Imagined London (3 page)

H
yde Park Gate is, instead, the nexus of Forsyte land. For years the novels by John Galsworthy were out of fashion, despite an improbable Nobel Prize for Literature for their author. But two excellent television productions produced new paperback versions and a boom in sales. Nothing could improve the opinion of the literati—the English literary critic V. S. Pritchett, with his usual high-handed harshness, describes the author's imagination as “lukewarm,” and
The Forsyte Saga
is relentlessly described by English literary critics as “middlebrow,” the English literary equivalent of acid in the face—but a new generation of
readers discovered this family saga, and discovered that while it is not
Middlemarch
it is nonetheless quite entertaining and often moving. It is also a book in which London features almost mathematically as a map of the fortunes, aspirations, limitations, and adaptations of its various characters.

I'm not sure if anyone has ever put together a Forsyte's tour of London, although having been handed innumerable flyers for several Dickens one-man shows, a Sherlock Holmes impersonation, and a look at the phony London Dungeon that has been staged as a kind of quasihistorical amusement park ride, I wouldn't be at all surprised. It is the perfect tourist novel, in some sense, since so much of it is about what people own, what it says about them, and how their lives appear from the outside. In other words, real estate and facades.

It is possible to organize a tour yourself, somewhat in the manner of the “Good Walk” section of a Fodor's guidebook that loops around what were once called “the fashionable ways.” It's also possible to be struck immediately by how little has changed, and how much, which, of course, is the keynote of London. Galsworthy draws a little map in words, early on in this doorstop of a book, confident, it's clear, that his readers will understand the code contained in the addresses: “There was
old Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the James in Park Lane; Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde Park Mansions—he had never married, not he!—the Soamses in their nest in Knightsbridge, the Rogers in Princes Gardens.”

They are all still there, 150 years after the action of the novel: the tall houses with the white fronts and the dignified columns, the street where Swithin lived, with its buffer of old-growth trees from the busy traffic of the Bayswater Road. But Park Lane was savaged in the early part of the last century, the bowfront houses with gardens running right down to the edge of the greensward largely demolished and the road along Hyde Park widened into a major autobahn. The broad avenue is a hodgepodge now: of lovely old houses taken hostage by corporations and equipped with security keypads to one side of the fanlit doors and sleek office furniture as out of place as a cow in the high-ceilinged parlors; of graceless apartment blocks with postage stamp balconies scarcely worthy of the name and certainly not capable of a chair and a table from which to sit and savor the view; of estate agents offering more of the same; of Jaguar and Rolls-Royce dealerships.

In the park itself is a posted timeline, showing how it too has changed, the land acquired by Henry VIII
for hunting in 1536, hangings at Tyburn discontinued in 1783. There is a notice on the board to leave the baby birds alone: “Parent birds rear their young better than you can.” Another asks for public help with information on a recent assault and carries the heading
RAPE
in red capital letters. A third suggests the number of dogs that can reasonably be handled by a single park-goer (four) but concludes that no hard-and-fast rule will be made “at this time.” Young Londoners seem a bit sick of the stereotypical view of the English: doggy bird-watchers mired in propriety and history. It is just that the stereotype seems to so often conform to observable reality.

It is probably in the London parks that the descriptions contained within its best known novels come most alive; it is also in the parks that a reader realizes that the London frozen in the amber of great fiction is a London quite out-of-date and out of time. The soldiers on horseback in Rotten Row may seem more appropriate than the runners in shorts and singlets simply because, for a reader, the tableau of Hyde Park is indelibly one of a parade of conveyances, barouche and phaeton and curricle. (I have encountered them all dozens of times in period fiction. I still have no idea what they are, much as after all these years of reading the English magazine
Tatler
I have still not managed to puzzle out who gets to
be called an Honorable, and why. Frankly, I don't much care.) The milky-skinned English roses are outnumbered by Indian families walking with their sloe-eyed children. This is part of the problem with developing an understanding of London simply from reading its great books; too much of it takes place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, too little in the present, on buses and the Underground and in the back of an Austin Mini and in neighborhoods rich with the sounds and smells of India or Jamaica.

Surely there are still Becky Sharps, manipulating their way into an advantageous marriage and a lucrative lifestyle; the British magazines are full of them, in towering heels and dwindling skirts. But seeing Hyde Park through the eyes of a Forsyte is as ridiculous as seeing Greenwich Village through the eyes of Henry James. The modern, the ever changing, insists on tapping you on the shoulder or, occasionally, slapping you in the face. In the Princes Gardens block where the Roger Forsytes once set up housekeeping, there are indeed the expected elegant white houses with small pillared porticos. But at the corner is the half-sunken modern block that is the sports center of the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, “pilates classes, inquire within.” And, across the square, a kind of Soviet gray structure sits as the antidote to the slender
lightness of the older houses; it must be a dormitory, for only college students use flags as curtains. The students fly across the square on bicycles and the occasional skateboard or pair of Rollerblades; if Soames Forsyte was appalled at his daughter's necklines, he should see the young women with pierced navels moving hither and yon.

