Free Imagined London by Anna Quindlen Page A

his place.
    All of London divided into pro- and anti-Canning camps. Some gossiped that she had disappeared to hide a pregnancy and birth; others collected hundreds of pounds for her and invited her to be feted at the fashionable White’s in St. James’s. Her story could be transplanted wholesale into today’s papers or infotainment news shows, except for her eventual punishment: She was exiled to America. Perhaps, like John Lennon, Tina Brown, and a clutch of other famous British subjects, she went on to find happiness there. Or perhaps it was a true execution by inches, as the Anglophile Henry James would have it. Near the end of The Portrait of A Lady, there is an exchange between Isabel and Mrs. Touchett that makes the novelist’s position clear: “Do you still like Serena Merle?” the older woman asks our heroine.

    Henry James, 1843-1916
    â€œNot as I once did. But it doesn’t matter, for she’s going to America.”
    â€œTo America? She must have done something very bad.”
    â€œYes—very bad.”

CHAPTER TEN
    E nvy is a writer’s lot in London, and not only because so many great writers have walked its streets. (And continue to do so—during my first stay at the Groucho Club, I glimpsed Salman Rushdie drinking at the bar. This seemed notable mainly because it was at the height of the very public fatwa against him by conservative Muslim clerics, who had threatened death in return for the purported blasphemy of his novel The Satanic Verses. It was said that Rushdie was in hiding. The bar at the Groucho was quite dark, so perhaps it was as good a place as any to hide.)
    There simply could not be a better place in which to set a story. After the Great Fire destroyed so much of the city, Christopher Wren proposed that it should be re-created along a more sensible grid system. This would have made London immeasurably easier to negotiate—when a stranger is lost in London, she is lost indeed—and sensible in a way that it is not now and never has been. Thank God the proposal was considered, and rejected. The city that rose from the ashes rose along the same nonsensical system of country lanes and downhill passages that had defined it before. And so it reasserted itself as a kind of mazelike mystery that is irresistible for the imaginative mind.
    It is, perhaps, Dickens who best describes the allure of the architecture when he speaks of Scrooge’s rooms in “a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide and seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.” There are countless buildings that seem trapped in the narrow backstreets of the West End or Chelsea, streets designed for one century and trying to make do in another. At Piccadilly there is a warning sign that Jermyn Street, home of the the shirtmakers Turnbulland Asser and the perfumier Floris, is “unsuited for long vehicles.”
    For someone used to the tidy, slightly boring numbered streets of upper Manhattan, it is a joy to encounter St. James’s Street, St. James’s Place and Little St. James’s Street. Every street name seems to have a codicil attached, a cartographic family tree; as Thackeray noted, “All the world knows that Lord Steyne’s town palace stands in Gaunt Square, out of which Great Gaunt Street leads.” Nearby, according to the novelist, is New Gaunt Street, and Gaunt Mews. All this would seem like satire if you did not see it all around you in the city itself.
    So a lover of language finds herself enamored of geography here. The placenames alone are a gift to a novelist. If there is anywhere in the world that sounds grander than Belgravia, I’d like to know it; Fifth Avenue, by comparison, is just a number. Elephant and Castle, Camberwell, Stepney, Bethnal Green. Bolingbroke Grove, Threadneedle