Serpentine Bridge, 1888
by Brian Kimberling
[ places - november 05 ]
An accurate description of architecture is generally dull, however marvelous the structure, but the cloud of associations a historical figure attached to it is endlessly engaging stuff. On a recent excursion in London I took a couple of paragraphs penned by Henry James 117 years ago. You could surely unearth some Joseph Conrad or Robert Louis Stevenson appropriate for the same purpose - something vague and ruminative and thoroughly, if obliquely, biased. Triangulating from allusions and landmarks and some guesswork, you can arrive at the exact spot where such-and-such observation or speculation was first made. And when you get there, you've discovered a secret London.
You're skeptical at first - surely that traffic-addled low bridge was never James's favorite? Surely those hideous '60s tower blocks obscure whatever was visible back then? And surely the London glories of James's day were mostly blitzed? It is easy to get dejected about the whole project in advance. Of Hyde Park James wrote, in an exquisite mix of prescience and misguided optimism, that the “high things of London,” visible from the park, including “domes of institutions” and housing for the poor, “only make the spaces vaster by reminding you that you are after all not in Kent or Yorkshire”. They even “take such an effective gray-blue tint that a clever watercolourist would seem to have put them in for pictorial reasons.” These days the high things of the city are the teeth of a tedious modern maw gnashing London into monotony. You could be in a park in Dallas or Sydney or Frankfurt and it would look the same.
You can see, up close, that perhaps the bridge had some allure, long ago. It looks old enough, anyway, though it is mystifying to ponder the “very bannisters, old and ornamental, of yellowish-brown stone,” that James was “particularly fond of” - they are workaday bannisters to the modern eye, seemingly newer than the substructure. On the bridge itself crisp hoof and creaking wheel have been supplanted by that ubiquitous silent gliding bubble, the modern automobile; the people no longer parade for one another but cultivate some individuated milieu with stereos and fuzzy dice. All of this may be progress, but the bridge is now bereft of charm. At least it still serves to convey you over the Serpentine. You climb to the apex and, still disbelieving, look west as James did.
Surmounting the faraway treetops like the standards of an advancing army are the spires of Westminster. You can't see them anywhere else nearby, but at this point you see through James's eyes: “The towers of Notre Dame, as they rise, in Paris, from the island that divides the Seine, present themselves no more impressively than those of Westminster as you see them looking doubly far beyond the shining stretch of Hyde Park water.” They are flanked by concrete abominations now, but these pale away beside the “extraordinary nobleness,” as James describes it, of the main view.
The tyranny of hourly news bulletins and irksome ringtones and glaring advertisements comes momentarily to a thudding halt; the abiding essence of London is distilled in that view, its modern overlay briefly repealed; coats of slapdash whitewash stripped and the original work revealed. Never mind blogs and ASBOs and the endless intricacies of political parties and binge drinking and ohmigod George Bush: London emerges from its modern moulting and annihilates the question, whatever it was. London is indifferent to our contemporary aches and ecstasies; London endures and abides.
Less thrilling to relate, but somehow even more satisfying to experience, is the other end of the bridge. Turning according to James's directions “through the gate of Kensington Gardens as you go towards Bayswater” you encounter “an altogether enchanting vista - a footpath over the grass, which loses itself beneath the scattered oaks and elms exactly as if the place were a 'chase.'“ These days there are disagreeably perfect gravel paths to right and left, and a rumbling hum from the Bayswater Road. Still the faded overgrown footpath seams the grass of the central ridge like a swatch of green velvet; a thing you could unstitch to peer back at Henry James and wave hello, if you knew how.
