Read Imagined London Online

Authors: Anna Quindlen

Imagined London (6 page)

BOOK: Imagined London
2.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
CHAPTER TEN

E
nvy is a writer's lot in London, and not only because so many great writers have walked its streets. (And continue to do so—during my first stay at the Groucho Club, I glimpsed Salman Rushdie drinking at the bar. This seemed notable mainly because it was at the height of the very public
fatwa
against him by conservative Muslim clerics, who had threatened death in return for the purported blasphemy of his novel
The Satanic Verses.
It was said that Rushdie was in hiding. The bar at the Groucho was quite dark, so perhaps it was as good a place as any to hide.)

There simply could not be a better place in which to set a story. After the Great Fire destroyed so much of the city, Christopher Wren proposed that it should be re-created along a more sensible grid system. This would have made London immeasurably easier to negotiate—when a stranger is lost in London, she is lost indeed—and sensible in a way that it is not now and never has been. Thank God the proposal was considered, and rejected. The city that rose from the ashes rose along the same nonsensical system of country lanes and downhill passages that had defined it before. And so it reasserted itself as a kind of mazelike mystery that is irresistible for the imaginative mind.

It is, perhaps, Dickens who best describes the allure of the architecture when he speaks of Scrooge's rooms in “a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide and seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.” There are countless buildings that seem trapped in the narrow backstreets of the West End or Chelsea, streets designed for one century and trying to make do in another. At Piccadilly there is a warning sign that Jermyn Street, home of the the shirtmakers Turnbull
and Asser and the perfumier Floris, is “unsuited for long vehicles.”

For someone used to the tidy, slightly boring numbered streets of upper Manhattan, it is a joy to encounter St. James's Street, St. James's Place and Little St. James's Street. Every street name seems to have a codicil attached, a cartographic family tree; as Thackeray noted, “All the world knows that Lord Steyne's town palace stands in Gaunt Square, out of which Great Gaunt Street leads.” Nearby, according to the novelist, is New Gaunt Street, and Gaunt Mews. All this would seem like satire if you did not see it all around you in the city itself.

So a lover of language finds herself enamored of geography here. The placenames alone are a gift to a novelist. If there is anywhere in the world that sounds grander than Belgravia, I'd like to know it; Fifth Avenue, by comparison, is just a number. Elephant and Castle, Camberwell, Stepney, Bethnal Green. Bolingbroke Grove, Threadneedle Street, Cadogan Terrace, Lavender Sweep, Leadenhall Market, Half Moon Street, Queen's Circus, Queen's Club Gardens, Queen's Gate Mews. The
London A to Z
is a tone poem that could easily be arranged as blank verse of a high order. In fact, the Scottish mystery novelist Anne Perry has cribbed from it unashamedly, naming her novels after London locales
in which they are set, Southampton Road, Rutland Place, Cardington Crescent, and the like. (London does not rename things; while America is now rife with John F. Kennedy Boulevards, there is no Churchill Street or Princess Diana Avenue.)

Meanwhile the American mystery writer Martha Grimes has chosen to name her books after pubs, a decision that is so sensible, given the richness and variety of public house names, that the only wonder is that it wasn't done years before. In just a week in London, a tourist making a haphazard list comes up with the Shakespeare, the Samuel Pepys, the Bag O'Nails, the Dog and Duck, the Friend at Hand, the Porcupine, and the Coal Hole. In his magnificent book,
London: A Biography,
the novelist Peter Ackroyd writes that in 1854 there were seventy King's Heads, ninety King's Arms, seventy Crowns, fifty Queen's Heads, thirty Foxes, and thirty Swans. There were some twenty thousand pubs to chose from in all at the time.

(One Friday evening, wandering through Shepherd Market, we came upon a crush of people in one of the narrow cobbled back alleys laughing and chatting and holding glasses in front of a cattycornered establishment called Ye Grapes and concluded that we were intruding on an office party or some other kind of
official gathering. “Probably just an evening out at the local,” said a friend, quite correctly, as it turned out. Reading about public drinking and drunkenness, especially the liberal use of gin, is an essential part of knowing London through books. It turns out that that, too, has changed little, even in a more abstemious time.)

The
A to Z
was assembled originally by a woman who walked nearly twenty miles a day and covered three thousand miles of streets. Perhaps at the end she felt as if she truly knew London. If so, she might be alone in that. “London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh,” writes Ackroyd in his introduction. “It cannot be conceived in its entirety but can be experienced only as a wilderness of alleys and passages, courts and thoroughfares, in which even the most experienced citizen may lose the way.” Ackroyd's book, in my worn and spotted paperback edition, is more than eight hundred pages. After walking the streets of London, it does not seem excessive.

And his point about experiencing the city episodically may be the key to why it is such a spectacular starting point for fiction; the episode is, after all, how we novelists do what we do. Virginia Woolf once said in a letter to her sister, “To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were
nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.” But that's nonsense, made more nonsensical by how many wonderful things the writer managed to produce while in the midst of the storm of the city. In fact it may be exactly the opposite: The small and quiet spot offers so much less, so many fewer of the telling details that are so critical to a sense of place. These are the details that are right there for the observing in a city so diverse, so polyglot, so hodgepodge.

