24th Oct 2005
A walk through Derek Marlowe's London.
Do you remember Derek Marlowe?
Nicholas Royle On the trail of the late novelist.
Many thanks to Nicholas Royle and Time Out for allowing us to reprint the walk from the Time Out Book of London Walks vol 1.
For more information about Time Out books, Visit www.timeout.co.uk
Start: Pimlico tube.
Finish: Ravenscourt Park tube
Distance: 12.5 miles/20km
Time: 8 hours
Getting there: Victoria line to Pimlico
Getting back: District line from Ravenscourt Park
Note: no previous knowledge of Marlowe's work required.
In his day, he would have needed no introduction. These days, to some people, he still needs none, but it's symptomatic of publishing in the 21st century that this piece is obliged to begin by introducing its subject to a potential new readership. Derek Marlowe was born, in Perivale, Middlesex, on 21 May 1938 and died in November 1996 in Los Angeles, having published nine novels and written numerous TV and film scripts. With his first novel, A Dandy in Aspic, Marlowe established himself as a classy prose stylist who held the reader in thrall to his equally generous gift for narrative. This winning combination was never to desert him throughout his career and his work consistently received acclaim at the same time as delighting readers, so it's a shame that all nine of his books are now out of print. But given the astonishing amount of trash that does get published these days in the mad dash to find the 'next' Louis de Bernières or Helen Fielding, it's hardly surprising that Marlowe's novels can only be found in second-hand bookshops.
All that may change: a couple of publishers are looking at getting one or two Marlowes back on the shelves and, meanwhile, you can read the opening chapters of what would have been Marlowe's tenth novel, had he had chance to finish it, in Neonlit: The Time Out Book of New Writing (Quartet, 1998). There's even a possibility that his 1972 novel, Do You Remember England?, will be filmed. One of Marlowe's favourite words was 'enthusiasm'; his novels are peppered with references to his characters' enthusiasms. My overriding personal enthusiasm, since I saw the film of A Dandy in Aspic in 1978 and subsequently read the book, has been for the work of Derek Marlowe. Let me lead you on a trek, from Pimilco, through Mayfair, to west London, that will not always take the shortest route between A and B. It will take you past many of the most splendid sights of London and some of the more mundane. Punctuating the walk are the various addresses Marlowe occupied in London, the houses and flats, family homes and otherwise, where he wrote his novels. The route does not follow the chronology of his movements; to do so would result in a walk even more eccentric than the one you are invited to do.
We start in Pimlico. But not before a quick jaunt via the Victoria and Northern lines to Tufnell Park. If, on the basis that it is outside London, we discount 17 Elton Avenue, Greenford, Middlesex, where Derek lived as a boy, Marlowe's first London address is actually 107 Fortess Road, NW5. Marlowe lived here in 1960, in his last year as a student at Queen Mary College, University of London. He shared with a boy from college - as he wrote in a letter to his sister Alda and her husband Peter - and they paid 30 shillings each to share the three-roomed, furnished flat. 'My room has a little attic window with print curtains,' he wrote, 'and over my bed is a Modigliani and books.' Alda and Peter were then living in Copenhagen. 'Maybe one day,' he signed off, 'your little brother will be successful, then he can fly over to see you whenever he wants.' Within six years A Dandy in Aspic (1966) had become a bestseller and was made into a film for which Marlowe wrote the screenplay. But it's another Marlowe title that I slip through the letter box of 107 Fortess Road today along with a note explaining the nature of the project on which I am engaged. It strikes me as fitting, somehow, that there should be at least one copy of one of Marlowe's novels in each of the addresses where he lived.
Let's start with a flourish by giving away a UK first edition of the sinister 1975 novel Nightshade (slightly soiled but in good condition with dustjacket - I'm indebted to writer Gareth Evans for tracking down and donating this copy). Through the letter box it goes, landing with a thud on the mat where its creator wiped his feet 45 years ago, with not the slightest idea in his head at that point that he would one day write a novel about the unravelling of an English marriage on the voodoo island of Haiti. This act releases us from north London - all of Marlowe's London postcodes would henceforth commence with an S or a W - and we can jump back on the tube.
