Not Anything To Show More Fair

About three months ago my Artistic Director asked me if I would go as one of the theatre’s “staff hosts” on our week-long London Theatre Tour in May for subscribers and donors.  This was (a) a complete surprise (b) really flattering, my Artistic Director being a man of awe-inspiring intellect whose good opinion it’s an honor to have, and (c) made me want to go behind a door and do that thing Laura Linney does in Love Actually after she kisses the guy for the first time, because as everyone who knows me will attest, London is my best-beloved city and one I visited annually for more than 20 years before circumstances and its ascension to the title of Most Expensive City In The World put it out of my financial reach.   With the exception of one holiday visit in 2004 through the generosity of a friend, I hadn’t been back in almost fourteen years.  That’s a long, sad time to sustain a long-distance relationship.

There will be some posts coming up about the trip – one of the motivators for finally getting myself to cowboy up and start this blog was the realization that (as is always true when I travel) I had a great deal to say and share beyond what Facebook posts can accommodate or than I am comfortable putting within its voracious clutch – but before we go there, let’s create some context and talk for a while about London.

Recently as I was trawling the internet for something entirely different, I came across this quote:   “My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.”  (Ben Aaronovitch,  Moon Over Soho)   The same can probably be said about any of the world’s great cities – it’s certainly true of New York, where I grew up, and I know people who’ve had this reaction to Paris, Dublin,and less high-profile places as well.  But for me, it is and has always been London.  We go way back, London and me, to long before I ever set foot in England.  It tugged at me in the way that my friends who have home-places in their family history are tugged at by them; I spent the whole of my high school and most of my college years homesick for someplace I’d never been.  To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, America is my country, and Seattle is my city, but London…London is my hometown.

A lot of people over a lot of centuries have tried to explain just what it is about London that’s so compelling to those of us who, wherever we may have our everyday residence, think of it as “home.”   Even the dedicated journaler James Boswell was kind of stymied, but managed to come up with this:  “I was full of rich imagination of London... such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity."

Agitated with felicity.  Not bad. 

Also not bad is Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnet On Westminster Bridge, written when he was 30 years old.  (Anglophiles, English Lit majors and poetry aficionados will already be ahead of me in identifying it as the source of this posting’s title.) Over the next half century Mr Sublime would go on to find many many things very nice to look at, including mountains, waterfalls, ruins of various buildings, and of course lots of daffodils in one place, and honestly for me in his later years it all gets to be a bit much really, but somehow this early poem, startled out of him on a 5 AM journey by the Dover Coach from Charing Cross to Calais, has always felt in the simplicity of its language and the clarity of its emotion absolutely genuine and spontaneous to me.

And of course, too, I know exactly how he felt.

If you stand on Westminster Bridge today, at that hour, when time is porous and you can hear the layers of history shift and rustle against each other, the sky just flushing pink behind the dome of St Paul’s, you don’t have to try very hard to see the city as Wordsworth did.  If you were to activate your Dr Who TARDIS and bring him to stand alongside you (assuming that he would just stand there and not start apostrophizing everything in sight), he would more than likely recognize it too and find it still beautiful, despite the distant premonitory
hum of the day’s 21^st century traffic and some significant changes to the skyline downriver.  There, just beyond the cathedral and the old financial district, a Tomorrowland array of bizarre corporate-owned skyscrapers of aggressively adventurous design by some of Europe’s most cutting-edge architects has bristled up in the last ten years, with cozy, clubby nicknames derived from the familiar objects they resemble and suggesting a table-setting out of Lewis Carroll:  the Cheese Grater, the Shard, the Canned Ham, the Walkie Talkie, the Onion, and, most notably, The Gherkin – which last I have to assume was assigned to it the minute the first blueprints came in to forestall its being called something it resembles a great deal more closely but somewhat less suitable for reference in mixed company.

