A Writer's World (39 page)

Ah yes, said the editor wryly. There was never a shortage of gossip in Wells, or controversy either. They were an independent sort, the Wellensians. Why, I should have heard the fuss when the Bishop took to
culling the wild duck in his moat by shooting them out of his window! Or when they built those dreadful new canons’ houses, all trendy streaked concrete, behind the Old Deanery! Oh, yes, Wellensians often resented the airs of the clergymen Up There: though it was not strictly true that the precinct was walled in defence against the assaults of the townspeople, often enough it felt like it.

The Alderman vehemently agreed – the controversial Alderman, everyone called him, who turned out to be a fiery Welshman, bred by the Parachute Regiment out of the Swansea valleys, whose passionately conservationist views during his period as Mayor had led him into bitter conflict with the cathedral. Vividly he recalled those old affrays for me. Had he not threatened to take the Dean to court when he chopped down the Mulberry Tree? Was it not he who instructed his Council, when the Bishop was late for a civic function, to take their seats without his Lordship? The Alderman clearly loves a fight, and I rather wished he was engaged in one just then, so that I could see the sparks fly for myself. But no, though he spoke to me movingly of an erroneous new sewage scheme, all was quiet in Wells just then. He sounded rather disappointed, and so was I; for Barchester is not Barchester, after all, without a battle on its hands.

Or, for that matter, without a Mrs Proudie. It was when I reached the Bishopric at last that I felt my pilgrimage had failed. Faith I had certainly found in Wells, diligence, loyalty, pride: but the sense of authority, of an established order unbreakable and supreme, which is essential to the Romantic view of England, is lost with the winds of social change and historical necessity. In Trollope’s allegories that old discipline was represented if not by the person, at least by the office of the Bishop, splendidly identified by his accoutrements, his circumstances and his privileges; but the Anglican Bishop of tradition, gloriously fortified by material well-being and spiritual complacency – that grand figure of fancy has long gone the way of the Empire-builder and the top-hatted Station Master.

As it happens the Bishop’s Palace at Wells is perhaps the most splendid Bishop’s Palace of all. Surrounded by its own moat, its own castellated walls, its own parkland beyond, it stands on the edge of Wells, in the flank of the cathedral, looking across green fields into the depths of Somerset. It is like a fortress, and though the enormous banqueting hall is now only a picturesque ruin, still the palace is a terrific spectacle. Duck of many varieties paddle its moat, and swans deftly ring the gatehouse bell for their
victuals. The palace itself stands grandly around its yard, with a huge pillared refectory, and a fine library, and a private chapel in which, within living memory, daily choral services were held for the Bishop, his family and his servants.

But no majestically awful Mrs Proudie greeted me at the palace door. Nobody greeted me at the main door at all, for the Bishop of Bath and Wells now lives only in the north wing of the structure, the rest being devoted to conferences and other useful activities. Gone are the days when the Bishop and his family ate all alone in splendour in the centre of the vast undercroft, surveyed by a gigantic gilded mitre above the fireplace. Gone are those daily services in the private chapel – nowadays the Bishop prays there alone. Gone is the daunting approach to the episcopal presence, never to be forgotten by curates of long ago, when after treading the long stately corridors of the palace, through the dark gallery lined with portraits of earlier prelates, they timidly opened the door of the great study to discover his Lordship, against a serried background of theological treatises, tremendously at his labours.

The Bishop himself recalled that vanished consequence for me. Now he and his distinctly un-Proudean wife live more modestly, more sensibly no doubt, more Christianly I suppose, but undeniably less impressively in their nicely done-up wing. His new study, furnished in pale woodwork by the Church Commissioners, is unexpectedly emblazoned, around the tops of its bookcases, with a text not from Leviticus or the Sermon on the Mount, but from King Alfred. His visitors’ book, when I signed it, contained on the previous page the signature of the actor Peter O’Toole. His car is a Rover – ‘such a blessing when you’re overtaking on our narrow Somerset roads’. This is a very modern, very functional bishopric.

