AN AMERICAN'S LOVE LETTER TO LONDON

Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, Edward R. Murrow, John Steinbeck, Irene Worth, and me

(Above: Ethel Sands; Henry James; Lady Ottoline Morrell, The National Portrait Gallery London, by unknown photographer, vintage snapshot print, 23 May 1909)

“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London,” wrote Henry James in one of his notebooks. “It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. …”

London is now my new home base for half of each of the coming years. The other day as I was walking toward the West End after having been to the African Fashion exhibit at the V&A Museum in South Kensington, I happened by 116 Piccadilly, where the Athenaeum Hotel and Apartments are now located, and thought of John Steinbeck who lived at the address in 1943 when he was a war correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune. He wrote that he told his wife that the view from this place made Big Ben seem so close that he could set his watch to it. Writing about the city five years later when he and photographer Robert Capa collaborated on their book A Russian Journal, Steinbeck claimed, “People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . ‘It's the glass,’ says one man, ‘the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle.’ ... An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in—a squeaky voice. ‘Lavender!’ she said. ‘Buy Lavender for luck.’ The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.”

As I walked on, I realized that I am creating a sketch book of memories myself here in this possible life I had never thought possible until I figured out a new way to look at life itself. I sold or donated almost everything I possessed. Oh, I kept a few boxes of books and a few pieces of art - stored them with friends - and about a fifth of my wardrobe which I brought with me in my move from Hudson, New York, in a couple of suitcases. But everything else: gone. Less has never meant more. I gave up everything in my life but the living of it. No person has ever made me willing to do such a thing. But my longing for London did. On my many extended trips here over the last few years, I ceased longing however to be happy and, in so doing, found true contentment. I am content in London where, for me, happiness and sadness exist side by side, and sometimes even platonically hold hands. One has to romance happiness, but contentment frames itself in a sometimes tactile, always tender friendship. Longing for happiness was just another reason to fail since I could never really find it. So I stopped searching and found London instead.

I set out contentedly each day from the one room in Kilburn where I will continue to live for six months each of the coming years and where I presently share a bathroom with another tenant, a young man from Cyprus named Pan, to see not only what the day will bring but what life will. Pan is also the name of the god of nature and I love the parks here and their ancient regimes of trees, a treasure of roots and sculptural trunks that have grown, in the last 73 years since the flat tinkle of broken glass and that lone shout of “Lavender,” to trust the bombless sky once more. People complain about the greyness of the sky here and how much it rains but I focus on the remarkable steely stoicism of the light. I often perceive it as blue and feel less blue myself because of it. “Even when there is no light, there is light,” I tell friends as I attempt to describe how it finds a way to emerge even on the rainiest of days as it teaches me to do the same within the grayness that at times makes a grab at life. Or as T.S. Eliot, another American who loved it here and could inculcate incongruity into his otherwise exacting creative impulse just like James and the less studious but sturdier Steinbeck, wrote at the end of the IX Chorus of The Rock, “Light/Light/The visible reminder of Invisible Light.”

As I write this part of this latest column I am sitting in one of the cafes at the Barbican about to experience Sir Simon Rattle, who was once married to a Black American Harvard graduate who still lives here (the place continues to capture her heart) and is one of my dearest London friends, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in a concert performance of Leoš Janáček’s opera, Káťa Kabanová. More longing: in his 60s, the composer fell for the 20-something Kamila Stösslová who became his muse and unrequited love. More incongruity: I am sure she made him feel both very old and yet in the clutches of youthful desire if not her own. London in many ways makes me, yes, aware of my age - I will be 67 in March - yet also makes me feel like my youthful queer self as it energizes me and gives me the wondrous feeling of discovery I have been lacking in this last decade, or longer. I am satisfied for London to be my muse as it both mentors me with its age-old charms and rouses a no longer dormant lust for life. London is not my 20-something young woman with whom I feel a profound connection, but it is my 20-something young man. It has reminded me of a heart’s metaphorical aspects as I make my way deeper into the new realities of my life here. Sometimes a fleshless muse - London’s limbs of liminal light, its neck of nature, the polished handiness of its hackney carriages, a river that serves as a gestural gender there in the crotch of it according to one’s need for definition, an adornment of culture, a cacophony of phonics, punkish, princely, its brutalism misted with an empathy for absence, loss - reminds you that you are both made of flesh and remade by it, the muse.

