Imagined London Read online

  During all those years of reading A Christmas Carol, we were never entirely sure what was meant when Fezziwig, in the midst of a dance in which he and his wife were “top couple,’’ was said with great admiration to have “cut.” In fact the word itself is in quotations, as though even in Dickens’s time it was too slangy to stand alone. Since the description continues, “cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs,” the five of us have decided that what Fezziwig does is what we call a split.

  But until recently we had no idea why the boy Scrooge asks to buy the prize turkey for the Cratchit family after his spiritual resurrection replies, “Walk-ER!” Even on my English trips, I got no more than a puzzled look. (“That sounds very much like one of those cockney phrases Americans insert in films,” one English editor said dryly.) My son and I were therefore enormously chuffed to discover in the Ackroyd book that the word was a piece of street slang that “lasted three or four months only” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and therefore was probably a remnant of Dickens’s boyhood. “It was used by young women to deter an admirer, by young boys mocking a drunk, or to anyone impeding the way,” Ackroyd writes. Mystery solved. (And another wonderful turn of phrase added: “What a shocking bad hat!” contemporaneous with Walk-ER and aimed at anyone of really singular appearance.)

  Not only is this no longer the language of London, but English is in some ways no longer the language of London. One study showed that more than three hundred languages are now spoken in the city’s schools, from Bengali, Punjabi, and Urdu to Cantonese and Jamaican patois. (“Babelians,” Zadie Smith calls them in her novel of the new immigrant London, White Teeth.) And American slang and usage has become such a consistent presence, not only because of visitors but because of exported rap music and sitcoms, that the lines between argots are relatively porous. While once we were warned to ask for the bill, not the check, and to order a sweet, not dessert, almost no wait staff in a London restaurant looks twice if you ask the American way.

  This does not work both ways, however; one English visitor told of the general hilarity that ensued when she ordered pasta in a New York restaurant, pasta being pronounced in England in a way that more or less rhymes with “master.” Nevertheless, there are certainly times when the English treat their American cousins like subverbal idiots; perhaps the concierge did not realize he was leaning slightly forward and raising his voice appreciably when he told me about the theater tickets he’d acquired for us: “They are located in the stalls. Stalls. What you call the or-che-stra.” It was all I could do not to reply, “I know what the stalls are. I’ve read Trollope and Ngaio Marsh!”

  On the other hand, the poor man had probably had his own language trials, judging by the performance one night in Piccadilly Circus by a group of drunken American men in Union Jack tee shirts who were having what they considered an uproarious conversation that seemed to consist entirely of the expressions “cheerio” and “bloody.” Of course, one of them also felt moved to quote from Wayne’s World about Piccadilly Circus: “What a shitty circus! Where’re all the tigers and clowns?”

  The other problem with learning language from books is that literature frequently reflects an exaggerated form of normal dialogue. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, for instance, have a hyperannuated adolescent voice that bears homage to, but doesn’t always mirror exactly, the footloose orphan of the nineteenth century or the disenchanted prep school boy of the twentieth. Surely the Pickwickians speak like a series of playlets—not surprising given Dickens’s affinity for the theater—not like actual human beings.

  In fact, while I had managed to wend my way through various novels, had come to understand what it meant when Rumpole’s father-in-law referred to the Old Bailey as “not exactly the SW1 of the legal profession,” I was not really prepared to use these locutions in real life. And I was certain I had no idea how to pronounce many of the words I had learned to recognize with my eyes: How in the world did you actually say Cholmondeley or Gloucestershire? It remains a source of shame to me that through much of my girlhood I pronounced the name of the river that runs famously through London with the “th” fully articulated and a long a after. “Thames,” one of my high-school teachers finally said, “rhymes with gems.” As a reader, English place-names had become what Russian surnames had always been: something to register with the mind and the eye but never to venture with the tongue.

