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(The London Informer)

Morning Star 24.9.08  EXHIBITION: Beyond the Jiving

JUDITH AMANTHIS  Honor Oak Gallery, London SE23

JUDITH AMANTHIS discovers an Austrian artist who was inspired by working-class youth in 1950s Britain.

GANG culture, knife crime, antisocial dead-end rebellion, zero proper nourishment and problems at home. Britain's working-class youth never had it so bad. It's 1955, the year exiled Austrian artist Margareta Berger-Hamerschlag published her bestseller Journey Into A Fog.

In it, she recounts her frustrations and aspirations teaching art to youth club members in the notorious slums of west London's Paddington and Kilburn, areas where youths are still killing each other today and where immigrants are still being met with hostility by locals and local authorities alike.

Youth workers are still taking on, some by way of art projects, the effects of the poverty and social exclusion that are none of the children's making.

But we have history to jog our memories - in an exhibition at the Honor Oak Gallery in south-east London and an accompanying book by Mel Wright called Beyond The Jiving.

Hamerschlag was born in 1902 in Vienna, learning her sense of social responsibility from her father, a doctor and socialist who practised in poor parts of Vienna.

She was a prodigious artist, working in the company of the new objectivists who were circulating around Vienna's art schools in the 1920s.

New objectivist artists included Otto Dix and Georges Grosz, who painted skewed city perspectives and respectable shirt fronts straining at buttons, which were, in part, a furious critique of the post-World War I German establishment.

Similarly, Hamerschlag's 1920s woodcut series Die Stadt (The City) is populated in deeply scored and gothic black and white by various foreground characters, such as the long-nailed and certainly malicious lady pianist in Das Klavierkonzert, while background factories, tenement blocks, a fashionista's grimace and the desperate leg-splits executed by a night club dancer all waltz crazily away from a fixed point on the horizon.

By now a writer and artist with several exhibitions under her belt, the bohemian Hamerschlag lived with her architect husband in a Viennese artists' community before taking off for Greece, Lebanon and Palestine, where the couple lived and worked until 1936.

They couldn't return to Austria because of the political situation, so they chose London. Joining other exiled German and Austrian artists, they lived in Paddington in relative poverty until Hamerschlag's 1955 bestseller.

Her youth club work had started off as a financial necessity, but rapidly became a source inspiration for her art and writing.

Her diary entries turned into her book and some of her drawings and paintings - she worked compulsively - became the book's illustrations. Surviving the violent Teds scene with her German accent and middle-aged grey hair must have required a lot of inspiration.

She's at her best in her brush and ink wash drawings, some watercolours, in which the boys' and girls' dramas of sex, fights and jiving are so securely composed that you immediately begin to make up the story of what's just happened to provoke this clash of flailing arms and legs or that hand round another's throat.

What happened to the Boy With Pingpong Ball to make him so angry that the flimsy ball is about to crumple in his fist? Is a squaddy's hand grenade or a cowboy's pistol in his imagination?

Hamerschlag's later work picks up on the storytelling suggestiveness of her early work and her capacity to imaginatively heighten her subjects' lives, to compact the most fraught or moving of incidents into a single frame.

An objectivist to the end, at no point does her work turn in on herself.

And she was a progressive educationalist - that beleaguered bunch now taking the flack for Britain's failing school system - who was concerned about these girls' and boys' capacity to observe their world with an open mind and to plunge into life's intricacies with their brains on fire.

After all, once they left the all-white youth club, they may well have been on their way to harass - or worse - their newly arrived Caribbean neighbours.

Hamerschlag's superb draughtsmanship shows best in her watercolour still lifes and landscapes. But she was a humanist and the still lifes just don't move, lacking the fag-in-the corner-of-the-mouth emphasis of her human subjects, the imagination pinging off those shirt front buttons.

Beyond The Jiving - an exhibition of Margareta Berger-Hamerschlag's paintings and drawings, is on now at Honor Oak Gallery, London SE23. Runs until October 18. Phone (020) 8291-6094 for more details.

Beyond the Jiving looks at artist's life

Author Mel Wright's Beyond the Jiving is a fascinating portrait of an artist's life, writes Germaine Arnold.

This study of the life of Margareta Berger-Hamerschlag is a fascinating insight into an artist who has largely been overlooked in the years since her death. In Beyond the Jiving, author Mel Wright has compiled the memoir of the artist to coincide with the 50th anniversary of her death, in the hope of bringing her work to a wider audience The brief but comprehensive book gives a vivid image of Berger-Hamerschlag's life, chronicling her early childhood right through to her untimely death, and features many reproductions of her artwork.

