London Fragments: A Literary Expedition

2006

Preface to the English Edition

I suppose it is presumptuous for me, a foreign author, to call my London Fragments an homage to this most fascinating, puzzling and bewildering metropolis. Perhaps less presumptuous is the implicit intention of this book, written as it is by a German, to draw attention to at least some of the great German-speaking Anglophiles of the past who regarded London as the obvious focal point of their pro-English sentiments. To get the measure of a German Anglophile you have to imagine my first English teacher at a grammar school in the depths of the Black Forest. She was a vicar’s wife from the minor aristocracy, who would drink her cup of tea at five o’clock sharp, enlighten us on the difference between ‘dinner’ and ‘supper’ and make us sing ‘God save the Queen’ on St George’s Day. ‘Things English’ were not to be criticised in her classes. England, with London as the pinnacle of the English-speaking world, was presented to us innocent children of the deep and dark southwest of Germany as the model of all civilization and the cradle of democracy. Since I came to London in 1981 I have indeed never ceased to be fascinated by this incommensurable metropolis, even though I soon became disillusioned with Thatcherism which left too many lasting scars on the mentality of both the city and the country.

Even though this book is not about politics in London I should like to say that one of the most remarkable and heartening developments in the capital is the re-establishment of London’s administrative and political autonomy which had been tragically, and by continental European standards unlawfully, taken away in the 1980s.

Perhaps there should be a minimum length for a book on London; 800 pages seems about right. Or if one considers the time it should take to write it, I would imagine somewhere between 25 years and a lifetime. By these standards London Fragments would have to fail. However, this book is a testament to my passion for and irritation with this mega-city. By chance, the English edition was completed exactly a quarter of a century after I first came to these shores, which means that these reflections on London had spent a long time maturing before they were written up in 2003/2004. It also means that I believe that a look at London from the perspective of literature might better tame this urban beast and beauty.

My London Fragments therefore documents the illusion that this city can be tamed by words; that adequate expressions for its incommensurability can be found; and that London cares about the way in which it is represented in literature. Of course, by any standards this is a total fiction. The notion that cities can be read like novels should not hide the fact that we also need to listen to them, even though they do not listen to us. Cities are centres of indifference and anonymity. They are buzzing hubs of activity and cultural diversity but also focal points of suffering, deprivation and despair. In essence, they are unmanageable. And yet they radiate a sense of structure and the self-explanatory rhythms of life.

When I say ‘they’ I mean, of course, London, this city of cities, admittedly still less chic than Paris, less charged with mythology than Rome or Athens, but more diverse than Tokyo and less frenzied than New York. London is a synthesis of everything and everybody but what to call its common denominator is an open question; least of all would it be Englishness. It seems familiar and strange at one and the same time, cosy in some parts and alienating in others.

In short, it is the stuff that literature is made of, fiction and poetry that fluctuates between reality and imagination guided by strangely fascinating people who are represented in the following pages by the ‘Lady in Yellow’. In fact, there was a harbinger of this figure in previous literature about London: when Heinrich Heine, that towering figure of 19th-century European poetry, came to London in 1827 he pretended to have encountered an ominous ‘Yellow Man’ on the barge that brought him up the Thames to London. He hoped to make him his guide to London but soon after disembarking he lost sight of him. Not so in my case: the ‘Lady in Yellow’ keeps pointing me in various, often opposite, directions in this city. I assume that in her quiet back garden in some noisy London district there must be a little menagerie with a small unicorn in its midst.

Truth be told, London Fragments was also written as an homage to Heinrich Heine and his Englische Fragmente, not because of his relentless mocking of the English character (Heine never forgave the English for their attitude towards food and for having defeated his life-long idol, Napoleon) but because of his stylistic and compositional finesse, the subtlety of his observations and the sheer brilliance of his associative reflections.

When I started writing London Fragments, nature came to visit the capital in the form of countryside protesters, and the year in which the English version of this book was completed began with a dramatically different invasion of nature into the urban setting. A northern bottlenose whale, hopelessly lost, swam up the Thames, creating a feeling of sheer helplessness and impotent compassion everywhere. A similar spectacle was recorded by John Evelyn in 1658: ‘A large whale was taken betwixt my land abutting on the Thames and Greenwich, which drew an infinite concourse to see it, by water, horse, coach and on foot, from London and all parts.’ Compassion for sea creatures was less developed in those days. ‘It would have destroyed all the boats, but [ … ] after a long conflict, it was killed with a harping iron, struck in the head, out of which spouted blood and water.’ Our 11-year-old 18-foot female whale, a Moby Dick in search of a new Herman Melville, died of convulsions.