In fact, he was appalled long before the twentieth century had given over to the twenty-first: “A democratic England,” he concludes bitterly by the end of the saga. “Disheveled, hurried, noisy and seemingly without an apex…. Gone forever, the close borough of rank and polish.” Every British generation has complained that its successor has transgressed the old standards. One of London's best known poems is a version of the kind of not-what-it-used-to-be that you can hear creaking out of the old hands at any pub. In this case the old hand happens to be Wordsworth:

Milton! Thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! Raise us up, return to us again…

Or, as the cabbie on his way to Islington said as he frowned at a brace of Indian students on bicycles, his complaint at one with the spirit of Soames and Wordsworth both, “The city isn't what it was, miss, I can tell you that.” The jeremiad that followed about the effects of immigration on the economy, the crime rate, and unemployment was as old as time, and as literature.

Galsworthy is a better novelist than he is given credit for, and he chooses his settings well. Soames's sister Winifred lives in a house in Green Street rented for her and her husband Montague, who gambles and womanizes. Green Street is a pleasant and quiet lane off the park, and anyone would be pleased to own one of the houses that line it. But they are markedly less grand than those of the elder Forsytes, clearly the right place for a female child who has married a man of little fortune and uncertain reputation. These are buildings slighter, less chesty, more burgher than baron.

Property is, after all, what the saga is about, and what so many English novels, particularly of the nineteenth century, find of greatest concern. (Galsworthy, like Edith Wharton, is a twentieth-century man who appears to have been becalmed a century before his time.) Americans confuse this with class, since they like
to think of themselves as members of a classless society, just as they like to think of their British counterparts as hopelessly immured in a hierarchy hatched a millennium ago. Neither is accurate. It is a mistake to make too much of democracy, or aristocracy. The great fulcrum is industry. At the end of the third book of the Forsyte saga, there is a society wedding at which the family takes pride in the inability to distinguish between themselves, landed bourgeoisie, and the titled family with whom they were now allied. “Was there, in the crease of his trousers, the expression of his moustache, his accent or the shine on his top hat, a pin to choose between Soames and the ninth baronet himself?” they ask in one narrative voice.

(Or there is this, in a more satirical vein, from
Vile Bodies,
one of Evelyn Waugh's hilarious and beautifully mean-spirited satires: “At Archie Schwert's party the fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh, Earl Vanburgh de Brendon, Baron Brendon, Lord of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn, Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenonceaux Herald to the Duchy of Aquitaine, ‘Hullo,' he said. ‘Isn't this a repulsive party? What are you going to say about it?' for they were both of them,
as it happened, gossip writers for the daily papers.” So much for title in the twentieth century.)

This is apparent in the park, too, in the democratization of place and of fashion. No more are the gentry discernible from their servants by the cut of a jacket, the curl of a wig, the impeccable handle of the right umbrella or briefcase. Japanese tourists conspicuously carry expensive leather bags, while the young English princes are seen in blue jeans and university sweatshirts. Nannies dress as well as the mothers they so closely resemble. No great city will ever be without strata, London perhaps least of all. But they are more difficult to define than ever before.

It was this that Soames lamented when he decried a democratic England, this ability to tell a gentleman by the notch of his lapel. By the time Soames's daughter Fleur is married, he is living outside of the city, some ways from the house in Knightsbridge where the story begins. Number 62, Montpelier Square, it says, is where he begins his ill-fated marriage to the alluring Irene, who feels suffocated by her husband and their life together. And, to be sure, Montpelier Square even today feels hermetically sealed, although it is only a few blocks from Harrods and the busy Brompton Road. The garden at its center, with its carefully manicured wall of hedges and tidy gravel paths, can easily be imagined as a cross between a sanctuary and a green prison. Wisteria vines climb the walls of several of the houses, giving them a sort of
Sleeping Beauty
quality. At midafternoon on a workaday weekday, there is no one in the central garden, no one on the square, no one on the streets at all except for two workmen working on the pointing of an exquisitely restored house, a hint of lavish drape and bullion trim just visible through the long windows.

Montpelier Square

Like many of the most beautiful squares in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, Montpelier Square has
the trick of seeming as distant from the push and pull and press of the main roads as if it had a great glass skylit ceiling over it. It is possible to imagine either being completely content here, or very very restless. Or perhaps that is just remembering the novel, remembering Irene and her discontent.

