a coffee and gets himself a date. Things with Annick move slowly, as Toni points out in a letter, c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la chair. All in good time, Toni:

When we came out I mentioned, in a formally casual way, the stock of calvados at my place. It’s proximity was known. The flat was as I’d left it, which means as I’d half-arranged it. Reasonably tidy, but not obsessive either way. Books lying open as if in use (some of them were – all the best lies have an alloy of truth). Lighting low and from the corners – for obvious reasons, but also in case some eager, treacherous spot had come into bud during the course of the film. Glasses put away, but rewashed first, and rinsed not dried, so that the calvados wouldn’t have to be drained through its usual bobbing scum of tea-towel.

Chris spends the next few weeks in a haze of sex and French cinema. The relationship ends in tears, of course, and he throws himself into his studies, spending his remaining time in Paris in the booking gloom of the Bib Nat. And what of the riots and protests, les événements de Mai 68? Rien. Chris has missed the lot.

Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons

A veritable Requiem for a Twister, Fistful of Gitanes is Simmons’ homage to one of the geniuses of twentieth century pop music who died in 1991. Gainsbourg was a prolific songwriter who refused to stick to any genre, a provocateur who caused outrage with his priapic behaviour and drunken appearances on French Television, a poet and an artist, legendary in his home country, but whose reputation abroad is more of cult figure.

Born Lucien Ginsberg in 1928 to musician parents, both Jewish refugees from revolutionary Russia, Gainsbourg suffered a traumatic adolescence which saw him forced to wear a gold star in Nazi occupied Paris, and crippling stage-fright, (both in the concert halls and the bedroom), which he overcame by drinking, a habit he picked up during national service:

“Serge was the only person I’ve ever known who liked the service militaire,” said Jane [Birkin]. “He learned to drink in the army. I think, timid thing that he was, he found that if he had a little bit too much to drink he was funny – he was the one standing on the chair telling jokes whereas before he would have gone red with shyness – and that the could suddenly have chums and take a girl out without being too worried.” ... “I went into the French Army having never touched a drop of alcohol in my life,” he would later claim, “and I left 13 months later, an alcoholic.”

Starting out like his father as a nightclub piano player, success was slow for Serge. He was signed to record label Phillips but his records never sold, despite his strong song writing. As teenage rock music took over France, Serge thought he was never going to make it, then he wrote a winning song for the Eurovision Song Contest (some countries take it seriously, you know) and the French public couldn’t seem to get enough of him. By the late sixties, the charts were full of his songs and he was in the midst of an affair with Brigitte Bardot...

“There’s a trilogy in my life,” said Serge in Mort Ou Vices, “an equilateral triangle, shall we say, of Gitanes, alcoholism and girls – and I didn’t say isosceles, I said equilateral...”

An enthusiastic smoker (three to five packets of Gitanes a day!) as well as a drinker, Gainsbourg had his first heart-attack at 45. Not that he would let it cramp his style:

...although is doctors had warned him that cigarettes were bad for his heart; others in the medical profession had announced that drinking was good for it; so by upping the intake of one, he figured, he could cancel out the harmful effects of the other.

Gainsbourg spent the 70s with English actress Jane Birkin, with whom they had a daughter, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. He wrote prodigious amounts of songs for her to sing, as well as for other artists and himself. His masterpiece Histoire de Melody Nelson was released in 1971, and he courted considerable controversy with a reggae version of the French national anthem at the end of the decade. Sadly, he was also getting increasing drunk and difficult to live with: Jane left in 1980. Gainsbourg himself, was turning into a Mr Hyde like character, his dissipated, alcoholic alter ego, Gainsbarre.

Serge himself had a wonderful phrase ready for when anyone else asked him about the Gainsbourg/Gainsbarre duality, something along the lines of fellow-drinker Tom Waits’ line about preferring “a bottle in front of me to a frontal lobotomy” but with a few added layers: “Gainsbourg se barre, Gainsbarre se bourre.” (For the non French-speakers, ‘bourre’ is pronounced like the ‘bourg’ bit of Gainsbourg. ‘Se barre’ means to cross yourself, shut yourself out or disappear, and ‘se bourre’ means to get shit-faced drunk, something usually achieved in un bar).

The effect on Gainsbourg wasn’t pretty, even if he was still producing music at a phenomenal rate:

...there was beginning to be a look of corruption about him. Like a negative image of Dorian Gray, as his work stayed fresh and invigorated, his appearance became more worn and debauched.