Leave Pimlico station by turning left out of the Rampayne Street exit and head for Vauxhall Bridge Road. On the opposite side slumps Random House. Long before Jonathan Cape was bought by Random House, which in turn was gobbled up by German giant Bertelsmann, that fine imprint Published five of Marlowe's novels, The Memoirs of a Venus Lackey (1968), A Single Summer With LB (1969), Echoes of Celandine (1970), Do You Remember England? (1972) and Somebody's Sister (1974). How nice it is to imagine Vintage - Random House's stylish paperback imprint - acquiring the rights to publish new editions.
Walk away from the river towards Victoria and turn right into Osbert Street leading to Vincent Square and its lush playing fields where the grey-flanelled Westminster School boys practising in the nets have changed little since Marlowe's day. In the autumn of 1964 at the age of 26, Marlowe moved into 10 Vincent Square Mansions with Piers Paul Read and Tom Stoppard. Earlier that year at a school for writers in West Berlin, Marlowe and Stoppard (who, as we will see, already knew each other from Blenheim Crescent) had met Read. The three aspiring writers each got on with their own work, as well as making regular sorties into Berlin - West and East. 'Derek, of course,' recalls Read, 'had a beautiful girlfriend called Barbara: I do not think there was any moment in his life when there were not beautiful women at his beck and call.'
On his return from Berlin, Marlowe decided to write a spy thriller. With his experience as a playwright (his first play, The Scarecrow, won the Foyle Award for Best New Play of 1961), this represented a change of direction which Stoppard and Read tried to talk him out of. A Dandy in Aspic, which Marlowe wrote while staying with Alda and Peter in Kent, took just six weeks to polish off. 'I was always emptying the ashtrays,'recalls Alda.
Alexander Eberlin (played by Laurence Harvey in the film), a Russian spy working for the British, is ordered to hunt down a Russian by the name of Krasnevin - himself. The plot becomes a gallimaufry of twists and turns and Marlowe's prose seduces even the most casual reader.
Follow the south-west side of the square to Walcott Street, where you'll find Vincent Square Mansions. The unknown occupiers of No.10 receive my only copy of NEL's film tie-in paperback edition of A Dandy in Aspic, leaving me with the UK first edition (Gollancz hardback, yellow dj). Follow the square round to the opposite corner and turn into Fynes Street. Hit Regency Street and there on the corner of Regency and Page Streets is the excellent Regency Café, much favoured by cabbies and builders. Turn
right out of the café and walk up to Horseferry Road. Turn left.Mayfair beckons. Take pedestrianised Strutton Ground, home to a busy market, then cross Victoria Street and head up Broadway, past New Scotland Yard. Go left by the tube then right down Queen Anne's Gate, past the Home Office; go down to Birdcage Walk and cross into St James's Park. The shortest route follows the path across the lake (Buckingham Palace on your left, Horse Guards to your right) to the Mall.
Follow the map to Berkeley Square, where at No.50 you'll find Maggs Bros, antiquarian booksellers; it doesn't have much past 1950, so no chance of hitting upon a Marlowe first edition. The way now becomes convoluted, so use the map to get to Chesterfield Street. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) lived at No.6, Beau Brummell (1778-1840) at No.4. Brummell, the original dandy, was a hero of Marlowe's, whose own flamboyant dress-sense was expressed 1960s-style in velvet suits, white jeans, fancy shirts. Eberlin could afford to dress in bespoke suits thanks to his working for both the Russians and the British. Marlowe located Eberlin's British bosses at 4 Chesterfield Street as a homage to Brummell, who crops up later in Marlowe's work in the erudite A Single Summer With LB. Opposite Brummell's house is Bahamas House and on Charles Street you'll find the Embassy of Myanmar (Burma in Eberlin's day); throughout this walk we'll pass dozens of embassies. The success of A Dandy in Aspic, a tale of international intrigue, meant that henceforth wherever in London Marlowe chose to live he would invariably pass a clutch of embassies on his way to buy a newspaper (The Times - he'd polish off the crossword in half an hour) or a pack of panatellas.
