London 2

June 11, 2013

Yellowish London sky, the city sounds different from New York’s by virtue of featuring almost no car horns. Went to the National Theater to see James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner done with verve and commitment. I ate in the Lytelton café there before hand, a hugely civilized thing which I had gone early expressly to do. Shared my table with Larry, a big man who knew many people in New York (none of whom I knew) and with whom I talked theater. I could see us being theater friends in another life. My seats in the Olivier were beside Astoria and Bianca, two London girls, who were not theater goers but who had come because Bianca’s sister was in the show “That her in the pink cardigan.” Afterwards as I tottered back to the hotel, I remembered why crossing Waterloo Bridge is one of my favorite things in the world– Saint Paul floating ghostly under the multiplying skyscrapers to one side, St Stephen’s Tower and Parliament on the other, the great Wheel (blue now) monumentally still. I will go on until I just have strength enough to throw myself off that bridge at night, with all those lights about me. The faux prophet in Russell Square grabbed my hand and said my lifeline was grotesquely ("sadly," he actually said) long, which I knew. Then he gave me the seed of a bush and called it a lucky charm and wanted twenty quid.

On to the Axis Bar in the Aldwych, where I keep forgetting to stay, and mean to. Lorenzo the Milanese bartender and I had a lovely chat, about Milanese history, about Italian dialects, about the sad state of human affairs. Lorenzo’s father is a playwright who specializes in work in the Milanese dialect. As I tottered toward the Shakespeare, where I was to have the last drinks of the evening, and make three of those instant friends who dwell so in the recollection, I was thinking that my evening was providing a critique to Baldwin’s play. The Amen Corner is more important historically than artistically, and a little naive in conception and execution, but I kept thinking that Margaret’s beliefs were my beliefs, for the most part, and how was it possible for the same spiritual convictions to be expressed in such opposing modes? On the street it was clear to me: the religion that says no is false; that which says yes is true. That which forbids is false; that which invites is true. Drunk and silly, I was at once happy and sanctified. My happiness walking up Kingsway was beneficent, life-affirming, giving, and based materially on getting from one late night venue to another for a drink before everything closed. The gloom I had felt leaving New York was gone, the sense of futility, of premature finish, washed away by Lorenzo and Bianca and Astoria and the life passing me on a London street.