(Above: This engraving of Benjamin Franklin, by Edward Fisher after Mason Chamberlin's 1762 portrait, was created while Benjamin Franklin was living in London. National Portrait Gallery London.)

As I walked on through Trafalgar Square the other day on my way from South Kensington to the West End, I thought of Benjamin Franklin who lived nearby at 36 Craven Street which is now the Benjamin Franklin House Museum. He lived at two separate addresses on Craven but had the same landlady who owned both buildings, a widow named Margaret Stevenson. Franklin first visited London as an apprentice printer when he was a teenager in the 1720s, and later arrived in 1757 with his son William and, except for 16 months back in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, didn’t leave England until 1775. Franklin’s wife and other children back in Philadelphia never visited him in those 16 years he lived here as Stevenson and her daughter, Polly, for whom he filled in as a father, became a second family to him. Was the longing he experienced here not for his home back in America but for the new one he was making for himself in London and the woman who helped him daily do it? Was his longing romantic and requited? I’ll leave that to historians. I think he felt longed-for in other ways - appreciated - that he didn’t feel in America for he was more than just a politician here. He could even shunt his shunning Puritan background aside and be as eccentric and singular as he knew himself to be. Franklin was rather a queer fellow himself, modern for his day, before the term took on a more modern meaning. For example, instead of taking a “tonic bath’ in cold water, as was the custom of so many of his day, he preferred to take a morning “air bath” in the nude. “I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air,” he wrote in one of his letters, “and with this view I rise early almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing.” Indeed, he dared Craven-ly to do so in London with his windows reportedly thrown open if any passersby cared to ogle him in his contemplative nakedness where the rising visible Invisible Light illuminated him as he illuminated himself. Just as his Puritan forebears had fled England, he had fled their puritanical religious posturing to return here after his teenage experiences. London made him too feel younger as he got older. He was looked upon more as a famous scientist as well for his Experiments and Observations on Electricity had already been published here around 1751, his scientific experiments also the means he employed to put more reason into the religious fanaticism that, in his case, was also familial. He was not only a Fellow of the Royal Society, but it also awarded him its Copley Medal in 1753. He made friends with many of the leading intellectuals of the day, including Joseph Priestley, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin and Richard Price. The aristocracy had made it fashionable to be scientifically enlightened and thus helped to make him an early celebrity who did not want to get out of here. On July 2, 1768, he wrote to his son William of his ardor for the place and that “having lived long in England, and contracted a friendship and affection for many persons here, it could not but be agreeable to me to remain among them some time longer, if not for the rest of my life.” It was not to be. Politics intervened, overwhelming both his statesmanship and his scientific celebrity, and he fled to America where his ardency was transformed into that of an American revolutionist.

(Above: Edward R. Murrow)

(Above: Irene Worth as Jocasta and John Gielgud as Oedipus in the Peter Brook production of Seneca’s Oedipus at the National Theatre when it was located at the Old Vic.)

My own ardency is for theatre and journalism so a town known for its theatre and able in the digital age to have a readership for around ten main daily printed newspapers has a strong allure for me. Another longing I have that will remain unrequited is to have been part of journalist Edward. R. Murrow’s circle when he and his wife Janet, lived in a flat on the second floor of Weymouth House at 84 Hallam Street. Murrow reported back to America for most of World War II and became known for his opening, “This is London” and his closing, “Good night, and good luck.” There was a stretch of 57 consecutive nights from September 7th to November 3rd in 1940 when he experienced and described the Luftwaffe attacks on the city. It was more than reporting; it was bearing witness. I’m not sure I would have passed muster and been accepted into the fold of the “Murrow’s boys” but I sure as hell would have enjoyed being dealt into one of his all-night poker games at his kitchen table which included politicians and journalists and writers and once even Clark Gable, an actor whose muster was masculine enough to warrant a kitchen chair and some poker chips. Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Murrows on Hallam Street and I’ve always liked to think she was dealt into a poker game because I always thought she had the face for it.

