REVIEWS OF MY WORK

Journals Volume 1 (1996-2001): A Soho Golden Age by Ernst Graf (out of print)

 Reviewed by Jad Adams

NB: Mr Adams submitted this review to Amazon and Amazon perfectly understandably removed it as two days earlier I--with customary bad timing--had made significant changes to the structure of the book, completely removing the parts entitled 'Therapy' and 'A Season in Hell' which Mr Adams alludes to below, and then eventually republishing the three parts under separate cover as THERAPY (1996-98), SOHO (1998-99), and AUTISMUS (1999-2002). Mr Adams has kindly allowed me to print his review here. Only my ex-wife (bless her) understands just how much Ernest Dowson means to me, and that is solely thanks to Mr Adams & his wonderful Dowson biography, which is what makes his words below so emotional for me. I thank him for them.

In the 1880s the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun roamed the streets of Christiania (Oslo) and wrote a book about what he felt: Hunger (1890). That is what is in the book: an account of his famished wanderings. In a work widely described as being the foundation text of modernism, it introduces stream of consciousness, interior monologue, it has no background or plot, his human inter-actions are misunderstandings, his logic for his actions (such as it is) is bizarre and personal.

Reading Ernst Graf’s journal made me think again and again of the starving Norwegian. The narrator, guided by nothing but habit and eroticism goes to strip clubs, porn cinemas and prostitutes. He remarks, ‘Any day out in London that does not end in me getting my cock out, or being completely naked, is an incomplete day.’ This is Knut Hamsun with a hard-on.

He feels superior in his exuberant sexuality, ‘I feel strong, relaxed and powerful because I am indulging my polymorphous perversity.’ He nurtures a wish ‘to see how far I can push my priapism till it destroys me’ which is not an ambition shared by a great many people.

He is not without introspection: he examines his behaviour and worries that he is not being extreme enough. His introduction to treatment is not explained, but he does go to therapy sessions, ‘where ‘I was able to talk about my greatness’ which is perhaps not what the therapist (also an object of his lust) had in mind.

The lack of conventional literary structure in this book is highlighted by its construction. There are no page numbers, no days are noted though sometimes a chapter has a date which shows it covers a clearly defined period such as ‘Chapter 10, October 1998, I live on a sea of scented bosoms.’

It is in three sections: Therapy, A Season in Hell and Autismus. This is a very literary book, referencing Frank Wedekind, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Kane, Henry Miller, Emile Zola and others along with artists Egon Schiele and George Grosz. Even in his wide reading the narrator has an original standpoint, talking of getting a ‘fix’ of literature and treating Fu Manchu and Dracula as characters as real as their authors or as people he sees around him.

The conflict here is between his desperate need for intimacy and his inability to bring it about, ‘People who have no relationships are haunted by sexual desires,’ he says, ‘I am so strong against all the attacks I must face but totally defenceless against friendship.’

This is not to say there is no character development. In later years, with the decline of ‘the glory that was Soho’ the narrator begins to examine his autism (which to my unprofessional eye looks like high-performing Asperger’s syndrome, at the ‘soft’ end of the autism spectrum).

There is a relationship referred to here, but it is filtered through the prism of his single mindedness, ‘The moment I met the most desirable Queen of my life was the moment I completed my journey to monsterhood.’ Not many interactions are recounted, but what there are seem like those of a Samuel Beckett play, ‘whenever I forget I am not a real person and try to engage with people, it ends in disaster.’

There is also a sense as the pages turn that this is near the end of something – the end of the century was when porn cinemas were being closed because of the widespread use of videos and then DVDs; conventional strip clubs were closing as old-fashioned entertainment; the redevelopment of Soho because of high real estate prices meant prostitutes could no longer afford the rents of their apartments. The narrator does not concern himself with such financial or technical explanations, all that matters is their effect on him. It is what he calls ‘The Demolished Eroticism.’

I started looking at his book and noted clues as to the author’s identity – he lives somewhere, near but not in London, he has a job but we don’t know what it is, he has had a girlfriend, he comments on having been bullied....then I stopped playing detective and let the flow take me. This is not a conventional book, but it is the most original book I have read all year. Its virtue is its moral courage to say the unsayable, its exalted language and its view into a world which is repellent, fascinating and in the end, revealing.

