Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  In October 1972 when the evenings had begun to darken early in London, a nineteen-year-old boy stepped out of Nash House on the Mall, Decimus Burton’s splendidly laid-out approach to Buckingham Palace. The boy had been watching a movie at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, was bored, and wanted a cigarette. Just outside the ICA is a wide flight of steps, scantily lit and shaded by trees. The boy came out here for his smoke. It was a warm, Indian-summery night, and the Mall was buzzing with strolling couples and tourists out after dinner from their hotels. When the movie ended, the crowd emerging from the ICA mistook the boy’s body for a zonked junkie or a pavement drunk. It’s the sort of thing you see often enough on Piccadilly; here it was misplaced, an incongruous touch of squalor on this much swept and tended triumphal avenue.

  The boy will live, but he will be permanently paralysed. Two men, he has said, came at him from the side of the steps: one gagged him with his hand, the other got his arm round his neck and severed his spinal cord with a 2½ inch blade of a penknife. The whole encounter had a ghastly surgical precision. Nothing was stolen; the men were total strangers.

  There are rumours of a gang called the Envies. Their brutal, seemingly motiveless assaults on strangers go largely unreported by the press, apparently for fear of ‘carbon copy’ crimes. Who might not fall victim to the Envies? You have a car, a girl, a new suit, a cigarette, even a smile on your face, and they may come at you out of the dark. They choose the most elegant and unruffled parts of the city for their attacks. They act on appearances: on what looks like prosperity, or good luck, or happiness. Unlike most muggers, desperate for the price of a fix, they say nothing, take nothing except your right to live. Like a soldier in a war, you die or are maimed because you were wearing the wrong uniform. What was the boy’s mistake? His clothes? His expression? His mere attendance at a rather snooty resort of the cultured middle classes? In the last few years, it’s become plain that you are at your most vulnerable to the mugger in the ‘play and entertainment’ areas of the city. In New York, Broadway and the Plaza are notorious danger spots; in London, the district around Waterloo, enclosing both the South Bank arts complex and the Old Vic, has the highest record of unprovoked violent assault. The assumption is usually made that these are areas where people carry stuffed wallets and, softened on food and wine and theatre, are easy game for the thief. But another, more frightening explanation presents itself: that the victims were chosen simply because they seemed to be enjoying themselves, having a good time, and that envy is perhaps an even stronger motive for violence than greed. We have so separated ourselves, person from person and group from group, in the city, that we have made hatred a dreadfully easy emotion. It comes to us as lightly and insidiously as the symptoms of an unconsciously harboured disease.

  Coming out of the London Underground at Oxford Circus one afternoon, I saw a man go berserk in the crowd on the stairs. ‘You fucking . . . fucking bastards!’ he shouted, and his words rolled round and round the lavatorial porcelain tube as we ploughed through. He was in a neat city suit, with a neat city paper neatly folded in a pink hand. His fingernails were clipped to the quick. What was surprising was that nobody showed surprise: a slight speeding-up in the pace of the crowd, a turned head or two, a quick grimace, but that was all. I think we all knew, could feel on our own pulses, the claustrophobia and the hostility that was eating away at the man who was cursing us. Inside, we were all cursing each other. Who feels love for his fellow-man at rush hour? Not me. I suspect that the best insurance against urban violence is the fact that most of us shrink from contact with strangers; we don’t want to touch one another or feel that close to the stink of someone else’s life. The muggers and the men who feel up girls on crowded subway trains are exceptions. But if our unexpressed loathing for strangers in a crowd were to break that barrier of physical inhibition, who knows what hell might be let loose on the streets and underground.

