The Vienna Café was a coffee house and restaurant at 24–28

New Oxford Street Oxford Street is a major road in the City of Westminster in the West End of London, running from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch via Oxford Circus. It is Europe's busiest shopping street, with around half a million daily visitors, and as o ...

, London. Located opposite Mudie's Lending Library and near the

British Museum Reading Room The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main Reference library, reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the ne ...

Bloomsbury Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural, intellectual, and educational institutions. Bloomsbury is home of the British Museum, the largest mus ...

, it became known in the early 20th century as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals. Regular visitors included

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

, H. G. Wells, and

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...

. The café was listed in the 1889 Baedeker Guide for London. It closed in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I.Glinert 2007, 41.

Regulars

The artist Wyndham Lewis first met Sturge Moore, brother of the philosopher G. E. Moore, at the Vienna Café around 1902; the men became great friends. Lewis was there with Sturge in 1910 when he was introduced to the American poet

. Pound, who lived in London from 1908 to 1921, had arrived in the café that day with

Laurence Binyon Robert Laurence Binyon, CH (10 August 1869 – 10 March 1943) was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. Born in Lancaster, England, his parents were Frederick Binyon, a clergyman, and Mary Dockray. He studied at St Paul's School, London ...

,Tytell 1987, 102. assistant keeper in the British Museum Print Room.Meyers 1982, 32. Pound noted in "How I Began" (1914) that he had lunch in the café after completing his poem '' Ballad of the Goodly Fere'' (1909) in the British Museum Reading Room. H. G. Wells also used the Vienna Café, as did Amy Lowell, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, C. R. W. Nevinson,

T. E. Hulme Thomas Ernest Hulme (; 16 September 1883 – 28 September 1917) was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism. He was an aesthetic philosopher and the 'father ...

R. A. Streatfeild Richard Alexander Streatfeild (22 June 1866 – 6 February 1919) was an English musicologist and critic. His career was spent at the British Museum, although not in its music department. His publications included books on opera, Handel and modern m ...

, Robert McAlmon, and

. Yeats arranged to have lunch there on 16 January 1905 with the art critic

D. S. MacColl Dugald Sutherland MacColl (10 March 1859 – 21 December 1948) was a Scottish watercolour painter, art critic, lecturer and writer. He was keeper of the Tate Gallery for five years. Life MacColl was born in Glasgow and educated at the Univ ...

. In a letter to

Wilfrid Blunt Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (17 August 1840 – 10 September 1922), sometimes spelt Wilfred, was an English poet and writer. He and his wife Lady Anne Blunt travelled in the Middle East and were instrumental in preserving the Arabian horse bloodlines ...

in October 1914, Pound wrote: "Yeats complains that the closing of Vienna Cafe costs him more inconvenience than the fall of Antwerp." The poet Henry Newbolt referred to the group he met in the Vienna Café for lunch after using the Reading Room as the "Anglo-Austrians". Laurence Binyon,

Walter Crum Walter Crum FRS (1796–1867) was a Scottish chemist and businessman. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1844. Life He was born in Glasgow, the second son of Alexander Crum of Thornliebank, a merchant there, and of Jane, the eldest da ...

, Oswald Valentine Sickert and

Barclay Squire William Barclay Squire (16 October 1855 – 13 January 1927) was a British musicologist, librarian and librettist. Biography William Barclay Squire was a devoted music enthusiast. He spent 35 years of his life (1885-1920) working for the British ...

were regulars. Others he saw there included Samuel Butler, Festing Jones, Selwyn Image, John Masefield,

Luigi Villari Luigi Villari (1876–1959), son of Pasquale Villari Pasquale Villari (3 October 1827 – 11 December 1917) was an Italian historian and politician. Early life and publications Villari was born in Naples and took part in the risings of 1848 ther ...

, Frederic Baron Corvo, Lawrence Weaver, Roger Fry,

Edward Garnett Edward William Garnett (5 January 1868 – 19 February 1937) was an English writer, critic and literary editor, who was instrumental in the publication of D. H. Lawrence's ''Sons and Lovers''. Early life and family Edward Garnett was born i ...

, and a son of

Giovanni Segantini Giovanni Segantini (15 January 1858 – 28 September 1899) was an Italian painter known for his large pastoral landscapes of the Alps. He was one of the most famous artists in Europe in the late 19th century, and his paintings were collected by ...

