Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [27]
It is a poem, or a short story, or perhaps a comic book all by itself, and a shock to the system: statues and carvings representing the continents and commerce, engineering, agriculture, and manufacturing, yards of gilded fencing, and at the center a vast altarpiece of elaborate mosaics, atop it, not a tabernacle, but “Albert,” as it says on the base, as though there had been no other before or since. He is more than twice life-size, including his famous muttonchop whiskers, and blindingly gold.
Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens
During the war the statue was darkened so that enemy planes would not use it as a marker to attack Kensington Palace, but a thousand books of gold leaf used in a recent renovation brought Albert back to where he was meant to be: as good an evocation of deranged adoration as exists outside the leap of a widow onto a ceremonial pyre. Victoria built the monument in memory of her beloved prince; just across the road is the Royal Albert Hall, which was meant to be called the Hall of Arts and Sciences. The widowed Queen shocked everyone when she laid the cornerstone, christened the building, and unexpectedly added the late consort’s name. The shock seems overdone; if the bystanders had only looked across the street at the blinding rococo of the Albert Memorial, they might have wondered when the Queen would rechristen St. Paul’s Cathedral and the British Museum in Albert’s name as well!
Of course it is not only the great monuments that make the London scene rich in inspiration, but the small corners and commonplaces as well. Eaton Square, all abloom between solemn white-columned rows of houses, still bespeaks privilege and a dignified self-possession, that thing the Mitford sisters mocked as U, for Upper class. But it’s for sure people of wealth and accomplishment once thought of as arrivistes are ensconced within some of its homes now. (After all, an Egyptian who can’t get himself British citizenship owns Harrods, and has complemented its almost medieval food court, with its eels and rabbits and quail, with an ill-advised Egyptian hall!) The taxi drivers’ houses scattered around the city, where cabbies can have a cup of tea and a chat (or a grouse) still remain, even if some of the cabbies are Indian or Jamaican. And on Vigo Street a man in full old-fashioned London regalia—balmacaan, waistcoat, suit, tie, and umbrella by his side—sells orchids from a stall. What in the world can his story be? Perhaps I’ll just invent it.
Then again, maybe not. It’s the ghosts that might be inclined to keep writers away from London as well as to draw them. If the sight of full bookshelves sometimes make us wonder whether another book is really the answer to any question, then the streets of London respond resoundingly. No more about Pall Mall! No more about St. James’s! No more about the highhanded doorman or the beggar with his dog. (Is it affirming or dispiriting, to read in Peter Ackroyd’s book on London that historically the dog “has always been the companion of the London outcast,” the beggar’s “only companion in this world of need,” then to walk out to Piccadilly and find a homeless man, with a sand-colored mixed breed, in front of the Pret A Manger sandwich shop with a sign “My Dog Needs Food.”) Being a writer is a continually humbling experience, carrying within it always rejection, by editors and readers, the cognoscenti, and the marketplace. The books of London suggest a deeper, more punishing rejection: the rejection of surfeit. The deed was done long ago, and brilliantly. Being a writer living in London must be like being a chef in Paris, or a priest in Rome—intimidating, and with good reason. V. S. Pritchett once wrote, “ London has the effect of making one feel personally historic.” But his writing has always given