Here at the core the times have overtaken Barchester. The majesty has left the palace. Crowds of people throng to those conference rooms, taking their cafeteria luncheons on canteen tables in the undercroft (where the gilded mitre looms large as ever, but anomalous). Often the gardens are open to the public, and at any time of day sightseers are to be observed hanging over the gate which, inside the great gatehouse above the moat, inadequately (to my mind) asserts the privacy of the bishopric.

Nobody could represent these changes more persuasively than the present Bishop and his wife, who sit in their modest private corner of the gardens as a Bishop and his lady should, relishing the green and the grey of it all, the long mellow line of their ancient wall, the sweep of the trees and the droop of the trumpet vine, the Turneresque pile of the ruined
banqueting hall, the silent towers of the cathedral beyond. But it is not the same. Atavist that I am, yearning sometimes from the austerity of Wales for some of the gorgeous and heedless assurance that used to characterize our magnificent neighbour – nostalgic in this way for the England I am just old enough to remember, I missed the purple swagger and the swank.

For it was partly the conceit of it, Trollope’s hubris of the cloth, that captured our imaginations once – now gone it seems, for better or for worse, as utterly from Barchester as from Simla or Singapore.

And coming down from Sonoma in the evening light, as in a resplendent dream I see the City.

At such revelatory moments, warranting the opening not just of a sentence, but of an entire essay with a conjunction – at such moments the city of San Francisco deserves the capital letter its citizens, I notice, like to give it. I have been experiencing that mystic initiation intermittently for thirty years, and it never fails to exalt me – so full of hope does the City look, so incomparably felicitous on its hills above the sea, like the city of all desires in the closing pages of an allegory.

All the more puzzling, then, that when I actually enter the streets of San Francisco, this time as always I find my responses peculiarly ambivalent. The vision lets me down. There is nothing illusory to the loveliness of the place, but at closer quarters the allegory fades, and something soft, something pallid seems to muffle the excitement. Whenever I come here – more so every time – San Francisco strikes me as being at once the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful and the most tantalizing of all the great cities of the world.

Ah, but
is
it a great city? Certainly the streets look properly metropolitan – boulevards lined with banks, posh stores and hotels where Sinatras stay, neighbourhoods authentically equipped with ethnic eateries and adult
bookstores, back alleys urbanely nooky, flowered and burglar-alarmed. But the buildings themselves, however imposing, strike me as oddly tentative or temporary of feel, buildings without foundations, buildings not made to last. In some obscure and perhaps seismically related way, San Francisco feels too flimsy to be a metropolis.

Besides, where have all the people gone? Half the city seems uninhabited, as though some impending new catastrophe has emptied it of its residents, leaving only disposable strangers to be swallowed up or incinerated. Even in Union Square on a Saturday evening, about the loudest noise is the clanking of the cable-car cables in their grooves. Even the financial quarter at high noon seems eminently chattable, strollable and ready for lunch. Like city people everywhere, San Franciscans love to boast of their traffic problems and crime rates, but to a visitor the pressures of this city seem, if not actually small-town, at least decidedly provincial.

The colours of San Francisco are gentle pastel colours, not the golds and crimsons of capital consequence. The light is a washed sea light, filtered always, one feels, through early morning mists. Even the local ocean never seems to me a proper whole-hog, titanic ocean, but is more like a vaster Great Lake, so that surveying its surf-fringed rocks from the heights above, I often catch myself wondering if it really is salt water down there.

They call all this laid-back, and so it is. For my tastes, though, it is a kind aesthetic betrayal. The City of my dreams, that half-imaginary shining city of the Sonoma road, is anything but laid-back, but blazes always with fires of aspiration. Think of Rio, or Sydney, or Hong Kong, or Manhattan – all cities of glorious visual impact too, but cities as thrilling at intermission as they are when the curtain goes up. Of all the supremely handsome cities I know, only San Francisco greets you, after the dazzle of its first impression, not with urge, but with relaxation …

San Francisco has its thrills, too, and once it was among the most vital and thrusting of all cities. But not even its fondest citizens could call it that now, and when I ventured to suggest to one of them that his beloved town might benefit from having a couple of thousand more people in it, he answered with a fine San Franciscan retort. ‘Might it not possibly be,’ he almost solicitously answered, ‘that you are by temperament an LA person?’