JAD ADAMS @JadAdamsAuthor

Jad Adams has worked as an author, television producer and a journalist. His books include the definitive biography Tony Benn; a biography of ‘the man behind the Mahatma’ called Gandhi: Naked Ambition and a composite biography of the Nehru clan called The Dynasty. Television work includes biographies of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Lord Kitchener. Another strand of Jad’s life is his interest in the culture of the 1890s about which he has written in Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle and Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson. He has also written biographies of Kipling and Emmeline Pankhurst. Jad is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London; and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Publications by Jad Adams

In The Strip Clubs And Brothels Of Europe: A Winter’s Tale by Ernst Graf

Reviewed on November 29, 2018 by Troy Francis

https://realtroyfrancis.com/2018/11/29/strip-clubs-brothels-europe/

No man is an island. Well I’m as close to it as I’ve ever met. There may be other people like me but by definition I am not likely to bump into them.

Ernst Graf

As anyone who follows me over on Twitter will be more than aware, I am a fan of the writer and diarist Ernst Graf. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t retweet some choice morsel of his prose for others to enjoy. (Some will recall that I interviewed him here in 2017). Perhaps some people following me get fed up with this. Maybe they’re asking themselves, why the hell does Troy—who is a ‘game’ guy—quote this man who bangs on about strippers, hookers and Kasper Hauser (who he?) the whole time? But the fact is that Graf is one of the finest writers working today, and his work, informed by his travels to the ‘four stations of the cross’—Berlin, Vienna, Brussels and Munich, and the strip clubs, porn cinemas and brothels there—gets right to the heart of modern masculinity with a directness that no one else dares emulate.

Critical Probing

It was heartening, recently, to see Graf finally getting some mainstream critical attention from Jad Adams, author of Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent, the book that first introduced Graf to Dowson and ignited his long fascination for him. Adams’ admiration for Graf is palpable and deserved. Calling him ‘Knut Hamsun with a hard-on’, Adam’s rightly characterises Graf as a highly literary writer, observing that his Journals 1 (A Soho Golden Age) references ‘Frank Wedekind, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Kane, Henry Miller, Emile Zola and others along with artists Egon Schiele and George Grosz.’

Of course, Ernest Dowson’s association with the decadent movement of the late 19th century is key here, since Graf is himself a product of the decadent imagination, inspired not only by Dowson, but also Baudelaire and others. On Dowson’s death Oscar Wilde said “Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was, a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol, or a scene. I hope bay leaves will be laid on his tomb and rue and myrtle too for he knew what love was”. 

Well, Ernst Graf knows what love is too—even though his instinct (or the instinct of his literary alter ego) is to run from it. Ernst Graf isn’t his real name. That was the name of the German gynaecologist who discovered the female G spot. Who knows what his real name is? In fact, who knows anything very much at all about the figure behind these books—other than what the texts themselves reveal. And who knows how much of that is fictionalised. 

As Jad Adams notes, ‘he lives somewhere, near but not in London, he has a job but we don’t know what it is, he has had a girlfriend, he comments on having been bullied….then I stopped playing detective and let the flow take me.' And that is essential—letting the flow of Graf’s prose take you. The identity of the author is of no importance in comparison with what is on the page, and our appreciation of literary texts should not be sullied by the minutiae of biographical data.

Many times over the years I have reached out to Graf, asking if we could possibly meet. Many times he has politely but robustly declined. 

It is probably for the best.

Floozies

To refine things down to their essence, I go on holiday because of my penis.

A Winter’s Tale, like all of Graf’s books to date, is a travel diary detailing his excursions to Brussels, Munich and Berlin in 2015. As usual, there isn’t anything so vulgar as plot to interrupt the proceedings. As Adam’s observes, Graf is a product of the modernists, and his writing has the same stream-of-conscious quality as Hamsun, and before that Eliot, Joyce and even Proust.