Eberlin's own rooms are at 24 South Street, a featureless four-storey affair of unclear function but kitted out with a security camera as a warning to the curious. Turn left at Park Lane. Head past the hotels (Dorchester, Hilton) to the subway. Cross and look left to see Byron perched on an island hedged in by signs and chevrons.
Another of marlowe's heroes, Byron was the subject of A Single Summer With LB. Marlowe based his story of the summer of 1816 on fact. The acknowledgements include a nod to Ken Russell, whose film of that summer's events, Gothic, would not be made for another 17 years. A Single Summer With LB, while required reading for those interested in Byron, is one for Marlowe completists.
At Hyde Park Corner, admire the great bulk of the former St George's Hospital (now the Lanesborough Hotel - why not have a drink in the Library or an early lunch at neighbouring Pizza on the Park?). Take Grosvenor Crescent to Belgrave Square, home to several embassies. Head for Pont Street via West Halkin Street and Lowndes Street, and make a detour to Hans Place (Jane Austen stayed on the site of No.23 with her brother Henry in 1814-15). From Pont Street, turn into Beauchamp Place, a chic shoppers'
paradise with a smart Pizza Express at No.7.
Where Brompton Road veers left you'll see the Brompton Oratory on your right. Although Marlowe had spent the last years of his life in Los Angeles working in film and TV, he had grown tired of being a small cog in a big machine and planned to return to London where he would complete a
new novel (working title Black and White) and spend more time with his son Ben. But Marlowe developed leukaemia and, in the course of his treatment, tragically suffered a brain haemorrhage and died on 13 November 1996.
Cremated in LA, his ashes were brought back to the UK by Alda and buried in his father's grave near Hastings. There was a memorial service in March 1997 at the Little Oratory; Piers Paul Read delivered the eulogy.
Carrying on down Thurloe Place, past the V&A (where Eberlin keeps a collection of Sèvres porcelain in a vault), past 30 Thurloe Place (once home to one of the best and longest-running literary magazines, the late Alan Ross's London Magazine) and you're in the heart of South Ken, with its myriad shops, cafés and restaurants. Head down Old Brompton Road, perhaps popping into Waterstone's at No.99. Were Marlowe's novels in print, he would have merited inclusion in the Waterstone's Guide to Crime Fiction, if only for his 1974 novel Somebody's Sister, a brilliant and complex San Francisco-set detective story.
Turn right up Gloucester Road. It's worth visiting the Gloucester Road Bookshop at No.123, a wonderful second-hand emporium with long opening hours, which might be able to offer something by Marlowe.
Our next location is a short hop across Cromwell Road. As far as attractive routes are concerned, we are suddenly spoilt for choice (Kynance Mews is picturesque, lilac and wisteria blossoms tumbling down the walls, ceanothus brushing your legs), but let's opt for a left turn into Cornwall Gardens. At the end go right and check the wall on your right for a blue plaque in honour of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) resident at 5 Braemar Mansions from 1934 until the end of her life. Go right again and look for an alleyway on the left side of Cornwall Gardens leading to Stanford Road. Stop when you reach Eldon Road and gaze straight down to the house facing you from the east side of Victoria Road. This is 71 Victoria Road, where Marlowe lived with his wife Sukie for four years. Bought in 1968 for £37,000 with some of the proceeds from A Dandy in Aspic, it's a large house and must have been quite a change from flat-sharing. It may not be too fanciful to imagine Marlowe constructing a scene from Do You Remember England? while sitting at one of the top-floor windows gazing down Eldon Road at the sunset, given the pervading atmosphere of romantic melancholy in that novel. Somebody's Sister was probably also written here, but it's a battered US first edition of Do You Remember England? that I slip through the letter box of 71 Victoria Road today.