There are many other literary guides through London, as well as the most recent London-based fiction, in particular Ian McEwan’s fascinating novel Saturday (2005) with the extraordinary demonstration against the threatened invasion of Iraq as the backdrop of this masterpiece. One should also allow oneself to be lead through London by Maureen Duffy’s novel Capital (1975), experience London’s aura from the historical perspective Lawrence Norfolk evoked so masterly in Lempriere’s Dictionary (1991), add to one’s always frustrating, if not humiliating, experience of the London Underground Barbara Vine’s fictional contribution to this precarious and suffocating underworld, so unworthy of this great metropolis, King Solomon’s Carpet (1992), and accompany at least one of Geoff Nicholson’s London-mad characters on his explorations of this urban phenomenon in Bleeding London (1997).

However, an entire chapter should be devoted to Monica Ali’s incomparable examination of London’s ethnic East End, her novel Brick Lane (2003), one of the most fascinating depictions to date of the capital’s multicultural diversity in general and of the Bengali community in particular, not to mention its radical potential. It is only since my appointment to Queen Mary College, this powerhouse of intellectual innovation, in 2004 that I begin to discover for myself the exceptional richness of the opportunities and challenges of London’s East End. Previously it was mainly Harold Pinter’s reminiscence of the Jewish East End of his youth, The Dwarfs (1960) and, more recently, Gilda O’Neill’s memoirs of life in Cockney London, My East End (1999), that helped shape my conception of this area.

Having said this, it was gratifying to find Monica Ali sharing my enthusiasm for Virginia Woolf’s essays on London (The London Scene, 1975), which I allude to in Chapter 6 of this book. While London Fragments was being translated I found Ali’s delightful essay ‘After Woolf’ in The Guardian Weekend (May 2006) in which she describes how she was ‘idling in Woolf’s footsteps’. As she explained, ‘trying to get the measure of London is futile. Better to do as Woolf does in her 1930s essays on London, written for Good Housekeeping magazine, and catch at thoughts and feelings, the immediate perception of things, so as to be able to say, like Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, Yes, I have had my vision’.

Such a ‘vision’ can require some major sacrifices. So, for example, references to most of this City’s treasure houses, galleries and museums are missing in my London Fragments. Nor will the reader find cinemas, concert halls, hospital wards, or the large cemeteries and small churchyards (for most -continental Europeans coming to this country the most desolate and God-forsaken places imaginable) – all these fertile grounds of literature.

Ever so much is still to be discovered in this city; so much is unaccountably lost. We are what we see, hear, remember and imagine. We are inhabited by images and sounds, ‘soundscapes’ of London as opposed to Greensleeves, that irresistible melody of another world that is, however, still contained in ours. Oh, London, this perpetual wake-up call to (literary) life.

Rüdiger Görner

January 2007

1

Arriving in the Nowhere by the Thames

Approaching London at night: as if floating in on shadows, perforated by millions of lights. The holding pattern in a droning albatross over Albion’s urban centrepiece. Albion, England’s Celtic name, meaning ‘White Land’ – white like the legendary chalk cliffs of Dover.

As an unknown captain and his autopilot circle us over London hundreds, thousands of people are arriving: at Paddington, Waterloo and Victoria stations, at the innumerable bus stops and Tube stations, in the maelstrom of road traffic, and even in rare cases at piers along the Thames. Arrival is an illusion, the illusion of ever being able to arrive, because London is the metropolis of the gyratory system. And ‘gyratory system’ means: avoidance of a clear sense of direction, a prerequisite for any arrival.

London is also the city of fly-by-night luggage merchants. What other city has so many improvised kiosks with suitcases, most often next to newsagents or in front of Underground stations? As if the vendors hope that the spectacular headlines about the all-time low of the world situation would induce passers-by to quickly acquire a new piece of luggage in order to be able to escape somewhere else.

And so we continue to circle above London. During a night flight it seems endless. A casual exchange of words develops in passing with the passenger in the next seat; mostly meaningless banter, as no one whom you might have spotted while queuing to check in and hoped might be assigned that seat ever sits there. After all, such an ideal travel acquaintance would be as good as a sizeable lottery win; the equivalent of arriving before the arrival time, like breaking through the holding pattern. Oh, you also read Nick Hornby? Oh, you are still reading Heine? Or: how long we might still have to circle? One talks of turbulence survived during a descent from 10,000 metres or of the newest statistics that claim London on average grows by 40,000 inhabitants each year, or about the weather forecast for your stay north or south of the