Whether these nicknames were created in advance by the architects or a PR firm, or by Londoners in an effort to warm up to these oddball new arrivals, they’re an indicator of how quickly the city begins to flow forward and fold itself around yet another evolutionary layer.  While right now the public-school monikers are a bit like putting a tea cozy on a chainsaw, in no time they’re going to become familiar and friendly, and their owners as unsurprising and integral to the landscape as Big Ben and St. Paul’s itself - or the National Gallery, which no one liked very much either when it first happened (they called it “the Cruet Stand”) and just try to picture Trafalgar Square without it now.  The Tate Modern still looks like a crematorium to me and always will, but it doesn’t bother me any more, and the London Eye, initially such an anomaly in that stretch of the River, has quickly become organic to it.

London changes, as is inevitable and as it must, but it carries its past in its arms and very little falls out along the way.  A Roman wall faces off across a modern roadway with a tower built just after the Norman invasion.   A brutally contemporary building next to King’s Cross Rail Station is home to an original copy of the 800 year old document that was the first ever effort by the people to limit by law the power of the monarch.  In Chelsea, an apartment building called The Orchard stands where Thomas More used to walk among his beloved fruit trees, weighing his conscience against a king’s command.  A few miles further downriver, the ruins of the 16^th century Rose Theatre glow in water and shadows underneath a 20^thcentury office block.  In John Keats’ House in Hampstead, if you’re there in fine weather, two chairs stand in the side parlor just as they are in Severn’s

famous painting of the poet, with a copy of Chapman’s Homer set down on one of them and the garden door standing ajar, as if he’s just slipped out ahead of you.   And oh by the way, up in the Midlands they just found the body of Richard the Third underneath a car park, where they sort of suspected it would be because they knew what was there before (Greyfriars Church) and more or less where in that building the body had been buried, so they just had to look at the plans, which they also have.  Plus, they know who his descendants are, 700 years on, and where to find them for DNA comparison.  (Seriously, these people never throw anything away, as you’ll know if you’ve ever been on the upper floors of the Victoria & Albert Museum surrounded by literally thousands of dinner plates, or actual ceiling-height towers of earrings.)   Blue plaques on buildings everywhere announce who used to live there and what they accomplished, Dickens and Lillie Langtry and Charles I and W.S. Gilbert and P G Wodehouse and Alexander Fleming,until you start to feel that in parallel time streams they’re all still coming and going invisibly about their business, kings and clerics, politicians and poets, painters and scientists, a living pentimento.  

 

It isn’t just the real-world history that’s so present either.  Legend is as much a part of the landscape as reality.  In Berkshire, the Postcard County, you’ll find the hill where St George fought his dragon, with the bare spot on top where the dragon’s blood permanently blighted the land, and not far away is the turning for Wayland’s Smithy, where Merlin came to commission the making of Excalibur and the only place for shoeing invisible horses and forging invincible armor.  (Fans of Susan Cooper will also know that Wayland forged two of the six Great Signs of the Light, Bronze and Iron.)  In winter Herne the Hunter rides here on his black horse with blazing eyes and the Wild Hunt streaming out behind, searching for damned souls, and further west, in Somerset, are the ruins of Glastonbury, where some believe that King Arthur waits for his time to come round again, all of it fixed to the green hills by the great grey thumbtack of Stonehenge, the beating heart of mythic Britain.    And underneath all that, there’s something even more ancient, old old magic at work still:  the ley lines, the network of fairy highways that run beneath the earth, and where they intersect, men have built their places of temporal and spiritual power from the Picts right on to the present day, responding to the resonant hum of the earth under their feet.

