American book review

American Book Review

CHASING THE STARS AND HOPING TO SHAG THE MOON by Karen Moller

The Unending Conversation?by Alain Arias-Misson

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One first remarks the speed, the staccato give and take of this odd dialogue?about books and friends— characters, hundreds it seems,?from fiction and from real life, equally intimate (“I learned about life from books”, says Karen),?anecdotes of?the?famous and the obscure ("Known Knowns and Unknown Knowns" as Cyclops calls them, comfortable among the latter),?rub elbows with them. Karen Moller, with her famous designer past and many friends from the contemporary French art world, such as the eccentric and visionary Filliou and that ultimate avant-gardiste the flying Yves Klein to the British pop world of the Beatles and the larger-than-cartoon,?declamatory American poets, Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, ranges over social and feminist and literary history and fascinating?stories within stories of friends and great novels?with irrepressible zest and the freshest of prose; practical, clear-eyed, with remarkable self-awareness and minimal encroachment of the ego, she is the?Mrs.?Pepys of this stroll through the cultural landscape. While Cyclops, often lost in obscure personal histories, indistinguishably autobiographical and fictitious, explores the murky back-streets of provincial English towns in a growling jive that owes as much to Dickens and Joyce as to the Goon Show in search of a mythical mother who may have been the widow of the legendary WWII hero Captain Crabbe, who may died in his attempt to attach a device underwater to the hull of a Russian warship that brought Khruschev?to Britain for MI5, rapping next with the peculiarly luminous Piero Heliczer, paradoxical?Jewish "Nazi" child star who practically invented Warhol’s famous ??ritual happenings??, sharing canned meals with the would-be American Jean Genet-- Gregory Corso— on the floor of?Madame Rachou’s?Beat Hotel in Paris in the late fifties, or digging for herbs and edible weeds with the lyrical German painter Hundertwasser in the latter’s refuge in the French province,?after Heliczer was ejected for wandering nude in the village center and playing his flute at 5 in the morning.

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?No, do not look in these pages for a leisurely plod through their cultural landscape of the last half-century with marvelous mountain lake views like the Scottish Tour of Keats and Burns…?Karen and Cy on their own Grand Tour of the cultural explosion of the Sixties and its repercussions throughout the next half century, mix and scramble pop music and feminist politics, personal anecdotes, the front page Profumo/Christine Keeler sex scandal and London’s notorious landlord Ranchman, and innumerable great novels which they appear to live in and mix with the like of Kafka’s K or Beckett’s Watt with the same intimacy as all the fantastic characters whose paths they cross in ??real life??. Indeed the boundaries between real life and the life of fiction are often blurred and unless you read closely you may not know which landscape you are currently strolling in with them. What they do have in common with Keats and Burns, like them from modest origins, is a powerful demotic and literary urge, with a narrative that runs from Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol’s factory to the recondite poet-monk dsh (Dom Sylvester Houédard) and the redactor-poet Tom Phillips!???

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For it must be said that Dickens and Austen and Kafka and Joyce and Beckett and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky can be found at every corner of their streets and in their London taverns and on many fine promenades, and their company with Karen and Cyclops is quite delightful! Not that they are of one mind! Collisions take place between these two inexhaustible conversational ramblers, as should be expected when they examine every nook and cranny of each others’ fascinations and obsessions with the century— for example when a woman’s keen eye and an old ex-Beat’s latent paternalism clash (oh yes, this is one of Karen Moller’s sharp perceptions, here and in her previous memoir of high fashion and hippie and Beat culture— the girl who took off from small-town Canada with Kerouac’s ??On the Road?? under her arm to conquer the world--and did— the fashion world!)?was quick to realize that the males of this intoxicating new culture celebrated their sexual freedom while ogling the females as common property— was this so different from Islamic ideology (another one of Moller’s furious grievances and celebration of truly heroic Islamic women?writers?such as the Somali, Hirsi Ali, and the Iranian,?Nafisi, watch out for the fireworks there!)? Sparks also fly in the conversation regarding Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir and novelists like Bronte and?George Eliot. My take was that with Karen’s disconsolate realization of her old friend’s surviving macho-ism, Cy beat a wise retreat?in their correspondence, after some preliminary waving about of the banner of patriarchy!??

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If this is a book about books—it is far from bookish! While the passionate dialogue of these kindred spirits ranges across the literary and art world, tantalizing footsteps of their own are traceable across these pages. Karen Moller, growing up in the mountains of Canada, skiing to school as a child, who “wanted to be a boy while all the other girls wanted boyfriends,” whose father wouldn’t pay for her education because girls just got married, so she escaped to art college in Calgary on her own and paid for her??classes by waitressing. Then off to Paris to study with André Lhote, “sitting around in Café Flore when I first arrived in Paris, hunched over a coffee, a Gauloise cig hanging out of the corner of my mouth”, helping Robert Filliou with the performance of his?Collage of the Immortal Death of the World?,??a backup model for Yves Klein’s notorious body paintings, querying William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel,??next stop, London, where her boutique soon became a fashion hotspot, her clothes modeled by Twiggy,??partying with the Beatles, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, the artists and poets of London. A fierce feminist protesting for women’s rights, she tossed bricks at the police from a rooftop in the Paris ‘68 riots. She went on to become one of the most famous fashion forecasters in the world with her company in Paris, her designs sold to every major fashion house from Paris and London to New York and Tokyo, her picture splashed across the cover of Nova Magazine as the “New Woman”. Finally, having made her fortune by sixty, she decided to devote herself to writing and has since written four books!

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Her friend of sixty years, Cyclops, an orphan of Dickensian atmospherics from Portsmouth, started life working at a baby powder factory, then an English brewery where the employees conversed hilariously in imitation Dickensian mannerisms, next hawking folk at Billy Mannings Fairground to shoot with his prepared guns-- then decided after reading Colin Wilson’s The?Outsider?that this wasn’t a life and took off for Bohemian Paris, where he was rebaptized Cyclops because of his eccentric appearance in Paris “in leather coat from the Flea market, Cuban heeled boots, completed with beard and black eye patch”, an underground figure who frequented William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beilies,??and was close to the photographer, Harold Chapman, at the Beat Hotel where he met Karen. “My University” he calls it. He joins a circus with his friend, the brilliant Piero Heliczer, who became a close friend of Andy Warhol and created multimedia shows called?Ritual Happenings?which Warhol largely appropriated. After being expelled from Paris France, at some point Cy unwittingly smuggled spy films out of East Berlin for the CIA, coming close to a dangerous end. Shipped back to London finally from Trieste after glutting himself on the most expensive dishes a fine restaurant could provide for his last supper without a penny in his pocket, he somehow became a highly successful rare book dealer working from a stall in the?King’s Road Antiquarius Market, in a style most novel in this traditionally conservative profession—and doubtlessly attractive!

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The point is that?- here?is a true dialogue?of two graphically brilliant souls, not just a compilation of?congenial exchanges but a true confrontation. This rich delving into the past half century will be nostalgic and enlivening for those who lived through those years and inspirational and fascinating for those who didn’t!