London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Doubleday, 864 pp., $45 TO AMERICAN TOURISTS, standing in line at the Tower or Westminster Abbey, London seems an old city, enveloped in architectural and historical atmosphere. In fact, next to nothing survives of the Romans’ London–or Chaucer’s, or Shakespeare’s. Unlike many other English and European cities, the London that exists today is a creation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It simply feels older than that, and to understand why one needs to delve into its archives, digest its great (and not so great) writers, and lose oneself in its streets–all of which Peter Ackroyd has done in “London: The Biography,” his marvelous depiction of the life of a long-lived city. Ackroyd is a major novelist and biographer who has specialized in the imaginative recreations of London that he calls “hauntings.” In his 1993 novel “The House of Dr. Dee,” he imagined a twentieth-century historian who discovers that he has inherited the house of John Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist and astrologer, in Clerkenwell, an out-of-the-way neighborhood that becomes a character in its own right. In his 1996 biography of William Blake, Ackroyd celebrates Blake as Londoner and mystic in what is perhaps his finest nonfiction investigation of a writer and his relation to England’s capital. What unites his fiction and nonfiction is Ackroyd’s commitment to “playing around with the idea of time.” Ackroyd has also retraced the footsteps of Sir Thomas More, Charles Dickens, and T.S. Eliot–three more Londoners about whom he has written first-rate biographies, and this has given him a remarkable inwardness with London across time. He has also followed his own fanciful nose wherever it leads (often into areas like Clerkenwell or the East End that are untrodden to tourists). The results can also be enjoyed in novels like Hawksmoor and The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders, two esoteric tales about death and sexual transgression. “The kind of people I tend to write about, magicians, occultists, mystics, visionaries,” Ackroyd has observed, are “almost as important as the palpable presence of the city.” Now, at last, in London: The Biography, Ackroyd has let the city itself be the main character. The book is not a typically chronological canter through the capital’s history. To be sure, Ackroyd follows a broad time-line from London’s geological foundations to “the silver cladding and curved glass walls” of the twentieth-century Docklands, making all the major stops and plenty of unfamiliar ones. This Christmas pudding of a book is served up (unlike some of his novels) in a readably plain style. But “London: The Biography” has exasperated some reviewers. If it’s not a history or a bedside book or an anthology, then what is it? The subtitle–cute, lapel-grabbing, and artfully honest–provides readers with their first clue. Ackroyd is often tempted by “psychogeography,” the magico-mystical notion that England’s capital was first (and still may be) organized around the sacred hills and wells from which ancient Celts and their shadowy predecessors channeled chthonic forces. “It is a strange city beneath the ground,” Ackroyd muses of London’s Tube, sewers, subterranean rivers, and legendary troglodytes, “perhaps best exemplified by worn manhole covers which, instead of reading SELF LOCKING, spell out ELF KING.” DEEPLY CATHOLIC IN HIS SYMPATHIES, Ackroyd celebrates Cockneys as the ebullient preservers of a Catholic culture that was forcibly extirpated during the Reformation. Expanding upon his own devotion to “pantomime and masquerade,” to conjuring and magic lanterns, to puppet shows and camp humor, Ackroyd maps London’s inner life. “I believe I am describing London in almost a religious sense,” Ackroyd has remarked, but adds that he “cannot be sure what particular religion it is.” His Catholicism certainly comes with a large dash of paganism, both plebeian and arcane. Ackroyd doesn’t seem to care that most of London is, physically, no more than three hundred years old. Nor does he worry overly about twentieth-century changes in skyline and streetscape. Instead Ackroyd responds to a London that survives in the spirit and in language. London is a “palimpsest”–a partially erased manuscript–which he exults in decrypting. In “London: The Biography” there are speculations galore (and no footnotes whatsoever), but some readers will feel that Ackroyd has plucked out the heart of London’s mystery, if not of its palpable presence, more successfully than more punctilious historians. Personal disclosure comes during a touching evocation of Fountain Court in the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. “One Londoner came here as a schoolboy, with no knowledge of its history or associations,” Ackroyd recalls of his first sight of its small, serene fountain that is three hundred years old and commemorated by writers as diverse as Dickens and Verlaine. Innocent of its history and literary associations, that schoolboy “immediately fell under the spell of its enchantment. At last, in these pages, he has the chance of recording his debt.” Then autobiography promptly segues into psychogeography. “If persistence through time can create harmony and charity,” Ackroyd continues, “then the church of St. Bride’s–only a few yards from Fountain Court–has some claim to good fortune.” Within the grounds of Christopher Wren’s great church–whose steeple inspired the traditional design for the wedding cake–have been found a prehistoric ritual site and evidence of a Roman temple and of a Saxon church in wood. “So the various forms of divinity have been venerated on one spot for many thousands of years,” Ackroyd concludes in benediction. “London is blessed as well as cursed.” IN AN INTERVIEW, ACKROYD HAS EQUIVOCATED about “the sacred geography of Druidic sites” around which he perambulates in “London: The Biography:” “I take it with a slight pinch of salt. I’m not a zealot of New Age interests; ley lines I can take or leave. But certainly such elements tend towards a powerful presence.” In fact, Ackroyd sprinkles his salt selectively. Whenever anyone tries to identify the first Londoners, things get tricky, and normal biographers who can’t locate the birth of their subject within a few