The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  The clash between scarlet dream and pin-stripe reality is frank in the courts. They are the best booths in the London circus, easier to walk into than a news cinema and the only toothy bit of Dickensian London left. Dickens had the feeling for the London Wonderland. You can begin at the bottom with the police courts, a place like Bow Street. And here, as so often in this city, you are distracted and have to break off, for you are in a characteristic London muddle. For they have put an Opera House as fine as Milan’s and the toughest police court of the city into the middle of Covent Garden vegetable market, so that you have to dodge the Black Maria and step over squashed oranges and cabbage stalks before you can see Fonteyn dance or hear Schwarzkopf sing.

  Behind the market lorries is a church famous as a burial place for actors. The best collection of theatrical prints outside the museums is on the walls of the saloon bar of The Nag’s Head public house, and at five in the morning the bar will be packed with market porters. One of the minor pleasures for women in London is to walk through Covent Garden early in the morning to a serenade of wolf cries, whistles, blunt suggestions, and the crucial bars of love songs from men of powerful voice. And here, in a strong smell of disinfectant, the Law hauls in its morning catch of thieves, prostitutes and drunks. People put in an hour at Bow Street before the pubs begin to open at 11:30.

  Bow Street is crude casualty and is not dressed up. London’s Alice in Wonderland really begins at the law courts of the Old Bailey, under its golden sword and scales, and continues at the Queen’s Bench. When I was a child I used to sit at my father’s office window watching the crowds queue for the murder trials at this ugly temple, which they put up in place of disreputable Old Newgate. This is a region of ghosts, doubly so since the war. In Dickens’s time the Law was housed in eighteenth-century buildings and behaved with Gothic oddity; now it is housed in nineteenth-century Gothic and behaves with a disturbing decorum. Yet pale oak paneling, with its suggestions of parliament, public libraries, choir stalls and the halls of modern universities, has not killed the waggishness of the Law. Wigs and scarlet robes, ermine and starched bibs, look alarming against this color. The real thing here is ourselves, foolish in our ordinary clothes but also rather aggressive, vulgar and impudent. There is nothing like the sight of a truculent witness, in a navy blue suit and with a bad accent, stonewalling Learned Counsel. The air is motionless, dry and tepid. A small cough, the turning of the pages of briefs, the quiet voices of lawyers, conducting as it seems not a trial but an insinuating conversation among educated friends—these stiffen behavior. A very thoughtful game of chess is going on at dictation speed. The Pawn goes into the box, Queen’s Bishop stands up, King’s Bishop sits down, a Knight scratches under his wig with a pen. Wrapped in his scarlet, that untakable piece the Lord Chief Justice, an old man with a face as hard as a walnut, restlessly moves his waxen hands.

  The Law is a patient, tedious occupation and in London it relieves the boredom by its own little comedies.

  “And you may think, m’lord,” says Learned Counsel, “that it is not without significance that when the prisoner signed these cheques he appended the name of Ernest Stoney, a reference possibly to the circumstance that he was at that time without funds.”

  “Not one of your best, Mr. So-and-So,” says the judge.

  “An inadvertence, m’lord, an inadvertence,” murmurs Counsel. He is satisfied. The calamities of legal wit are to be borne like the loss of Bishop’s Pawn: the prisoner gets eighteen months. We laugh, the Usher calls silence in Court and we turn to look at the confidence man who tricks the colonials in some Strand hotel, the boy murderer with the vain smile on the lips—the Lord Chief does not frighten him—the row of conspiring company directors, respectable corner-seat men of the suburban train, the women of a lifetime’s convictions, empurpled now by the uncomprehended load of her enmity toward us. We look at the newcomers since the war: the Poles, the West Africans, the West Indians who bring the angry pathos of their uprooting before the soft voices of their alien judges.

  London is prolific in its casualties, its human waste and its eccentrics. We see that blowsy red-haired woman with the gray beard who dances and skips about the pavement in the Haymarket. A well-known trial to bus conductors, the woman always carries a spare hat concealed in a brown-paper bag for traveling by bus. She changes her hat and then sings out:

  He called me his Popsy Wopsy

  But I don’t care.