Another regret is never having seen Irene Worth, a female actor who was born in Nebraska but made a name for herself in London, in her heyday here, especially in the infamous 1968 production of Seneca’s Oedipus directed by Peter Brook at the National Theatre when it was headquartered at the Old Vic. I’ve always loved this entry in The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan: "What is the best theatrical impromptu I've ever heard?” he wrote. “Probably John Gielgud's during the dress rehearsal of Peter Brook's production of Seneca's Oedipus at the Vic. Irene Worth as Jocasta had to pretend to impale herself vaginally on a large wooden sword fixed point upwards on the stage. To do this she went through a lot of protracted squatting motions, with appropriately agonized expressions. At the dress rehearsal she stopped in mid-squat and, shading her eyes, peered out into the auditorium. 'Peter,' she said, plaintively. 'The last time I did this it was much larger and it was on a plinth.' 'Plinth Charles?' said John G. 'Or Plinth Philip?'" I did see Worth in 1975 give a magnificent performance in New York as Princess Kosmonopolis with Christopher Walken as Chance Wayne in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth directed by Edwin Sherin. There is a remarkable production, in fact, of Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in London right now at the Almeida Theatre in Islington starring Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley. I have already seen it three times and have a ticket for its scheduled final performance on February 4th. I will be writing about it soon.

Not all mornings are filled with light and the lovely longing I can now contentedly feel here in London. The other morning was quite stressful in the prosaic way that a morning of foiled errands can be as I fell back into an addled-old-man mood from the youthful elan that can align itself alongside, if not within, me. I am far from a grouch but I can feel the tug of grouchiness on such mornings. Plus, I had to head over to Islington, not to see Streetcar but to meet a friend visiting from New York whom I know from a fellowship to which we belong. She wanted to explore the neighborhood after a meeting of such a fellowship and I, still feeling prosaic, was in no mood for exploration, especially the poetic sort that Eliot tells us from which we shall never cease in the “Little Gidding” section of Four Quartets. Yet I did decide to turn purposefully to poetry to lift me from my mood and somewhere between the Kings Cross/St. Pancras tube stop and the Highbury & Islington one I calmed myself by reading this poem below by Naomi Replansky who died this past week at the age of 104.

THE OASIS

I thought I held a fruit cupped in my hand.

Its sweetness burst

And loosed its juice. After long traveling,

After so long a thirst,

I asked myself: Is this a drought-born dream?

It was no dream.

###

I thought I slipped into a hidden room

Out of harsh light.

In cushioned dark, among rich furnishings,

There I restored my sight.

Such luxury could never be for me!

It was for me.

###

I thought I touched a mind that fitted mine

As bodies fit,

Angle to curve; and my mind throbbed to feel

The pulsing of that wit.

This comes too late, I said. It can’t be true!

But it was true.

###

I thought the desert ended, and I felt

The fountains leap.

Then gratitude could answer gratitude

Till sleep entwined with sleep.

Despair once cried: No passion’s left inside!

It lied. It lied.

(Above: The flower market next door to St. Mary’s church on Upper Street in Islington.)

After reading this and before pulling into Islington, I began softly to cry on the train, the softness like the rain that can fall here in London, that fell earlier that morning refusing to be another foiled thing. The tears were not for the death of Replansky but for the beauty of the still-presence of such a poet, the distilled wondrous wisdom of this queer elder writer who now was aligned within all the others who have gone before her - Virginia Woolf and Jan Morris and Oscar Wilde and Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden and Michael Dillon and E.M. Forster and Radclyffe Hall, among the members of her tribe. And I didn’t feel crazy crying on a train as I would have in New York but re-aligned somehow - and worthy of tearing up on the tube reading a poem about worthiness. I then met my friend at St. Mary’s church on Upper Street and before we set out on our exploration, I stopped off at the flower market next door. “Do you have any lavender?” I asked. I was out of luck; there was none in its array. But I felt lucky to be out of luck in London. And there is hope in that. There is hope here. There is hope.