In a sweetly elegiac memoir entitled
Winter in London
published more than a half century ago, a writer named Ivor Brown wrote quite correctly, “Great men have lifted their fictions from these pavements; the ghosts of any London lane are infinite.” It is impossible not to feel them peeking over your shoulder and, if so inclined, to find inspiration in their generations. To sink down on a bench with the inscription “From members of hall in memory of the first Earl of Birkenhead” on one of the paths that crisscross Gray's Inn must speak to even the uninspired. If nothing else it is a perfect aesthetic moment, a balance in absolute equipoise of muted red brick, bright green grass, gravel, and window glass glinting in the sunlight. Trollope captured the atmosphere perfectly and simply in one of his Palliser novels,
The Prime Minister,
when he described the offices of Mr. Wharton: “He had a large
pleasant room in which to sit, looking out from the ground floor of Stone Buildings on to the gardens belonging to the Inn—and here, in the center of the metropolis, but in perfect quiet as far as the outside world was concerned, he had lived and still lived his life.” The gardens were planted by Francis Bacon. The first performance of Comedy of Errors was in the hall. The ghosts are most distinguished.

Or, if you are of a mind to write something more florid and romantic, there is always the Albert Memorial, which all by itself must explode forever the notion of the English as an emotionally distant race. Down the Broad Walk or across the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, and suddenly, there it is, like a great bejeweled costume brooch in a case of enameled Asprey cufflinks.

It is a poem, or a short story, or perhaps a comic book all by itself, and a shock to the system: statues and carvings representing the continents and commerce, engineering, agriculture, and manufacturing, yards of gilded fencing, and at the center a vast altarpiece of elaborate mosaics, atop it, not a tabernacle, but “Albert,” as it says on the base, as though there had been no other before or since. He is more than twice life-size, including his famous muttonchop whiskers, and blindingly gold.

Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens

During the war the statue was darkened so that enemy planes would not use it as a marker to attack Kensington Palace, but a thousand books of gold leaf used in a recent renovation brought Albert back to where he was meant to be: as good an evocation of deranged adoration as exists outside the leap of a widow onto a ceremonial pyre. Victoria built the monument in memory of her beloved prince; just across the road is the Royal Albert Hall, which was meant to be called the Hall of Arts and Sciences. The widowed Queen shocked everyone when she laid the cornerstone, christened the building, and unexpectedly added the late consort's name. The shock seems overdone; if the bystanders had only looked across the street at the blinding rococo of the Albert Memorial, they might have wondered when the Queen would rechristen St. Paul's Cathedral and the British Museum in Albert's name as well!

Of course it is not only the great monuments that make the London scene rich in inspiration, but the small corners and commonplaces as well. Eaton Square, all abloom between solemn white-columned rows of houses, still bespeaks privilege and a dignified self-possession, that thing the Mitford sisters mocked as U, for Upper class. But it's for sure people of wealth and accomplishment once thought of as arrivistes are
ensconced within some of its homes now. (After all, an Egyptian who can't get himself British citizenship owns Harrods, and has complemented its almost medieval food court, with its eels and rabbits and quail, with an ill-advised Egyptian hall!) The taxi drivers' houses scattered around the city, where cabbies can have a cup of tea and a chat (or a grouse) still remain, even if some of the cabbies are Indian or Jamaican. And on Vigo Street a man in full old-fashioned London regalia—balmacaan, waistcoat, suit, tie, and umbrella by his side—sells orchids from a stall. What in the world can his story be? Perhaps I'll just invent it.

Then again, maybe not. It's the ghosts that might be inclined to keep writers away from London as well as to draw them. If the sight of full bookshelves sometimes make us wonder whether another book is really the answer to any question, then the streets of London respond resoundingly. No more about Pall Mall! No more about St. James's! No more about the highhanded doorman or the beggar with his dog. (Is it affirming or dispiriting, to read in Peter Ackroyd's book on London that historically the dog “has always been the companion of the London outcast,” the beggar's “only companion in this world of need,” then to walk out to Piccadilly and find a homeless man, with a sand-colored mixed breed, in front of the Pret A Manger
sandwich shop with a sign “My Dog Needs Food.”) Being a writer is a continually humbling experience, carrying within it always rejection, by editors and readers, the cognoscenti, and the marketplace. The books of London suggest a deeper, more punishing rejection: the rejection of surfeit. The deed was done long ago, and brilliantly. Being a writer living in London must be like being a chef in Paris, or a priest in Rome—intimidating, and with good reason. V. S. Pritchett once wrote, “ London has the effect of making one feel personally historic.” But his writing has always given me the impression that Pritchett tends to feel personally historic a great deal. For an American writer, London can have the effect of making you feel personally insignificant.

Even writing about London itself brings you smack up against it, against Henry Fielding and Boswell, or fellow Americans like Mark Twain or the anglophile Henry James. Virginia Woolf, sadly, has now become known to modern Americans chiefly as Nicole Kidman in a prosthetic nose; in her own time her novel
Mrs. Dalloway,
whose kinesthetic approach to the whole world all in one day inspired Michael Cunningham's
The Hours
(and from there the movie in which Kidman appeared) received a chilly reception. Members of her own circle were puzzled by it,
and the critic Arnold Bennet wrote, “I could not finish it.” But it is not simply that it was one of the first forays into a new, more realistic kind of novel writing—“The method of writing smooth narrative can't be right,” Woolf wrote in her diary. “Things don't happen in one's mind like that”—but that it is as good an account of how we experience a beloved place as any in literature. During the course of her errands, Clarissa Dalloway ecstatically breathes in the palpable London around her in the way we all have done when we are in the midst of a place we know and treasure, whether it be the country, the town, or the city. In the process she takes one of London's most predictable and therefore almost invisible icons and makes it new again:

For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of traffic or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.
The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.

BOOK: Imagined London
2.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Trapline by Mark Stevens
Scandal of Love by Janelle Daniels
Red Hot Deadly Peppers by Paige Shelton
Doubleback: A Novel by Libby Fischer Hellmann
Death of an English Muffin by Victoria Hamilton
Love Charms by Multiple
Blood and Guitars by Heather Jensen
Some Like It Deadly by Heather Long