Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [26]
(One Friday evening, wandering through Shepherd Market, we came upon a crush of people in one of the narrow cobbled back alleys laughing and chatting and holding glasses in front of a cattycornered establishment called Ye Grapes and concluded that we were intruding on an office party or some other kind of official gathering. “Probably just an evening out at the local,” said a friend, quite correctly, as it turned out. Reading about public drinking and drunkenness, especially the liberal use of gin, is an essential part of knowing London through books. It turns out that that, too, has changed little, even in a more abstemious time.)
The A to Z was assembled originally by a woman who walked nearly twenty miles a day and covered three thousand miles of streets. Perhaps at the end she felt as if she truly knew London. If so, she might be alone in that. “London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh,” writes Ackroyd in his introduction. “It cannot be conceived in its entirety but can be experienced only as a wilderness of alleys and passages, courts and thoroughfares, in which even the most experienced citizen may lose the way.” Ackroyd’s book, in my worn and spotted paperback edition, is more than eight hundred pages. After walking the streets of London, it does not seem excessive.
And his point about experiencing the city episodically may be the key to why it is such a spectacular starting point for fiction; the episode is, after all, how we novelists do what we do. Virginia Woolf once said in a letter to her sister, “To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.” But that’s nonsense, made more nonsensical by how many wonderful things the writer managed to produce while in the midst of the storm of the city. In fact it may be exactly the opposite: The small and quiet spot offers so much less, so many fewer of the telling details that are so critical to a sense of place. These are the details that are right there for the observing in a city so diverse, so polyglot, so hodgepodge.
In a sweetly elegiac memoir entitled Winter in London published more than a half century ago, a writer named Ivor Brown wrote quite correctly, “Great men have lifted their fictions from these pavements; the ghosts of any London lane are infinite.” It is impossible not to feel them peeking over your shoulder and, if so inclined, to find inspiration in their generations. To sink down on a bench with the inscription “From members of hall in memory of the first Earl of Birkenhead” on one of the paths that crisscross Gray’s Inn must speak to even the uninspired. If nothing else it is a perfect aesthetic moment, a balance in absolute equipoise of muted red brick, bright green grass, gravel, and window glass glinting in the sunlight. Trollope captured the atmosphere perfectly and simply in one of his Palliser novels, The Prime Minister, when he described the offices of Mr. Wharton: “He had a large pleasant room in which to sit, looking out from the ground floor of Stone Buildings on to the gardens belonging to the Inn—and here, in the center of the metropolis, but in perfect quiet as far as the outside world was concerned, he had lived and still lived his life.” The gardens were planted by Francis Bacon. The first performance of Comedy of Errors was in the hall. The ghosts are most distinguished.
Or, if you are of a mind to write something more florid and romantic, there is always the