Click here to see the whole article.

Beyond the Jiving is published by Deptford Forum Publishing on Sep 1. An exhibition of Berger-Hamerschlag's work opens at Honor Oak Gallery on Sep 18 to Oct 18. 020 8291 6094.

Deptford Forum Publishing

 Eva’s Waltz by Mel Wright

- Hot Clubs, Cool Jazz and Eva Braun -

Published September 2006. ISBN 1 898536 12 0   £6.99. 

Available from www.Bookseller Crow On The Hill.

Crystal Palace (020 8771 8831)

Lewisham author Mel Wright’s second novel for Deptford Forum Publishing is published in September. Eva’s Waltz, which has been described as a “wartime romp,”  is set in Soho and follows the exploits of Polish émigré –    dance band drummer, Lenny, and Al, a black GI trumpeter in their passion to play jazz, dodge the bombs and the authorities on their tail. And to top it all, unbeknown to Lenny, Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun has taken a liking to a tune that he has recorded.

Ex social worker, Mel Wright is a community development worker across London and author of Rock Around Lewisham, articles about fifties and sixties music and the novel, Be Lucky!  He has lived in Lewisham for thirty four years and is also a musician, a drummer – performing since the sixties with blues bands and accompanying American blues legends e.g. Arthur Big Boy Crudup, Juke Boy Bonner, Champion Jack Dupree, Lightnin’ Slim, Curtis Jones etc (see www.melwright.co.uk) He currently plays with the celtic mix, south London based, The Flying Chaucers playing events around UK including Glastonbury Festival.

Eva’s Waltz – Author’s comments:

“Eva’s Waltz has been described as a ‘wartime romp’ with its ducking and diving the Nazi bombs, black market rivalries. It has a strong comic element, although it does have a serious side as well. The waltz, written by Lenny, the protagonist, draws in Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress and members the Nazi inner circle, as well as surprisingly sealing the fate of one character.”

“The story is set in 1943, Soho when the American troops and others were arriving for the preparation for invasion of Europe. At the time there was a real melting pot of nationalities in the West End and interest in swing and jazz as the jitterbug dancing took off. People were keen on having fun as well as surviving! The black American GI’s were segregated from the whites and certain areas in London were banned to them by the American authorities.”

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Reader's Comments

Barbara Hearn

" I have read the novel and I have to say I found it gripping. It is not often I feel I cannot put a book down but this one of them. Reading Mel Wright’s book added a new angle to my understanding. It is a really interesting take on the social side of the war and what was happening among all the ‘other people’ that is those who were not fighting and who we often hear so little about. The story weaves its way through the music and mischief of war torn London in a thoroughly engaging manner. The worrying links it makes to the very heart of Nazi Germany add a chill and a thrill. I do hope others get to read it and to support this local author."

October 2006

 Yolanda Fossaluzza - a teenager in Soho in 1943

 "I rarely read fiction but your book was truly superb, so evocative of my wartime and just after days in Soho and West End, I remember the spivs and wide boys, not all as friendly as Lenny, but it was part of Soho life at the time,  very very enjoyable."

October 2006

 John Miles review of  Be Lucky! and Eva's Waltz. October 2006

Some time around 1920 two very different American writers, Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway, found that by stripping out description and shielding the author's voice, they could establish a new arena for popular literary fiction. The resulting 'hard-boiled' style established a way of writing about working-class life. In Britain a version of this approach surfaced definitively in the 1960s in the novels of Alan Sillitoe, Bill Naughton, and others. The style made possible the creation of tough, self-interested. working-class protagonists (men) who did not have to be either villains or 'characters' - no longer Bill Sykes, Sam Weller, or any of their successors. Oddly, perhaps, it was left to television to sustain an older tradition of writing about working-class life - although this often operated through the distorting lens of situation comedy, with its relentless construction of aspiration as pretension.

