Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [14]
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.