by William Boyd
That’s what annoys me about Oxford, I suppose. Even the drunks have pretensions.
In the end one has to say that few places and few communities can be so entrenched in their own ideal projections as Oxford. In Journey Without Maps Graham Greene remarks that
When on rare occasions beauty and magnificence do coincide, one gets a sense of theatre or the films, it is “too good to be true.” I find myself torn between two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than it is and the belief that when it is better it is really worse.
Auden sensed something very similar about Oxford, I think. Those “Stones… utterly satisfied …,” and its population,
Mineral and creature, so deeply in love with themselves
Their sin of accidie excludes all others
We exclude all others at our peril. Perhaps what unsettles me about living in Oxford is the feeling I receive that its inhabitants, or more specifically, the academic community amongst whom I work, sense and savour the beauty and magnificence but, ultimately, don’t make the vital final qualification, and are content enough to live on with the sin. Perhaps it’s time to leave.
1980
Being Translated
“Goodbye. I your new translator am.” The old joke about encountering your translator for the first time is both irrelevant and, curiously enough, often eerily correct. I remember meeting one of my translators at a British Council do somewhere abroad and he was virtually monoglot. We stood in a corner trying to talk to each other about whatever novel of mine he was currently translating and I could barely understand a word he said, so thick was his accent and wayward his syntax. Yet he was regarded as one of the country’s finest translators and by all accounts had done my novels proud. Of course, what is most important in a translator is not his facility in your language but in his or her own. Also, I suspect that, initially, few authors worry a great deal about accuracy or style. The thrill of being translated is simply having a new copy of that familiar old book; of seeing that title transformed into something quite bizarre. Indeed, different alphabets do even more to satisfy this particular urge: Japanese, Hebrew and Greek versions can be relished and savoured quite uncomplicatedly.
However, as you get closer to home, I have to admit, worries start to intrude. My novels have been translated into twenty languages. I suppose that in at least half of the cases I have had absolutely no communication with the translator. And perhaps this is just as well: you can then repose all your trust in the professionalism of your publisher, confident that he would not employ someone merely desperate for cash. But once the translator makes contact your sanguinity can be all too easily undermined. My Norwegian translator, for example, actually concluded one of his letters to me thus: “Hey listen, man, if you’re ever in Oslo and short of bread you can crash in my pad anytime.” After I stopped laughing I started frowning. If this was his idea of English, how was his Norwegian? I conjured up images of a superannuated hippie sitting cross-legged on a mattress in an Oslo squat blithely grabbing at the wrong end of every textual stick in my novel. Luckily we fell out shortly after that. He berated me with some vigour over what he regarded as my thoughtlessness, not to say selfishness, in writing a novel as long as The New Confessions.
One of the first languages my novels were translated into was Dutch. Now, I cannot speak or read Dutch, my translator never made contact and, duly, the novels appeared. Because every Dutch person I had ever met spoke perfect English this was one set of translations that I never wondered about. But then, when A Good Man in Africa, An Ice-Cream War and Stars and Bars had been translated into, respectively, Gewoon een Beste Kerel, Gewoon een Oorlogie and Sterren, Strepen en een Gewoon Englesman, I began to worry. What was this “Gewoon” business, for Heaven’s sake? Did they think I was writing some kind of serial novel? To this day I’ve never dared ask.
Most of the time one hopes earnestly for the best, trusts to luck and tries to suppress those horrible suspicions. That Bulgarian edition of A Good Man in Africa with a naked black lady spread-eagled across the endpapers… Someone completely mystified by the expression “Tal-lyho!” and asking for an explanation … what, no dictionary to hand? And if “Tallyho!” was such a poser what in God’s name did he make of “Haughmagandie”? So why wasn’t he asking about it? And so on. But these instances are rare. On the whole I have exceptionally good relations with my translators and in the case of my French translator, Chris-tiane Besse, I have a co-worker whose diligence and attention to detail are second to none. And in French, at least, the rewards of the new text can be appreciated. When one reads, for example, sentences like, “Le lendemain matin, la véranda craque sous les pas, couverte comme elle l’est de leurs cadavres coriaces. Des lambeaux délicats et chatoyants d’ailes abandonnées gisent dans les coins,” the frisson of surprise and pleasure is genuine and acute and one realizes that a different language need not imply a loss and diminution of effect and how even a scrupulous literality can be transformed by the skill and art of a real expert.
