Reviews of the Week
What Is Wrong With London ?
Royal Borough. By Rachel Ferguson. (Cape. I cs.) Beautiful London. Photographs by H.Gernsheim.(Phaidon Press. t7s.6d.)
THERE is a nostalgic, things-are-not-what-they-were air about all these books. Mr. Willson Disher is frankly pessimistic, for he chronicles the disappearance of music-halls, theatres and pleasure-
gardens before the onslaught of bureaucrats,' those erstwhile Puritans, and the planners. They even planned, he tells us, to remove a favourite theatre to build, of all things, a traffic circus! Mr. Willson Disher feels himself to be the messenger in a tragedy telling of the murder of the spirit of delight and the process by which a city is deprived of its soul. The late Mr. Cohen-Portheim's book, first published in 1935, now has Mr. Raymond Mortimer popping up here and there to inform us that this building no longer exists, that that vista has been blocked, that food can no longer be obtained ; and to question with some justification whether we were wise to share the cake more equally when it was smaller than ever in living memory. Miss Ferguson, in her charmingly fey way, looks back rather than forward, though she writes of her favourite borough in war-time and since. Mr. Gernsheim's photographs are perfect—too perfect, for they picture a London permanently sunny and static, a London that never was nor will be. And the anthology, a magnificent compilation, is full of evidence of a London of social vigour, communal amusement, and an endless flow of wit, wisdom and gossip. Sadly one must ask, " Orr sons des neiges tranian ?"
In part, certainly, the decline of London life is due to the war. The shortage of houses has tended to mean that people with similar interests and of like education cannot live in proximity: friends do not meet accidentally in the " local " or out shopping ; meetings have to be carefully arranged, transport enquired into, and spon- taneity is lost. It is in a new as well as the old sense Donne's: "'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone ; all just supply and all relation." As a result, London has no longer, save perhaps in Chelsea, any quartiers, and so it has lost much of its flavour, its ease of living and its intellectual life in the non-organised sense. Dulwich is in desuetude ; the Elephant and Castle is as epicene as the gilded halls of shadows which now dominate it ; Hampstead is submerged beneath the same antipathetic foreign-ness that has for long negated Stamford Hill ; Bloomsbury is given over to birds of passage. Instead, the process of suburbanisation, already operating before the war, has been speeded up, and the rows of hutches get longer and the rabbits more and more unsociable. (And here it is worth remarking that Socialism in practice, far from revolutionis- ing home-life, has stimulated millions more to aim at those suburban and unsociable delights—the fireside, the slippers, the Book Club choice.)
The red blood of social intercourse increasingly withdraws into the four walls of the box in the row, and so a great city decays. It was the smell of decay which struck Mr. George Seferis, one of the greatest living European poets, on his first visit to London, and he noted "the shock 1 experienced at the sour taste of death in the fog and the intensified circulation of fear in the arteries of a great city." This deserves place in the Massinghams' horror section along with Carlyle spitting out: "Acrid putrescence! " in Eaton Square, Blake noting in every charter'd street faces with " marks of weakness, marks of woe," and James Thomson, the ghost of the Vauxhall Bridge Road, hemmed in by a city of Dreadful Night.
For, of course, there has always been anguish in a big metropolis— and London is the biggest. (Would there have been existentialist Angst without great cities ?) Two hundred years ago—with the picturesque already dernier cri, Pope in the country at Twit'nam, Gray in the country churchyard, and the Lake poets on the rural horizon—Dr. Johnson felt compelled to thunder: " A man who is tired of London is tired of life." Fulfilling another of Johnson's dicta—literature is to make life a little mbre livablethese six books do make us a great deal less tired. Even though we disagree
with their enthusiasm or their criticisms, we are, I think, drawn to go and see the facade of Boodle's in St. James's, highly and rightly commended by Mr. Cohen-Portheim ; we• take another look at Waterloo Place, but, no, it is not as Mr. Gernsheim pictures it ; we read Mr. Bush on Bartholomew Fair and see new things next time we go to Smithfield ; we shall never shop at Pontings again without thinking of Scarsdale House and the lovely garden Miss Ferguson tells us was once there.
But of London as "comprehending the whole of human life, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible," only the anthology has much to give—and, of course, there is little in it more recent than 1939. It is a " curious " collection in the eighteenth-century sense, assembled from memoirs, impressions of foreigners, letters: Charles Booth trying to convert the London Jews ; George Orwell in a doss- house (the retching cough—" Oh! for Christ's — sake, shut up!"—the leprous walls); sections on sewer-hunters, jive and eccentrics (Yeats on Madame Blavatsky). Special praise should be given to the authors' preface for its wit (" the rich, like the poor, have always been eccentrics ") and its gusto (" the London char- women on holiday at Southend sailing down the front like noble carthorses "). Mr. Bush writes, pleasantly and informatively, of the better-known objects ; his is a London for Beginners, and Londoners get a poor show. But it.is a book to give to the new- comer to the metropolis ; it may add solace to his bitterer moments in his first bed-sitter. There are plenty of people in Miss Ferguson's book, a 'sequel to her successful Passionate Kensington, but it is by no means a Kensington for Beginners. One feels the need to have lived as long in Phillimore Terrace as Miss Ferguson to be able to enter this charmed circle. But I liked her wit and her choice adjectives- " unappetising cyclists," "our more intimate shopkeepers." Mr. Cohen-Portheim's book is basically an over-subtle view C' London is a Sphinx "), but the photographs, apparently recently added by the publisher. are full of atmosphere and life. There is nothing in Mr. Gernsheim's book as instinct with reality as these pictures of Kensington Gardens in the mist or a Soho street at midnight. " Popular photographers," say the Massinghams, " appear to see London only at sunset or sunrise." Mr. Gernsheim sees everything at noon in July with everyone indoors. It is not London—but one cannot forget either his groups of statuary from the Abbey, every detail limned, or his depersonalised National Gallery and St. Martin's looking north, where, as in an early De Chirico town painting, one expects to see at any moment an emanation of that spirit which has so long haunted the Mediterranean imagination—
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