. The waiter was Joseph, an Italian. Newbolt wrote that they "lived mainly on excellent Viennese dishes and talked faster and more irresponsibly than any group of equal numbers" he could remember. The café had a triangular room on the first floor with a mirrored ceiling, "which reflected all your actions", Lewis wrote, "as if in a lake suspended above your head". The writers met at a couple of tables on the south side of that room. According to

Jeffrey Meyers Jeffrey Meyers (born April 1, 1939 in New York City) is an American biographer, literary, art and film critic. He currently lives in Berkeley, California. Biography Jeffrey Meyers was born in New York City in 1939 and grew up in New York. He wa ...

, the café was a haunt of European émigrés and was furnished at the time "in the Danubian mode with red plush chairs and seats". The owners were Austrians or Germans, who became "alien enemies" when the war began, and as a result the business had to close.Lewis 1967, 280.

Appearance in ''The Cantos''

The Vienna Café made an appearance, as the "Wiener Café", in Pound's "Canto LXXX" of '' The Pisan Cantos'' (1948):

Notes

Sources

References

Works cited

* Baedeker, Karl (1889). ''London and Its Environs: Handbook for Travellers''. Volume 188. Leipzig: Baedeker. * Betsworth, Leon (2012)
The Café in Modernist Literature: Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys"
University of East Anglia. * Brooker, Peter (2007)

004 004, 0O4, O04, OO4 may refer to: * 004, fictional British 00 Agent * 0O4, Corning Municipal Airport (California) * O04, the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation * Abdul Haq Wasiq, Guantanamo detainee 004 * Junkers Jumo 004 turbojet engine * Lauda ...

''Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism''. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. * Glinert, Ed (2007). ''Literary London: A Street by Street Exploration of the Capital's Literary Heritage''. London: Penguin Books. * Lewis, Wyndham (1967)

937 Year 937 ( CMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * A Hungarian army invades Burgundy, and burns the city of Tournus. Then they go southward ...

Blasting & Bombardiering
'. London: Calder and Boyars. * Myers, Jeffrey (1982). ''The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis''. Boston: Routledge & Keegan Paul. * Newbolt, Henry (1932). ''My World As in My Time: Memoirs 1862–1932''. London: Faber & Faber. * Pound, Ezra (1974)

une 1914 Une is a municipality and town of Colombia in the Eastern Province, part of the department of Cundinamarca. The urban centre is located at an altitude of at a distance of from the capital Bogotá. The municipality borders Chipaque in the no ...

"How I Began". In Grace Schulman (ed.).
Ezra Pound: A Collection of Criticism
'. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 23–26. * Pound, Ezra (2003)

948 Year 948 ( CMXLVIII) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Arab–Byzantine War: Hamdanid forces under Sayf al-Dawla raid into Asia Mi ...

''The Pisan Cantos''. Edited by

Richard Sieburth Richard Sieburth (born 1949) is Professor Emeritus of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University (NYU).

. New York: New Directions Books. * Shaheen, Mohammad Y. (Fall & Winter 1983). "Pound and Blunt: Homage for Apathy". ''Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics''. 12(2/3), 281–288. * Starr, Alan (Spring 1982). "Tarr and Wyndham Lewis". ''ELH''. 49(1), 179–189. * Terrell, Carroll F. (1993) 980–1984 ''A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound''. Berkeley: University of California Press. * Timms, Edward (2015)

013 013 is a music venue in Tilburg, the Netherlands. The venue opened in 1998 and replaced the ''Noorderligt'', the ''Bat Cave'' and the ''MuziekKantenWinkel''. 013 is the largest popular music venue in the southern Netherlands. There are two concer ...

"Coffeehouses and Tea Parties: Conversational Spaces as a Stimulus to Creativity in Sigmund Freud's Vienna and Virginia Woolf's London". In Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, Simon Shaw-Miller (eds.). ''The Viennese Cafe and Fin-de-Siecle Culture''. Berghahn Books, 199–220. * Tytell, John (1987)
''Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano''
New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. * Yeats, William Butler (2005). ''The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume IV, 1905–1907''. Edited by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. New York: Oxford University Press.