Imagined London Read online

  Ethnicity, too, has become its own setting, so that novels of the immigrant experience are among some of the best and most successful that modern London can offer. But again, they are rarely portraits of a place. The family of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is so claustrophobically contained within the housing project and the ethnic enclave in which they live that it is a shock to the reader when, more than halfway through the novel—and more than thirty years after the head of the household has arrived in London—they visit Buckingham Palace. An American tourist, his accent “familiar from television,” asks where they are from and the husband’s reply is, “We are from Bangladesh.” His wife is as dismissive of Buckingham Palace as Virginia Woolf had been in Mrs. Dalloway decades before: “If she were Queen she would tear it down and build a new house, not this flat-roofed block but something elegant and spirited, with minarets and spires, domes and mosaics, a beautiful garden instead of this bare forecourt. Something like the Taj Mahal.”

  Between these modern writers who trade street atmospherics for the interior world of the psyche and the early English novelists who assumed a reader’s knowledge of their locale and so little thought to limn it come centuries of others whose work falls between the two poles. There are the years of Dickens and Thackeray, with their rich and ornamented descriptions of the city, a function of the style of the times and, perhaps, the presumed eye of foreign readers. There are the elegiac descriptions as the glorious empire gave way to one small island, the satire of Waugh and the despair of Forster, a sense of a certain sort of dominant and indomitable London slowly slipping away. “Today Whitehall had been transformed,” writes Forster, who clearly loved the place and feared for it, too. “It would be the turn of Regent Street tomorrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air and saw less of the sky.”

  Brick Lane, center of London’s Bangladeshi community

  The passage speaks poetically of the end of something. Yet it is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth. On the South Bank of the Thames, where the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales began their journey, there now stands silhouetted against the often lowering clouds the newest London landmark, the London Eye, the world’s tallest—and certainly most technologically sophisticated—Ferris wheel. It was derided as a bit of a gimmick when it was first proposed, and the plan was to take it down after a few years. But it has become an icon of the city—another icon of a city that perhaps has more iconographic places, buildings, and locations than any other.

  Atop it, in one of the glass cars in which tourists ride, it is possible to see most of London. The London that was rebuilt after the enemy bombs wrecked it. The London that was rebuilt after plague and fire ripped through. The London of Holmes and Watson and Nancy and Fagin, of bright young things and enemy bombs. London upon London upon London, a city in which the destruction of the Blitz managed to unearth a section of the original Roman walls nearly two millennia after their construction. No novelist would use such a metaphor; reality is often more heavy-handed than we can afford to be.

  It is a grand panorama, the view from this great engineering marvel, this new colossus. But it is no better than the view of the city from St. Paul’s enormous gold dome, an icon that has stood the test of an additional three centuries of time. The only difference is that to get to the dome you must take the steps. We are accustomed now to being carried.

  Both are marvelous, but neither constitutes my most beloved place in this best beloved of cities. For that you must come down to Earth and wander aimlessly. Maybe just off Sloane Square, or in Cheval Place, or on Burnsall Street, or Elgin Crescent. Maybe in Notting Hill or South Kensington or Bloomsbury. Finally you will reach it: a house with a bay window or a fanlight over a door, a house with a handsome gate or a small garden.

  Around it, a street or two away, swirls the clamor of one of the busiest cities on Earth. Inside is—what? Did a debutante once wait there for her car? Did a maid slip out to meet her lover? Did street peddlers sell ribbons here, or fruit and flowers? Does it stand on the ruins of an older house, or a cow pasture, or even a Roman fort? Did the bombs shake its foundation and the modern real estate boom triple its value?

  Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.

  And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  By the time I had finished Imagined London, I had built a large castle around me. It was constructed completely of books. Whenever I left my desk, I would have to find my way through a passage I’d engineered between travel guides and literary criticism. In the process I broke the binding on a perfectly good Fodor’s, ruined two paperback editions of Dickens I left out in the rain, and dog-eared and underlined some of the greatest classics ever written.

  I also had the time of my life, some of it spent in a small hotel in Mayfair sharing a suite—and several endless televised cricket matches—with Quindlen Krovatin, the writer and reader who is also my son.

  First and foremost I must thank him for all the work he did on this book, and for the pleasure of his company. I couldn’t have been habitually lost in London with anyone more interesting.

  I acquired Peter Ackroyd’s remarkable history of London only after I had begun work on this book. I ripped through it in two days, despite its massive size, because it is so intelligent and entertaining. It is probably impossible to write about London without owning a copy.

  I could not imagine living life without the writers mentioned in these pages. In a world that seems increasingly senseless and graceless, they bring intelligence to bear on the human condition.