None of this is to suggest that England is some kind of utopian civilization, that it doesn’t have its share of problems – it does - or that it’s any better than any other country at preventing history from repeating itself – it’s not.  They particularly like the one where a small but valiant group of Englishpersons ends up hopelessly overmatched by an enemy army, the weather, circumstances, geography, or all of the above, and either does or does not prevail.  It doesn’t matter which, because what the English are better at, at least to these American eyes, is acknowledging that the whole of their historical record, the bad along with the good, is pertinent to who they are in the present.  When I said earlier the English carry their history with them every day, I meant all of it:  the ignoble as well as the noble, the defeats as well as the victories.   In some ways they almost seem to prefer a glorious catastrophe to a glorious success, it reinforces their sense of themselves as people who behave well in the worst of circumstances.  (Though of course they don't always do that either - I remember being there during a walkout by the firefighters and the Underground workers that closed down the Tube, and let me tell you it was not a pretty sight on Oxford Street.)  There’s conspicuously little of the perpetual rewriting, revising and erasing of event that reflects badly on the national image that we do so compulsively in the U.S, spinning as hard as we can to pretend something didn’t happen when it manifestly did, or to creatively rearrange our history until we like it better.   BBC newsreaders reporting on American current events often seem to be just ever so slightly amused, and it’s not difficult to see why.  From the other side of the Atlantic, American news plays like the hormonal thrashings of a teenage country that doesn’t yet have the historical maturity to put its national crises in an appropriate perspective, which, combined with the equally adolescent need to be - or appear to be - always in the right, results in its responding to everything with frothing hysteria.   But a 2500 year timeline tends to put things in a different kind of context and encourages a more proportional response, and if the British don’t always manage to actually learn something from their less admirable moments, they do at least find something positive to take from them in the impetus to say, essentially, “Well that certainly happened,” and move forward with as much dignity as possible, rising above and carrying on as they are wont to do.  Rudyard Kipling wasn’t just whistling Lilliburlero when he wrote, “If you can look on triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same….”  He was quantifying an ideal of behavior that was, and is, real and observable in the English character.  

I went to England for the first time when I was junior in college.  It was my first time abroad, and also my first plane flight.  This was back in those now-unimaginable days when flying was still a little bit glamorous and people got dressed up to do it:  I wore, as I recall, a skirt, high heels, a very stylish trench-coat and a little hat that matched.  I may even have had gloves.  And I didn’t look like a freak, either – everyone was dressed that way.  (Now, of course, I wear whatever is the closest thing to pajamas.)  I remember looking out the window and seeing the countryside spread out below in a patchwork of more greens than I had ever known existed and looking remarkably like a creative plaything I used to have as a kid where you spread out a cloth patterned with streets and parks and roundabouts and put little building-block houses and things on it to make a town, and feeling both extraordinary happiness and a deep and surprisingly unsurprising sense of homecoming.   Right from that first arrival at Heathrow, everything about being there felt natural.   The money felt right in my hands.  The city mapped itself in my head with the ease and speed of something remembered.  Even the traffic coming from the wrong side felt, intellectually, right and proper (although muscle memory was harder to conquer, your body expects what it's accustomed to in spite of what your brain is telling it, and to this day I still look in both directions before I step off the kerb, just in case).   

For the next two decades I "went home" to England almost annually, thanks to the longest streak of housing good fortune in travel history.  Through most of the ‘80s I stayed – once for nearly a year - with people who were friends of a friend in New York and who became my “English family,” in a tall yellow house on Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, at the time the leading edge of the gentrification tide.
 

When I was living there the area was just beginning to be colonized, as tends to be the case, by artists, actors, musicians and writers. A famous biographer and his equally famous writer wife lived in the neighborhood; a distinguished playwright had clandestine lunches with a lady not his wife at the French bistro round the corner; and somewhere in those years we acquired a screenwriter who would eventually make the area famous and impossibly trendy by putting all its charms on film.  You can actually get a good look at Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, it’s the street that Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts walk down after she first has dinner with his friends, and the garden they climb into was our communal garden, where we used to walk the Jack Russell in the evenings.  I worked for cash in a bookshop just off the Portobello Road, and yes, there was a travel bookstore a couple of blocks away, but sadly the gentleman who ran it looked nothing whatsoever like Hugh Grant.

In the ‘90s, home base became Lennox Gardens, a quiet oval of 19^th century buildings off Walton Street in Knightsbridge, where my godfather bought and furnished a beautiful flat in the belief that he’d be spending a significant amount of time working in London and would want a pied a terre that would be ready for action whenever he walked into it.   As so often happens, things didn’t turn out quite as planned, and the flat was often untenanted, so when his pieds were a terre elsewhere he generously made it available to friends and
family who wanted to use it.   

