The Vienna Café was a coffee house and restaurant at 24–28 New Oxford Street, London. Located opposite Mudie's Lending Library and near the British Museum Reading Room in Bloomsbury, it became known in the early 20th century as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals.Glinert 2007, 41; Betsworth 2012, 41–42; for the library, Yeats 2005, 21, n. 3. Regular visitors included Ezra Pound, H. G. Wells, and W. B. Yeats.

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.Meyers 1982, 26. Lewis was there with Sturge in 1910 when he was introduced to the American poet Ezra Pound.Tytell 1987, 102; Terrell 1993, 441; Brooker 2007, 53. Pound, who lived in London from 1908 to 1921, had arrived in the café that day with Laurence 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.Pound 1974, 25. H. G. Wells also used the Vienna Café,Lewis 1967, 281. as did Amy Lowell, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, C. R. W. Nevinson, T. E. Hulme,Timms 2015, 203. R. A. Streatfeild, Robert McAlmon,Starr 1982, 183. and W. B. Yeats. Yeats arranged to have lunch there on 16 January 1905 with the art critic D. S. MacColl.Yeats 2005, 21. 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."Shaheen 1993, 281.

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, Oswald Valentine Sickert and Barclay Squire were regulars. Others he saw there included Samuel Butler, his friend and biographer Festing Jones, Selwyn Image, John Masefield, Luigi Villari, Frederic Baron Corvo, Lawrence Weaver, Roger Fry, Edward Garnett, and a son of Giovanni Segantini. 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.Newbolt 1932, 209–210.

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.Lewis 1982, 280; Timms 2015, 203. According to Jeffrey Meyers, the café was a haunt of European émigrés and was furnished at the time "in the Danubian mode with red plush chairs and seats".Meyers 1982, 31. When World War I began, the Trading with the Enemy Act 1914 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 (1948):

See also English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries Viennese coffee house

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) . 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) . 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) [June 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) . The Pisan Cantos. Edited by Richard Sieburth. 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) [1980–1984]. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press. Timms, Edward (2015) . "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.

Further reading Brown, Mark (25 March 2009). "Enthusiasts mark centenary of modern poetry". The Guardian.