Imagined London Read online

  In the way that the Dutch are blunt and businesslike, the Italians warm and gregarious, and the French high-handed, the men and women of London seem to be by nature reserved. In nineteenth-century novels this is frequently portrayed as a division of class—the wealthy are reserved out of snobbery, the lower classes outgoing and therefore democratic—but in actual modern life the sense of standing apart from strangers seems to span social and economic class. Perhaps it reflects a kind of triumph: Londoners, after all, have prevailed, prevailed over epidemics and economic downturns, foreign enemies and pesky tourists. They need not stoop to empty pleasantry. This reserve is even reflected in the most recognizable of English architecture, the terrace house: Those long graceful rows of identical buildings, standing foursquare to the street, give nothing away about the lives inside except, perhaps, that on some cosmetic level they are lives well lived. They hold their peace.

  I, on the other hand, do not. I am an almost pathologically extroverted person even by United States standards—the operative cliché in America is “she never met a stranger”—and in London, more than any place on Earth, it seemed to me that this would be akin to having a particularly glaring birth defect.

  I never spoke of that, however, when the surprising fact arose that I had never been to London. (Never been abroad, actually. Too, too shamemaking, as Nina Blount would have it in Vile Bodies.) It was always that I had a newspaper job whose various duties made a transatlantic trip impossible. But even when I was given the opportunity to cover the wedding of the Lady Diana Spencer to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales—which, for a certain sort of female reporter of my generation, was like covering the World Series or the splitting of the atom—I found some excuse to let the assignment go to another reporter, someone who knew from past experience how to negotiate the streets around St. Paul’s Cathedral. Even without the knowledge of foresight, without knowing that the event was not only the world’s most closely watched nuptials but a kind of literary festival of sorts, since the marriage would wind up covering the gamut from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to an Evelyn Waugh satire to a kind of unholy John Osborne play of regret, betrayal, and recrimination, saying no to the royal wedding suggested that avoiding London had become as much of a personal avocation as reading about it had long been.

  It did not take psychoanalysis to figure out that a large part of this was the fear of disappointment. From the earliest days of our family, when it was only my husband and me, before our children joined in, we had read aloud from A Christmas Carol each Christmas Eve. Critics can say what they will about Dickens, and they are often right; he does sometimes seem as though he were staging a crazed Punch and Judy show on the village green of the mind rather than writing a novel, certainly any sort of naturalistic one. But if you read his work aloud as a kind of performance, as he did on his reading tours, there is no doubt that he creates a world.

  In A Christmas Carol, a slight book whose cachet has been further depleted by its incarnation as, among other things, a Muppet movie and a musical extravaganza at Madison Square Garden in New York, that world is almost tangible. That London, too. It is a cold night, and powerfully foggy, and a group of the poor are gathered around a fire, and carolers go from door to door. In one warehouse the workers are dancing into the night, with a fiddler playing along with the help of a pint of porter. In a small house a poor family is eating every morsel of goose. In a larger one a young couple and their friends are playing at Blindman’s Bluff. And at the end, Scrooge the ogre is “as good a man as the good old city knew,” which is as good a way as saying “happily ever after” as any. By the time they were six my children could recite some of this from memory, and by the time they were twelve they had laid claim to the chapter, or stave, that they would read each year. Ask any of them what “a bad lobster in a dark cellar” describes (the spectral face of Marley glowing on Scrooge’s doorknocker), and they can tell you.

  At a time when England in general and London specifically were dealing with modern urban evils, with bad health care, high unemployment, domestic terrorism, anti-immigration bigotry, and increasing crime, the fact that there would be no lamplighters nor poulterer’s shops seems a most pathetic reason for an educated woman, particularly one who also happened to be a reporter and a writer, to stay away from that place that, above all else, called her home. This was wacky, and it was quite specific: I am a Philadelphian by birth and have visited the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall many times, and not once have I felt rattled or bereft by the fact that I was unlikely to meet Benjamin Franklin on Rittenhouse Square. (On the other hand, there are precious few great novels set in Philadelphia.) Yet so it was with London. Each of us has an illusion we would prefer to maintain intact. The Vatican, the Far East, the Grand Canyon, Hollywood. (Truly an illusion, that last one.) This was mine.

  What a relief to discover, on that first visit, that on close acquaintance I loved London rather more than less, as much for what she had become as what she had been, although the two seemed to me to be inseparable. Although I had work to do—interviews in the back of the Groucho’s slightly lugubrious dining room, afternoons at Broadcasting House, from which the BBC seems to have what any American journalist would consider a stranglehold on the media—my free time was spent wandering aimlessly through the streets of London, from Covent Garden through the West End, along the Strand and down to the Thames. Listening to the half-slurry, half-sharp intonations of the average English accent, passing a group of suited city types ranged outside the crammed entryway of a pub, taking the vertiginous escalators down into the Underground and then up again, all while moving from monument to monument—it was just as I’d imagined, and then some.

