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 between Marble Arch and Tottenham Court Road via Oxford Circus. It marks the notional boundary between the areas of Fitzrovia and Marylebone to the ...

, 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 Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, London, ...

Bloomsbury Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London, part of the London Borough of Camden in England. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural institution, cultural, intellectual, and educational ...

, 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 List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, hist ...

, and

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (, 13 June 186528 January 1939), popularly known as W. B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the ...

. The café was listed in the 1889 Baedeker Guide for London. It closed in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

.Glinert 2007, 41.

Regulars

The artist

Wyndham Lewis Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited ''Blast (British magazine), Blast'', the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His ...

first met Sturge Moore, brother of the philosopher

G. E. Moore George Edward Moore (4 November 1873 – 24 October 1958) was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the initiators of analytic philosophy. He and Russell began de-emphasizing ...

, 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, Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, CH (10 August 1869 – 10 March 1943) was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. Born in Lancaster, Lancashire, Lancaster, England, his parents were Frederick Binyon, ...

,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.

also used the Vienna Café, as did

Amy Lowell Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Life Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughte ...

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (né Gaudier; 4 October 1891 – 5 June 1915) was a French artist and sculptor who developed a rough-hewn, primitive style of direct carving. Biography Henri Gaudier was born in Saint-Jean-de-Braye near Orléans. In 1910, ...

, 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 Imagism ...

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, George Frideric Han ...

Robert McAlmon Robert Menzies McAlmon (also used Robert M. McAlmon, as his signature name, March 9, 1895 – February 2, 1956) was an American writer, poet, and publisher. In the 1920s, he founded in Paris the publishing house, ''Contact Editions'', where he ...

, 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 Unive ...

. In a letter to Wilfrid Blunt in October 1914, Pound wrote: "Yeats complains that the closing of Vienna Cafe costs him more inconvenience than the

fall of Antwerp The fall of Antwerp ( ) on 17 August 1585 took place during the Eighty Years' War, after a siege lasting over a year from July 1584 until August 1585. The city of Antwerp was the focal point of the Protestant-dominated Dutch Revolt, but was fo ...

." The poet

Henry Newbolt Sir Henry John Newbolt, Order of the Companions of Honour, CH (6 June 1862 – 19 April 1938) was an English poet, novelist and historian. He also had a role as a government adviser with regard to the study of English in England. He is perhaps ...

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, Oswald Valentine Sickert and Barclay Squire were regulars. Others he saw there included Samuel Butler, his friend and biographer Festing Jones,

Selwyn Image Selwyn Image (17 February 1849, Bodiam, Sussex – 21 August 1930, London) was a British artist, designer, writer and poet associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. He designed stained glass windows, furniture and embroidery, and illustra ...

John Masefield John Edward Masefield (; 1 June 1878 – 12 May 1967) was an English poet and writer. He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967, during which time he lived at Burcot, Oxfordshire, near Abingdon ...

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 th ...

, Frederic Baron Corvo,

Lawrence Weaver Sir Lawrence Walter William Weaver (1876–1930) was an English architectural writer and civil servant. Early years Lawrence Weaver was the son of Walter and Frances Weaver of Clifton, Bristol. He was educated at Clifton College and was trained ...

Roger Fry Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English painter and art critic, critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent ...

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

, the café was a haunt of European émigrés and was furnished at the time "in the Danubian mode with red plush chairs and seats". When World War I began, the

Trading with the Enemy Act 1914 The Trading with the Enemy Act 1914 ( 4 & 5 Geo. 5. c. 87) was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that prescribed an offence of conducting business with any person of "enemy character". It was enacted soon after the United Kingdom ...

was swiftly passed: the owners were Austrians or Germans, who were classed as "alien enemies" under the act 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 ''The Cantos'' is a long modernist poem by Ezra Pound, written in 109 canonical sections in addition to a number of drafts and fragments added as a supplement at the request of the poem's American publisher, James Laughlin. Most of it was wr ...

'' (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 * La ...

''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 of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * A Hungarian army invades Burgundy, and burns the city of Tournus. Then they go southwards to Italy, pillaging the environs of ...

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 "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 ''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.