Where would Henry James go now?
Certainly not to Ken Livingstone’s London or Mayor Bloomberg’s New York, where over-regulation, promiscuous surveillance, and an obsession with security are flattening both cities into monochrome. It’s hard to imagine the ever-scrupulous Mr James setting foot in Bombay, or Mexico City, or Cairo, but those cities still retain the brimming vitality, the whiff of danger along with that of raw sewage, the human variety of vagrants living cheek-by-jowl with millionaires, the poorly lit streets and pools of deep shadow, that gave nineteenth century London its extraordinary hold on the imaginations of artists and writers throughout the world. I’d dearly like to interrogate a bunch of western urban planners and security advisers, and find out which metropolitan city figures most prominently in their nightmares as the worst of the worst. That would be a place seriously worth visiting, for in the matter of cities, it’s in gross imperfection that perfection lies.
Where would Henry James go now?