“London” by Henry James(in English Hours, Oxford University Press, 1982, originally Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1905)

Henry James is one of my favorite writers: I love his long sentences, the way the make me slow down when reading: both in the sense that I often have to slow down, because of their length and twistiness, and in the sense that I want to slow down, to better savor the way they’re constructed and the images they contain. I also enjoy smart travel writing, and I love to read about England. So this book, a collection of James’s travel writing about England, was clearly a good purchase for me. I’ve been reading it quite slowly, with lots of breaks to read The New Yorker instead, so I feel like I’d better post about it as I go, especially if the rest of the essays are as good as the first one: there are so many bits and pieces I want to quote, which could make for a really long post if I waited ’til I’d finished the whole book.

In the introduction, Leon Edel says, of James, “He travels for the delight of his senses; he relishes the old, the picturesque, the noble antiquities, the idea of continuity and preservation—the sense of history that lives within the beauties and the uglinesses of the land” (vii), and I think that’s a great description and a big part of the appeal: James captures that sensory delight and that sense of history in his prose. He’s also observant and sometimes funny: in the book’s first essay, which is about London and its appeal, London and James’s first impressions of it (though the essay itself is from 1888, about twenty years after he arrived in London), there are sentences like this, about his first experience of walking along the Strand: “It appeared to me to present phenomena, and to contain objects of every kind, of an inexhaustible interest; in particular it struck me as desirable and even indispensable that I should purchase most of the articles in most of the shops” (4).

James talks a lot about how much of London’s draw is in its size: the fact that it’s too big to be or mean just one thing, the fact that you can’t talk about “London,” really: he says that it’s “a collection of many wholes” (18), and so there’s no single story of it or experience of it. This resonates with me because, of course, it’s part of the appeal of New York, too, the sheer size of it, the fact that there are so many different New Yorks all existing at once. I love sentences like this:

The immensity was the great fact, and that was a charm; the miles of housetops and viaducts, the complication of junction and signals through which the train made its way to the station had already given me the scale (3).

Or passages like this:

It is, no doubt, not the taste of every one, but for the real London-lover the mere immensity of the place is a large part of the savour. A small London would be an abomination, as it fortunately is an impossibility, for the idea and the name are beyond everything an expression of extent and number. Practically, of course, one lives in a quarter, in a plot; but in imagination and by a constant mental act of reference the accommodated haunter enjoys the whole—and it is only of him that I deem it worth while to speak (5).

And even better than these generalities are the specific places and scenes James evokes: the railway stations and their bookstalls, or the crowds boating on the upper Thames, or the British Museum on a winter afternoon. He’s also wonderful at capturing weather, mood, light, like this:

We are far from liking London well enough till we like its defects: the dense darkness of much of its winter, the soot on the chimney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford Street or the Strand on December afternoons.

There is still something that recalls to me the enchantment of children—the anticipation of Christmas, the delight of a holiday walk—in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I can still waste time in looking at them with dirty Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier Soho on the other. (19)

Oh, man, so good. It makes me want to visit London again ASAP, even though obviously the London of 2010 is different from the London of 1888; but perhaps even more than that, it makes me want to savor New York in all its moods and weathers, and makes me look forward to the deepening nights of autumn, the cozy feeling of being inside with the lights on when it’s dark out; the somehow equally cozy feeling of being outside on a chilly sidewalk on a chilly night, bundled in coat and scarf, walking past the lighted windows of brownstones, catching glimpses of people at their dining tables or in their kitchens.