1986
London
London is too big, too sprawling and attenuated, to be encompassed or defined, to be fixed on the page in one or many identities. The city spreads itself out generously, expanding north, south, east and west from its brown river looping lazily through its shallow limestone valley. I live near its centre, a hundred metres from the Thames in Chelsea. I have friends who live in Hampstead and Crouch End to the north, Barnes and Richmond to the west, Streatham and Tooting Bec in the south, Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs in the east, but they feel so far away, as if they were inhabitants of other towns, in other counties. If I were to visit them, for example, for lunch or dinner, I would think nothing of allotting an hour or more for the journey, or even longer, depending on the time of day. These are vast distances for a city dweller and they affect our perceptions of the place radically. To a very real extent it is quicker for me to go to Oxford than it is to Stoke Newington in north London, easier to travel to Cambridge than visit a colleague who works on a newspaper in Wapping in the city’s east end. Oxford and Cambridge, provincial towns a hundred kilometres away, feel more accessible than districts of the city I inhabit. What does that tell me about London? What kind of Londoner does that make me? And I am not alone. No matter where you live in the city the same sense of isolation, the same alienation from other areas of the place affect you. We live so close and yet we feel so far apart, with such a long journey to make from district to district. And with these fraught trajectories across the city it is no wonder that we draw in on ourselves, create zones and parameters, homelands and reservations, beyond which we are reluctant to go. If Los Angeles can be defined as ninety suburbs in search of a city the same can be said of London too. There is no one London, there is no one place, one entity, it is a congregation, a plurality, the sum of its many and disparate parts.
Broadly speaking, the city is made up of two dozen or so villages, each geographically distinct and each with its own character. When I spread a map of London in front of me and look at those areas I know well, where I regularly frequent and visit, I am astonished at how much of the place is still terra incognita. I live in Chelsea, I know the neighbouring “villages” of Fulham, South Kensington and Knightsbridge well, very well indeed. A little further beyond and things begin to grow hazy: Hammersmith and Belgravia, Pimlico and Westminster, Notting Hill and Bayswater, Mayfair and Bloomsbury are familiar but I can easily get lost in them. I look at the map and I see I have barely strayed beyond London’s south-west quadrant. To the south, just across the bridges over the river, lie Battersea, Wandsworth and Clapham—barely explored. To the north, north of Regent’s Park, lie places that are wholly alien and strange. From time to time my work takes me to Camden Town. And beyond Regent’s Park, north of the great railway termini of Euston, St Pan-cras and King’s Cross, I feel I cross an invisible boundary. Here in north London the buildings look darker, sootier, in less good repair. The streets seem more narrow, the people scruffier, the pavem
ents littered and soiled. Yet I have travelled barely two miles from my home. It is not so much that I have crossed a topographical frontier, it is more of a psychological barrier that separates me from these other areas. I feel different here in north London, just as I do in the east or south of the river, and because I feel different everything about these places—the buildings, the denizens, the atmosphere—is subtly altered as well.
So we cling to our familiar territories and venture forth with a bizarre reluctance. Everyone judges the other districts of London in unconscious comparison with their own. I have no desire to live anywhere else in the city so for me “London” is to a significant degree Chelsea and its immediate environs. I don’t drive either so my local streets possess a familiarity denied the motorist. I walk for miles through south-west London, in ever widening loops that take me to regular points of reference—bookshops, cafes, restaurants, cinemas, auction houses, newsagents. Here they make the best cappuccinos in town; here I can buy a complete copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times on a Monday; here I can sit and read in a garden by a fountain. My portion of the city is exhaustively mapped, it is known intimately, but its grid references remain private and subjective.
Chelsea, of course, is a famous place and has been a haunt of artists and writers for two hundred years: Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Whistler, Rossetti, Henry James, Swinburne, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon… From my bedroom window I can see the spire of the church Dickens was married in. In a house in the little square around the corner Mark Twain stayed, and so on. It is a district of narrow streets and stuccoed houses, of secret tree-filled squares and back-street pubs, of Georgian terraces and Victorian public buildings, all loosely held together by the winding ribbon that is the King’s Road. Cyril Connolly (1903-74), writer, critic and bon viveur, in many ways the quintessential Chelsea dweller, developed a potent nostalgia for the place. He called it “that leafy tranquil cultivated spielraum where I worked and wandered.” It is an enchanted place and there is a quality about the light too that appears different: perhaps it is the gleaming stucco that reflects back with extra force what little sun we receive in London, or perhaps it is the river—so close, but always out of sight—the air above and around it washed twice a day by its tidal ebb and flow, a conduit of freshness running through the grime of the city.
So much else of London suffers by comparison with Chelsea (or so Chelsea dwellers would have you believe): elsewhere seems less fun, less heterodox, less green, less refulgent, but Chelsea shares one quality with the other districts that makes London different from almost any other city one can imagine. Chelsea’s winding, narrow streets are lined with houses, small cottages and mews, Georgian crescents, Victorian terraces, and when one reflects further one realizes that London is in essence a city of houses, of single homes with small gardens with a single front door. There are a few areas of flats and apartments, but the overriding impression is of one family unit, one house. This seems to me to explain much about London, and not just the city’s sprawling, generous, unstructured size but also its particular atmosphere and ambience. The house becomes the centre of the city dweller’s universe, social life takes place behind the curtained windows of the dining room and sitting room, not in the streets, or squares or great public meeting places. In fact there are no real public areas in London, no great squares, no spacious boulevards. At night the vast majority of the population are back in their homes, enclosed and self-sufficient and indifferent to the life beyond their front door.