If the current occupiers decide the invitation to place this book on their shelves is made by an obsessive whose enthusiasms should not be indulged, I will at least have tried, for what it might be worth, to string up a karmic net, a psychogeographical web woven out of Marlowe's lines of dialogue, his lists of descriptive minutiae. The plot-lines of energy exist already, laid down by the man himself as he progressed from one home to another in his gradual move west.
From Victoria Road, Derek and Sukie - and Ben, born in Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Hammersmith, on 16 August 1969 - moved to the country. Marlowe achieved what appears to have been his dream of the country life, a rural idyll in which he could play the bucolic dandy for his own - and his guests' - amusement. Foscombe was a large Gloucestershire manor house superbly situated on a hill with commanding views (in The Rich Boy From Chicago Freddie and Cissie buy 'a house in gloucestershire on the peak of a hill with a view of eight counties, two of which contained some of their land'). Friends invited to stay would find themselves breakfasting on peaches and champagne. (For a glimpse of Marlowe's idyll, visit Gloucestershire and find the village of Ashleworth, where any local will direct you to Foscombe. A public footpath will take you to within sight of the house and afford you sufficient insight to understand what led Marlowe to dedicate the first of the two books he wrote there - Nightshade and The Rich Boy From Chicago - to it.)
In 1976 the Marlowes moved from Foscombe to Froxfield, Wiltshire, where they stayed until 1979, when, their marriage at an end, they moved back, separately, to London. Sukie and Ben went south of the river to Stockwell while Derek remained in west London, choosing a flat that was exactly the same distance from Victoria Road as Victoria Road had been from Holland Park Road (which we will come to later). And the same distance from Holland Park Road as it was from Victoria Road. Without wishing to confuse the reader, the three consecutive loci (if you ignore the six-year stint in the country) form an equilateral triangle. This may be utterly devoid of any significance, but it makes a pretty pattern on the map.
Walk up Victoria Road and turn left into Cottesmore Gardens ending up back at Stanford Road, where you turn right. Head north up Kensington Court Place and you will spot a blue plaque in honour of TS Eliot at Nos.1-14 Kensington Court Gardens. Go left into Thackeray Street, up the side of Kensington Square into Young Street: Thackeray (1811-63) lived at No.16. Turn right into Ken High Street and left just before the Royal Garden Hotel into Palace Green, leading to Kensington Palace Gardens. Although this is a private road and closed to motor vehicles driven by you or I, it is open to pedestrians who are free to stroll past a whole string of embassies, as well as Kensington Palace.
At the top we go left into Notting Hill Gate and left again into Palace Gardens Terrace. On our left in a few yards is the tiny Notting Hill Books (no Marlowes on my visit), then at No.122 is the Ark, an upmarket Italian restaurant whose premises once housed a French bistro (also called the Ark) that was a favourite with Marlowe. The flat the novelist took when he moved back to west London after the split from Sukie is a moment's walk away at 4C Strathmore Gardens. Resident here from 1979-83, Marlowe was concentrating on screenwriting. His last completed book was Nancy Astor, strictly speaking a novelisation of his own television script but, since the book described itself as a novel and Marlowe wrote both the script and the book, we'll consider it a novel.
The current residents of 4C Strathmore Gardens can make their own minds up - they get a copy of Penguin's TV tie-in edition. Since it was published in 1982, it's possible he either wrote part of it here or at least checked the proofs. Our next destination takes us to the heart of Notting Hill and back to 1964. Head back up Palace Gardens Terrace (Wyndham Lewis, 1882-1957, lived at No.61) and left into Notting Hill Gate. Turn right into Pembridge Road. On the right is Book & Comic Exchange, a very good source of second-hand fiction. Pembridge Road curves to the right, leading into Pembridge Villas.
