Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [25]
Henry James, 1843-1916
“Not as I once did. But it doesn’t matter, for she’s going to America.”
“To America? She must have done something very bad.”
“Yes—very bad.”
CHAPTER TEN
Envy is a writer’s lot in London, and not only because so many great writers have walked its streets. (And continue to do so—during my first stay at the Groucho Club, I glimpsed Salman Rushdie drinking at the bar. This seemed notable mainly because it was at the height of the very public fatwa against him by conservative Muslim clerics, who had threatened death in return for the purported blasphemy of his novel The Satanic Verses. It was said that Rushdie was in hiding. The bar at the Groucho was quite dark, so perhaps it was as good a place as any to hide.)
There simply could not be a better place in which to set a story. After the Great Fire destroyed so much of the city, Christopher Wren proposed that it should be re-created along a more sensible grid system. This would have made London immeasurably easier to negotiate—when a stranger is lost in London, she is lost indeed—and sensible in a way that it is not now and never has been. Thank God the proposal was considered, and rejected. The city that rose from the ashes rose along the same nonsensical system of country lanes and downhill passages that had defined it before. And so it reasserted itself as a kind of mazelike mystery that is irresistible for the imaginative mind.
It is, perhaps, Dickens who best describes the allure of the architecture when he speaks of Scrooge’s rooms in “a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide and seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.” There are countless buildings that seem trapped in the narrow backstreets of the West End or Chelsea, streets designed for one century and trying to make do in another. At Piccadilly there is a warning sign that Jermyn Street, home of the the shirtmakers Turnbull and Asser and the perfumier Floris, is “unsuited for long vehicles.”
For someone used to the tidy, slightly boring numbered streets of upper Manhattan, it is a joy to encounter St. James’s Street, St. James’s Place and Little St. James’s Street. Every street name seems to have a codicil attached, a cartographic family tree; as Thackeray noted, “All the world knows that Lord Steyne’s town palace stands in Gaunt Square, out of which Great Gaunt Street leads.” Nearby, according to the novelist, is New Gaunt Street, and Gaunt Mews. All this would seem like satire if you did not see it all around you in the city itself.
So a lover of language finds herself enamored of geography here. The placenames alone are a gift to a novelist. If there is anywhere in the world that sounds grander than Belgravia, I’d like to know it; Fifth Avenue, by comparison, is just a number. Elephant and Castle, Camberwell, Stepney, Bethnal Green. Bolingbroke Grove, Threadneedle Street, Cadogan Terrace, Lavender Sweep, Leadenhall Market, Half Moon Street, Queen’s Circus, Queen’s Club Gardens, Queen’s Gate Mews. The London A to Z is a tone poem that could easily be arranged as blank verse of a high order. In fact, the Scottish mystery novelist Anne Perry has cribbed from it unashamedly, naming her novels after London locales in which they are set, Southampton Road, Rutland Place, Cardington Crescent, and the like. (London does not rename things; while America is now rife with John F. Kennedy Boulevards, there is no Churchill Street or Princess Diana Avenue.)
Meanwhile the American mystery writer Martha Grimes has chosen to name her books after pubs, a decision that is so sensible, given the richness and