Imagined London Read online

  It seemed to me that morning that the area had not changed a bit. That made me very happy.

  Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? Is it possible to stroll through Little Venice without having my perceptions colored by the artists in Margery Allingham’s mystery novel Death of a Ghost, or to visit the Old Bailey without imagining John Mortimer’s Rumpole trotting through its halls on his way from the cells to Pommeroy’s Wine Bar for a glass of plonk? Can I ever shake the ghosts of Clarissa Dalloway and Dr. Johnson?

  This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various British broadsheets, Goofy.

  They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways.

  As the tourists mass outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, also known as Buck House (or is that only what tourists who think they are au courant call it?), it is hard to conclude anything else. It is not only that the monarchy itself has become such a vestigial organ of the body politic in what is now a constitutional monarchy, but that this particular manifestation of its history and power is a kind of Potemkin village, neither illuminating nor majestic. (“A child with a box of bricks could have done better,” one of the characters concludes of the palace architecture in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.)

  The Foot Guards of the Household Regiment go through their famous change of personnel, in red coats and bearskin busbies, but the ordinary black-and-white coppers and the high security barriers around the old gilded palace gates tell the real story of the modern era. Down Birdcage Walk on a Saturday morning, in front of Wellington Barracks, two groups of guards, one with guns, one with drums, execute a complex pavane that is clearly as old as the Empire. But little is left of the Empire except a few stray Caribbean islands, the good-natured fealty of the Canadians, and the fact that, according to one cab driver, the second most common dinner dish in the U.K. (after roast beef and Yorkshire pudding) is chicken tikka masala.

  It is difficult to watch all this without A. A. Milne’s Christopher Robin rhyme going round and round in your head:

  They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace—

  Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

  They’ve great big parties inside the grounds.

  “I wouldn’t be King for a hundred pounds,”

  Says Alice.

  The guards with the musical instruments play the theme from Austin Powers. But is it really the theme from the silly cinematic satire of swinging England, or is it an ancient march tune co-opted by Hollywood producers? These are the sorts of questions that being an Anglophile tend to produce under the weight of long history and literary familiarity. Surely an American doesn’t want to get it wrong; if there is anything that England stands for, with its quiet central squares, its tweeds and twin sets and teas, the tight-lipped precision of its speech, it is that there is a right way to do things. This is where the right way has its ancestral home.

  “This is the past,” said a British book editor, indicating the street scene outside a posh Knightsbridge restaurant with a languid hand, not long before he decamped for great success in New York. “America is the future.”

  An easy glib explanation for a shift in geopolitics that has taken place slowly, over centuries. But it is not entirely true. London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible incredible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

  CHAPTER THREE

  London opens to you like a novel itself. Those who prefer Paris or Rome complain that the English capital has no precise center, that there is no spot in the city that could be considered the hub around which the wheel revolves. There is some truth to that. St. Paul’s is an enormous visual marker from above, like a stern presence looking down and around on all. The string of parks—Hyde, Green, St. James’s—make a sort of central hub that enables newcomers to find their way around some of the most important landmarks and some of the prettiest neighborhoods. Piccadilly Circus seems more important than it is mainly because of the street bustle its tortured topographical layout foments.

  But the truth is that that is not really how London is apprehended. It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand. Or, on a more intimate scale, the narrow little maze of Shepherd Market, with its ethnic restaurants and small spare trendy shops, to the wider but still quiet length of Curzon Street, to the full-on cacophony and traffic, both foot and auto, of Park Lane, and hence into the more quiet embrace of Hyde Park.

  It is as though four different landscapes, histories, ways of living, can be encapsulated in a walk around the corner—almost any corner. One moment, the throng and the lowering office building. The next, quiet, isolation, and the window eyes of a mews house. London has nearly as many residents as New York has, yet even its most central locations never feel overwhelming in the way much of Manhattan does, mainly because of this effect, this ability to step within minutes from tumult into peace. In its variety—architectural, historical, topographical—London holds as unique and singular a place in the world as the glory of its literary legacy would suggest.

  In Howards End, which despite being named for a country house is often a poetic, even elegiac tribute to the great city, E. M. Forster speaks of this:

  “Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierge and palms—it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace.”

  Anyone who has passed from the busy Brompton Road to the lanes and streets behind it understands this description; it holds true over much of London, which is a city of neighborhoods, and within the neighborhoods a place of discreet areas, each with its own atmosphere, its own feeling, its own story. It is also a city of houses. All cities are, of course, but while other European capitals are most often thought of in terms of their grand public buildings—and Paris in terms of its pale apartment buildings, Rome its sun-colored palazzos wrapped around an atrium of garden—the essential London scene is a row of low identical houses set around a square.

