Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [13]
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