Roger Silverman

Post date: 31-Aug-2020 21:51:38

rom: Roger Silverman

Sent: 25 February 2020 19:31

Subject: Re: 60s

Hi Paul,

Your amazingly detailed roll-call of our generation in the early 1960s brought back treasured memories. Unfortunately, until a few of us George Elioteers started meeting occasionally in the new millennium, I hadn't kept in touch with anyone over the decades. And of course they come from an even earlier stage in our lives. I got intensely involved in political circles from the time I left Hampstead, and drifted far away from my teenage "beatnik" or "hippy" identity. So I'm afraid I can't help you much in filling in the biographies of the characters you list. Anyway, here goes, for what it's worth...

Who was I friendly with in those days?

Ned (Richard Turner). I wish I knew what had happened to him. As well as an accomplished guitarist, he was also a clarinettist and probably a saxophonist. My parents found it hard to forgive me for casually making a present to him of the expensive clarinet that they'd bought for me, once I'd lost interest in playing it myself.

Then, Peter Sayers: another treasured friend in those days, though apart from one glimpse of him a few years ago at a party of yours, I've had no contact with him at all since the 1960s.

And Rab (Richard Best, I think). Am I right that he committed suicide soon afterwards?

Gabi Weissmann, of course: we've discussed his tragic and pointless self-destruction before. Another original and talented character, but in retrospect, maybe not quite as brilliant as he imagined himself to be - there was a lot of pretentious role-playing about him.

Jonathan Steele. I seem to remember a distant rumour that he'd been killed in a car crash. Do you know if that's the case? Or maybe he's still thriving somewhere?

Someone else that I hung around with for a time in my teens was Misha. A strange character: a kind of untimely adolesecent relic of a long bygone Viennese Jewish intellectual/cultural tradition.

Then there's Paul Vaughan and Vaughan O'Leary. I'll never forget one magical occasion with VO'L on trumpet and me on piano playing Lover Man together, that hauntingly beautiful song which Charlie Parker at one time broke down and collapsed as he played.

I remember Julius Holley well - a likeable character, partly because he was both a refreshingly cockney rogue (we didn't get many cockneys in Hampstead, and he was an exotic find) and a very talented poet. One time on an impulse we travelled together to Oxford and spent a night on speed sitting in an all-night cafe.

I see John Martin on your list too. He started at Sussex the same time as me, but our paths soon zoomed in completely different directions, and I'm afraid I came to dislike him - perhaps because he personified to such a blatantly extreme extent the alien faux-"bohemian" culture that I was intent on cutting links with.

And then there's Sally! My first proper long-term girl friend. We had a deep but stormy three-year off/on relationship in those days. She was a very loving, fragile, complex girl, from a strange background and with a tormented family history, but startlingly original and blazingly outspoken. Now it so happens that she's probably the only person on your list whose subsequent evolution I can fill you in on. Around seven or eight years ago I somehow came across her on facebook and renewed contact. She lives on her own with a sick Siamese cat in Oxford, and I visited her there a few times. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's often struck me how most people, far from changing and developing, just become ever more obstinately exaggerated versions of their former profiles: grosser and grosser caricatures of their former selves.That's certainly true of Sally, and it was on her initiative that our relationship mark 2 was abruptly terminated.

I'm sorry I haven't helped you much with these biographies, but it was fun dredging back all these memories from a long-gone golden age. I hope our paths will cross again soon.

Roger

Anyone remember George's American bookshop on Rue de la Huchette? I fulfilled a fantasy by sleeping on that very hallowed floor, hoping thereby to gain poetic immortality. But even at the foothills of Olympus, I can't claim to have actually rubbed shoulders with the divine Allen, Gregory, or William. (Will Bud Powell do? He mugged a few bucks off a passing tourist who'd tagged along that night with me to the jazz club.) Instead, I had to make do with the company of a gaggle of very sleek New York aristocrats, and an insufferably boring 70-year-old fart from England trying to wear a French beret and smoke Gauloises. Poor old long-suffering George (reputedly a descendant of the great Walt Whitman) soon kicked the lot of us out in the gutter.

You're right, Paul. At the time it was a liberating and exhilarating experience. But also, very soon a new conformism, a new orthodoxy, a new big business. Without wanting to sound priggish, for me it really was an early step towards a more enduring and more solidly based revolutionary effort.

Where that ended up is another and even sadder story.

Roger Silverman