'A Bright, Cheerful, Salubrious Hell'

Max Beerbohm’s first radio broadcast, delivered on December 29, 1935, is titled “London Revisited.” He celebrates the city of his birth (in 1872) and youth – the Edwardian era – and implicitly critiques the London of the interbellum years: 

“London has been cosmopolitanised, democratised, commercialised, mechanised, standardised, vulgarised, so extensively that one’s pride in showing it to a foreigner is changed to a wholesome humility. One feels rather as Virgil may have felt in showing Hell to Dante.”

 

When Beerbohm collected his BBC broadcasts he asked, “What civilized person in these days [1946] (unless he has a passion for such things as science or sociology), isn’t nostalgic?” Nostalgia for what no longer exists, uncomplicated by disappointment or bitterness, is always a temptation. I can reduce my nostalgia-tinged distaste for what has happened to Cleveland,  my hometown, to a single fact: Higbee’s department store downtown on Public Square, where I was taken each December to visit Santa Claus and his local sidekick, Mr. Jing-a-Ling, is now home to the Jack Cleveland Casino. “It is a bright, cheerful, salubrious Hell, certainly,” Beerbohm writes of latter-day London. “But still—to my mind—Hell. In some ways a better place, I readily concede, than it was in my day, and in days before mine.”

Talk of Hell and the city reminds me of a very different sort of book, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver, 1974), a novel in the form of dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. On the final page, the Italian tells the Mongol:

 

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

 

To describe a modern city as Hell is a little too easy,  a well-oiled cliché, though there’s something to it. Beerbohm, master of gentle irony, concludes his radio talk like this:

 

“I warned you that I was going to be depressing. I wish I hadn’t kept my word. I might well have broken it on an evening so soon after Christmas, so soon before the New Year. Forget this talk. Or at any rate discount it. Remember that after all I’m an old fogey—and perhaps rather an old fool. And let me assure you that I’m cheerful company enough whenever I’m not in London and not thinking of London. And now I’m just off to the country.”

 

[“London Revisited” is collected in Beerbohm’s Mainly on the Air (Heinemann, 1946; rev. 1957).]