But so lovely, so essentially decent, so exquisitely mannered! Even as I write these incivilities I bite my tongue, for the values that are traditional to San Francisco are the very values that I most admire: tolerance, individuality, courage, a graceful sense of fun. And yet, and yet …

I went one day to an anniversary party for the venerable survivors of the 1906 earthquake, on a sunny morning in Union Square. Nothing could have been jollier. Jazz bands played, free champagne was distributed by white-gloved waiters to one and all, a Clark Gable look-alike entertained the somewhat baffled veterans from the stage. (‘Isn’t he just great?’ cried the compère. ‘Yeah,’ dazedly murmured the survivors in response.)

Around the flanks of this celebration two senior citizens of independent instincts separately cavorted to the music – one a lithe but cadaverous old gent in a baseball cap, the other a plump matron wearing pink slacks and sneakers. He was energetically hamming it up for the audience, waving a flag, stepping high; she was dancing all for herself, privately, singing under her breath; and so the pair of them, oblivious to each other, shimmied and trucked in the sunshine while the band played on.

At first I thought, how charming! How San Francisco! But the longer I watched those aged jitterbugs, the more they began to seem to me like death’s heads grinning there, grotesquely prancing parodies of youth, in a
danse
macabre
of Union Square. Once again the City had disenchanted me, and what had seemed to be eternal joy turned out to be mere senility.

But then San Francisco often trivializes what it touches. There was a time, twenty years ago, when this city seemed to be leading us all into a new age of idealism – remember the Age of Aquarius? To watchers far away it seemed that in San Francisco a truly historical moment of liberation and enlightenment was occurring, but for most of its activists, it now appears, it was only a game after all, just a frolic with history, fuelled by drugs and rock and roll, superseded as the years passed by careers in computers or associate professorships.

There is no dismissing San Francisco’s regard for human variety in all its manifestations. This really is the city of few rebuffs! Where else do elderly ladies bear themselves with such sprightly confidence, sure of their place in society? (At the theatre the other night the usher was so elderly that she had to use a magnifying glass to check my seat number.) Where else would a young woman walk into a bookshop and ask with such blithe and loud aplomb, as I recently heard one ask, ‘D’ya have any books like
How
to
Enjoy
Sex
Successfully
?’ Compassion really does seem to be a San Francisco characteristic, and nothing in the contemporary scene is nobler than the loving care with which, as I understand it, this city’s gay community cares for its Aids victims.

Yet even among the fringe people, the people I generally like the best, I am nagged by San Francisco’s fatal element of sham. Your true eccentric is totally unaware of any oddity in himself, but here eccentricity is all too often debased into exhibitionism – the strutting of show-off dandies, the posturing of self-conscious weirdos. Worse still, I am disturbed by San Francisco’s undeserved propensity for tragedy. It will end in tears, as all our mothers used to say. Today it is Aids, and from the once festive coffee shops of Castro Street one sees only pale and anxious faces looking out. Yesterday it was drugs, and when, sitting on a San Francisco bench, I see another ruined and ravaged victim of the ’60s shambling by, I think: O City, City, I can sometimes hear, your siren song of Haight and Ashbury!

Then the sunshine comes, that particular pure sea-sun through my curtains! It holds me here, as it holds everyone else, and just a glimpse of it in the morning, just the idea of San Francisco awaiting me out there, is enough to make me cancel my flight and keep the room another day. It is not, of course, Malibu or Waikiki sun. Like the city itself, it is much more subtle and evasive than that. The palm trees in Union Square are fraudulent – this is anything but a tropic city. I think of it indeed as the southernmost city of the North – the westernmost eastern city, too, and the most Atlantic of the cities of the Pacific.