Gotham Diary:
London Bridge
3 September 2014
Gazing at the photograph above, which I took yesterday afternoon, and fixing particularly upon the orange marks that signify the level of the sidewalk that will be restored to us after years of cramped deprivation, my thoughts flew, as if through a course of quantum states, to London Bridge, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Was it still there?
It’s still there, spanning the Colorado River. (How’s the river doing, though?) It seems to have fit right in with the planned community around it. A structure of bland neo-classical grace, it emits none of the contextual dissonance that disturbs so many of the fanciful recreations of the Old World on this side of the Atlantic. There is nothing particularly “London” about it; it is difficult to imagine that the British capital is poorer for its absence. Built in 1831 — nothing to do with the fantastically built-up medieval bridge of rhyme — it was worn out and destined for demolition when an American developer bought the cladding stones and had them shipped to his project in the desert. And why not? It seems hardly more remarkable — indeed, somewhat less — than the transformation of rubble from the London blitz, which was all that the besieged island offered in the way of ballast for supply ships returning to the United States, into landfill for Manhattan’s East River (FDR) Drive.
In the late Sixties, however, when the bridge was being dismantled and shipped across the ocean, I thought it was all the end of the world. London’s eponymous bridge — relocated in the middle of nowhere in Arizona! The mere word “Havasu” made my skin crawl. There was a cultural crime in there somewhere. Why didn’t the British authorities want to do what the American developer had in mind, only somewhere in Britain? Why weren’t they holding on to their heritage?
Mind you, I was asking these questions only a few years after learning — being told — that not everybody in England had a butler, went to Eton, &c. This isn’t to say that I was unaware of poor and working-class populations. But they didn’t matter. I meant all the “nice” people. Surely they had butlers — although, now I thought of it, their butlers probably didn’t have butlers. Where did butlers come from, anyway? This was a troubling question.
My fantasies of Gracious England were a reaction to the blatant plainness of American social life —a banality enlivened only by occasional eruptions of vulgarity (car fins, rock ‘n’ roll, Technicolor epics). Photographs of stately homes, royal coaches, soaring cathedrals, and seaside crescents provided me with an ideal matrix for the projection of my idea of an anti-America. (I already regretted the American Revolution — although I couldn’t imagine escaping to Canada. Canada was in the wrong direction.) There was nothing in the photographs to suggest that Britain, the Britain of my time, was tired, diminished, broke, and hopelessly stuck to a class system that no longer made any sense. For every reactionary like me, there were dozens of young men and women who longed for New World freedoms. But to me, freedom was a dangerous drug that was more abused than used, and that led to disaffection, carelessness, and, ultimately, cynical despair.
I knew, of course, that two horrible wars had been waged, but I thought that they had been won by the good guys. I didn’t know how right Clausewitz was about “other means.” “Post-war” was synonymous, or at least co-extensive, with “Cold War.” In many ways, the Second World War had ended in the same way as the First, with an Armistice. Germany, to be sure, was soundly defeated — this time, by bombs, not peace talks — but the increasingly hostile Allies, the United States and Russia, agreed to put down their weapons, and to conduct their hostilities by proxy. Capitalism and Communism brawled for thirty years, in as bloody a fight as abstractions can wrest. Guilt by association ruined reputations with a frequency and ferocity unthinkable today.
On the one hand, Material Prosperity. This was inarguable. Almost everybody owned a new something-or-other. Food got cheaper every day. (Modern medicine, however, had yet to show what it could do.) Cleaner, faster, safer, and now in color. What’s not to love?
On the other hand, Material Prosperity — how awful it was! How ugly, how brainless, how addictive, how empty! While it was difficult to argue that Marxism led to happiness, or to anything better than a very grey and very precarious semblance of stability, the intellectual opponents of capitalism developed another line of attack, and called it “existentialism.” This was not the existentialism of Heidegger and other interwar German philosophers, but a stylized, Francophone doctrine that was prepared to be at home with any kind of materialism involving sports cars, cafés, pretty girls, and cartons and cartons of cigarettes. Life was absurd: therefore, be bold! Drive into a tree!
The turbulence of the times swept the dueling ideologies into parallel disregard for history. History was whatever insanity had led to the outbreak of the Great War. There could be no thought of going back to that. Sell the damned bridge!
***
I did not want to go back, not sincerely. I gave candlelight a try, even though I was forbidden to have candles in my room. It was distracting as well as straining. That was the limit of my experiment in pre-modern living. A week has never gone by in which I was not flushed by gratitude for living with modern plumbing. I used to like electricity because it made listening to music possible; now, of course, my very mentality depends upon it. The older I got, the more aware I became that I really would never want to go back to the past even if it were possible. I feel certain that a time-machine experience of the past, even of a moment that “know all about” from readings in history, would be as perplexing to me as a visit to the future would be for any native of that past.
But then, history is not “going back.” It is knowing where you’ve been. And because you’re never in the same place for very long, where you’ve been changes, too. History is endless, not just in time, but in shifting details.
Even London Bridge isn’t — for me — what it used to be.
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Daily Blague news update: Endorphins.