What we get instead of a cracking yarn is Graf’s musings as he takes trains around Europe (rarely planes), checks into his favourite hotels, gets drunk and hits the red-light districts, looking at strippers and hookers but rarely doing anything with them. 

What separates A Winter’s Tale from the previous books is that it is less sexually frenzied and more reflective. Put simply, the author is getting older and he no longer has the same drive to lose himself in eros. But still, he is drawn back to the same old places, like a heroin addict shooting up water in a vain effort to reach the old highs. 

Somewhere Michel Houellebecq (himself a fan of the decadents) writes about the nostalgia that middle-aged men feel not just for the experience of sex with young women, but for the desire that itself motivated that sex. We feel something of the same longing here. 

Sitting in the nightbars surrounded by floozies no longer makes me happy. They all say to me “You seem upset; what is wrong?” but my addiction makes me keep going, though I get no pleasure out of it. Wasting my time and theirs. 

Graf is addicted to the nightscene–to the bars, to the strip clubs with their plastic Balkan music and gaudy neons, and to the brothels, even as his desire to interact sexually in these places recedes. Later he writes:

This is why I travel. In a nutshell I travel to drink, and to eat, and to watch some pornography on a big screen and some scantily-clad floozies in a night bar—but just watch them, mind, rarely anything more than that. The planets and stars have to be in a rare alignment for me to feel any desire to do anything. 

The reason for this, we are told, is that Graf simply feels happier surrounded by prostitutes–in a way, he has become ‘institutionalised’ by the sex industry. He has haunted it for so long that he is unable to break away:

I only feel comfortable when surrounded by whores. 999 times out of a thousand I never do anything with them, but how happy I feel to be surrounded by them if I need them. God bless these women.

It says something about me that I come to a brothel and am more interested in the pictures on the wall. I seem to be becoming increasingly averse to real life women. 

Many would consider this a regrettable state of affairs, recommending that Graf seek therapy for whatever psychological issues have led him here. But far from being the root of Graf’s problems, the sex clubs of Europe have been his salvation—the very thing that enabled his self-actualisation: 

It was only in the strip clubs and brothels of Europe that I really learnt to cope with life and discovered some comfort and calmness. 

How to account for this? Simply because the sex clubs are renegade spaces inhabited by outsiders (both the girls and the punters) and as such are places where outsiders can fit in: 

What is this addiction of mine to strip clubs & brothels? I think it’s because it is an outsider’s world, and it was the first time in my life I ever found a place where I felt comfortable. 

What we detect here is a strange tension between the narrator’s pervasive desire to visit places which, while still fascinating to him, no longer give him the ‘hit’ he once enjoyed. Like some priapic, Marc Dorcel version of the Ghost of Christmas Past, he is condemned to keep revisiting the life of his former self.

Sordid

But what else is there? Graf is not one for settling down with a pipe and slippers, a wife and a brood of noisy kids: 

As I get older I do not “improve” i.e. become more mature, more of a “family man”. On the contrary I become purer me. That means MORE scopophiliac, MORE priapic, MORE provocative. As I get older all that happens is I become less & less ashamed of my tastes and behaviour and indulge them more purely than ever.

I simply cannot understand women who want children, and men who want children. I simply have a completely different mindset to them. Why on Earth would you want to destroy your freedom by having children? I still feel I want to be free to sow my “wild oats”. I cannot imagine a time when I DON’T want to sow my “wild oats”.

So there is no escaping his ‘four stations of the cross’, and we sense that Graf is both sad and unrepentant about it simultaneously.

‘Yes, I know it is all futile’, his work says. ‘But I will keep doing it anyway. I will keep travelling to these sordid places just to spite you. Just to spite me.’

Honest

One of the reasons I like Graf’s writing so much, and why I quote him so frequently, is that he is more honest about male sexuality than pretty much anyone else with a public profile I can think of.

