London 2

November 25, 2009

Cold and bright through the day. I had to wear my cap pulled down against the white blaze of sun low in the sky all day. Now half a moon rides high over Russell Square.

National Portrait Gallery first thing. I was on my way elsewhere, so I didn’t see everything, but I saw the floors with the horrible Victoriana– horrible not because badly done, but steeped in the most sentimental, sickening, and uncritical praise for empire. In one called “The Secret of England’s Success,” an angelic Queen Victoria hands a kneeling African a bible. Then Victoria and Albert are rendered in white marble as Celtic chieftains, she wearing the crown but looking up into a face as a puppy into the face of her master. A colossal portrait of a previous royal family features George V, Mary, Edward, and the Princess Royal, but there is no trace of poor George, the future king, or their sad, sick, hidden brother. Had he misbehaved that day and been left out? These imperial portrayals meshed, somehow, with the visitors who dominated the galleries. There was a group of
schoolchildren in blue uniforms, very tiny children six or seven years old, I would guess. They were mostly Arab and black, and their chaperones, aside from the white British teacher, were silent figures in full black burkhas. The very pink-and-white museum docent was telling them about the paintings, but in this child-voice that infuriated me from afar, and must have cut their attention off at the outset. Every verb was followed by “very quietly”– now look very quietly at this part of the picture. . . now turn very very quietly to the sculpture over here-- as if the art were an invalid to be protected the voices of children. Control was clearly above education in their order of things. When the children were released from the docent, matters were even worse, for their teacher accompanied them through the corridors uttering a searing Shhhh! literally every fifteen seconds, a piercing, ugly, ignorant noise many times more disturbing than whatever happy sounds the children were making. I hated that teacher with hatred for which there is no name. She brought into focus all those lordly portraits, all that trapping of empire; she was Blake’s Nurse of Experience, repression and loathing; she was every Dickens evil schoolmaster. I had to leave the building. Left into the National Gallery, and Trafalgar Square, which was a blaze of light.