Picked-Up Pieces (8 page)

LONDON LIFE

January 1969

A
N
A
MERICAN IN
L
ONDON
, whether he has come here to work for Esso or to escape the draft, cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The monumentality of Washington, the thriving busyness of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco—all these he finds combined for his pleasure. If he is on foot, considerately designed buses and taxis offer to lift him along a maze of streets; if he has a car, the roadways, however intimidating to a pedestrian instinctively looking in the wrong direction, reveal themselves as paragons of clear marking and disciplined flow. This, surely, is a city, a
civitas
in the root sense, a collection of citizens whose collective life and conscience is bespoken by the wealth of parks and museums, the gracious abundance of public services. Food, for example, which in France must be won by slightly daring forays into restaurants and
épiceries
that have the shuttered air of brothel-fronts, is here everywhere—fresh fruit heaped for sale in the most densely trafficked streets, candy machines on trees, counters of meat in clothing stores. If the telephone booths are scarcer than an American is used to, at least the ones he finds have not been vandalized. He moves through London with no fear, as in Rome, of being cheated and with no fear, as in Paris, of being willfully misunderstood. It is not merely the English language that makes this ease, it is a language of social expectation and response that in his own country is a rather harsh dialect. He finds, in London, tickets to concerts and plays easy to come by; yet when he
arrives the hall is full, or nearly. The balance between supply and demand is maintained with a reasonableness as mysterious as the opaque imbalances of Moscow. Its central institution is, I suppose, the docile, ubiquitous queue.

In the house that I rent hangs a large map of London and environs in 1741. City blocks stop at Marylebone: the eye travels north across stippled fields to Hampstead. Paddington, St. Pancras, and Kentish Towns are villages; St. John’s Wood a matter of two or three houses. Elsewhere on the map, Brompton and Chelsea, Camberwell, Peckham, and Stepney are all distinct and full of delicately etched orchards. Why should this seem special to me? All cities grow by swallowing their satellite towns. But these have kept their names and, somehow beneath the asphalt, a sense of locality, of neighborhood. If, as everyone (or at least every American) says, London is a city one can live in, credit the variety of demi-cities within it, few of them hopelessly unfashionable or ugly, all of them with some possibilities and style. London’s genius is conglomerate; how restricted, relatively, is New York, four of its five boroughs more or less unheard-of and the Manhattanites with pretensions to respectability penned into a few dozen blocks east of lower Central Park, or clinging to several side-streets in the increasingly decadent Village, or to the once solidly middle-class West Side. And these are sizable enclaves, compared to the “good” neighborhoods of inner-core Philadelphia or Cleveland. No doubt the contrast can be overdrawn. The square miles of chimney pots and sullen slate one sees from a southbound train window match for dreariness any American ghetto. Yet some of the factors blighting American cities (their ruthless grid-plan expansion, our centuries of racial discrimination and the bitter harvest of impoverishment, the rural nostalgia that foments the flight to the suburbs) do seem to have been absent or mitigated here, and London’s long primacy has made possible a kind of civic self-confidence absent or ambiguously ironical in America, except in small towns. I have moved here from a small American town, and find familiar virtues: some things are free, some are cheap, one walks among strangers without feeling menaced, the institutions of communal existence feel accessible.

A city, then, of sections rather than layers, where latitude mitigates pressure. The latitude of costume, for instance: it is impossible to dress too oddly for the streets. The clothes along Piccadilly are a spree for the eyes, as shameless as the underwear ads that flow past the startled standee
on the Underground escalator, as hard to believe, at first sight, as the Post Office Tower. On a sunny day along Regent Street it is as if England has costumed itself for one more Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, bobbies in their helmets and bankers in their bowlers and a chorus of clowns in bell-bottomed pants and slouch hats, with powdered faces and painted doll’s eyes. The miniskirts, too (unlike the ones on Fifth Avenue, perhaps because they are shorter) have a dolly look of unassailable innocence. The spirit of comedy lurks beneath the jubilantly erotic surfaces—and after all isn’t English literature, from the Wife of Bath and Rosalind to Moll Flanders and Sara Monday, peculiarly rich in comic heroines? Women parade in everything from yak hides to cellophane—everything except the stern little uniform of black cocktail dress and single pearl strand in which the sleek matron of Park Avenue or Paris sallies forth, sweet soldier, to do battle with her lover, broker, or furrier.

The hip young men seem sad. The uncut hair, which in America does hark back to a native wildness, to Davy Crockett and the redmen, here evokes some sickly Prince Valiant—a squad of pallid, faithless Christs. The faces of the American young reflect excitement: their struggle is for the center of the world stage, and there is an impressive largeness in their dreams of revolutionizing Western morality. I do not feel that excitement here;
Private Eye
is an updated
Tidbits
, the young socialists on television have the rabid punctilio of Dracula turned commissar, and the music is all sung in an American accent. What does Dusty Springfield know about a “preacher man”? Insofar as the popular music here is not derivative, it is Elizabethan balladeering beamed back after centuries of fermentation in the Appalachians, by way of Elvis Presley. It is white man’s music, grown in the package. Beyond the luxuriance of London (all those Rolls-Royces!) and the bustling bravura of its shopping streets, there is an England a foreigner glimpses mostly on television—a soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with Western Europe, John Bull counting his change as he runs for the bus. An American has difficulty understanding the technical headlines promulgated by your government of glum economists.
^*
But even your Queen looks somehow thrifty. The television news can seem desperately local—for a fortnight this fall, one besieged man in Shropshire eclipsed Asia, Africa, and our
elections. Asia, indeed, appears as remote as the moon—let the Yanks and the Reds fight over it. As to Africa, and ex-colonies elsewhere—“our commonwealth friends,” as Mr. Wilson a shade wryly terms them—they are like people with whom one was very intimate once, on a long lovely cruise, but who now are, well,
embarrassing
. Embarrassing, too, are all these darkish immigrants that make Mr. Powell’s eyebrows lift so high, and those marching Catholics in Londonderry (what
do
they want?), and the crazy Welsh (not Tom Jones and Burton, but the ones that blew up the reservoir), and those impossible French (we’d let them into
our
club, if we had one) and rude Herr Hochhuth … really, if we’d known the world was going to be such a nagging bore, we wouldn’t have bothered to beat the Spanish Armada.

