Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [7]
Of course, walking in London frequently includes getting lost in London, even for some longtime residents. A city first founded in Roman times and eventually encompassing a string of outlying villages has streets that could, most kindly, be classified as organic. In other words, once upon a time they were cow paths and the crossroads stiles. Any reader of Dickens knows the maze of narrow back streets that enables pickpockets to melt into a crowd and young orphans to disappear without a trace, ideal “for the very purpose of concealment,” wrote Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones. Any reader of history knows how stubbornly Londoners have held onto a street grid that seems to have been based on the children’s printed puzzles of trying to get from one side of a square to another. “Right lines have hardly ever been considered,” complained an architect in 1766. For a writer, of course, this polyglot landscape is irresistible, right lines not being the purview of the novelist or poet.
CHAPTER FOUR
One of the most exciting things about the city of London is how it honors those who labor in the salt mines of words. The most obvious manifestation of this is what is called Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. The truth is that the poets are somewhat edged out by the prose writers, and the corner is more a large anteroom, crowded with gawkers by virtue of its notoriety, relatively spacious compared with the rooms on the other side of the aisle simply because there are no recumbent kings or archbishops in this neck of the abbey. To arrive at Poet’s Corner in this age of pragmatism, it is now, unfortunately, necessary to thread your way through a maze of assorted barriers and one-way signs: “For the sake of moving it along, madam,” one of the red-robed marshals says.
(In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.)
The assortment of writers is various, the feeling ecstatic: So here they all are! Chaucer, Dryden, Browning, Tennyson, Byron, Dickens, of course, and even Noel Coward, his plaque beneath the doleful monument to two sisters who died in the early eighteenth century and distinctly at odds with it, with the unfunereal legend “A Talent to Amuse.”
Very few of the writers are actually buried with the monarchs in the abbey, and more modern plaques reflect that: George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, buried at Highgate, and Dylan Thomas, buried at Laugharne. Henry James is there with his divided literary loyalties: “New York, 1843; London, 1916.” And Dickens has a large plain black slab in the floor with simply his name, the brass as shiny as if it had just been polished, perhaps by thousands of fingers, or feet.
Although London book editors today are every bit as pessimistic and lachrymose about sales as their American counterparts, it is still possible to believe, at moments like this, that this island, and this city, are indeed the ancestral home of literature. The Underground stations are full of enormous posters for the latest blockbuster. The newspapers cover publishing thoroughly, although not as thoroughly as sport, the monarchy, and the current reigning reality television show. There are eight daily papers, many more than any American city has—even if several seem devoted more to photographs of women’s breasts and coverage of the unsavory sexual pasts of contestants in the television show “Big Brother”—and many of them cover the book business as though it were a spectator sport. On one spring Sunday alone there were articles about a bookstore in Mayfair, a book festival in Wales, the writer Mary Wesley, the writer Patricia Highsmith, as well as the usual reviews and publishing news.
The bookstore in Mayfair, a journalist reports, has stayed alive despite the fact that it sells both new and used books from a spot on Curzon Street that (like so much else in London) is a challenge for a visitor