Vienna Café



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. 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.

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 Ezra Pound. Pound, who lived in London from 1908 to 1921, had arrived in the café that day with Laurence Binyon, assistant keeper in the British Museum Print Room.

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, R. A. Streatfeild, Robert McAlmon, and W. B. Yeats. Yeats arranged to have lunch there on 16 January 1905 with the art critic D. S. MacColl. 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 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.

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, 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 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.

Appearance in The Cantos


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