  All around was the city I had learned to know, in all its incarnations. There were the street beggars with their dogs tucked into doorways. There were the lawyers—solicitors and barristers, I hadn’t learned to tell the difference, and QCs, I suppose, whatever that may be—moving like guided missiles in pinstripes to and from the Inns of Court. There were the giddy rich girls looking through the racks on Beauchamp Place in South Kensington, a clutch of nannies with their charges in strollers in Hyde Park, a young man in paint-streaked overalls selling river scenes next to the boats that take tourists up and down the Thames. There was a new London, a real London, a London apart from anything I had read that told its own stories through overheard conversations, glimpses into shop windows, bored faces on the train, waitresses in Soho coffeehouses.

  The guard had changed.

  I love big cities, find New York warm and companionable, think a little of the country goes a long way. So I loved this London from the very first precisely because past and present coexisted so completely. I would not say happily, always, since as a closet antiquarian I often find offensive the way in which the modern too often seems intent on shoving aside, with a big boxy hip, the slender graceful remnants of its own history. Perhaps nowhere was I as struck by this as I was in the City, for quickly I learned that that locution in literature referred not, as I had supposed, to the city of London, but to the part of London that is the oldest and today most dedicated to finance and commerce. It happened as I came upon the monument to the Great Fire of London. The denizens of the area had been wiped out by the Great Plague in 1665, and their chockablock little houses, shanties really, by a ravenous fire in 1666, and to commemorate the devastation Christopher Wren—whose contributions to the architecture of London in sheer number suggest that he never slept nor ate sitting down—conceived of a great stone column, erected not far from the baking house in Pudding Lane from which the flames were said to have first erupted and spread. Atop the pillar is a crown of flames, and at its base the explanation that the fire “consumed more than 13,000 houses and devastated 436 acres.”

  What’s devastated, however, is the majesty of the monument, which was designed to be seen by anyone crossing London Bridge from the south bank of the Thames. Now it is a little like finding a needle, not in a haystack, but in a box of blocks, t
he large ungainly office towers around it, including that monument to the spread of American capitalism, the London headquarters of Merrill Lynch. And at the Tower of London, where I squatted in awe on the green at a sign explaining that Anne Boleyn’s bones were beneath the ground nearby, I was amazed to see that the ravens that once picked at the heads on pikes at Tower Bridge were still in residence, then a bit dispirited to discover that their wings were clipped so that they could stay within the Tower close in their now purely ornamental capacity. St. Paul’s Cathedral has a revolving door for the convenience of the tourists and the staff; nearby is a pleasant Japanese restaurant, the only place in the financial district open for lunch on a Saturday. Thus did I make my peace with modernism, as most of us do, through convenience. Over sushi I read Scoop! and thus mollified myself with tall tales of Fleet Street within walking distance of the place itself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Not too far from Fleet Street, in that part of Bloomsbury near to Gray’s Inn, there is a street without the feeling of insulation and isolation the Forsytes must have had in Montpelier Square. Even its name takes it down a peg from Pall Mall or nearby Mecklenburgh Square: Doughty Street. History tells us that there were once porter’s lodges at either end, and gates that were closed and locked at night, creating an oasis within the bustle of the area. But there is none of that now. Rows of identical houses peer at one another from across a fairly busy avenue. None stands out from the others except that there is one that has a sandwich board on the sidewalk inviting passersby inside.

  Of all the writers who have made London their palette, their paint, their turf and their home, Charles Dickens is the gargantua. Inside the Doughty Street house it is clear that it has always been so, although this was where he lived before his assumed greatness became monumental and his public readings became as popular as public hangings had once been. The memorabilia that has been assembled by The Dickens Fellowships, whose members around the world take Dickens as seriously as the Archbishop of Canterbury takes Jesus, cover the full range of a career that spanned thirty-five years and included, among other works, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities. (A rabid Dickensian—and is there any other kind?—I cannot bear to leave it at that. There is also Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Christmas Carol.)

  Until the publication of the Harry Potter books, Dickens may well have been the British writer most often read by American schoolchildren, usually because his work was assigned to them. He is also largely responsible for a kind of back-alley view of London that prevails to the present day. Although literary critics tend to treat him a little like a happy fantabulist and a talented hack—“Dickens could never have written such a passage,” Oxford professor John Carey writes dismissively, quoting Thackeray approvingly in an introduction to an edition of Vanity Fair—his view of London, if not its people, is often astonishingly dark.

  Along with some of the more florid detective novelists and the song “A Foggy Day In London Town,” written by the American George Gershwin, Dickens may be singlehandedly responsible for the common perception that the weather may frequently render London’s streets so impassable as to be impossible. In the very beginning of Bleak House, after introducing mud so deep that prehistoric creatures might still be expected to be crawling out of the ooze, he continues, with the lack of restraint that is his hallmark, “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” And so on and on in a paragraph that contains the word “fog” thirteen times, as well as five semicolons.