  Many, if not most, London novels are set in such single-family buildings, upstairs and down. It took me a long time to figure out that the terrace house I encountered in so many novels is what we in the United States call a row house, in New York, no matter its material, a brownstone. (It also took me a long time to figure out that the council flats on estates that made an appearance in many modern novels were not grand places to live. They certainly didn’t sound like public housing projects. Bedsits, on the other hand, were pretty self-explanatory.)

  London is also a city of parks, gardens, and squares, so that much more of it is green and verdant than visitors initially suspect. (A third of London, according to one estimate, is grass or gardens. “Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets,” writes Dickens in Little Dorrit. “Nothing to breathe but str
eets, streets, streets.” But that was only in Southwark, around the debtors’ prisons.) Whole blocks of London in the springtime smell rich and musky; while a stroller moves in minutes from bustle to quiet, she may also pass through successive waves of perfume, lilacs, roses, syringa, even the stew-like scent of good rich loamy soil. A reader understands this coming into the city for the first time simply because so much of the action of so many novels has taken place in these hidden spots, only steps from busy roads, in the squares and parks. Eaton Square. Regent’s Park. They have come to have a mellifluous, slightly mysterious sound, even though in reality they prove to be more ordinary than their names. They could easily be the titles of books, not simply their settings.

  “I love walking in London,” says the title character of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, perhaps the perfect twentieth-century London novel. “Really it’s better than walking in the country.” When the destitute protagonist of Trollope’s The Prime Minister is in despair and deciding on a course of action, he walks the streets of London, despite nasty weather: “He went round by Trafalgar Square, and along the Strand, and up some dirty streets by the small theaters, and so on to Holborn and by Bloomsbury Square up to Tottenham Court Road, then through some unused street into Portland Place, along the Marylebone Road, and back to Manchester Square by Baker Street.” Unlike cities that have been modernized, renovated, changed, a visitor could walk precisely this walk today, including those “dirty streets by the small theaters,” and wind up as Ferdinand Lopez eventually does, at the great junction where trains go in and out of London. From there, onto the tracks.

  Of course, walking in London frequently includes getting lost in London, even for some longtime residents. A city first founded in Roman times and eventually encompassing a string of outlying villages has streets that could, most kindly, be classified as organic. In other words, once upon a time they were cow paths and the crossroads stiles. Any reader of Dickens knows the maze of narrow back streets that enables pickpockets to melt into a crowd and young orphans to disappear without a trace, ideal “for the very purpose of concealment,” wrote Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones. Any reader of history knows how stubbornly Londoners have held onto a street grid that seems to have been based on the children’s printed puzzles of trying to get from one side of a square to another. “Right lines have hardly ever been considered,” complained an architect in 1766. For a writer, of course, this polyglot landscape is irresistible, right lines not being the purview of the novelist or poet.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One of the most exciting things about the city of London is how it honors those who labor in the salt mines of words. The most obvious manifestation of this is what is called Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. The truth is that the poets are somewhat edged out by the prose writers, and the corner is more a large anteroom, crowded with gawkers by virtue of its notoriety, relatively spacious compared with the rooms on the other side of the aisle simply because there are no recumbent kings or archbishops in this neck of the abbey. To arrive at Poet’s Corner in this age of pragmatism, it is now, unfortunately, necessary to thread your way through a maze of assorted barriers and one-way signs: “For the sake of moving it along, madam,” one of the red-robed marshals says.

  (In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.)

  The assortment of writers is various, the feeling ecstatic: So here they all are! Chaucer, Dryden, Browning, Tennyson, Byron, Dickens, of course, and even Noel Coward, his plaque beneath the doleful monument to two sisters who died in the early eighteenth century and distinctly at odds with it, with the unfunereal legend “A Talent to Amuse.”

  Very few of the writers are actually buried with the monarchs in the abbey, and more modern plaques reflect that: George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, buried at Highgate, and Dylan Thomas, buried at Laugharne. Henry James is there with his divided literary loyalties: “New York, 1843; London, 1916.” And Dickens has a large plain black slab in the floor with simply his name, the brass as shiny as if it had just been polished, perhaps by thousands of fingers, or feet.