  And drops into a few unprintable words. We are very fond of her. There is the pavement artist who conducts a war with other street entertainers, especially those who use an animal to beg from the thousands of dog lovers, cat strokers, pigeon and duck feeders, the chronic animal lovers who swarm in London. “Worship God not animals,” he scrawls in angry chalk on the pavement. There is the Negro bird warbler, ecstatic in his compulsion, and the King of Poland in his long golden hair and his long crimson robe. There are those solitaries with imaginary military careers and the frightening dry monotonous gramophone record of their battles and wounds. They are compelled, they utter, they click their heels, salute and depart. A pretty addled neighbor of mine used to mix up the washing of the tenants in her house when it hung on the line in her garden. She was getting her own back on the Pope, who had broken up her marriage to the Duke of Windsor. One has to distinguish between the divine mad and the people pursuing a stern, individual course. The elderly lady who arrives in white shorts on a racing bicycle at the British Museum every morning, winter and summer, is simply a student whom we shall see working under the gilded dome of the Reading Room. The taxi driver who answers you in the Latin he has picked up from the bishops he has been taking to and fro from the Athenaeum Club all his life is not consciously doing a comic turn. He is simply living his private life in public. As Jung says, we are dreaming all the time; consciousness merely interrupts. It was what Dickens noticed in Londoners a hundred years before.

  We live in localities where we sharpen our particular foibles. The “local” public house is one gathering point, although television is emptying the pubs in the working-class districts. The London pubs are all different and live by character. For the stage, I think of the Salisbury, where a stage-door keeper the other day suggested to me that gin and eels made the ideal nightcap; El Vino’s for the journalists, the York Minster for the French. We live on strong beer and gin and drink them standing in moody or explanatory groups. At a pub we like to reveal ourselves suddenly and at length to a few new friends; but we respect privacy too. I have seen a man sitting in the midst of a packed and roaring pub reading The Economist from cover to cover, unaware of the quarrel between the sailor and the tart, the racing talk, the slow description of a hospital operation or the whispers to the girl having her neck stroked. He was simply insulated.

  People began to say before the war that London was becoming continentalized. So it was, in a superficial way. You can buy pizza in the mass restaurants without going to Soho and espresso coffee in the bars. Popular London lives by its mass diversions. For generations the city has been the world’s capital of ballroom dancing, and its “pallys” are packed most of the week to see the exhibitions. Africans and Indians color the popular crowd and the great dancers are watched with a critical devotion that I have seen equaled only by Spaniards at the bullfight. The thousands who go to the ballet at Sadler’s Wells or Covent Garden are a race in themselves.

  And there is gambling; London is almost silenced in some quarters on Thursday nights, when people are doing their football pools, and again at six on Saturday when they hear the worst. There are the greyhound tracks—London’s night betting machine; under the white floodlight that chemically green oval suggests the roulette tables of Monte Carlo. The mob goes to these places, the toughs, the spivs, the workers from the factories; but in the hot, carpeted bars of the people who are in the money you see the full heat of gambling, its secretiveness and its fantasies, as the floor is littered with betting slips. Living in London all my life, I had not met these Londoners
before: the swarthy, brash, gold-ringed men, the Oriental-looking women in their furs or these startling blondes on the bar stools. Once more I had found another race, as I did when I followed the crowd who go to hear Tosca at Sadler’s Wells or Shakespeare at the Old Vic, who have heard all the plays and all the operas you can name a dozen times over and call out for their favorite actors and actresses by name in an orgy of local religion.

  Another London race is the race of arguers. We can never resist an argument. There are the human cockerels at lunchtime in squares like Lincoln’s Inn Fields, crowing about every conceivable kind of political new dawn. But Sunday is the day for this essentially Puritan pleasure. We revel vulgarly in free speech. There are not only the dozen main meetings under the trees in Hyde Park but there are those earliest known manifestations of dialectical life on earth: the conjunction of two men standing nose to nose, with two or three idle friends attending, each proving the other wrong, not in rage but in quiet and disparaging parliamentary calm and pith. (“You say the Buddha is living—how do you know the Buddha is living? Have you seen the Buddha?”) From a distance the shouting of Marble Arch sounds like a dog show. The red buses go round the Arch and add the uproarious, band-playing suggestion of merry-go-rounds and racers, but nothing can drown the argument. “My friends,” the speakers shout, “believe!” Half a dozen voices call back, “Get on with it. You said that before.” And some wit yells out, “Where was Moses born?”

