London

July 4, 2010

Arrived in London with the whole gaggle. We threaded our way through the streets, Jeff pointing out famous houses with their blue plaques and all. Now at the British Museum, where I’m huddled with my cold blueberry tea, and I am, at last, happy. The students were on their own, and panic was general and understandable. The underground map which looks so clear to me must look like the Double Helix to someone perusing for the first time.

Got a satisfying room on the 7th floor of the Russell, handsome Enda having offered me an upgrade because my designated room was not ready. London Eye off in the distance, and the Imperial Hotel, the green dome of the BM floating above the trees. Grayish-whitish afternoon, as though one viewed the world from under a few inches of water. My desk is settled in a bay window with light coming in all sides, white gulls circling and crying. As soon as I touched the bed I napped such a nap, slept such a sleep as I’d not yet had in England. Something at Lucy Cavendish makes me restless and uncomfortable. I have no objective sense of what it could be. The physical lay-out of the place is creepy to me, but, again, how to put a finger on the exact nature of the creepiness? In any case, slept the last two weeks off, and was ready for action in a capital of the world.

I thought it was just the youth and activity of Cambridge, but in London I see the same thing, how fit and slim English people are compared to Americans. I can’t stop gawking at them, one fine body after another on the public streets. It is a shame for America.

Went to the Trafalgar Studio to see Holding the Man, adapted from a book by an Australian who died of AIDS, and sent over from a theater in Sydney. The coming-out-and-getting-AIDS trope is one with which I have had a troubled relationship. Almost all plays which touch centrally on either of these subjects are bad, and both would seem unsurvivable. But this one survives. The first act is lively and sweet, the second no more lachrymose than it needed to be. I’d say if one example of the genre should survive its moment, it could be this one. The audience was overwhelmingly male and clearly gay. In the second act a member of the audience passed out, and the play stopped while he was taken care of.

After the play and after a drink at the Silver Cross, there was still light in the sky.

Met Tommy from Roscommon at the edge of Russell Square just before midnight.

Saturday--

Complex of thread-y white clouds over the Centre Point Building. The east is a smear, like a dirty white veil.

Lingered and drank coffee and wrote in Covent Garden, where the air was heavy with the scent of the perfume shops.

Crossing Waterloo Bridge last night I was frantic to take everything in, to identify every done and fanciful tower, to remember every detail. Bought white shirts from a man who spends seven weeks every summer with his son in Chicago. He sold me 2 for 20 pounds to get rid of as many as he could.

Attended Terrence Rattigan’s After the Dance at the Lytellton last night. Thousands of happy people thronged the riverbank. There was a demonstration on the National Theater plaza by new graduates of a circus school. Despite obvious dissimilarities, After the Dance is quite like Hold the Man, in that it is the testament of a very specific population at a very specific time. The two share the peril of distance–even quaintness– when that time and those people are passed. The tragic element in both plays is the heedless determination to do exactly what one pleases without consideration of consequences. That there are such consequences has to do with a failure–or a grotesque hesitancy–of communication, which itself needs to be addressed in some play some time. They taffied it out into three acts with two intervals, which I suppose the structure demands. I remained interested, if not exactly riveted. Was David–the seductive, poisonous “hero”– Rattigan’s rather self-flattering , self-flagellation? I’m not sure I’ll rush to see another Rattigan soon, but I’m glad I saw this one. The melodrama was evident but not suffocating, the milieu of bright young things was high-pitched without being brittle. As an artifact of its times, it– like Hold the Man–deserves to survive to bear witness to those times. It was, anyway, far less irritating than Coward’s Present Laughter.

Saint Paul’s. my favorite interior space. Kings’ is great, but one feels one could laugh out loud in Saint Paul’s without too much transgression. Paid homage to the monuments of Donne and Blake and Philip Sidney. Ate my salt & vinegar crisps opposite the marble memorial to major general Sir William Ponsonry “who fell gloriously in the Battle of Waterloo on the 18th of June, 1815.” The nude general is well carved, but the conception of the stature is idiotic. How did the general get nude? How acquire that modest bit of classical drapery? Is the horse dead, or merely lying down to allow the big angel a landing strip? You’d think the last thing he needed at that moment was the laurel crown the angel is handing his direction. Were I somehow king or bishop or whatever you’d need to be, I’d have all the monuments to men of war removed from the cathedral. I understand the impulse of a grateful nation to erect marble colossi to the victims of obscure engagements in some war fought for some bad reason two hundred years ago, but how long should gratitude last? They are bad citizens for a church. Leave Blake, Donne, Wren, Landseer, leave Wellington and Nelson in their stone boxes in the basement, but sweep the rest clear, for light and space, for monuments to the men of peace and art.

Independence Day back home. Another brilliant morning, maybe the most brilliant of the lot. Left crisps on the windowsills for the gulls, but whether they got them or the wind did I don’t know. Yesterday was the second time I found myself in the midst of London Pride. I actually marched the last time, but this time I hung out on the periphery– still rich and strange, like combing the shore of some over-rich sea. Thousands gathered in Trafalgar. It was lovely.

Saw Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s effort to keep the Phantom cash cow going. It wasn’t awful. It was capsized by the splendor of the special effects, which made explicit what would have been more tantalizing left implicit, which did not quite disguise the poverty of ideas, both narrative and musical. It could have been small and intimate and lovely. It substituted effect for content every time. But I did not leave at the interval, as I half expected to do. For one thing, my aisle seat surrounded by vacant chairs was too luxurious.

Wandered Covent Garden– feeling quite melancholy, actually–until it was time for the London Diversity Choir to give its concert in Saint Martin in the Fields. There were 20,000 gays on Trafalgar Square, and the choir–in one of the world’s most famous churches–had for audience no more than Cantaria in the Congregational Church in Asheville. I could have lived without the concluding Abba medley, but the concert was quite fulfilling, and the countertenor for the Chichester Psalms was paradisal.

London has always been easier for me than Dublin because I never suspected I would find my soul mate here.

To King’s Cross, to Cambridge--