298
LONDON LETTER
London letters are best written from the provinces. Here
the effort of avoiding London is too great; it takes up all our time:
avoiding the crowds, the streets, the horror of its busy quarters, the deso–
lation of its empty ones even to avoid the people who are trying to avoid
us is quite an art and leaves but little time to learn what is going on. I
used to turn first, in the older
PARTISAN REVIEW,
to the London Letters
of Orwell and Koestler, who lived respectively in the Hebrides and
North Wales, because from their Celtic fringe they made London more
real to me, a Londoner. London
is
a climate, an atmosphere, a sargasso
sea of brick, smoke, feet, faces, historical associations in which we who
have lived here for so long are bogged down, unable to enjoy most of
its advantages. I have known many areas where one would drive willingly
ten, twenty, thirty miles to see a friend or enjoy a good dinner and even
further to visit a building or a picture; here it is all a terrible effort.
Chelsea, about five miles from where I live, or maybe only two or
three (no one seems to know) might be the other end of the world–
one hesitates to invite people from so far away or to accept their invi–
tations; St. John's Wood, about half a mile to the north, seems equally
remote because of its chilly northern quality. The overcrowding which
is the foundation of the exaggerated respect for privacy that controls
the English code of manners (and which seems so like rudeness in under–
populated and more hospitable countries) is here at its densest and
causes an even stricter code to be observed. Within a five-mile radius
of where I sit, live some of the people I have known longest and loved
most in the world, and yet I could not drop in on them without ringing
up first, and I would hesitate to see any of them more than twice a
week. Our manners are based on overcrowding and
ill
health. Not sick–
ness, but that listless and mildly irritable semi-coma which every true
Londoner recognizes as the natural time-obliterating climate of his mind
and which causes him to greet old friends who have just returned from
vast circumnavigations with a "Hullo - I thought you were going
abroad."