  “Believe! Believe!” What are we asked to believe? Some well-informed man is telling us that there are millions of gallons of water up in the sky—“What? Up there, Dad?” comes a voice—and that there will be a repetition of the Great Flood. We are asked to believe that Ireland will be free, that Russia wants war, that America wants war—or that they don’t—a hymn strikes up next door, all the Truth societies are at it like mongrels, a lonely figure disputes the Virgin Birth relentlessly, an elderly man, gnawing at a bone, tells us the Pyramids hold the key to human destiny. And then we hear the melting Oxford voice of a colored man from the Gold Coast five yards away: “If I become Minister of Commerce in the Gold Coast—” What is he going to do? Something unpleasant to London, just as the Irish are, the Egyptians, the Russians, the South Americans, the men of God.

  Insult, doom, destruction are offered to us. The crowds stand round grinning. The Guardsmen stand pink with pleasure. Sailors are delighted. The police stand by like hospital nurses. For nurse is never far off, gossipy at the moment, but always with an eye open. There is a nurse in every Londoner and nurse says things have got to be fair. One would be relieved if, as in wicked countries like France or Italy, things could be unfair—just for once. It is our weakness that we cannot manage that. “No,” someone shouts out to an interrupter. “Let him say what he thinks. Go on, mate, say what you was going to say.”

  The Park is Babel. But in Trafalgar Square, at the foot of Nelson’s Column and under the patriotic bas-relief of the Death of Nelson—for the British god is a sea god—you hear the Voice of the People. (They have put amplifiers on the noses of the lions there, which gives these soapy figures a new professorial look.)

  The Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who used to wander, tall, remote and lonely, about the London streets when he had woken up from the detective story he had been reading in the Savile Club, despised Trafalgar Square meetings and once told me that in Dublin he had led a procession up Sackville Street—since re-named O’Connell Street—and had smashed ten thousand pounds’ worth of plate glass. Such exaltations haven’t been heard of in London—not since the days of the Duke of Wellington.

  You have been looking at the Piero della Francescas in the National Gallery, watching the crowds there resting their feet on the sofas. You want some air and so, stepping over the face of Greta Garbo and the other Muses which have been done in mosaic in the hall, you come out into the Square. It is all pigeons, peanuts, prams and children getting wet and dirty in the capricious fountains; but round the plinth are the packed, studious-looking crowd, and the lions relaying the indignations of the speaker. He is almost certainly insulting the House of Commons and all those government offices down Whitehall. He is sickened by Downing Street. He is sarcastic about some “noble lord,” for if we love lords we also love being rude about them. He is appealing to us, the People, to lift up our Voice and say no to something or other.

  We look up at the sky. The appalling London pigeons fly round from their dung heaps on the top of Nelson’s Column, the Gallery, the Admiralty Arch or St. Martin’s. We listen to the babies crying. We stare at the advertising signs on the ugly buildings to the south, which remind us that if things are as bad as the speakers say, we can emigrate to any corner of the world. Most Londoners who look at those signs have relatives who have done so, and minds wander to what Jack is doing in New Zealand now, and how many years it is since Sis was in Durban, Saskatchewan or Singapore.

  Yet we do not emigrate. We accumulate. More of us are pumped day and night into the tubes, more of us lie under the heavy trees in the parks in the summer, more of us greedily parade past the Oxford Street shops, more of us queue for the cinemas, cram the hotels and burst the buses. It is notorious that the English, who founded colonies and peopled new places, now do not fill the emigration quotas and do not care to move. Crowd life is intense life, and what the Londoner misses elsewhere is intensity, for intensity keeps him solid and obliges him to be clever. We have become the great urban nation which is bored by the open spaces. London is our macrocosm. It is no longer the nightmare city of the early Industrial Revolution; it has moderated though it continues to be vulgar and exuberant. It adds to the London spell that the future of this monstrosity, which never has more than a few weeks’ supply of food in its store, is a gamble.

