Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [3]
And for an American child, there are certainly many stories set in America. But they are stories ranging all over the great sprawling subcontinent, from Willa Cather’s My Antonia in the Midwest to Steinbeck’s East of Eden in California to the Massachusetts Bay Colony of The Scarlet Letter. American literature ranges north to south, east to west; it is not concentrated in one place, one place that becomes alive in books as though it is a hologram taking clear three-dimensional shape just past the open covers and the turned pages.
For an inveterate reader, there is only one city that comes utterly alive in mind in that fashion. Henry James, an American whose novels became exemplars of his contempt for his own country and its people and his sometimes overweening regard for the island home where he lived in later life, summed it up:
“London is, on the whole, the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life. It is the biggest aggregation of human life—the most complete compendium of the world.”
From the sacred to the profane: Amber St. Clare, the heroine of Kathleen Winsor’s wildly successful 1945 Regency novel Forever Amber, concurs with James: “The memory of Newgate weighed on her like an incubus. But even more terrifying was the knowledge that if caught again she would very likely be either hanged or transported, and she was already so rabid a Londoner that one punishment seemed almost as bad as another.”
For a person raised on books, walking through streets in her mind’s eye, engaged in the love affairs and life losses of imaginary men and women, London is indisputably the capital of literature, of great literature and romance novels and mystery stories, too. There can be no doubt. The London of Thackeray and Galsworthy, of Martin and Kingsley Amis, of Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers, of Nancy Mitford and Elizabeth Bowen. The London of Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Dickens.
This is not to say that all English literature takes place within the city. Some of the finest English novels are set in its quiet countryside—Middlemarch, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Wuthering Heights. In Pride and Prejudice, London is a metaphor for bad behavior and great unhappiness, where Jane Bennet is snubbed by the Bingley sisters and Lydia and Wickham go to ground after their ill-conceived elopement. And some of the greatest of all London novels portray it as a place of filthy back alleys and disreputable back rooms. The London of Little Dorrit is no tourist mecca, and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders spends most of her time in the streets of London fleeing from poverty and the police.
Kingsley Amis at home with his sons, Martin and Philip, in 1961
And that is only the novels. Some of the most riveting and most memorable stories in the true history of civilization come out of the city, from the wives of Henry VIII to the Great Fire of 1666 to the ascendancy of the young Victoria and the abdication of her great-grandson Edward VIII. The storeowners in the area all know that when a visitor with a notebook wanders through asking where Whitechapel is to be found, she is probably looking, not for the Royal London Hospital or the Bell Foundry, but for the haunts of Jack the Ripper, one of the first and still best-known serial killers.
On that first visit to London one of the first stops I made was in Westminster Abbey, at the catafalque of Elizabeth I; in my girlhood, before anyone used (and overused) the term “role model,” that distant princess was mine, refusing to be demoted and undervalued because of her gender, determined