There are different routes from here to Blenheim Crescent, so there's no reason at all why we shouldn't jink up to Talbot Road via Courtnell Street and pay our respects to Nicolas Roeg, a resident of the street and one of the UK's greatest film directors. It's nice to know that as you walk up Courtnell Street you are literally following in the
footsteps of the man who made Walkabout, Bad Timing and Two Deaths. If you want a link with Marlowe, it's pretty tenuous, but there is one: Paul Mayersberg, the screenwriter on Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and
Eureka, also adapted Marlowe's Echoes of Celandine, filmed by Stuart Cooper as The Disappearance, with Donald Sutherland (the star of Roeg's masterpiece, Don't Look Now). Pure conjecture, but I would think it likely that Roeg is familiar with Marlowe's work: the two favour a method of building a scene by accumulating visual information, offering alternative viewpoints and loading apparently incidental details with enormous, almost occult, significance.
Heading west along Talbot Road brings us to Powis Square and the house (top left corner) where James Fox goes to ground with Mick Jagger in Performance, directed by Roeg and Donald Cammell (in fact the interiors were filmed in Belgravia). Follow the west side of the square and go right. Turn right into Portobello Road and in a moment you come upon the Electric Cinema, one of London's finest, which reopened in 2001. It was here that The Disappearance got a short run in 1977.
Before venturing west of Ladbroke Grove, it's worth having a look at the stretches of Blenheim Crescent and Elgin Crescent that lie to the Grove's east side. In this tiny, villagey neighbourhood you will find a brace of bookshops -the Travel Bookshop and Books For Cooks. Eventually we burst forth across the Grove and saunter down the right side of Blenheim Crescent to stop outside No.48. Marlowe rented a bedsitter here in 1964; Stoppard, who also lived in the building, recalls that Marlowe lived on either the ground or lower ground floor. The house has seen some changes since the 1960s and the bottom two floors are now a self-contained maisonette, No.48A. Its occupants get a copy of The Memoirs of a Venus Lackey (Panther paperback, slightly soiled) with apologies for the tacky cover (nude girl on beach). It turns out that the owner of No.48A (she has kindly left me a message by the time I get home) is in the best possible position to know that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, for she is the novelist Emma Tennant. An old acquaintance of Marlowe's, she is surprised to learn that he once lived in the space where she is now. Blenheim Crescent curves gently. Cross Clarendon Road and duck into Portland Road, following it all the way down to Holland Park Avenue, keeping to the left side, and you pass the home of Marlowe's former flat-mate Piers Paul Read.
The trees lining Holland Park Avenue form a partial canopy that creates an almost submarine luminescence. Shortly before Holland Park roundabout you will pass the Kensington Hilton, where Marlowe suggested he and I meet for drinks in the bar on one of his flying visits to London in 1995, by which time we were in sporadic contact as I had published a couple of his short stories. He was always under pressure on these trips and, sadly, our
appointment slipped his mind. Upset, he promised to treat me to dinner at my favourite restaurant on his next trip. But illness prevented any further visits and so we never did meet.Pass the Hilton and cross Holland Road at the lights, turning right for a few yards until, looking to your right, the parallax view of the giant blue, syringe-like water tower (actually a barometer) and the two blocks
of flats behind it resolves itself and the three line up, with the blue needle sandwiched. Now turn into Hansard Mews. To your right in the cutting below is a railway line that carries freight services and Eurostar trains returning to depot. Ahead, through the trees, catch sight of an incongruous, pretty mews. Follow Hansard Mews to its end and turn left into Lower Addison Gardens. Cross Holland Road a second time and come to a halt outside 19 Lower Addison Gardens. Marlowe had a flat on one of the upper floors, probably the top floor, between 1983-85, after leaving Strathmore Gardens. He wrote no books here, already making regular visits to the US. In The Rich Boy From Chicago Henry Bax's background is based loosely on Marlowe's own, and so, since it can't be ignored that we are standing no more than a hundred yards from the entrance to Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, on Holland Villas Road, which Marlowe attended, it's with a copy of that novel (Penguin, inelegant cover illustration)that I hit the current occupiers of the top flat at No.19.
A winding route now takes us back to 1965 and Marlowe's whereabouts between Vincent Square Mansions and Victoria Road. The top flat at 8 Holland Park Road is the third point of the triangle formed by Victoria Road and Strathmore Gardens and we reach it by a tree-lined, zig-zag route down Holland Villas Road, Addison Crescent and Addison Road, then left into either Oakwood Lane or Oakwood Court (the former's private status prompts the thrill I get from interloping in the exclusive domains of the well-off), followed by Abbotsbury Road, Ilchester Place, Melbury Road, Holland Park Road.
