Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [28]
Even writing about London itself brings you smack up against it, against Henry Fielding and Boswell, or fellow Americans like Mark Twain or the anglophile Henry James. Virginia Woolf, sadly, has now become known to modern Americans chiefly as Nicole Kidman in a prosthetic nose; in her own time her novel Mrs. Dalloway, whose kinesthetic approach to the whole world all in one day inspired Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (and from there the movie in which Kidman appeared) received a chilly reception. Members of her own circle were puzzled by it, and the critic Arnold Bennet wrote, “I could not finish it.” But it is not simply that it was one of the first forays into a new, more realistic kind of novel writing—“The method of writing smooth narrative can’t be right,” Woolf wrote in her diary. “Things don’t happen in one’s mind like that”—but that it is as good an account of how we experience a beloved place as any in literature. During the course of her errands, Clarissa Dalloway ecstatically breathes in the palpable London around her in the way we all have done when we are in the midst of a place we know and treasure, whether it be the country, the town, or the city. In the process she takes one of London’s most predictable and therefore almost invisible icons and makes it new again:
For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of traffic or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
That’s a good bit to quote in your own work from someone else’s, but it so vividly illustrates the point that London makes: that it has been known, and known by experts. (And another point, too, not confined to London; Lytton Strachey may not have thought well of Mrs. Dalloway, but like many brilliant British critics throughout the course of human existence, he was full of it.) This is a great gift to resident and visitor alike, but it is tough on those of us who search for fresh and individual ways to describe it. But the attempt must be made, the pilgrimage taken. What are all those small, oval, enameled plaques but a goad to the daunted spirit, a flag with the legend “It can be done!” By H. G. Wells and Elizabeth Bowen, by John Keats and Somerset Maugham. There are more than seven hundred of the plaques, and that, too, carries a double message: so much has been said, but many voices can be heard.
That is why, on my latest trip to the city, I came with my eldest child, my writer son. A bit of background psychological, not geographic: It became clear to me that Sigmund Freud was on to something with his Oedipal theory several years ago, when the boy began to become a man. Part of his passage into adulthood, I understood, was to separate from me convincingly through a prolonged period of covert removal and outright rejection. I suspected this was bad for him; I knew for a fact that it was bad for me. So I determined that I