How café culture influenced writers and artists
Ibsen, Satre and Dali worked best with a glass in front of them. A new book explores the contribution made by café culture to their greatest creations. Alice Jones reports
Published: 05 October 2006
It was the Austrian sketch-writer and habitué of Vienna's Café Central, Alfred Polgar, who perhaps best captured the essence of the literary café when he described it as "a place where people want to be alone, but need company to do so". Since the first European coffee house opened in Venice in 1645, artists and writers have adopted cafés as their unofficial workplaces - libraries in which they can eat, drink, smoke and gossip at the same time as working on the latest draft and sharing ideas.
While the French writer Boris Vian's assertion - "if there had not been any cafés, there would have been no Jean-Paul Sartre" - somewhat overestimates the powers of caffeine, the coffee house has witnessed and fuelled many of the intellectual, cultural and political developments in European society. In Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore in Paris, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir thrashed out their philosophy of existentialism. St Petersburg's Literary Café trades on its reputation as the bar where Pushkin downed his last dose of Dutch courage before his fatal duel. Venice's rival cafés on either side of St Mark's Square, Florian and Quadri, have played host to Byron, Casanova, Wagner and Henry James, and the Café Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona is assured its place in art history as the location for the 19-year-old Picasso's first exhibition.
The history of the coffee house is the subject of a new book, The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe by Noel Riley Fitch, which profiles 40 significant cafés still in business today in 20 European cities. They vary from the chandelier-lit opulence of Budapest's Café Gerbeaud to the dingy basement of St Petersburg's Stray Dog. The food varies, too - from elaborate sweetmeats in Hungarian cafés to the artists' cafés of the former USSR, "where little coffee or any food for that matter was available".
But a remarkable meeting of minds occurred within their nicotine-stained walls. The oldest café in Paris still in existence, Le Procope, opened in 1686 and owes its original success to the theatre troupe La Comédie-Française who made their home across the street three years after the café opened, with the playwrights Molière and Racine becoming regular clients.
In 1924, Salvador Dali met Federico Garcia Lorca in the underground, brick-lined cavern of Madrid's Café De Oriente, and produced an Indian ink sketch of the occasion. Kafka read the first draft of Metamorphosis one Sunday morning in the back room of Prague's Café Stefan, and spent many hours in the city's Café Slavia debating philosophical tenets with Max Brod. The Futurists and the Dadaists drew up their manifestos in Café Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, while five years earlier the Blaue Reiter ("Blue Rider") school of artists, which included Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Arnold Schoenberg, was formed in Munich's Café Luitpold.
Henrik Ibsen acquired the dubious honour of becoming a tourist attraction in his own lifetime as German and French visitors would gather to watch him take his regular two o'clock coffee at the Grand Café in Oslo, where Edvard Munch was also a regular. Sigmund Freud was so fond of his local Café Landtmann in Vienna that he was seen carrying out consultations within its wood-panelled rooms. In London's Café Royal, Verlaine and Rimbaud squabbled over drinks, and Oscar Wilde created scandal (as he seems to have done throughout the cafés of Europe).
Today, the decline of a true café society is to be mourned. One can hardly imagine Alfred Jarry's (author of Ubu Roi) pick-up line working in Starbucks. Spotting a pretty girl from his vantage point at the bar in Paris's La Closerie des Lilas, he approached her table, fired a shot into the mirror behind her with his gun and said suavely, "Maintenant que la glace est rompue, causons." ("Now the ice is broken, let's talk.")
'The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe', by Noel Riley Fitch is published by New Holland Publishers, £29.99
