One gets the impression that Tom Willis would like someone to write about him. ‘Tom Willis was in his element as he preached the gospel of literature to throngs of beautiful, well-heeled bright young things in the sleek halls of London’s most iconic venues’ runs Tom Willis’ internal monologue as he struts about the dingy nightclub basement, slapping a thousand sweaty backs and pressing the flesh of a thousand hands as though he were a City banker closing a big merger with some terrifying Vedic deity. An excess of self-reflectivity is typical of the authors Willis promotes at the literary parties he organises under the Soho Reading Series label, but Willis himself is all surface, and this opacity of personality, combined with the singular agency to actually organise an event, makes him that rarest of birds on the capital’s cultural scene: someone vaguely novel. To see if there was any bite to this would-be literary impresario’s bark, I went down to his most recent event last Friday at the 100 Club on Oxford Street.
It has been said — and said a good too many times — of the Velvet Underground that although their first record only sold a meagre number of copies, everyone who bought one was inspired to start their own band. The closest we have in our own unwanted reprise of ‘New York in the 70s’ is Dimes Square, from whose rejuvenating waters Willis drank during a spell in the city some years ago. Soho Reading Series is London’s ersatz Kofola version of this exalted milieu; a Sovereign House made safe for democracy; seen, said, and sorted. “I don’t want right-wing politics anywhere near [my events],” Willis tells one reporter, although earlier editions apparently used to feature sly allusions to the wit and wisdom of Milo Yiannopoulos and his ilk. Watching him up on the stage, urging the crowd to ‘get drunk and talk to sexy people’, I feel like the old Croix-de-Feu activists waving their placards reminding Mitterrand to pay his membership dues. Is this to be the Spirit of ’16’s hollow, Spenglerian afterlife; the rituals acted out and the formulas repeated long after the zeal has gone, like the tedious Claude-generated homily of a jaded suburban priest who just wants to get away from his Boriswaver parishioners and back on the craic? Dein goldenes Haar Dasha…
Whatever else he got up to in New York, Willis managed to internalise one key mantra of lockdown-era right-wing Twitter: to achieve liftoff, a movement — or its destitute cousin, a ‘scene’ — needs women. There are indeed a lot of women here. One such specimen tells my colleague (reader, did you think that I would speak to them?) that she was remunerated for her presence — whether or not this is true, they all seemed to clock off around 9:30 sharp, leaving the night to what Willis refers to as “the young men skulking in the corner [who] will be fans of Martin Amis”. Soho Reading Series events are sometimes held in headband-friendly locations like Saatchi Yates, but this club, into which I had not hitherto ventured, turns out to be a subterranean chamber bathed in a horrific red light that recalls the caldera of a volcano or the Jack Anderton campus tour. Willis touts an audience of 400, but a scan of the (admittedly not small) crowd suggests this to be the kind of aspirational approach to arithmetic that Anton Drexler used for the early Nazi Party’s membership rolls. Everyone I talk to claims this is ‘the first time I’ve been to one of these things’; I don’t see anyone getting drunk, or talking to sexy people, and the whole thing is closer to ‘there will be a brief reception for tea and biscuits in the library; the entire congregation is invited to attend’ than the Thielbuxx-fuelled bacchanalia during the last days of Rome that Dimes Square was supposed to be.
An oft-repeated line of attack in the numerous newspaper portraits of Willis holds that his ‘scene’ is too elite; that the whole thing is just more soulless, swanky parties for the posh Oxbridge grads who have ruled the literary roost in Britain since the Norman conquest. This seems rather a mix of Woke rhetorical brinkmanship and wishful thinking, the clientele and conversations being more redolent of the university student society than of fox hunt chitchat. For the first time since my own school days, I am actually exhorted to read Edward Said by a Pakistani baddie who takes umbrage at my boring Borgesian arguments as to the singular beauty and depth of the English language. While I love the Global South as much as anyone, and try to assuage her of this by praising Urdu poetry and bringing up Enoch Powell’s (and, so it would seem, Louis Mosley’s) fluency in that language, it is to no avail. This exchange could have been held at any time in any place in the English-speaking world from the 1970s onwards — the right may no longer be at the peak of its creative powers, but it can take solace in that Woke 2.0 has yet to manifest, and its enemies are still mumbling the same old incantations to themselves in the forlorn hope that this time the base metals of Heinemann’s African Writers Series will turn into another golden summer of love.
The readings themselves are easily the worst writing I have ever heard. “I’m a writer and researcher who does a lot of stuff in fascism, but that’s not why I’m here tonight”, says one woman who proceeds to read one about the “[something I don’t quite catch] and vulnerability of relationships, centred on my boyfriend’s cat”, although my notes are smudged and I may be mixing up two different people. Another reads a stream-of-consciousness monologue about “my time recovering from addiction at a Buddhist monastery in France” in a cadence and vocabulary that I realise it has been several months since I last heard. “Afterwards there was a group photograph, everyone rushing to be of service… Once you’ve got two sayings in a row you’ve got a whole lot of prejudices, so it’s better to stick to the facts…”
So this is what Sir Keir’s speechwriters are up to these days. This is the kind of thing you could only do in Blair’s Britain; the whole thing reeks of Rainbow Rhythms. Younger Pimlico Journal readers, having grown up in an age whose religious imagination was shaped by Carolean perennialism, Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures, and the barnstorming campaign against the assisted dying bill, will not remember that this is what passed for spiritual experience under New Labour, and still does in vast swathes of the country, although I suppose we can console ourselves that it is still more dignified than the psychiatric cant that has lately seized hold of the American mind.
Britain can do better. A consummate wokester like Willis might appreciate my providing him with the following land statement, which I urge him to read out at his next soirée:
This is the country which pioneered sentimentalism as a literary genre and whose sons carried the Oxford Book of English Verse into battle in their rucksacks in the Great War (the Germans, for their part, took Faust and Zarathustra); the island of gardeners who moulded the landscape in such a manner as to mimic the passage from one emotional state into the next; the land whose philosophers separated the provinces of experience into pleasures and pains and handed down the dictum that reason is the slave of the passions. Sentimentality is a hereditary disease in the English; the young people in attendance suffer no less from it than any of the illustrious names in our literary anthologies, but owing to the total collapse of education standards in this country, lack the repertoire of forms with which their predecessors pressed their flights of feeling into an enduring vintage.
Willis, who probably read a smattering of Mishima during his time in Dimes Square, has through these parties fashioned his own unique sensibility into a passable work of art, but in looking upon his works he must despair, for he has failed to cultivate the literary avant garde that might keep the flame burning after the last aspiring model and photographer has gone home and the last substack urls jotted down in the notes apps of the emaciated young men in jumpers swirling their pints of Murphy’s in the corners, to be deleted later that night as the ashamed realisation sets in — am I no better than this? No, there is no one to write about Tom Willis, and so to the dust shall he return.
This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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