  These concerns, too, were put off because I never actually visited London, until I hired as a nanny for our firstborn (the very selfsame writer mentioned above) a Mancunian woman, late the manager of a rock-and-roll band. (Until I met Kay, I would have thought a Mancunian was a person who came from some exotic foreign land, not someone who came from Manchester.) Early on we got into a frustrating rondelay about whether my son had any vests or jumpers. Eventually it became clear that Kay was referring to what I knew as undershirts and sweaters, and I showed her where they had been packed away after the baby shower. Over time sometimes I called them vests, and sometimes she called them undershirts. (Once there was a contretemps over a “dummy,” which turned out to be a term that had never crossed my field of vision during my reading. This was a pacifier. I don’t believe in them.) Eventually we even developed some conversational Englishisms around the house; for example, when one evening my husband felt moved to tell Kay that he found completely unintelligible her Mancunian accent—which, in his defense, even some Londoners find challenging—she replied, “Sod off, Gerry.” This became a term of art around the house for months to come, despite the fact that my Lonely Planet British Phrasebook informs me that its origins are in the word “sodomy.” But the explanation continues, “Most British people who use this term don’t mean anything sexually menacing by it…you may consider yourself insulted, but not too much.”

  The fact that there exists a British phrasebook to, in its words, “avoid embarrassing British–U.S. differences” says a great deal about the language chasm between the two. It’s been often remarked upon, and sometimes it goes both ways, although most of the time the Americans are the philistines. The Irish writer John Connolly, for example, has decided for whatever reason to set his suspense novels in various parts of the United States. (It’s probably the same impulse that has led Californian Elizabeth George to write a series of books about a titled inspector for Scotland Yard.) But Connolly blew it in a small way in a recent novel when his American hero put on a pair of trainers, a term of art for sneakers that few people in Maine or Louisiana would ever have heard of. On the other hand, one editor at a British publishing house was trying to see that one of her American writers made it across the pond successfully and wasn’t sure there wasn’t a glitch in a manuscript she’d gotten. “How would you describe chicken-fried steak?” she asked. (Yuck.)

  You can tell a really wonderful quote by the fact that it’s attributed to a whole raft of wits. Such is the quip about America and England being two countries divided by a common language. Churchill, I was told definitively by one student of modern history. Shaw, said an inveterate reader. But a quotations dictionary has it as Oscar Wilde (“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”) and another Bertrand Russell (“It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language.”) I feel quite chuffed about being able to speak English English until I actually do it. Then I find myself in Southwark, pronouncing (or mispronouncing) the w, and find myself thinking of Wilde. Or Russell. Or Churchill. Or whomever it may have been.

  Oscar Wilde during his tour of the United States and Canada in 1882

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The idea of a Literary London alongside the literal city is not a new one. There are courses on the subject for everyone from tourist groups to university students and even a scholarly journal with papers on such subjects as “Theatrical Spectacles and the Spectators’ Positions in Wordsworth’s London.” The English are not above playing the literary card; at one hote
l in Mayfair, the apartment suites are named after great writers, the Fielding, the Austen. In the window of Rule’s, purportedly London’s oldest restaurant, the stuffed pheasants in the window vie for attention with information about past diners, Dickens and Thackeray among them. And why not? If America confers luster on a home by saying “Washington slept here,” how can anyone be expected to resist the temptation to say “Shakespeare wrote here.” Not only wrote, but wrote triumphantly of his surroundings:

  This royal throne of Kings, this scept’red isle,

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden, demi-paradise,

  This fortress built by Nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea,

  Which serves it in the office of a wall,

  Or as a moat defensive to a house,

  Against the envy of less happier lands,

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,

  this England.