As I have said on Twitter, the playboy (or the libertine, a description which suits Graf better) is pilloried from all sides. The feminists hate him, of course (well, who don’t they hate?) But the hypocritical puritans on the right hate him too, since he rejects their prescription for a ‘good life’—family, clean living and religion. Instead, Graf finds his own form of religion in sin cities (‘For me Berlin is some kind of Holy City. For some people Jerusalem is a holy city, or Mecca; for me Berlin is a holy city’). And thus the libertine is hated for his honesty, and for his refusal not to live life on his own terms. Such is the fate of all those who don’t follow the herd, as Graf is all too keenly aware. However, resilience and a lack of confidence in his greatness are not among his shortcomings: 

I do have a belief that I am creating a body of work that will one day come to mean something, like the writings of Samuel Pepys. It may not have value now, but like Coal and Diamonds and Oil, it needs Time to bring value to it. This sense of my own specialness was always my best and last defence against depression that dominated most of my life, and eventually the defeater and vanquisher of that depression. My sense of greatness DEFEATED my black depressions; AND my bitter, pathetic little enemies. They had no idea who they had taken on; no idea they had bitten off more than they could chew. I almost felt sorry for them. Their resources were so much less than mine; their “hinterland” was non-existent. The secret source of my Nile was always a bewildering mystery to them. This is how great people always triumph over the small people. 

And that, ultimately is the point. Graf’s writing—the output derived from all of this activity—is what makes all the pain and tedium and regret and disillusionment and momentary joy quickly extinguished worth it. Yes, Graf may be a ‘pervert’ (he uses the term himself at one point), but far more importantly he is a writer. He is also an artist of the old-fashioned variety who is prepared to suffer for his art. To undergo hardships,  to ‘pass through Orphée’s watery black mirror’ and emerge with a document, a text that communicates just a little of what it is to be a human being with a pulse and a penis living on this crazy planet in the early 21st century.

I have uploaded three of my first four books on to Amazon so they are at least preserved for posterity. And after that, I just keep on adding to them. I really don’t want for anything else now—just the freedom to travel, repeatedly, back to the same places. For that oblivion, that suspension, that transcendence. 

And so Graf is stuck in Nietzsche’s ‘perpetual recurrence’, revisiting those same haunts time and again to inject that magic spark into his writing in order to pass transcendence onto us, his readers.

Toothless Bulgarian Fatties

I am very aware that not everyone reading this will share Graf’s enthusiasm for paid-for sex in dark porn cinemas with toothless Bulgarian fatties (as I once cheekily remarked). But that’s not really the point. What makes Graf’s writing so important is the way that he captures the addictive and obsessive nature of sexual hunger and satiation that all men will recognise, regardless of their predilections. 

If you have already read Graf then I would highly recommend A Winter’s Tale, which you can purchase here. If you are new to his work then you might be as well to start with the first volume of his Journals, available here. Either way, if you’re not reading him now then you should be. 

Aside from the meditations of sexuality, loneliness and existentialism, Graf is also a sharp culinary critic, as this brief restaurant review attests: 

The salad was mixed but dry; in the Café West End it comes soaked in delicious olive oil I think. But its main effect was just to make me want to sleep. I tried to have one more beer in the hotel, then to Ciné Paris for Tropical Anal.

Troy Francis
Writer | Consultant | Dating, Mindset & Modern Life For Gentlemen Of Today| Free daily email: http://bit.ly/2m3V7dU
https://twitter.com/RenegadePlayboy

At the turn of the year (2020) people started talking about a great wind rising in the West, South Alabama in particular, and then it hit us in Western Europe, "the old world", in the form of PunchRiot, a new literary magazine sired by the great Nick August. It hit us at pretty much the same time as Bat Flu hit us from the East, and at pretty much the same time as America seemed to descend into the kind of insane anarchy we saw at the cinema in The Purge and thought too far-fetched. Whether these three events were coincidence or not will perhaps only become clear a hundred, or 200 years from now. I was honoured that Nick asked me if I would write an initial six pieces for his first six issues, although he made clear at that time he would only be able to pay me in barrels of Alabama bat soup, which was fine by me, and further honoured when Nick offered this assessment of my contributions thus far in his Issue 6 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIlQbBg7y6w :

