Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [29]
Take that, Dr. Freud.
(There is, by the by, a Freud museum in North London, in the house where he lived after fleeing Vienna once the Nazis came goosestepping in. It contains the master’s original couch, as well as a Freud gift shop. I have never been there, perhaps because it is more entertaining to imagine the gift shop in my mind’s eye, perhaps because the whole theory of penis envy still makes me, to use a persistent literary Englishism, quite cross.)
The ruse worked, and never more splendidly than when I brought my son, then nineteen, to act as another set of eyes, ears, and constantly moving feet while I considered imaginary London. But it was not simply to persuade him of the brilliance of Dickens or the wit of Thackeray or the art of Woolf that I brought him, or set him to work rummaging through my old books for passages that spoke to him. (“Can you remember why you marked this?” he said to me once about a line in Yeats, a moment when we agreed to disagree about our tastes and writerly inclinations.) It was to hand down the possibility without the fear, the greatness without the intimidation. And the legacy. Herewith the world of Chaucer and Browning, T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene. You are a writer; you are welcome here.
“Are you intimidated by London?” I asked.
“Why?” he said.
Youth may be wasted on the young, as George Bernard Shaw once said, but not always.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It’s ironic that much of this literary pedigree began in what is now one of London’s least atmospheric areas. Southwark certainly has more cachet now than it had only a few decades ago, but it is the luster of its resurrection, not of its long rich history. The name reflects its location; it’s that big bump on the map south of the Thames that seems to push the river closer to the Strand and the Tower and all those better-known places that lie on the north side. There used to be a standing joke that to go to Southwark you needed a visa, in the same way Manhattanites like to joke about the other four boroughs of New York City.
Yet its literary pedigree is greater than that of Bloomsbury or the Inns of Court or any of the other London neighborhoods that have housed writers and their imagined characters. Because it was long ago the last great stopping-off place before London Bridge, then chockablock with houses all its length, it was a kind of frontier London, just beyond the reach of its laws and its social mores, a welter of taverns, gambling houses, and various other dens of iniquity. The pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales start their journey “in Southwerk at the Tabard.” Shakespeare’s Globe was there, and it’s said he lived in Southwark when he did some of his best work. Samuel Pepys apparently watched the Great Fire of London from a tavern on the Bankside.
And in Lant Street in Southwark, the young Dickens took up residence while the rest of his family was nearby in the Marshalsea, the long-gone debtors’ prison in which whole families lived, some with drapes and sideboards and pewter plate, until their debts could be settled. More than Doughty Street the area pays tribute to the master: Leigh Hunt Street and Weller Street are named for Pickwickians, and Little Dorrit Church is not far away.
Those rich, often criminal days on the South Bank slipped away. Twenty years after the Great Fire to the north there was another that devastated Southwark. Many of its old buildings were pulled down in attempts at what we now call urban renewal, and the German bombers turned much of that to rubble. For many years it was a ruin, the part of London that, despite its extraordinary history, tourists never went to see.
Little Dorrit Church, Southwark
Now it is one of the areas that draw them most consistently, although for someone seeking the atmospherics of old London, venerable London, imagined London, it is a little tough to take. Southwark is new London with a vengeance, although a few of its pleasures echo the old, albeit in a perilously