  As I write, the Liquid Theatre is in performance under the arches of Charing Cross Station; a ‘participatory’ theatre of touch-and-feel, where the members of the audience are led through games in which they explore each other’s bodies. It is a pleasurable, gentle, moderately inexpensive therapy for urban people, yet on the surface it seems a strange one. We spend so much of our time, after all, in crowds: our bodies are always colliding and rubbing, our hands brushing; our areas of privacy, in a society where land and space are constantly and dangerously rising in value, are being eroded. The modern city, of small apartments and densely occupied communications routes – trains, pavements, lifts, supermarket walkways – makes us live hugger-mugger, cheek to cheek. We need, apparently, to relearn how to touch each other amicably, and are prepared to spend money and a night out (pushing past more people on subways en route to Charing Cross) on that rather simple human exercise. Touch without violence or revulsion – and without sexual passion, too – has turned into a faculty threatened with extinction, preserved, at least for the urban middle class, in the hothouse conditions of encounter groups and experimental drama shows. To do it at all, we have to put on masks, act it out, be wheedled into it by psychiatric gurus or bare-chested, Afro-headed actor-managers.

  In cities, we have good reason to shrink from strangers. High rates of murder and assault are not in themselves symptoms of urban congestion. A remote, low-density rural area like Cardiganshire in West Wales can more than hold its own against London in its per capita murder figures. But in rural areas the majority of the victims of violent crime know their assailants (indeed, are probably married to them); in cities, the killer and the mugger come out of the anonymous dark, their faces unrecognised, their motives obscure. In a city, you can be known, envied, hated by strangers. In your turn, you can feel the exaggerated, operatic emotions that the city arouses in its inhabitants. The urban terrorist, the footpad, the Envy, the Angry Brigader, the Weatherman, is the final, ugly performer in greasepaint and grandiloquent gesture, of a drama which is for most of us, thankfully, a mental affair, a script in the head which few of us are sufficiently mad or desperate to act out.

  The house I live in in London is five storeys of solid, lavish, battlements. It was built when the Victorian middle-class family was the strongest institution in the world, and when its houses reflected the imperial wealth and grandeur (not to mention the divine ordination) of its status. Space was used with throwaway generosity: high ceilings, vast halls and stairways, marble-pillared porches which could themselves comfortably accommodate a modern self-contained flat. The house was once a working community. There were front-door callers, and tradesmen who tugged on the side-road bellpull that goes down to the basement. Like a model of Empire, the family lived on the labours of the servants who toiled and slept in the warren of rooms ‘below stairs’. But the twentieth century, with its smaller families, its reduced opportunities for massive individual wealth, its increased premium on the value of space, and its vastly more expensive labour costs, has destroyed the house as an organic structure. It has been sliced, horizontally and vertically, into a higgledy-piggledy pile of chunks of living space, some of many rooms, some of only a bit of floor big enough to make a bed. None of us live to scale; we are all dwarfed by the baroque proportions of the halls and passageways. There are strangers, not on the street, or across the square, but in the very next room. (There may even be strangers in your own room.) The house is constructed around a well – a deep rectangular column of light and air which was supposed to work like a lung through which the building breathed its own enclosed atmosphere. Now all it does is to bring strangers into eerie juxtaposition with each other. It transmits unasked-for intimacies, private sights, private sounds, which fuel suspicion and embarrassment and resentment.

  I am woken in the small hours by the sound of a girl achieving her climax; a deep shriek of pleasure that has nothing to do with me. I can hear her man sigh as close as if he and I were under the same sheet. On another night, a TV blares through an open window with a late-late show. On another, a woman is crying, a misera
ble train of broken hiccups. A man – I can hear his feet crackling on the bare boards – says: ‘Shut up. Why don’t you bloody well shut up?’ Then there are nights of joke-hashing: someone mutters like a priest going quickly through a private office, followed by bursts of yelling adenoidal laughter. The routine is repeated, and repeated; I fall asleep, alone, with Australians in my ears.

