Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [2]
This is the story of a woman and the city she loved before she’d ever been there. The city, of course, is London, and the woman is me. Before I was a novelist, or a journalist, or even an adult, I felt about London the way most children my age felt about pen pals. I knew it well, but only at a distance, and only through words. Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
I was not an athlete or, in the vernacular of the English novels I devoured, was not good at games. I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they’re not too terrible—well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones—and will reread something she’s already read, even if it’s something like a detective novel, when you’d suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesn’t, and besides, I often can’t remember who the murderer was in the first place.) I’ve remained that sort of reader to the present day, when my work as a novelist and an essayist means there is a lot more premium in it from a professional point of view. Aside from New York City, where I grew up as a person and as a reporter, the places where I most feel at home are bookstores and libraries.
And London.
The first time I recall visiting the great metropolis, I was sitting in a chair in a suburb of Philadelphia. The city streets were filled with fog and the cobbled pavers were slightly slick with moisture, so that the man and woman struggling down the street beneath the yellowed lamps slid on the street’s surface. It was just after the war, and some of the buildings were empty holes left over from the bombs of the blitz. The book describing all this was by Patricia Wentworth, one of the series of mystery novels she wrote that often took place in country shires but wound up always, inevitably, in the capital, at the cozy flat of what I believed at the time to be the essential English spinster, a former governess named Maud Silver.
I have since been to London too many times to count in the pages of books, to Dickensian London rich with narrow alleyways and jocular street scoundrels, to the London of Conan Doyle and Margery Allingham with its salt-of-the-Earth police officers, troubled aristocrats, and crowded train stations. Hyde Park, Green Park, Soho, and Kensington: I had been to them all in my imagination before I ever set foot in England. So that by the time I actually visited London in 1995 for the first time, it felt less like an introduction and more like a homecoming. Here, I thought, is where Evelyn Waugh’s bright young things danced until dawn, where Agatha Runcible, Lady Metroland’s daughter, and the Honourable Miles Malpractice played. Here is where David Copperfield sought his fortune, and where Adam Dalgliesh has his spare and private flat.
The portraits of New York in literature are undoubtedly vivid ones, from the gentry of Edith Wharton peering from carriages on Fifth Avenue to the nouveau riche of Tom Wolfe reflexively painting their dining rooms red. Paris is well served by Hugo, and the coal mines of Wales are a living thing in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Yet London has always been the star of literature, both because of the primacy of English literature in the canon and the rich specificity of the descriptions of the city contained in everything from Ngaio Marsh’s mystery stories to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazelet Chronicle. A student of literature could walk through London and move within blocks from the great books of the eighteenth century to the detective stories of the twentieth to the new modernist tradition of the twenty-first.
Evelyn Waugh in the 1930s
For those of us who are overwrought readers, what that comes to mean is that there is really only one capital city in the world. Oh, there are the Russian towns of Chekhov and the