Every now and then I come across something to read when takesc a brick to the glass floor of certainty I tap-dance across as I live my life and this is one such read that affected me so. Down through the floor of linear reality I tumbled as I read this amazing book.
I had heard David Litvinoff's name mentioned a few times over the years but I never really understood the associations, Who was he? What was he? What did he do to crop up again and again throughout and across the cultural references? Well, heres the answers to those questions and even a few I had not the wit to ask. Its crammed with details, historical and pop cultural as it is so difficult to navigate between the fixed moments in our shared cultural zeitgeist. David Litvinovff proved himself to be something of a living overton window as whatever gap or niche he found himself there he was. Almost impossible to pin down and no easy thing to explain away.
I remembered him mentioned in The Cardinal and The Corpse, the Channel four documentary about The Bookish underbelly of London. A search for a book he wrote. a book which never existed. Chased down by people who had an ethereal quality of their own. It references his connection to the film Performance and a seque into those territories is not for the squeamish or the easily offended. There are traces of dark magicks, of gangsters and the love that polari does not name. Its a deep dive into some very dark waters filled with treacherous currents and unknowable predators.
He sounded a terrifying figure to me. A very smart man with a savage wit that could take anyone apart. He was one of the few people who stood up to The Two, or The Krays as the rest of the world knew them. Not afraid to speak his mind and laugh at them, at their expense. Which they tolerated. Up to the point where they didn't and they instigated an attack on him when he was gifted a "Glasgow Smile" which may be more familiar to those who recognise The Joker's "You want to know how I got these scars?" before unleashing bedlam. He carried the facial scars for the rest of his life. One can only imagine what this does to a man. Although this book goes a long way to explaining just how that changes a being. There is much to gasp at in this book but also a lot to make one smile and tons to make one think. The little grey cells get a real bout of exercise as the mystery of this man's life are revealed. Its like stepping into a photograph, catching all the details just out of view. Its so obvious this was a man who wanted to leave no trail to follow yet by sheer force of his passing he could not help but leave a meandering trace of ghostly steps. His complexity caused a curious ache, "if only he..", but where does such thinking lead one? Inevitably to a gravestone in a jewish cemetery. a man put there by his own hand. Heart breaking.
And yet "if only he..."
The writer Kieron Pym does an amazing job of following in the footsteps of a man who seemed determined to leave no such trace. If a self-invented man chooses to vanish who can say for sure if he was there in the first place. There was a touch of Macavity The Mystery Cat about David Litvinoff "For when they reach the scene of crime-Macavity was not there." He was elusive, most willingly so, the ghosts of past pogroms birthed in him a restless spirit who exercised what the next generation of Anarchists would describe as "Punk Mobility", an ability to pack up and go leaving no trace as a situation changes. And given the nature of his friends; The Krays, Mad Frankie Frazer, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, who can blame him?