  No country needs more than that. And yet there is so much more in the syllabus for the Literary London courses and tours that abound. There’s Chaucer and a trip to the Guildhall, Shakespeare and the roughhewn replica of the Globe on the South Bank of the Thames, Poet’s Corner and Chelsea, and, of course, the Dickens House. The books and places most of the courses use and cite don’t change much. Fashions in literature do, of course. Galsworthy out, Bowen out and then in again, Woolf in only for modernists of a certain stripe until, that is, the movies took her up. My old clothbound History of English Literature, circa 1885, declares: “There are two distinguished authors, who divide the honour of being called ‘First novelist of the day.’ Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray stand side by side on that proud eminence, each with his multitude of admirers.” But the on-line reading list for Kingston University today states flatly, “The great figure of nineteenth-century literary London is Charles Dickens.” Poor Thackeray.

  Each of the reading lists for these Literary London surveys tends to end with the same modern writers. But those “modern” writers are often those who wrote seventy or eighty years ago, Woolf, Bowen, along with slightly more contemporary names: Julian Barnes, Hanif Kureishi, Jeanette Winterson. Much is made of Martin Amis’s novel London Fields.

  But London Fields is not a novel that is particularly evocative of London in any way, nor are most of its counterparts. The literary novels of London have become less about place and more about psychology, less about class per se and more about ethnicity. And modern London, like most other great capitals, has become more like everywhere else in a way that makes specificity in writing about it both less possible and less useful.

  It may seem a frivolous example, but I’m frequently struck by how all of this plays out in shopping. When I was a child and my parents traveled to Europe, they returned with presents that were specific and exotic, the sorts of things that were not readily available in the United States. From Spain, a heavily embroidered shawl. From Rome, beautiful leather boots. From Copenhagen, clogs—“what are those?” my friends would ask. From Ireland, fisherman’s sweaters. From London, tweed jackets. These were the marks of having traveled.

  But, of course, now we can buy Italian shoes and English woolens nearly anywhere in the world, just as nearly anyone in the world can buy those great American exports, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and the Gap jean. New Bond Street in London is, as it has been in countless books and histories, a wonderful place to shop, but it is no more English than I am. Chanel, Tiffany, Donna Karan, Cartier: The English luxe purveyors are outnumbered by foreign competitors and, sadly, the same foreign competitors whose stores can be found in Paris and Toronto, Hong Kong and Las Vegas, surely in New York. Conversely, there is now a Burberry store in many American cities, and Harris tweeds can be found everywhere. Even William Evans offers a Web site for hunting gear and jackets, plus fours straight from the London store via FedEx.

  There were those halcyon days during the 1960s and, later, in a smaller way, at the end of the century, when London had a hip cachet unheard of elsewhere in the world. The Beatles, Mary Quant, the Sex Pistols, the punk movement: The city had once again become the world capital, this time of cool. Cool Britannia: That was the catch phrase that all the magazines used as they turned London, a city for the ages, into flavor of the month.

  But cool is a commodity that runs wild as soon as it is let loose and never, ever, acknowledges its roots, and before you could say Led Zeppelin or Haight-Ashbury, America had buried its former forefather. Not long ago I was cabbing it to Notting Hill, the new cool London neighborhood (even as I write this I know, in the nature of things, that some other place has likely supplanted it), when the cab driver slowed appreciably. “That is the home of Madonna,” he said solemnly. Who is, of course, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese of celebrities, American, middlebrow, famous worldwide.

  Even the men who sell souvenirs along the iron gates of St. James’s Park are selling the same souvenirs, with slight adaptations, that their compatriots are selling opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue thousands of miles away. Florid oil paintings of a barely recognizable generic city. Sweatshirts with the Union Jack instead of the American flag. Even the ubiquitous tee shirt, now gone worldwide: “My grandparents went to (fill in the blank) and all I got was this lousy tee shirt.”

  Shouldn’t it at least read “bloody tee shirt?”

  The net effect is to make everywhere feel somehow the same, and nowhere feel particularly particular. What a metaphor it seems to compare and contrast the most splendid and the most recent portraits of the monarch in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. The glory of the place is a portrait by van Dyck of Charles I riding on a handsome, romantically rendered horse: enormous, overwhelming, larger than life-size in a baroque gilt frame. Its twin, I suppose, is the portrait of Elizabeth II presented by the artist Lucian Freud in 2001. It is about the size of a sheet of writing paper, and shows the Queen wearing the astonishing diamond diadem, on display elsewhere in the gallery, atop her familiar lacquered bouffant.

