Dreadful, delightful city
t's official then, London sucks. So at any rate declares the latest edition of the Lonely Planet Guide, berating the city's inhabitants for their bad manners and deploring the whole place as a vast midden around which swirl the eddies of greed, incompetence and corruption. The public prints have 'reacted' to this uncomplimen- tary evocation of a latterday Gomorrah. Their editors, that's to say, at a time when domestic and foreign news seem more than usually drab, have found room for a great deal of serious head-scratching by various columnists as to whether or not the Lonely Planeteers have got it right. Up go demands for a charm offensive by bus drivers and sales assistants, for a few noughts off the prices in Harvey Nichols and the instant metamorphosis of the Underground network into a Disneyland Tunnel of Love.
Whom have all the journos, not to men- tion the authors of the guide itself actually been talking to? More significantly, what have they been reading? Anyone remotely interested in London's impact on its visi- tors' imaginations could have told them that this touchy-feely initiative is missing the point entirely. Enthralling instead, to everybody from casual tourists and intiner- ant composers to political exiles and ambassadors en poste, has been the city's peculiar distillation of gloom, solitude and remoteness as an ideal dimension for the private lives of its inhabitants. Through the challenges of its nonchalance, detachment and massive incuriosity, the metropolis paradoxically finds us out in ways which a more dedicatedly glamorous place like Paris or New York could never achieve.
Henry James understood this better than anybody. Following a brief English landfall as a boy in 1855, he returned after the Civil War to begin that passionate if scarcely uncritical relationship with this country Which ended with his adoption of British citizenship in old age. While still in Ameri- ca he'd suffered the 'obscure hurt' from a rusty fire-pump, whose 'huge comprehen- sive ache' certain biographers have been notoriously eager to interpret as castration. Leon Edel, his most devoted chronicler, says it was nothing more exotic than a Slipped disc. At Malvern, where he was taking a cure for constipation brought on by a gruelling sequence of lavish Victorian dinners, a deeper hurt struck home with the news that his cousin Minny Temple had died of tuberculosis. After the initial pain of loss, however, came something akin to relief, as if her death had freed him for the life he meant to lead. Whatever James's temporary rage at the stolidness of 'vast, indifferent England' in the face of his grief, he could now get on with the business of shaping Minny into his archetypal heroine, an Isabel Archer or a Milly Theale, engaged with her rather than to her (which might have comprehended worse sorts of ache than the malfunctioning Yankee fire engine was capable of inducing). His jaunts made around this time through the Midlands, the Welsh borders and East Anglia were written up as articles for American magazines and eventually bundled together in 1905 as English Hours. By then these travel notes, however well penned, had acquired what is politely called 'a faded charm', and their moments of overt sentimentality, as the writer gushes over Gothic quadrangles, monastic ruins or 'nice girls' playing tennis on the lawns of a Warwickshire rectory, belong to an earlier touristic generation. In those days Ameri- cans, indulgent towards their disreputable old colonial mother as they never had been since the Revolution, had relished her quaintness and dilapidation with a kind of enraptured innocence the later James was hard put to conceal by even the most sophisticated editing. English Hours isn't all ivy-mantled, oak- panelled heritage fantasy. The author's growing absorption with England is alert to our perverse appetite for surprise and unorthodoxy. At Epsom, with half an eye on the Derby (what would a Jamesian win- ner have been called? Ambiguity by Nuance out of Intuition?) he is far more interested in watching a bunch of gypsies and costermongers vainly trying to heave a sozzled lordling, 'a mere bag of liquor, at once too ponderous and too flaccid to be lifted', back into his carriage. At a country house he catches a blonde girl in conversa- tion with a stupid-looking boy and inter- prets their dubious exchange — 'I suppose it's pretty big', 'Yes, it's pretty big'. 'It's nicer when they are big' — as the British mode of lovemaking. Even his style assumes a beefy directness of aim. `Jamesian', as used nowadays by lazy book reviewers, means three-syllable words and subordinate clauses, but just how Jamesian is an opening sentence which reads, 'Towards the last of April, in Mon- mouthshire, the primroses were as big as your fist'?
It was London which so vitally crys- tallised the Master's notions of English life as the perfect raw material awaiting trans- formation through his subtlest strokes of art. Sitting in lodgings off Piccadilly one dreary April afternoon, he was visited by one of those essential epiphanies which make a rite of passage for everybody who acquires the least understanding of what the city is truly about. He remembered his arrival, hotfoot from Liverpool a few weeks earlier, on a dank Sunday, the trundle from Euston in a greasy four-wheeler, the low black houses, the glare of the gin-palaces, the shampoo he bought at Rimmel's in the Strand, the glove shop at Charing Cross he yearned to 'deflower', and the shadow of the huge four-poster thrown by the bed- room candle on that first night.
Now, looking around at his damp ground-floor sitting-room, 'an impersonal black hole in the huge general blackness', the young American was suddenly gripped by a suicidal homesickness. 'London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all over- whelming; she was as indifferent as Nature herself to the single life.' The moment passed, crucial to his resilience, and he braced himself for that ultimate test of any traveller in a strange town, the experience of eating out alone. In a few years, by no special irony, he could be heard bewailing the number of dinner invitations he felt compelled to accept.
'The dreadful, delightful city' had clutched James to her for ever. He learned to savour her tyrannical immensity, the romantic blurring of time and space creat- ed by her fogs, and the way she so elabo- rately turned her back on the river, its 'brown, greasy current, the barges and the penny steamers, the black, sordid hetero- geneous shores'. After his death in 1917 his sister-in-law smuggled his ashes back to Massachusetts, a selfish and pointless piety. He belonged to the London of which he wrote, 'She is as good-natured as she is huge, and the more you stand up to her the better she takes the joke of it.' The Lonely Planeteers could do with some of the Master's wisdom and generosity.
Jonathan Keates
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