Lovin' Liverpool

Liverpool (along with Stavanger, Norway) is the Cultural Capital of Europe. But I made it my cultural capital over fifty years ago when I led a group of Arcadia University students on a one week orientation tour to the UK. (They dubbed it their Magical Misery Tour because I jammed so much Culture down their unwilling throats when they just wanted to go straight to London and start pub crawling.) I met their overnight flight at Prestwick and mercilessly bussed them to Scottish TV in Glasgow to view a new documentary on the decline of the butler in upper class Brit homes, written by my first U.K. intellectual mentor, Richard Hoggart, who fifty years ago wrote the first book on how mass culture was addling the working class he grew up with in Leeds.

Then on to the new planned town of Cumbernauld where Glasgow U prof Alexander C. Scott introduced them to Hugh MacDiarmid, the scourge of Scottish poetry. ( Just dessert, after their lunch there!) We took a break after overnighting in Edinburgh where they saw a new play on Aberfam, Wales where a slagheap had savaged the small town’s elementary school. A pitstop in Ainyck on Tweed where the original of Beaver College’s Horace Trumbauer’s design showed the that a replica could be better than an original. We were met there by the brand new, first female mayor who was so new that that she still got off on noisily jangling her breast work mayoral ID at us!

Then a fresh break at Newcastle on Tyne where the hot young poet Tony Harrison happily harangued us. And, finally, Liverpool: where in a medieval morality play God spoke Liverpudlian( “Life is WUUUnderfullll!! He declared to a skeptically, bone-tired gaggling group of overpressured late teenage Amurricans.) That first whiff of Liverpool was unforgettable! As my taxi driver last week attested: "Liverpool is the capital of Ireland.” My Hibernian genes throbbed fiercely.

On my recent Cult Cap two dayer, everything had changed—for the better, yea for the best: the formerly tawdry docks on the Mersey had been transformed into an array of museums, restaurants and night club, led by the Tate Liverpool, glorying during a packed last weekend over the first UK ever retro on Gustav Klimt. Don’t feel sorry for your late selves: there’s a fire sale on the brilliant catalog for a mere 19.99 pounds! Given that final jam, a book is better than those moiling crowds. There is an even more stimulating intro to its 20th century holdings. I found the sector on Cubism most revealing (mainly sculptors like Gaudier-Breska, Henri Laurens, Henry Moore, and sweet, sweet Brancusi!) The Tate-ification of the UK is a miracle to be relished.

But there is More, Much More in those Less and Less Mean Streets. One, mainly the sector between Lime Street Station and the Docks is in the middle of a total Makeover, meaning new digs for the dominant John Lewis department store as well as an altogether new Hilton Liverpool set for opening next year. But climb with me up Mount Pleasant on the South side of the kookily kranky Adelphi hotel, two minutes by foot from Lime Street Station. It is lined with Victoriana, including a used book store, just opening up for the day. I snapped up three 50p bargains from street book bins—Erika Jong’s “Fear of Fifty”, Francine du Plessix Gray’s book on radical American Catholicism, "Divine Disobedience” (which somehow I missed totally in my Dorothy Day phase), and Gilbert Highet’s expostulations on Education with a Capital E, "The Art of Teaching”. I settled down to hear the owner nimbly tell a caller not to bother him with the load of crap he was describing on the phone! Give it to a school!

Then onward and upward, to the Metropolitan Catholic Cathedral, a marvel of Modernism and stained glass so superb and prolific, you were almost tempted to make a General Confession and rejoin “the Church” as we used to singularly think. Whew! That was too close for comfort!! Unlax in the funkiest church store ever assembled. For example, I bought a pair of (God help us!) Holy Socks, my theme being “I am the Vine, and you are the branches” as in grape wine, supported with thematic “poetry” just short of constituting a mortal sin against literature! I gave it to my beloved granddaughter, Sonia, to ease her entry into the Heavy Hitter Harvard Divinity School, (God is punishing me with her Major!)

Then ask for directions to the Victoria Art Gallery up the street in the old superceded U of Liverpool first building. If you don’t eat a lunch in their former refectory, you’re a disgrace to the Slow Food movement! I had tomato soup fortified with diverse slabs and backed up with house made minibuns so idiosyncratic I chatted up the perpetrators. Hmmm. But dessert so to speak an esthetic find to rattle your current cage.

One Stuart Sutcliffe, died alas at 22, was John Lennon’s bud in the first version that became The Beatles. They have just discovered his OOOH VRAI! And it’s charming enough to linger over. The Homeboy’s catalog sold out prematurely, but you can book an order. I like his cartoony early work (before Jackson Pollock abstract-unexpressified his muse!) And scour the other rooms, thematically deployed, especially the James John Audubon collection. Amble downhill towards Lime Street Station, and you will see U of L modernizing itself, with spiffy slogans on the temporary fences guarding street walkers from ambient builder abuse.

The second morning I walked the keener and less mean streets of the Big L, at first in search of FACT, a cultural Center. Found it, but not opened yet. I clicked away digitally delirious at funky street signs which abound there. I was looking for National Line Express bus station a few minutes hike from the Catholic Cathedral—to book my overnight bus the next night from Glasgow. There lay dying in the Western Infirmary, a 90 year old mentor of mine, Maurice Lindsay, Scots poet and BBC broadcaster, who taught me when my Am Lit professors sneered at improving mass media, that you could be good at both, thus giving my life its final direction.

A word about hotels. I planned to try the lowest level Accor hotel, Formule 1, but an International Fireman’s Convention beat me to the Reception, so I tried out the brand new Jury Rooms, facing the Docks as well as the new Convention Center and Echo Stadium. It was dear, but first class. The second night I spent at my old fave, the Adelphi, three minutes by foot from Lime Street Station where I had an early train to Glasgow the next morning. Chatting with the amiable Hibernian chooser of rooms, he gave me a classic four poster bed with swirling curtains on all four sides. I was tempted to hit the street and find a paid companion to share my first Four Poster joy! (Happily reason came to the AIDS of my early dementia!) The Adelphi (1914) is the last railway/steamship generated fancy hotel built in the once grimy L. It’s terminally quirky, whose ballroom is said to be a replica of the Titanic! Talk about sinking feelings, doing the Dip.

I wandered around looking for real cheapies—such as the Regency across the street which had the beguiling sign on the door which leads to the rooms: WORKERS ARE REQUIRED TO REMOVE THEIR DIRTY BOOTS BEFORE PROCEEDING UPSTAIRS: signed PHILLY.(No kidding!)

I was finally reminded of my wife’s and my effort to give our teenies a cultivated Xmas that year: We began with an evening ramble on the Champs Elysee, where Tim (11) found a shop selling model airplane kits. The next morning we foolishly succumbed to his request to revisit that shop alone. He got lost, and we found him being feted in a first class restaurant by the brass from the local P.O. to which he had repaired, figuring they must know English to send letters to England.

Then Chartres, Midnight Mass at Mont San Michel, my favorite church in all of Christendom. During our Xmas day visit to Versailles, there was a teenage Revolt. They wanted to be back in London Boxing Day evening without fail. We succumbed, sullenly. It turned out they wanted to see the new Beatles film, "A Hard Days Night” on the BBC. The little drones were right after all! Our baptism in the Mersey.

LORD HAVE MERSEY ON US!