This has, it seems to me, two obvious effects that make London unusual, given its size and renown and that it is one of the great capitals of the world. First, the pace and energy of the city seem to quieten spontaneously at around eleven o’clock at night. It is as if there is a kind of tacit curfew, a feeling that to be out in the city after midnight is—if not illicit—not exactly normal. Leave a cinema or a show at the end of the evening and try to find somewhere congenial for a drink or a coffee or a meal and you are severely tested. The pubs are closed or closing, only a handful of restaurants serve meals after 11 p.m., public transport winds down, taxis disappear. The city is going to bed and those who want to stay up a little later are going to have their ingenuity and their wallets stretched to the full.
The second feature of London that extends from this home-based society is its privacy. London is a private city, intimate and reclusive. It works best for those who know its secrets, those who have learned the ropes. Even the pub—that one symbol of communal life on every street corner—represents a physical challenge to the stranger. You have to push through a heavy door to enter. You cannot see what is happening inside from the outside. It does not offer an implicit welcome to the casual passer-by, unlike the sidewalk cafe. It is a closed place, its windows are frosted, its gaze is inward-looking. Children are not admitted, its aura is masculine, gloomy, self-absorbed. Even more extraordinary, inside some pubs there are bars that operate on an overt class system: this bar, the decor says, is proletarian, for serious drinking; that bar is genteel, a place where you may bring your wife. The two rooms are often quite separate, entered by different doors.
There is no street life in London as might be recognized in Paris or Rome or Madrid, there is no community of souls in this city, there is no democratic sharing in what the city offers. To get the best out of it you have to be a member of a club. Clubs operate in many diverse ways, from the traditional gentlemen’s club in St James’s or Pall Mall to an avant garde theatre group, but they all point to the same conclusion. If you live in the city and if you wish to exploit it to the full you discover that again and again, to experience the best London has to offer, you have to become a member.
Fifty yards from my house there is a small London square, classic, pretty, with tall plane trees and rhododendrons, a lush lawn, some park benches. You come upon it, as is true of so many of London’s hidden squares, quite by accident. It looks enchanting, a small green island amongst the brick and the asphalt, sheltered and tranquil. Iron railings surround it. Tired, footsore, perhaps just seeking a moment’s repose, you try the gate. Locked. But people are in there, children are playing. A small sign says—“residents only”—you walk on by, excluded. You may look but you may not touch. This little garden in Tedworth Square is yet another of London’s exclusive clubs for members only. If you want to enjoy it you have to qualify for a key.
Such moments provoke attacks of spleen against London and its bourgeois smugness. You cannot live in a great city and not be alternately enraptured and repelled by it. I think of my own nine years in London, how privileged and protected they have been, and how any account of my point of view of the place does no justice at all to its dark side, London’s slums and sweat shops, its poverty and meanness, its vice and brutality. Look how the glossy limousines sweep out of the Savoy Hotel on to the Strand and how there, in every shop doorway in their cardboard boxes, huddle the homeless, the drunk and the deluded. But this juxtaposition is commonplace, this is not London’s problem any more than it is New York’s or Delhi’s or Nairobi’s or Manila’s. Other grudges against the city are, however, more precise and localized. Why has London neglected its river and built power stations and coal yards and warehouses along its banks? Why have so many disgusting buildings been erected everywhere else? London was never beautiful, it could never be described as stylish or splendid. Its centre—Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square—has a solid, massy quality to it, a reflection of the prodigious success of its mercantile past and imperial dominance. But even in the 1950s London had a low, almost Venetian skyline, punctuated by its needly church spires, one that has now virtually disappeared, swallowed up by the unregulated explosion of office blocks and high-rise buildings. Why is there so much dog shit in the streets? Why are there so many cars? Why did we allow Mrs Thatcher to abolish the perfectly efficient, though inconveniently socialist, Greater London Council so that this enormous city no longer has an elected administration to run it? The litan
y of complaints can run and run.
But, as Dr Johnson said, “He who is tired of London is tired of life.” And it takes only a moment for the bile and resentment to alter into in-vigoration and enthusiasm. In 1928 Cyril Connolly returned to London after five weeks in Spain. In his journal he recorded: “Back in London … feel nothing but intense disgust. General dissatisfaction and distress.” But a few days later he writes, “I seem to be falling in love with London… To feel this jungle come to life all round one in the evening, the same October mists, fires, lights, wet streets, blown leaves, to plunge into its many zones not knowing what one will discover …” This seems to me the authentic London voice and the authentic London experience. There is a vibrancy about the city just as there is complacency and apathy. There are maddening irritations as well as astonishing diversity. And there is also this constant prospect of discovery before you, of new places, people, experiences, views and vistas that this huge, perplexing, secret city somehow manages to keep hidden until it chooses to reveal them. A big solid hard place, pragmatic and worldly, but it still retains its powerful, irresistible allure.