Marcus Cunliffe, in his biography of Washington, says of the American outlook: “In comparison with the dense, shrewd, worldly British texture from which it is derived, it is surprisingly thin, diffuse, and romantic.” True; yet, like an Andean Indian, one born to this thin air learns to breathe it and feels a slight heaviness on the chest elsewhere. There come moments when the “dense, shrewd” texture seems stifling. Two enjoyable American experiences are mailing letters and going to the movies; post offices and movie houses are central in most towns, yet rarely crowded and briskly managed. In England I have learned to dread the moment in the cinema, so stuffy with smoke, when after the short subjects the lights shockingly leap on and weary-looking girls in white insist that we purchase from them yet more sweets before being allowed, freighted with pap, to plunge back into dreamland. And in the post office, after floundering to the stamp counter past the long queues waiting to purchase licenses, receive pensions, and whatever else their life-long wrangle with the Welfare State involves, it is maddening to watch the clerk (whose clerkliness is of Gogolian intensity, the product of generations of breeding carried on with dip pens and inkwells) as he tries to balance your letter against a number of brass weights, fiddling to find the right combination, having the letter slip from its tray, replacing it, and at last like blind Justice locating a state approximating balance and then mincing out your postage to you in a series of oddly denominated stamps whose sum he frequently botches, thanks to the intrinsic awkwardness of non-decimal addition. And the way one can get a bank statement only by writing for it to the manager! And those ponderous
three-prong electric plugs! Clumsiness, I suspect, is cherished as a British resource, like muddle and heroism. It forms a code, a lock, to which one needs a key. In the end, there are recesses of England that exist only for initiates. The alien moves through pleasant green hallways and anterooms, always conscious of spike fences and polished locks. Some Duchess, if memory serves, said at the funeral of our greatest Anglophile, Henry James: “Poor Mr. James. He never quite met the right people.”

June 1969

T
HE
A
MERICAN
(
ME
) who last winter thrust upon the readers of
The Listener
his impressions of London left so much still to say that, with his homeward flight number announced for the second time and all suitcases excitedly popping their catches, he feels compelled to add a ragged postscript.

The English National Character
. Such a thing must exist, yet residing in England has not brought me closer to it. Quintessential Englishmen here, with their combed tweeds and calibrated drawls, turn out to come from Hungary or Buffalo. In conjuring up for myself the essence of Britishness, I remember men encountered far from Albion. For example, I remember A.B., with his leather-patched elbows and hideously sensible shoes, who walked miles of Manhattan, unmarried, alone, unafraid, cheerful. The bookcases of his West Side room, amid the siren-loud night and the scuttle of Puerto Rican heroin pushers, breathed of Oxford—dear little blue classics, Waugh and Powell in their pastel British jackets, and poetry volumes as thin as shingles. Over a decade has rolled by; he lives in Connecticut, has four daughters, sails boats, wears the same shoes, and takes a tolerant anthropological interest in local rites like P.-T.A. meetings and three-hour cocktail hours. America amuses him. Or I think of C.D., met in Cairo, with the same bony pink forehead and strategic, disarming stammer. He had been a professor of moral philosophy; abruptly, on some road to Damascus, he had switched to Islamic architecture and mastered Turkish, Arabic, and Russian. That morning when he took me on a tour of mosques, he brushed away begging children as one would brush away the summer midges that come between you and the page of a book. Dazed by his torrent of precise information about a succession of indistinguishably murky and friable
buildings, I asked him, with an American’s naïve faith that the universe is a collection of Freudian symbols, the significance of the dome. I shall not soon forget the quality of his blue gaze as his tongue shifted gears. I had become a begging child. “The dome?” he at last said. “It has no significance. It is a
dome
.”

Only in England would Donne’s assertion that no man is an island have seemed a paradox and not a commonplace. Son of an island, each man is himself an island, secure in the certainty of his own boundaries. Things foreign break upon him like waves. He is the world’s toughest traveller. What an incredible diaspora of amateur explorers, footloose second sons, dissatisfied colonels, and inquisitive ladies in hoop skirts creates and fills an Empire between Drake’s accidental circumnavigation of the globe and Scott’s doomed saunter toward the South Pole! The Africans called Mungo Park “the one who travels alone,” and the same term would apply to Livingstone, Lawrence, Doughty, Burton. The attraction between the British and the Arabs must rest in part on a common austerity, an ability to travel light.