A Review:
Saturday 2nd October 2004
 
SAX ROHMER'S WEST END
presented by Antony Clayton 
 
It was a grey and filthy afternoon when the London Adventure met outside the Museum Tavern, later than usual at 4.30, for the Sax Rohmer walk led by Antony Clayton. Despite the slashing rain, participants were soon pleasantly irradiated by Rohmer's crazed exoticism and the incomparable ambience of his writing, charmingly read by Antony and guaranteed to produce an inner glow.
 
First stop was the British Museum's Egyptian sculpture gallery, a suitably awesome setting in which to consider the fascination that Rohmer (born Arthur Ward, and brought up in Herne Hill) felt for ancient Egypt. He even went as far as to compare Doctor Fu Manchu with the Pharaoh Seti I, whose sarcophagus is now the centrepiece of the John Soane Museum. We then proceeded towards Chinatown and the West End, pausing here and there to hear about the fiendish Doctor, the evil genius with "a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan." The historical context of Rohmer's anti-Chinese paranoia was also properly aired, the Doctor being, of course, "the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man."
 
One of the most notable halts was the Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street, a rare survivor of the small, specialised, sanctum-like shops that flourished in London until quite recently. These play a special role in Rohmer's work, like the Dickensian curio shop of Moris Klaw in The Dream Detective, or the antique emporium of J Salaman in Museum Street itself, in The Devil Doctor, where a small Buddha - emphatically not for sale - is touched despite warnings and turns out to be nothing less than a secret lever, opening up a flight of steps to reveal the doctor of the title, Fu Manchu in person, "not a hundred yards from the British Museum."
 
Further locations included St Martin's Court and what was formerly the New Theatre, where Antony talked of Rohmer's early association with the stage. Suddenly the crash of flying tables and chairs was heard, channeled and amplified around the alleys with the noise of impending riot. It proved to be some football fans, one of them covered in blood, running for their lives pursued by fellow enthusiasts. Having narrowly escaped a trampling, the party now proceeded in an orderly fashion to Davenport's Magic Shop, fondly remembered by many of us as the extraordinary conjuring shop opposite the British Museum, where is now a branch of Starbucks. Relocated to a urinaceous underground concourse, the shop still has a highly atmospheric window display and formed a perfect backdrop to hear about Rohmer's friendship with Houdini, further enhanced by period posters including the robed and pigtailed stage-Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo, killed by a bullet in his act and discovered after his death to be a William Robinson.
 
Chinatown was an inevitable destination, albeit a different Chinatown from Rohmer's Limehouse, but Chinatowns are a moveable feast. Before it became Chinatown's main thoroughfare, Gerrard Street was the site of the notorious 43 Club, while just around the corner in Lisle Street was the shady chemist where the circle of actress Billie Carleton bought their drugs. Her fatal overdose, and the arrest of Chinese dealer "Brilliant Chang", was almost certainly an inspiration for Rohmer's 1919 novel Dope, although he always denied it.
 
Crossing Soho we stopped in Ham Yard, where Rohmer was a member of the Hambone Club, and it was here that Antony gave us Rohmer's views on law and order. Like many writers of pulp fiction, Rohmer was rather reactionary, and in fact advocated "government by the whip and the axe."
 
Rohmer's success enabled him to live in Mayfair, like some of his characters, in a flat on Bruton Street which was supposedly haunted from the house's previous incarnation as a gambling hell. As Antony said, standing in Bruton Place before the final destination of the Guinea public house, Rohmer is now largely remembered in the world of higher education for his racism. This is always useful for routine point scoring, but it misses the paradoxical fascination of his writing and its more subtle glories, among which Antony praised not just his pacing and suspense but above all his tremendous creation of atmosphere and ambience. Like Machen, Rohmer was one of those writers with a sense of secret sublimities and insidious transfigurations lurking in odd corners of the cityscape. He writes in Fu Manchu's Bride that "under the street along which we are walking, at the back of a house which we have passed a hundred times, lies something else - something unsuspected" - and with those words, Mr Clayton brought this excellent walk to its satisfying end. 

Phil Baker

  
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