decades are in serious trouble. But few chroniclers of London, at least since the Middle Ages, have proved as exuberant or cavalier as Ackroyd. Evidence for a Celtic settlement proves elusive, but “London” itself intimates a true Celtic etymology. Ackroyd may not be a zealot, but he is an enthusiast. At the outset of “London: The Biography,” he parades the possible etymologies for the town’s name: “the stronghold by the stream,” “long hill,” “marsh,” “fierce” (“intriguing, given the reputation for violence which Londoners were later to acquire”), and that gnarled chestnut “King Lud’s dun (or city).” Too smart to place his bets, Ackroyd merely regrets that “those of skeptical cast of mind may be inclined to dismiss such narratives” even though “the legends of a thousand years may contain profound and particular truths.” INDEED, ACKROYD MAINTAINS THAT “the wrong etymology is often accurate about the nature of an area.” This is Humpty Dumpty’s theory of language in which words can mean anything you want them to mean. “That existing street names may betray a Celtic origin” is for Ackroyd “as instructive as any of the material ‘finds’ recorded on the site of the ancient city.” This way madness and New Age tourism lie. Loopy about etymology and topography, Ackroyd can make it up as he goes along. What proves most interesting about “the tall and glittering Lloyd’s Building” (London’s niftiest skyscraper) is the fact that it was erected on the site of a medieval maypole that overshadowed church steeples. In an interview, Ackroyd readily conceded that this conjunction of maypole and skyscraper is “quite coincidental, obviously, in many respects”–“it has nothing to do with ley lines, nothing to do with any of that”–but again he hammered home his case that Londo
n manifests “a topographical power, a topographical spirit” that springs from “what happens on any one spot over and over again.” Still, while psychogeography provides “London: The Biography” with its leitmotif, Ackroyd manages much more. With a keen eye for popular culture–from children’s street games to the mayhem surrounding public executions–he provides lively vignettes of Londoners at work and play. Most unmystical readers will be charmed. When he goes off the deep end, he makes a splash of it, but he gets the vast majority of his mundane facts right. From dining out and the sexual underworld to the Great Fire and the Blitz, it’s all here, more or less. Studiously attentive to the voices of earlier commentators on London, Ackroyd provides a cornucopia of snippets, often unfamiliar, from the tomes of antiquaries: “The Rookeries of London,” “The Quacks of Old London,” “The London Nobody Knows.” “London has always been a great ocean in which survival is not certain,” Ackroyd observes at the outset of his narrative, when he descries fossilized starfish and sea urchins in the plinth of Charles I’s statue at Charing Cross. Later he speaks of London’s “wave-like” quality, of the tidal “suck and throw” of its history. “London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh,” that “defies chronology” and in which, as in “London: The Biography,” we “must wander and wonder.” “THE CROWD IS NOT A SINGLE ENTITY, manifesting itself on particular occasions,” Ackroyd assures us, “but the actual condition of London itself.” When he declares that “the crowd encourages solitude, as well as secrecy and anxiety,” we can appreciate the haven which he found, as a schoolboy, in Fountain Court. London resembles a newspaper in which, as Walter Bagehot, early editor of the Economist, observed, “everything is there, and everything is disconnected.” Employing the same metaphor, the novelist Ford Madox Ford avers that “connected thinking has become nearly impossible,” but adds that one still has to “know the news, in order to be a fit companion for one’s fellow Londoner.” Ackroyd is adept at melding his own choice of metaphors with their use by his predecessors. Familiar Dickensian fogs are traced hither and yon: “The fog that Tacitus described in the first century still hovers over London.” By now, petrochemical smog has replaced toxic industries and coal-burning fireplaces. London becomes George Orwell’s “city of the dead,” and “of all cities” Ackroyd concurs that “London seems most occupied by its dead.” And Rome? Ackroyd ripostes in the words of the novelist George Gissing: “London by night! Rome is poor by comparison.” Ackroyd pounds London’s nocturnal pavements, listening to the voices of the dead and deciphering topographical spirits from manhole covers. Normal biographies have beginnings, middles, and ends–just as people’s lives do. The problem with London is that it’s all middle. The city has endured and survived its countless obituarists. They have died; London hasn’t. Even Stephen Inwood, whose excellent “History of London” (1998) is longer than “London: The Biography,” confessed in a lecture several months ago that the metropolis proves too big to squeeze between the covers of a history book. So what is a historian to do? One solution is to write “London: The Biography.” Peter Ackroyd can pull things off that historians normally can’t. The London of Bagehot and Ford may rebuff connections, but psychogeography encourages them. Ackroyd’s discussion of Cockney speech takes us from Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly to Dickens’s Sarah Gamp and Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle in the twinkling it takes to turn the page. The word “Cockney,” he explains, comes from “a cock’s egg,” a freak of nature; or perhaps it derives from coquina, a Latin word for cookery, thanks to London’s cook-shops; or, inevitably, it may come from “the Celtic myth of London as ‘Cockaigne,’ a place of milk and honey.” Such etymologies can’t all be right, but Ackroyd conflates them with panache. American tourists may never visit Clerkenwell, but sense intuitively that London is unaccountably older than much of its physical appearance. Most will pick up lightweight guidebooks rather than “London: The Biography,” but Ackroyd captures their inchoate feelings that there is more to London than meets the eye. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon teaches eighteenth-century English literature at Villanova University. October 15, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 5