Mel Wright's two novellas, Be Lucky! and Eva's Waltz, are written in this older tradition , although with echoes of current screen drama – the scene in Eva's Waltz where English coppers and US military police dispute their jurisdiction in London could go straight into an episode of Foyle's War. We read these books with a strong awareness of the author as our guide. Mel is a constant presence, a genial observer of the shifting urban environment, keen to set the scene before his characters emerge and take over. The style is affectionate, the result engaging, capturing the rhetoric of pub conversations, small-scale business deals, and awkward romantic assignations with some finesse. Wright, a former social worker, doyen of both community action and musical performance, has an eye both for people who lack confidence in their emotions, and for those – particularly women – whose self-confidence can seem to overflow. In Be Lucky! this enables him to capture with sensitivity and good humour the negotiations of a middle-aged black couple, who may - or may not - be retiring as landlords of a Deptford pub to return to the Caribbean. Beneath the cockney business with which the tale is much concerned Wright pursues with some sharpness both the dilemmas that come with age, and the complexity of realigning oneself in a multi-cultural environment.

Nevertheless, the genre has its weaknesses, and there are points in Be Lucky! when the comic escapades leave the characters undeveloped and the plot going in circles. It was a surprise to learn that Mel's next work would focus not just on London in the Blitz but on the war-time life of Eva Braun. Eva's Waltz is much more ambitious than Be Lucky!, and Wright's concern to constantly set and reset the scene, engage seriously with the direction of half a dozen lives in two countries, while maintaining a larky comedy around the war-time black market, threatens at times to pull the book apart. There are several plot strands, linked by the very different meanings, in London and Nazi Germany, of a waltz tune written by two Jewish brothers from Warsaw. We discover it is a favourite melody of Eva Braun. Lenny, one of its composers, living in London as a refugee, is a jazz drummer. He is besotted with Sonia, a singer from a middle-class background, and becomes a close friend of Al, an aspiring African-American trumpeter. They form a band called 'Bundle of Blues'. Meanwhile, Eva Braun, trapped in the Berghof at the time of Stalingrad and El Alamein, and frustrated at her delayed marriage to Hitler. becomes enamoured of an ambitious SS officer who is engaged to her sister.

In London, Wright struggles initially to separate Lenny and Al from the life around them, a world of spivs, tarts, waitresses, out of work musicians, and anxious families, which he describes like a gentle Hogarth. In Germany, he gets to grips with Braun from the beginning, while, in London, it is not until we learn more about Sonia, struggling with her severely depressed and recently widowed mother, that we get properly engaged. Mel writes very nicely about playing music, and working live gigs, but the evolution of Bundle of Blues, and the hustling needed to sustain it, is not of itself terribly interesting. This emphasis contributes to Al being partially obscured – we see him almost entirely as the vehicle for Lenny's aspirations, prone to endless flirting, or fast asleep at the wrong moment. This is a pity as he is brilliantly introduced in a first chapter, making a nostalgic return visit to London from Chicago with his admiring great-grandson. But this is not really his story – the camera is never quite at the right angle, a point that emerges most sharply when he sits out a night-club brawl between black and white GIs, broken up violently by the military police. The protagonists have nothing to say to each other about the racism that courses through this incident, which makes it strong on period detail, but inert as a vehicle for examining their moral development, and helping us to get to know Al properly.

There's a sense in which the author has simply put in too much. The book takes a sensuous pleasure in what it feels like to play live music. It sets out to evoke the music scene in war-time London, and to examine it as a multi-cultural cross-roads. But then there are three central characters in London, with numerous genre scenes associated with them, and three in Germany. It's interesting that its in Germany, where neither the comedy business nor the scene-setting predominates, that a more linear narrative, with greater emotional depth, has room to emerge.  Hopefully, in his next book, Mel will bring all this back home.

October 2006

Be lucky!

“Mel Wright’s eye for the details of everyday life, illuminate an engaging tale. It is of course a shrewd device to centre his vignettes on the pub – he can make anyone he wants to walk through the door and enliven the action. Race-page addicts, market traders, dodgy dealers, brassy women and weirdos like Pyjama Man Terry, who gets ready for bed before his evening pint, develop the narrative and Wright throws in a touching love story as well”.  

The Guide, John Collis – May 2003

 “Alcoholism, anger management, loneliness, pensioner poverty, racism:

the problems customers can brew up in a pub with a shouty street market on the doorstep are enough to fill a social worker’s week. Mel Wright has been a social worker for more than 20 years in parts of east and south east London, and his encounters with the regulars who use such pubs have ended up in a book; not a manual – but, more fun, a novel. So Wright raises two cheers for old-fashioned local pubs. But let us give a third cheer for Deptford Forum Publishing, which took up his book after literary houses turned up their noses.”    

The Guardian, John Cunningham –Society.29.4.03

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