  I may have been blessed in terms of timing, but I haven’t encountered the kind of weather that has become the ruling London cliché. Instead, I’ve always been charmed by the light, which seems to me to have a silver-gilt quality that renders the atmosphere serious and expectant. I love that golden, almost edible light in Italy and the French Riviera, but it seems to me the meteorological opposite number of deep thoughts. London weather—the chill spring, the light rain, the dove-gray sky—telegraphs moments of moment and the tramp-tramp of real life. And I have never encountered much of an English fog, and certainly not the sort of pernicious blanket of dirty black that Dickens delights in describing.

  The passage always recalls to me my first run-in with the notion that Dickens was a bit of a blowhard. When I brought home Oliver Twist in my book bag, assigned to read it in seventh grade (a terrible idea, as though within our suburban, center-hall colonials we twelve-year-olds would naturally relate to the prepubescent Oliver as he was orphaned, lost, and steered toward a life of crime), my mother commiserated with me about the rigors of reading Dickens. “He describes every leaf on every tree in every street in every town,” she said.

  This is a pretty fair assessment of the sort of detail the writer piles on (and which detractors assign to the fact that he was filling magazine pages, since many of his books were first serialized), but it so happened that I was a leaf-tree-street-town sort of person and, later, the same sort of writer. And there was something about the chapter I had read surreptitiously in the classroom, during (I’m pretty sure) a lesson on oblique and obtuse angles, that had simply gotten to me. It was the moment of the orphan’s birth: “There was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration.” It was a combination of the arch and the archaic that spoke to me. Perhaps it was all those years reading the simple serviceable prose of the New Testament in Catholic school; I was dying for something with some potatoes and two veg along with the meat.

  From his perch in the comfortable Victorian starter house that has now become a museum to his genius—dining room, morning room, drawing room, dressing room, but not much room for servants—Dickens created an indelible London in novels that merged storytelling with social commentary. But the fog was the least of it. One word-picture of an area near St. Paul’s by the Thames in Little Dorrit describes “an old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square courtyard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it, a jumble of roots.” Oliver Twist finds himself living with Fagin in rooms in which “the mouldering shutters were fast closed: the bars which held them were screwed tight into the wood, the only light which was admitted, stealing its way through round holes at the top, which made the rooms more gloomy and filled them with strange shadows.” A visitor can take the Tube to London’s most notorious neighborhoods, and not see anything that approaches the dingy squalor of Dickens’s London. This is either a tribute to urban renewal or literary overstatement.

  Charles Dickens during his visit to the United States in 1867-68

  Unsurprisingly, many of the books grew out of autobiography. The Dickens who was put to work labeling bottles in a blacking factory is mirrored in David Copperfield. The boy whose father was sent to debtors’ prison, along with his entire family, grew up to reflect the experience in Little Dorrit. And the months he spent in the office of a firm of Gray’s Inn attorneys informed the intractable litigation Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the suit at the center of Bleak House that has made it the essential novel about the grinding inexorability of the self-perpetuating legal systems of all nations.

  In the Doughty Street house there is a rather famous painting of Dickens by R. W. Buss, who was one of the original illustrators of The Pickwick Papers. It shows the familiar figure—for it is a measure of Dickens’s fame that unlike virtually every other novelist, his face with its long beard and poufs of hair is quite recognizable—surrounded by a succession of tiny figures representing the characters in his novels.

  The painting was never finished, and most of the figures are in black and white, sketched in lightly, ghostly. They have a sort of bothersome swarmlike air to them, as though they are buzzing around his head with the annoying insistence of
insects, and perhaps they were, not as fictional figures but as elements of Dickens’s past, from which he would have been happy to be free. (And was during much of his lifetime. Only a few intimates knew of Dickens’s tortured past, although others could have divined it through the telltale mixture of confidence and self-doubt he carried always with him. In an 1885 book on the history of English literature, for example, the writer is described as merely moving from Portsmouth to London with his family. No blacking factory, no debtors’ prison.) No wonder the London of his novels is both a place in which fortune can be found and in which degradation lurks as well. “Midnight had come upon the crowded city,” he wrote in Oliver Twist. “The palace, the night cellar, the jail, the madhouse—the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid faces of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child—midnight was upon them all.”

  In Buss’s portrait, Dickens sits near a handsome wooden desk with a slant top. It is the same desk that is pictured in an engraving in the Dickens house with the sentimental title “The Empty Chair,” an engraving done on the day of Dickens’s death in 1870. And the selfsame desk sits in what was the writer’s study in the Dickens House Museum, entombed in a glass case like a fragment of the True Cross.

  The case bears witness to the other Dickens, the opposite number of the impoverished boy tormented by his father’s disgrace. Critics have often found the writer’s novels unpersuasive because they tend to divide into two parts, the black hole of poverty, despair, and decay, and an inordinately satisfactory salvation, usually by the good people of the new middle class. (Unlike many English writers, almost no one with a title or an estate turns up in Dickens. The well-to-do tend to be the sort of people that Jane Austen’s characters describe as “in trade.”) The man himself found this formula persuasive because it had been the story of his life, and its reality must have been as real to him as the enormous and ornate Spanish mahogany sideboard that sits against one wall of the dining room in Doughty Street and which Dickens lugged from one home to another after buying it in 1839. Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Dickens was able to leave his past behind.