Round and round the square, peering at the house numbers for 62, where Soames kept her like an especially beautiful painting in a frame of crystal and polished furniture. Round and round again. But there is no number 62. Perhaps the author wanted to protect any actual house from the taint that might attach to the fictional unhappiness in his own creation. Perhaps he chose a number out of the air, without any attention to the house numbers on Montpelier Square itself. Perhaps in a small way he wanted to drive home what is always a valuable lesson, when we insist on learning the world through books: that accuracy and truth are sometimes quite different things.

M
y excitement, even joy in the concrete existence of these fictional locations—even if the numbers don't exactly match—raises an obvious question. Why did I wait so long to visit London in the first place? Like every American teenager, I'd had my chance to backpack through Europe, an excursion that inevitably included a hostel in Chelsea, a pub near Piccadilly, and far too much Guinness. “Another pint!” friends of mine shrieked in a private joke when they'd returned. “Please, sir—I want some more.”

I suppose that was part of it, that feeling of being the ugly American in the high reaches of high art that made me cringe. It is a sense I experience each time I return to London about the essential character of its people: They are cordial strangers, happy to proffer directions, say, but content then to be on their way without the sort of where-you-from-how-you-like-it pleasantries that would be the hallmark of any such American exchange. As an experiment I once stood on a corner of the Strand with an open map and a pronounced expression of confusion for fifteen minutes. I
can assure you that if I did this on Broadway someone would offer directions, since New Yorkers are indefatigable know-it-alls. In London, not a single passer-by volunteered.

Jane Austen, 1775-1817

This national character is quite clear after only a few days in London, and clearer still in fiction. Those who chatter or openly emote are classified in virtually all English novels as fools; in fact, the mindless yammerer, fecklessly easy with strangers and unthinking of propriety, is a bit of a stock character, the best known version being Mrs. Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice.
When Londoners do become what, in the parlance of their national character, might be considered overwrought (although certainly not by any passersby in New York), it is usually because of something flagrantly un-English. So it was that, in the fall of 2003, city residents responded savagely to the American David Blaine. Blaine is usually referred to as an “illusionist,” which is what you call a magician with pretensions and a press agent, and for reasons obscure he decided to spend forty-four days in a Plexiglas box suspended from a crane near Tower Bridge.

This was originally described heroically as a feat, like Blaine's feats in America, where he was encased in a block of ice and a coffin and lionized while doing so. But the English perceived this sort of display not as a
feat, but as a stunt. And because they are a people who decry unwarranted spectacle—they are, after all, the subjects of a queen who, when not wearing the Crown Jewels and an ermine cloak, often has on enormous rubber boots—they took after the American. During his time in the box, Blaine was pelted with eggs, golf balls, and loud opprobrium.

Perhaps it was in part because Blaine had set his plastic box up over the Thames, a bit like a monument on a plinth by the shores of what is, in many ways, less a river than the single most indelible piece of British history. Birdcage Walk has been paved over since Charles II rode his horse down its length, and the reading room of the British Museum has a new roof and new books. But there is something about flowing water that seems immutable, as though there might still be a hint of Cromwell or Chaucer running beneath the bridges, the most eternal part of a constantly reconstituted city. “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” Edmund Spenser wrote in the sixteenth century, and then T. S. Eliot added to it four centuries later:

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights.

The London newspapers suggested that Blaine's rude welcome was a function of class warfare or anti-Americanism. But perhaps it would have been different had he not set himself up over London's great living monument, the longest river in Britain. His stunt became the modern equivalent of a public hanging, with the crane giving a gallowslike air to the enterprise. When Blaine was tormented by the sound of drums from below, and the hurling of French fries, perhaps he ought to have been grateful; Thackeray went to a hanging once at which the dandies squirted the crowd from upper windows with brandy and soda, and sometimes after the body had been taken down sections of the rope would be sold as souvenirs.

Perhaps it was simply that Blaine seemed literally and figuratively to have gotten above his station, to be openly boastful in a way the British find repellent. The Londoners who are effusive seem to be so as an act, usually for profit: the cab drivers, the souvenir hawkers, those who offer bus tours and maps on the busier street corners. (Either that, or they are hosting game shows on television. If he were writing today, Dickens would doubtless have Mr. Micawber introducing humiliating snippets from home videos with a laugh track playing madly.) Many of them seem to have taken a page from
The Pickwick Papers
or the musical
Oliver!
and the result
is not a happy one, a bit like that overamped tour of the London Dungeon.

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.”