  The flat across the well is occupied by a gaggle of people, and most of them are passing through; they flit when it suits them. I can’t fit their faces – let alone their names – to these night noises. Letters come for them, and go soggy and stale in the mailbox. We share a front door, nothing more. Could that girl there, with the dough-pudding features and the shabby twinset, be the same girl who was so rapturously fulfilled last night? Perhaps. For unlikeliness is the key here: you play heads-bodies-and-legs with incongruous fragments of other people’s lives. It’s only with consistent behaviour, where all the details fit, that strangers become knowable, that their lives take on a pattern you can sympathise with and understand. As long as they remain like this, inchoate and unplotted, they are spooks: the easiest thing to do with them is to knit them into a paranoid fantasy. So lonely old people – and not just in cities – conceive of the active, fragmentary life around them as a concerted plot, full of sinister coincidences.

  To live in a city is to live in a community of people who are strangers to each other. You have to act on hints and fancies, for they are all that the mobile and cellular nature of city life will allow you. You expose yourself in, and are exposed to by others, fragments, isolated signals, bare disconnected gestures, jungle cries and whispers that resist all your attempts to unravel their meaning, their consistency. As urban dwellers, we live in a world marked by the people at the next table (‘Such a brute, that man. She went to the Seychelles,’ comes the sudden loud phrase, breaking out of the confidential murmur), the man glimpsed in the street with a bowler hat and a hacksaw and never seen again, the girl engrossed in her orgasm across the air-well. So much takes place in the head, so little is known and fixed. Signals, styles, systems of rapid, highly-conventionalised communication, are the lifeblood of the big city. It is when these systems break down – when we lose our grasp on the grammar of urban life – that the Envies take over. The city, our great modern form, is soft, amenable to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams, interpretations. But the very plastic qualities which make the city the great liberator of human identity also cause it to be especially vulnerable to psychosis and totalitarian nightmare. If it can, in the Platonic ideal, be the highest expression of man’s reason and sense of his own community with other men, the city can also be a violent, sub-realist, expression of his panic, his envy, his hatred of strangers, his callousness. It’s easy to ‘drop’ people in the city, where size and anonymity and the absence of clear communal sanctions license the kind of behaviour that any village would stamp out at birth. Just as the city is the place where you can choose your society, so it is also the place where you can ‘drop’ discarded friends, old lovers, the duller members of your family: you can, too, ‘drop’ the poor, the minorities, the immigrants, everyone, in fact, who isn’t to your taste or of your class. The mugger can step out of the shadows to drop a victim who has been singled out by the dimly seen cut of his clothes. In the city we can change our identities at will, as Dickens triumphantly proved over and over again in his fiction; its discontinuity favours both instant-villains and instant-heroes impartially. The gaudy, theatrical nature of city life tends constantly to melodrama. My own aim here is to investigate the plot, and its implications for the nature of character, of the modern city, in the hope that we may better understand what it is that cities do to us, and how they change our styles of living and thinking and feeling.

  TWO

  The City as Melodrama

  What did these vain and presumptuous men intend? How did they expect to raise this lofty mass against God, when they had built it above all the mountains and clouds of the earth’s atmosphere?

  Saint Augustine on Babylon, City of God, Bk XV

  The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of festering guilt: a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive. Our current mood of revulsion against cities is not new; we have grown used to looking for Utopia only to discover that we have created Hell. We are accustomed to gazing at America to make out our future, and in America the city is widely regarded as the sack of excrement which the country has to carry on its back to atone for its sins. Radio, television, magazines, colleges mount ritual talk-ins in which the word ‘urban’, pronounced in the hushed and contrite tone of a mea culpa, is monotonously followed by the two predicates, ‘problems’ and ‘renewal’. On these joyless occasions, it is made clear that the problems have no real solutions, and that the notion of rehabilitation is a piece of empty piety, a necessary fiction in which no one really believes. When Mayor Lindsay of New York made his abortive bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972, the only tangible result of his campaign was a flood of sick jokes about the garbage in his streets, animal, vegetable, and mineral. It further became apparent that nobody in the United States wanted a big-city president: better to look to Maine, Alabama, South Dakota, California, whose native sons would not be polluted by the stench of those cities where most of America’s domestic troubles are located.