Rock journalist Nick Kent ran into him at a film festival in Val d’Isères:

“He looked like someone who wasn’t taking care of himself. His eyes had that bloodshot, unfocussed look of someone who was not so slowly poisoning himself with alcohol. One of the other people on the panel was staying in the room next door to Giansbourg’s suite, and he told me that every night he was awakened by Gainsbourg screaming – screaming – ‘I’m going blind!’..."

The writing was definitely on the wall. In 1989 he had another heart attack:

That year he would be in and out of the American Hospital five times. The first time, in January, the doctors warned him that if he didn’t stop drinking he would be blind in six months and dead in twelve. “My back’s against the wall, but I don’t give a fuck,” Serge shrugged.

To his credit, he actually stayed sober for a while, after he had had two thirds of his liver removed first. Still, all was going well until he started work with teen sensation Vanessa Paradis. The stress put him straight back onto the bottle. In the ever decreasing circles of his final decline, he spent his time with old friends and lovers including Jane Birkin:

“He couldn’t stop at a petit verre – a glass or two. He had to finish the bottle. Then another bottle. And as he didn’t used to eat at midday, if you have a Pernod as your breakfast then you’re usually pretty slaughtered by tea time...”

In March 1991, the years of strong cigarettes and stronger drink finally took their toll and Serge died, one month shy of his 63rd birthday. France mourned. Difficult, sometimes impossible, outrageous, but also warm hearted and amusing as well as incredibly talented, Gainsbourg led a colourful, contradictory career that has only recently been given the appraisal it deserves outside of his native France.

Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia by Denise Hooker

I threatened a return visit to Fitzrovia about six months ago, and if anyone’s life encompasses the three criteria of 120 Units – pleasures, pains and perils – then it’s Nina Hamnett’s. In Denise Hooker’s revealing and poignant biography she comes across as one of the truly great characters of her age, but one whose undisputed talents were ultimately wasted by drink.

Born in 1890, Nina had a miserable childhood but her skill at drawing allowed her to escape the stifling background at home. She began exhibiting in London and hanging around in arty circles in the 1910s. The Bohemian culture in Fitzrovia was fairly well established by then. Augustus John, who knew how to put away the drink himself, was one of its denizens:

If not drinking his favourite hock and seltzer, John was known to demolish a bottle of brandy with little apparent effect and it was said that he had the drinks while his friends had the headaches.

Nina modelled for John, as well Roger Fry who admired her queer satyr-like oddity and grace, and numerous other artists, as well as painting herself. She found herself in Paris before the first world war where Modigliani introduced himself to her.

It’s a matter of conjecture as to when the wheels come off in Nina’s story, but for my money, things are on the wane by the time of her second visit to Paris in the 1920s. She is distracted more and more by the bottle, doing the rounds in Montparnasse, where:

...they drank a lethal concoction called Pernod Suze Fine, consisting of Pernod, gentian and Brandy.

Back in London, Nina embedded herself with one foot in the art word and the other firmly in its café and bar society:

Despite her need to be liked and admired, the more she gloried in her immense social success, and the more she frittered her talent in oceans of drink and casual debauchery, the clearer eyed she became about the futility of it all.

Not that it slowed her down.

By the mid thirties Nina was producing very little work beyond quick portrait sketches in pencil or chalk... Distracted by life, Nina had not been able to develop her talent and fulfil the faith that people had in her... Always willing to tell another anecdote in return for the next drink, gradually Nina Hamnett the personality, the celebrated reine de bohème, took over from the serious artist.

Nina took up residence in the corner of the bar at the Fitzroy Tavern and held court there for the best part of two decades:

On a good night, with the right company and a suitable amount of alcohol, Nina was very amusing. She was always on show, always playing to the crowd, and at her best she gave command performances. With a little too much to drink she could be disconcerting – as when she would boast that Modigliani said she had the best tits in Europe and pull up her old jersey to show them off.

After the war, the slow path to the dying of the light. Bombed out and under redevelopment, Fitzrovia was a ghost of what it once was. As was Nina:

The years immediately after the war saw the last flickering of the dying flame of Fitzrovia... More than ever Nina became a monument of a lost Bohemia and was affectionately valued as such by some, considered a boring irrelevance by others. Sitting back on her bar stool, a little drunk, she would talk straight ahead of her, barking out stories or exclamations before demanding, “Who’s going to buy me a drink?”

She made appearances in Soho as the arty crowd moved south of Oxford Street, but Nina in her last years was drunk and unpredictable, peeing on the furniture and throwing up in her handbag before staggering home to Paddington. Her second biography, Is She A Lady, was described as rambling, disjointed and inconsequential; sadly, so was Nina.

In December 1956, Nina Hamnett fell over forty feet from her window and was impaled on the railings below. The Queen of Bohemia died a few days later.