Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

by Anna Quindlen

  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.”

  Gandhi’s statue, Tavistock Square

  In short, it seemed the ideal spot for writers, then and now. In Tavistock Square today, for instance, the focal point is a statue of Gandhi, a clutch of votive candles at the base of the memorial, a branch of flowers habitually wilting in his cross-legged lap. To one side of him is a tree “planted in memory of the victims of Hiroshima by the worshipful mayor of Camden councillour Mrs. Millie Miller JP 6 August 1967,” and not far from it is an enormous slab of rock littered with browning white carnations with the inscription “To all those who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill,” which turns out to be a memorial to conscientious objectors. Nothing could be less Hyde Park Gate, the stuffy upper class neighborhood Virginia and her sister sought to escape by fleeing a few miles to Bloomsbury.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hyde 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  My 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.