  A middle-sized American city at 7 p.m., after the commuters have taken to their cars and the too-bright sodium lights show through the quickening dusk (I am thinking of Worcester, Hartford, Springfield Mass.), feels like a burnt-out dream. No-one is about, bar a dusting of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and they have the furtive air of people habituated to being always suspected of being up to something. The white-domed Statehouse, memorial of a grandiose colonial conception of civic order, looks a tartarous yellow. A hundred years ago, people put up portly brown-stone houses along wide wooded avenues. Their architecture is proud, but one can almost smell the rot in the stone, rank and soggy with inattention. In the hallways, you catch a whiff of bacon-fat and Lysol. Each apartment door has a winking spyhole cut into the wood, and people live behind chains and double-locks, with mailorder .38 revolvers tucked handily into a drawer along with the napery. The humans most in evidence are the policemen. Their car headlights rake housefronts for junkies, and you can hear their klaxons screaming, always a block or two away, like invisibly ominous owls. After midnight, in the neon-blaze of the Dunkin’ Donut shop you can see them, a line of broad bums stretched over red plastic stools, their pistols hanging out on straps like monstrous genital accessories.

  Or there is the dismal story of Bixby Hill on the outskirts of Los Angeles. There nice people have erected their $150,000 homes inside a fortified stockade, eight feet high, patrolled by heavily armed security guards, with an electronic communication system installed in every house. In a TV programme about this armour-plated ghetto, a shrill housewife, surrounded by hardware and alarm-buttons, said, ‘We are trying to preserve values and morals here that are decaying on the outside.’ And her husband, a comfortable Babbitty figure, told the reporter: ‘When I pass by the guard in the evening, I’m safe, I’m home, it’s just a lovely feeling, it really is.’ When they talked of the city beyond the walls, they conjured a vision of Gomorrah where the respectable and the innocent are clubbed, butchered, burglarised, where every patch of shadow has its resident badman with a knife, a gleam in his eye, and a line of punctures up his forearm.

  Perhaps the original dream of the American city, with its plazas, squares, avenues, and Washingtonian circles, was too optimistic and elevated for reality. On Chestnut Street and Elm Street, the trees languished. But the present disreputable state of civitas in the United States is the product of an exaggeratedly Calvinist sense of sin. Finding the city irredeemable is only the other side of the coin to expecting it to be Paradise: utopias and dystopias go, of necessity, hand in hand. Disillusion is a vital part of the process of dreaming – and may, one suspects, prove al
most as enjoyable. When New Yorkers tell one about the dangers of their city, the muggings, the dinner parties to which no one turns up for fear of being attacked on the way, the traffic snarl-ups, the bland indifference of the city cops, they are unmistakably bragging. Living in Greenwich Village is almost as exciting as war-service, and beneath the veneer of concerned moralism it is not hard to detect a vein of scoutlike enthusiasm for adventure. The New Yorker, echoing Whitman, is a proud participant in the decadence which has made his city even more world-famous than it was before: he is the man, he suffers, he is there.

  His nightmare city is simply an ideal city in reverse, just as the great ideal cities in history, from Plato’s Republic to Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, have been constructed in protest against the uninspiring conditions of cities as they actually were and are. The failures and imperfections of Athens, Rome, London, New York, Paris have given rise to towns in books which in their architecture, their social and political life, would express man’s highest aspirations to perfectibility. The very existence of the city, with its peculiar personal freedoms and possibilities, has acted as a licence for sermons and dreams. Here society might be arranged for man’s greatest good; here, all too often, it has seemed a sink of vice and failure. Nor has this melodramatic moralistic view of city life been the exclusive province of philosophers and theologians; political bosses, architects, town planners, even those professionally tweedy sceptics, sociologists, have happily connived at the idea of the city as a controllable option between heaven and hell. Bits and pieces of ideal cities have been incorporated into real ones; traffic projects and rehousing schemes are habitually introduced by their sponsors as at least preliminary steps to paradise. The ideal city gives us the authority to castigate the real one; while the sore itch of real cities goads us into creating ideal ones.