Word: soho
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ADRIFT IN SOHO (229 pp.]-Colin Wilson-Houqhfon Mifflin...
Bourgeois Animal. Wilson's Adrift in Soho is about Harry, who felt like "a trapped animal" in his Midlands town. So he came to London with about ?25, a cardboard suitcase and a haversack full of books to practice his trade of being a poet and philosopher. Almost immediately he meets his mate, a New Zealander named Doreen, and his mentor, a sometime actor named Charles Compton Street. Charles introduces him to the fine art of living without working-cadging food and drink, stealing an occasional rare book, sleeping on suburban trains or on somebody's floor. Charles...
...long ago, Jazz Pianist Calvin Jackson was asked by a couple of well-oiled ring-siders what he was trying to say. Take Laura, said Calvin: "Musically you can put her anyplace you want to-in the woods, at sea, in a bar, in the Village or in Soho. I'll show you." When he had played through Laura once, one ringsider turned to the other. "By damn," he said, "she's in the woods...
...short stories of this collection are told in the first person and appear in chronological order. As such, they are links in Alec Waugh's own footloose life, beginning with his callow saunterings through Soho restaurants and Mayfair drawing rooms and ending with surprise encounters in tropic seas. As Alec Waugh sojourns from Malayan rice fields to Levantine hospitals, from German opera houses to sleepy islands in the Indian Ocean, his plots rise happily out of the travelogue prose. In The Last Chukka, the British manager of a Siamese lumber camp imagines that he has leprosy and goes jungle...
...camera rarely lets you forget that it's exposing a jungle. It weaves in and out among hip teen-agers, displays Soho as a dense underbrush, hides behind cars and then peeks out over them, clutters scenes with a variety of plants. Nor can you escape the animal screaming--the music, the noisy conversations, a few wild arguments...