  Yet, despite the crown, the Queen looks like a peevish aging housewife. There is nothing of splendor in the image: This is a quite ordinary woman incongruously bejeweled. One can only conclude that if Freud had painted such an image—realistic, no doubt—of Charles I, he would have been summarily executed. Ditto for the architects of the Millennium footbridge, opened to much fanfare—and months late—to celebrate twenty-first-century London. Reporters trooped across it en masse, and as they did it began to undulate up and down, side to side, until eventually members of the press were clinging to its sides. (Those familiar with the English press speculated that this was not, in fact, a mistake.) The engineering problems have since been resolved, and the new bridge joins the other legendary spans across the Thames. But there’s no doubt that if such a bridge had been built by Henry VIII for some grand occasion and had rattled about in such a fashion on its maiden voyage, heads would have rolled.

  It would certainly be simple to decry this, to do as older Londoners do and sigh and frown and complain that the old place just isn’t as it was, as it was before the war, after the war, before the boom, before the bust, before the arrivistes and the new rich. But why ought the novels of today’s London mimic their forebears? Where’s the creativity (for writers) and the amusement (for readers) in that? The question seemed to be answered visually in the courtyard of Burlington House, which stands back from the throng of Piccadilly like an outraged dowager lifting her satin skirts. The Earl of Burlington’s town mansion is now the home of the Royal Academy, and, before its famous summer exhibition got underway in 2003, workmen were busy erecting a statue in the courtyard. The figure appeared to parallel the monument to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the eighteenth-century neoclassicist president of the Royal Academy; the sculpture stood catty-corner from Reynolds, facing him, triumphant on a pede
stal, a torch in his hand. But, on closer examination, the torch was a microphone, the figure wearing jeans, and his physique not that of Greek statuary but of the modern health club and weight machines. (No Athenian was ever so ripped!) And inside the pedestal was a propane tank, so that from time to time the mike would spew a plume of fire. Perhaps the statue was an ironic comment on the bewigged figure facing it, cast in bronze, holding an artist’s palette. But it appeared to be imitation without reason.

  The literature of London now reflects its modernity, as it should. It also reflects, less happily, the everywhere-is-anywhere ethos of easy air travel and effortless chain imports that has homogenized most of the developed world. Only the detective novels, perhaps needing some firm undeniable bedrock for their uncommon tales of murder, blackmail, and back channel plots, still draw heavily upon clear and specific delineations of place. And even one of the detectives of P. D. James—Baroness James, now, as London continues to pay homage to literature—lives in the new London, in a modern flat facing “the huge shining pencil” of Canary Wharf and the contemporary sprawl of Docklands.

  P. D. James in 1987

  Yet this change in arts and letters is all part of a discernible continuum, too. The descriptions of London in the novels of Martin Amis, for example, are as perfunctory as those in Defoe, but for quite different reasons. While Moll Flanders rattles off the names of the streets she travels with little or no description because her creator could be confident that his readers would be able to effortlessly conjure up the location, Amis’s protagonists do so because detailed descriptions of place are not the point in his novels, in which human psychology is both theme and location. “Chelsea, Blackfriars, Regent’s Park, Bloomsbury, Hampstead, and so on,” he says of one nomadic character. But for the extent to which these places are important in the action of the book, he could just as well have written “Chelsea, Tribeca, Park Slope, Greenpoint, and so on,” substituting the names of New York neighborhoods. The novel owes very little to a sense of specific place, and Amis seems to have considered the city in which he lives as little more than a platform for the universal anomie of his characters. It is only at the very end of London Fields that he becomes a flagrant Londoner, when he adds, in a kind of coda, “The people in here, they’re like London, they’re like the streets of London, a long way from any shape I’ve tried to equip them with, strictly non-symmetrical, exactly lopsided.”