Elizabeth Bowen has a fantastic short essay in a 1957 collection called
Coming to London (ed. John Lehman) in which she describes her impressions of London as an Anglo-Irish 4-yr-old. She then goes on to describe the way London evolved for her into the place where writers seem to come from. My favorite parts of the essay are at the beginning, but I've also included a lovely quote where Bowen talks about her memory being dominated by visual rather than aural impressions.
- All through my childhood, London had a fictitious existence for me. It loomed darkly somewhere at the other side of the water; I thought of it (when at all) as an entity, at once magnetic and dangerous. It was, from all I heard, a city into which no one ventured alone, and which was to be entered only after preparation and wary forethought. It stood for the adult, and so much so that there should be children in London seemed unimaginable—in fact that there should be people of any kind was only a secondary idea: I pictured the thing as a mass of building, a somehow impious extreme of bulk and height in whose interstices was fog. I first crossed the city when I first crossed the sea, when I was 4: it must have been winter, we arrived after dark and were driven as hurriedly as possible from Euston to some other terminus in a cab. The street lamps, seeming dimmer than Dublin’s, showed us to be in the continuous bottom of the chasm, among movement conveying a sense of trouble, and which one suspected rather than saw. My mother, for a minute put down a window, saying, as though in extenuation, “London has a smell of its own.” But this, like all else given off, was nonhuman (74)
- If I had been an American child instead of an Anglo-Irish one, it is possible that London, from being farther in the distance, would have been more clear-cut as an idea: I should have had some rational notion of it, instead of being infested by it imaginatively. As it was, it was like a hand too near my eyes. Nobody ever told me about London, or explained to me what it was—I was assumed, I suppose, to have been born knowing. This must have come from the Anglo-Irish ambivalence as to all things English, a blend of impatience and evasiveness, a reluctance to be pinned down to a relationship—one which, all the same, nobody could have conceived of a life without. So for what seems a long time London remained partly a not quite convincing fiction, partly a symbol of ambiguity, partly an overcast physical fact. (75)
- I found myself in the same room as Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley; and I know there were others. I remember almost unearthly electric light broken on brocade-angular folds of one poet’s dress, and her benevolence (she was talking about something lost under a sofa) and the graven face and shining cavern eyes of the other. Of Aldous Huxley I was most nearly frightened, through no fault of his. But alas these images, and se many since, cast themselves on the screen as a silent film: I have a wonderful visual memory but a poor verbal one. I recall little or anything that has been at any time said—the sense and atmosphere of a conversation, yes, but the words, no. And all things considered, this is a tragedy. (79)