Nearly all this part of London is owned by the Grosvenor Estate, and many of the buildings seemed to be occupied largely by cast-off relatives of the aristocracy and younger children of the lesser nobility. Staying in an earlier flat on the same street (a sort of “audition flat”, to see if the area would suit) I used to hear all about the neighbors from the building’s concierge, a small plump Irishwoman who in the time-honored tradition of concierges knew a great deal more about everybody than was probably good for her, or for them.  On the top floor we had the Honorable Mrs  M-----, who hardly ever left the precincts of her flat, since her back, like the rest of her, was 93 years old and couldn’t be counted upon to perform properly for any length of time.  Beneath her lived the Dowager Duchess S ---- and her younger sister, who made little landscapes out of seashells and sometimes felt courageous enough to exhibit them in local bookshops and galleries.  Below them and just above me was the swinging young Lady Mary C-----, whom I only ever saw on Fridays when Her Grace the Duchess, Lady Mary’s mother, came round with the Rolls to whisk her away to the races at Cheltenham or down to thecountry estate, wherever that was.  It was like being the poor relation in  a Nancy Mitford novel. 

But, in time, my lucky streak ended.  In the early oughties both the yellow house and the Knightsbridge flat were sold - if the internet is to be believed, the house went for something just shy of $4 million pounds, which tells you something about what’s happening to London real estate, goodness knows what it must be worth now – and that, for many wistful years, was that, although recently the prospect brightened considerably when my cousin's daughter Katie moved there to study at Central School of Drama and stayed on to pursue her career.  (She has a blog of her own about her adventures abroad, and it’s been a great joy to share vicariously in the start of a second generation’s love affair with England.) 

I’ve never been able to come up with an entirely satisfactory metaphor for what it feels like to me to arrive in London, to be there, but just recently one presented itself that comes as close as any, appropriately enough through a quintessentially London-ish experience I had during the Covent Garden Festival of Vocal Music, at a concert by the male a cappella group Lionheart of music written for Henry VIII and the King of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.  (Bear with me, this is the long way round, but we’ll get there eventually.)  They sang in the Church of the Knights Templar in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which was consecrated in 1185 –probably with Henry II in attendance, on a break from arguing with Eleanor – and looks like something out of Indiana Jones:  round, as all Templar churches are, with tombs in the floor and knights lying in effigy with their broadswords clasped on their chests.  Very Da Vinci Code.  The whole thing made one feel like an absolute speck on the timeline of history:  there we sat, listening to music sung by a contemporary group, written 500 years earlier, in a space that pre-dated the music by 300 years.  Because of its repertoire, Lionheart is used to performing in this kind of acoustically challenging venue, and they know exactly how to pace and place the music so that the reverberation becomes an enhancement and not a liability, singing with such a pure and perfectly blended straight tone that when they’re in unison the effect really is of a single voice.  When not, each harmony is crystalline and complete, hanging alone in the air for a split second before passing on to the next, so that one has the experience of hearing each chord for itself at the same time as hearing its place in the whole.   Each selection at the end would hang suspended on the seventh for a moment, and then a single voice inside the harmony would shift cleanly and precisely from one note to another – no scooping or sliding for these guys – and complete the resolution, inevitable as the keystone sliding into the top of an arch.  It gave you a kind of piercing satisfaction, almost physical, as if that simple transition from suspension into perfect balance momentarily brought your soul into alignment with the universe. 

And that is what returning to London, being in London, feels like to me: something that all the rest of the time feels unresolved lifts quietly and lightly into place.  And for as long as it lasts, until it’s time to go, there is completion, and harmony, and beauty, and peace.

Earth hath not anything to show more fair:     

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 

A sight so touching in its majesty: 

This City now doth, like a garment, wear 

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, 

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky; 

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

 Never did sun more beautifully steep 

In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill; 

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! 

The river glideth at his own sweet will: 

Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

 And all that mighty heart is lying still!                                

       "On Westminster Bridge", William Wordsworth

 

Photo credit, Westminster Palace: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/piero/2193243542/">Piero Sierra</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a>   Photo credit, John Keats: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/baxterboy/6064612547/">timechaser</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a>

Photo credit, Notting Hill: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcanevet/486111647/">manuel | MC</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA</a> 

Photo credit, Thames Sunrise: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/66720528@N04/8475403157/">James Blunt Photography</a> / <a href="http://foter.com">Foter.com</a> / <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/">CC BY-ND</a>