  In any case London is traditionally free of hysteria, stoical and disciplined, but not beyond the resources of nature. Publicly powerful and often hated for that, London has always valued private life most. It is a place where whims have their rights, where nerves are not exacerbated, where one is at ease, where standardization of behavior is disliked and where the tone of casual conversation is affectionate. There is regard for what can last; this can be called vegetative, sentimental, unrealistic, muddled. A Londoner himself would call this feeling: passion.

  (1956, 1989)

  AMAZONIA

  In South America there are two major experiences which humble and dwarf the traveler, which could easily exhaust a lifetime, which make him feel like an irrelevant insect: I have written of one of them—the Andes. There remains the Amazon, not only the greatest river in the world but the immense, almost untouched tropical forest which extends for nearly three thousand miles from the Andes to the mouth. Amazonia is a country in itself, totally without roads—for you cannot count the few miles of road that run out of Belém at the mouth, or from towns like Santarém, Manaus in Brazil and Iquitos in Peru—knowable only by the numberless waterways that spread like veins from the gross red arteries of the main rivers. Not always red; at Manaus, the great Rio Negro comes in gray and silver, and for miles the two unmixing waters—the Amazon and the Negro—flow side by side. It is hard to know which of these seas of water—they will rise more than forty feet when the rains come—is the main one. You are looking down on a huge brown drainage system of innumerable lakes and tributaries and there is no feature in the unchanging landscape by which you can pick them out and name them with certainty. From the paddle steamers that go up to Manaus—those flat-bottomed, wood-burning houseboats, several stories high, with their scores of hammocks slung on the lower decks so that they look like floating laundries—the continuous jungle is a low wall standing back from a vivid green verge of reeds and grass and sand. I flew a thousand miles up the Amazon from Belém to Manaus; and, once there, up the Rio Negro by boat.

  From the air, the jungle is a close-packed carpet of what might be kale, starred by the palm trees or by puffs of silver. It is unchanging for thousands of miles, without hills or mountains, at any rate in the first
fifteen hundred miles or more, and it is apparently uninhabited. Yet in a day’s travel you come across numerous small riverside towns. The palm-thatched houses are propped on thin tall poles on the shore, against the seasonal floods, and there the river boats of all sizes, thatched or boarded against the sun, come with their fruit, their mandioca flour, their beans, their snakeskins, their cloth, to tie up or go phutting off on their daylong journeys up the blinding road of light. The alligator gazes at them from the bank, the angelfish cloud round them at the quays, the bloody piranha wait to attack in the streams and the pools.

  In the boat the Indian family lives. The babies crawl about, the woman cooks or hangs out her washing, or calls to her neighbors—for these boats string along in tows, with the family parrot riding at the stern. These journeys start in the cool of dawn; by nine o’clock it is dangerous to expose your skin to the sun: in an hour you are blistered and in a fever of sunburn, deceived by the river breeze or the black, electric cloud-mountains of the coming tropical storm. When the rain comes, sky, forest and river turn to dirt and the spirits sink low, for the heat of the day is close and animal.

  At first the jungle wall looks innocent and familiar like any stretch of creepered woodland we know, and there are places, above Manaus, where you would not be greatly surprised to see some well-known church spire rising. Then you notice the sudden flaunting of the fleshier trees, the liana curtains and the metallic leaves of the giant ferns, the immense bamboos and the scores of packed-in growths you may never know the names of, spreading their spell. You breathe the hot rot of the primeval forest floor. And there is a spell. This region acts like a drug. Men settle at Belém and then, once curiosity gets them up the river, they cannot rest until they have gone “further.” I know a Brazilian engineer who took his wife and newborn baby up the river for months. “She knows that I am married also to the jungle,” he said. Traders do well in Manaus and then sell out in order to get away to the upper, more savage reaches of the river. The climate reduces them to skin and bones, the bad diet ruins them, their will is eaten up by the lethargy of the forest, but they are held entranced by it. It is, they say, like a congenial poison and though sickness or exhaustion may make them glad to get out, they are just as likely to go back, as sailors go back to the sea on a bad ship they claim to hate.