Since it's possible that Marlowe wrote Echoes of Celandine here, I slip a copy (hardback, first, no dj - I'm not made of money) into the communal hallway and climb back down the steps to Holland Park Road, looking up at the top of the building in case a curtain should twitch, a window scrape open and a handsome profile (thick, wavy brown hair, panatella) slip out. One begins to suspect, in these unchanged surroundings, that time is less rigid than one
has been led to believe. Wander into Leighton House, yards down the road, and lose any remaining sense of the present in the lulling Arab Hall, with its restful blue tiles, soft tinkle of running water, creaking boards.
The last lap. Turn right at the bottom of Holland Park Road into Strangways Terrace (another private road; another pleasant water feature), then left into what's left of Melbury, skip across treacherous Addison and nip into Napier. The hulking great hangar in long shot ahead of you is Olympia Exhibition Centre. Between you and it lie Holland Road and the same railway we saw earlier at Shepherd's Bush. Use the pedestrian access to Kensington (Olympia) station to follow the sign to Kensington, Addison
Road station and take the footbridge over the line; skirt the exhibition hall and find Blythe Road. You'll know you're going the right way by the vast, crenellated edifice on your left. Built a century ago, Blythe House is home to the National Art Archive. Trimmed with barbed wire and sentry boxes, it puts you more in mind of something out of A Dandy in Aspic. Beyond lies Blythe Road Restaurant and, further on, Daddy's, an Iranian restaurant which occupies premises formerly occupied by Wilson's, an extremely fine Scottish restaurant. The ex-proprietor, bag-pipe playing Bob Wilson, was a cousin by marriage of Marlowe's, and the restaurant was where family and friends (including the actor Nicholas Ball) gathered for a wake after the writer's death.
Cut across Shepherd's Bush Road and rat-run down to King Street, pausing for refreshment in the Stonemason's Arms on Cambridge Grove. Hit King Street and go west - it's what Marlowe did. It's a straight line on the map from Strathmore Gardens to Lower Addison Gardens to his last home in London, our final destination, 80 Hamlet Gardens, W6. You protract that line in a westerly direction and you'll find it ends up as near as dammit in LA. King Street throws up a very good Thai restaurant, Sabai Sabai, at Nos.270-272. Pass the entrance to Ravenscourt Park and turn right into Hamlet Gardens. Go to the end and turn left. Where the peeling green paintwork gives way to the fresher white, you'll see Marlowe's block. He lived at the top, in No.80, from 1985-90. Ken Russell's Gothic was released in 1987, a good enough reason to give the current owners a copy of A Single Summer With LB (Penguin, slightly worn) with a supplementary Darklands 2 (Egerton Press, mint), featuring an exquisite short story,
'Digits', that Marlowe wrote either here or at 1505 Blue Jay Way, Los Angeles, his next and last address. (A kind letter arrives from the new owners of No.80. They know about Marlowe and are grateful for his miles of bookshelves.) Double-back to Ravenscourt Park (road named after the park) and turn left; in 100 yards you reach a gate. It's a pleasant park with swings, slides,paddling pool, sand pit, open spaces, dog exercise areas, tea shop, duck pond, aromatic garden and occasional sightings of another major figure in British fiction, a contemporary of Marlowe's who is still very much with us thankfully - JG Ballard.
Now that the walk is at its end, your options are several. Quickest escape is via the District line at Ravenscourt Park. You might prefer to recline in the park's verdant pastures or head back to the river. The Thames is little more than a quarter of a mile away (the same distance separated the river from our starting point in Pimlico): relax with a drink on the terrace of the Dove and contemplate the fluid trajectories of Marlowe's career, assessing the degree of immortality conferred upon him by that which he has left behind, a unique body of work that richly deserves to be back in print.