  Although London book editors today are every bit as pessimistic and lachrymose about sales as their American counterparts, it is still possible to believe, at moments like this, that this island, and this city, are indeed the ancestral home of literature. The Underground stations are full of enormous posters for the latest blockbuster. The newspapers cover publishing thoroughly, although not as thoroughly as sport, the monarchy, and the current reigning reality television show. There are eight daily papers, many more than any American city has—even if several seem devoted more to photographs of women’s breasts and coverage of the unsavory sexual pasts of contestants in the television show “Big Brother”—and many of them cover the book business as though it were a spectator sport. On one spring Sunday alone there were articles about a bookstore in Mayfair, a book festival in Wales, the writer Mary Wesley, the writer Patricia Highsmith, as well as the usual reviews and publishing news.

  The bookstore in Mayfair, a journalist reports, has stayed alive despite the fact that it sells both new and used books from a spot on Curzon Street that (like so much else in London) is a challenge for a visitor to locate. The clerks know longtime customers by name and taste; one elderly lady, the newspaper story recounts, was once prepared to buy a gardening book for a peeress and was told apologetically by the manager, “I’m afraid she already has it.” In an age when most bookstore trade seems to be more like buying blue jeans than buying words, this sounds more than a little like a place in a novel. This, in some transmuted form, it likely has been, since in The Pursuit of Love Nancy Mitford’s heroine works in a bookstore (albeit one identified as on a “slummy little street,” which Curzon Street has never been), and a small oval plaque on the outside of the G. Heywood Hill shop identifies it as a place in which Mitford herself once worked. Thus London becomes a hall of mirrors: real shop, real writer, imagined shop, imagined shopgirl. It’s commonplace to talk of the autobiographical novel. London is also the home of the autogeographical one.

  Curzon Street

  Nearly every block in the center of the city seems to have at least one building with one of these small oval blue enamel plaques identifying some great literary enterprise that has taken place within. Granted, some of those plaques honor statesman, as politicians are called in England when they are dead, or long retired. Disraeli, Charles Fox. But the lion’s share are memorials to writers. One is attached to a narrow house at 46 Gordon Street, which is now the office of career services for the University of London. “Here and in the neighboring houses during the first half of the 20th century,” it reads, in somewhat wordier fashion than is usual, “there lived several members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell and the Stracheys.”

  For readers and writers who came of age in the middle of the twentieth century, the word “Bloomsbury” carries weight that perhaps cries out for a plaque wordier than the run-of-the-mill. Woolf and her friends were in the act of trying something entirely different: in their lives, their work, their relationships, their relationship with the world. The plaque is a little misleading in its specificity; biographies of the Woolfs make clear that they hopscotched all over the area, from one prettily named backwater to another—Gordon Square, Fitzroy Square, Brunswick Square, Tavistock Square. Enemy bombing in Mecklenburgh Square during the Second World War drove them permanently into the country and the famous rendezvous with the river and the stones in her pocket that now seem the inevitable denouement of Virginia’s mental illness.

  The choice of neighborhood by the Woolfs and their circle makes clear what any reader knows about London: that geography is destiny. It is one of the central tenets of English literature: Where you live tells us who you are, or who you have become, or want to be. Not simply what sort of house you occupy, but what street it stands in. When the Sedleys move from Russell Square, wi
th its tall distinguished houses and the long drawing room windows overlooking the trees and the gravel paths, to what is described as a “baby house” near the Fulham Road in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, it is immediately clear even to those who have never visited either place that their family fortunes have plummeted. On the other hand, in Trollope’s The Prime Minister, the compromised and questionable Lady Eustace “lived in a very small house in a very small street bordering upon Mayfair, but the street, though very small, and having disagreeable relation with a mews, still had an air of fashion about it.” When the heroine of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love leaves Bryanston Square, and her husband, for a small house on the Thames at the end of Cheyne Walk, she has exchanged an advantageous marriage for the life of a freewheeling freethinker. (“The worst of being a Communist is that the parties you may go to are—well—awfully funny and touching but not very gay,” she tells her sister.)

  So it was that the Woolfs chose an area pretty, solid, clearly respectable but with an edge of bohemianism. Londoners to the bone, the members of the Bloomsbury group knew that they would be making a statement about intellectualism and individualism (and perhaps free love and sexual experimentation) merely by putting their address on their writing paper. Writes Virginia’s nephew Nigel Nicolson, “It was a district of London that, in spite of the elegance of its Georgian squares, was considered by Kensington to be faintly decadent, the resort of raffish divorcées and indolent students, loose in its morals and behaviour.”