All I want to say about Ernst Graf, because (sigh)...he's got such a...in every one of his dispatches he's got....First of all, every piece he sends in requires really no editing at all (for the most part). His pieces come in almost immaculate and you can tell he puts a lot of...there's a lot of quality that goes in to what he's doing. And I don't know if he's so good he can just dash this off in 5 minutes and have it be perfect, because there are some people who can kind of do that with a lot of stuff, or if he labours over this for long periods of time, but his prose is always really smooth, it's always print-ready, it's always funny. He writes about places and the people he sees in those places, there's a lot of sexuality and stuff like that in there, which is cool, but the thing that I think is cool about it is he really brings home the sense of place that he's writing about. You know when you're a kid you read books to escape and go on adventures in your mind and all that kind of stuff, in your imagination, and reading him kind of brings me back to...that same sense of going on an adventure in your imagination, but he brings it up from what's appropriate for a 9-year-old boy to a middle-aged man and the stuff that happens and just the way he turns a phrase and everything, it's really a lot of fun to read. So I look forward to having a lot more of his work in the magazine, because I really think it adds something, and I've got a good bit of positive feedback about all of his work. 

Nick August 
Writer. Editor. Technologist. Software engineer. Startup veteran. Money-grubber. Publisher. https://twitter.com/thenickaugust
Editor of PunchRiot https://twitter.com/PunchRiotMag
Sample issue of PunchRiot here https://punchriot.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/thepunchriotsampler.pdf

In May 2018 Troy Francis honoured me by reading some of my work online, declaring generously "I felt like a kind of oral Watson to your Holmes." Many thanks also to the lovely @Faily_ for enduring it. Best wishes to her wherever she may be. Click on the picture below to hear Troy's dulcet tones.

Nick August warms to his theme in his PunchRiot Issue 10 review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBs0P9C3Em4

"And then Ernst Graf, the Marquis de Shard himself, closed out the first series that he did with us called IF last issue and now he's got a new one called A PILGRIM'S TALE and that is kind of going off in a new direction. There are a lot of things I like about the stuff that he writes. I originally got acquainted with him through Twitter and read some of his blog posts and I thought they were insightful and funny, and in terms of someone who is very well read, particularly in English and European fiction and literature, he's all over the place there, he's got so much context and reference to draw from. There's a lot of wit and cleverness in what he writes. I would like to know what his writing process is because his narratives are always so quick and light, they're deceptively smooth and my experience anyway is you don't get there without putting a lot of work and a lot of effort into what you're doing.

There's a literary form called the picaresque which usually involves people on crazy adventures running around the countryside getting into trouble, often with their sexual organs, and if you've read any of Ernst Graf's stuff you'll know that that's a major theme of what he writes about, and it's so funny because I've always really appreciated the more understated approach to writing humour that the English do and it's no less vivid, it's just - the tension between the sort of understated and normal way to communicate this matter-of-factly, and in this latest one it's like...when you read Ernst Graf's stuff you imagine this crazy character running around England painting the entire country in his ejaculate, and for a lot of people who would write that it would be like some kind of Jackie Martling skit or something that was from something like Hustler magazine or something, but the way Ernst Graf does it, it always happens in such bucolic and sort of classic surroundings and scenarios and he drops that stuff in there so matter-of-factly, I just think it's funny as hell and cleverly done, and it's hard to cheer for a guy running around England jerking off but for some reason he makes it easier to cheer for that guy, and I just think that's hilarious.

..Then you've got the thoughtful but picaresque humour of Ernst Graf - one of the things I've always liked about Ernst's writings is he writes about places, and the way that Ernst writes about places, I always want to be in that place, I always want to see that place, because like I said he is deceptively smooth in how easy it is to read through his stuff, because it's got humour and it's got a lot of emotion, it's got a lot of things in it, but it's very well-controlled and that's the thing that I think is extraordinary about his work. If he does dash it off without much of a thought I'd be very surprised; he's got a very unique vision and very unique voice and he's very good at getting that in there so when I read his stuff you can really feel the place he's talking about, and he makes it interesting like you want to be there, or at least that's the impact it has on me, so I like that."

A PILGRIM'S TALE available to read ONLY in PunchRiot in 12 episodes. At time of writing only the first episode has been published so far - subscribe!