Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  Greenhorns

  The steamer is at rest, the captain awaits the visit of the Custom House officials. All eyes are strained, searching through the shifting mist and dense forest of masts for the first glimpse of the eagerly hoped-for relations and friends, for the first sight of the long-dreamt-of city of freedom and prosperity. Presently a boat rows briskly to the side of the vessel; seated in it a young woman with mock seal-skin coat, vandyke hat slashed up with blue satin, and surmounted with a yellow ostrich feather, and long six-buttoned gloves. She is chaffing the boatman in broken English, and shouts words of welcome and encouragement to the simple bewildered peasant who peers over the side of the vessel with two little ones clasped in either hand. Yes! That smartly dressed young lady is her daughter.

  Beatrice Potter on the arrival of Jewish immigrants to London, in Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, 1897

  I was all in a flutter at having at last got to the place which I was so madly fond of.

  James Boswell, London Journal, 19 November 1762

  When I finally arrived in London to stay, I felt twice life size. To be an immigrant is to play one’s first and key role in the drama of city life. You are part of a mythology. The Jewish refugee, at the end of the three-week voyage in steerage from Bremerhaven, kisses the stones of the dock at Ellis Island, thankfully fingers his phylacteries, and gazes, stunned, at the buildings of Manhattan, so tall that they are as high as the sky. Dick Whittington turns again on Highgate Hill, summoned across the valley to the city by the bells of Bow . . . For every immigrant, the city is a different dream. He comes to it in flight – from persecution, from economic drought, from the stifling tittle-tattle of the home town – and enters it in wonder and hope. Even his fear and bewilderment at the massive scale on which it all works, at the impersonality with which he is treated by strangers in the custom hall or café, contribute to his excitement. The entry to a new city, even when it’s made in the internationalised tedium of an airport lounge, is a dramatically heightened occasion. Everything seems bigger, more blatant than its familiar photographed images; a giant labyrinth of unmeasured hopes and threats and possibilities.

  Today, we come to the metropolis more often from suburbs or other cities than from villages. Our sense of shock is less intense. The culture of the big city spreads a long way beyond its ring-roads, and the newcomer to London, off the train from Norwich or West Hartlepool, is likely to feel that he has come home. This is the source of so much of the gossip and fashion with which he has been living at third hand. Provincial cities now tend to subsist like dogs, on the scraps dropped from the metropolitan table. One waits for the new films, new clothes, new slang, to get around to the local Odeon and the Gay Birds boutique, and by the time they arrive they seem already staled. In London, everything is fresh; the ink is hardly dry on the reviews, and the latest thing in clothes still has the air of a violent departure – in a few weeks, it will have been absorbed into cliché as magazines and advertisements reproduce and flatten it; but for now, on the King’s Road, it is stunning, lurid, shockingly new.

  This continuous freshness of the city composes most of what is left of the city’s power to persuade the immigrant that he has crossed a frontier into a new world. The slovenly drift of urbanisation, a process which combines all that is most lifeless in both the city and the country, has desensitised us to the dramatic contrasts between the nature of the village and the nature of the metropolis which so preoccupied nineteenth-century writers. A British sociologist, R. E. Pahl, recently remarked, ‘In an urbanised society, “urban” is everywhere and nowhere; the city cannot be defined.’ If that is true, the truth seems a little dim and wet; and it smacks of a certain academic blindness to a very real imaginative experience – the knowledge that in Paris, London, New York (in the metropolis, if not just in ‘the city’) one is in a realm of thought and action quite different from that of the suburb, the small town, the provincial city.

  The difference is easier to symbolise than to describe, and the architects of the city in the nineteenth century instinctively grasped its importance. They filled the outskirt areas of great cities with grandiloquent gestures and promises, signs, notices, and monuments, whose extravagant tone was in keeping with the heightened, self-mythologising emotional state of the newcomer. They announced that here was a territory of unprecedentedly expanded experience; a stage for human activity which was bigger, freer, more conducive to dramatic success or spectacular tragedy, than anything you had ever known before. As the steamer from Europe sails through the straits between Brooklyn and Staten Island, Manhattan is paged by the Statue of Liberty and its inscribed poem by Emma Lazarus:

  Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to be free:

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

  In Jewish-American novels, for which the experience of coming new to the city has been a particularly rich thematic source, the halo of Liberty’s head is characteristically seen silhouetted against a setting western sun; it is at once welcoming and sinister, a generous promise and an omen of disillusion. In his superb and only novel, Call It Sleep (1934), Henry Roth began with the figures of a mother and child standing on the deck of an incoming steamer as it nosed into New York:

  Behind the ship the white wake that stretched to Ellis Island grew longer, raveling wanly into melon-green. On one side curved the low, drab New Jersey coastline, the spars and masts on the waterfront fringing the sky; on the other side was Brooklyn, flat, water-towered; the horns of the harbor. And before them, rising on her high pedestal from the scaling swarmy brilliance of sunlit water to the west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed out to a single plane. Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light – the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty. The child and his mother stared again at the massive figure in wonder.

  The statue stands, synecdochally, for the whole city; and written on it, for those who can see, is their future history. It is a melodramatic vision, but its most magniloquent or nightmarish features can hardly hope to match the amazing range and change of the city itself. Nothing could be too dazzling or black for that.

  Even the bourgeois piety of the East Anglians relents at that moment of ring-road grandiosity, in the shy boast: WELCOME TO NORWICH – A FINE CITY. Approach roads and waterways are sites for architectural extravaganzas, bursts of civic definition and ambition. The western entry to London has astonishing feats of gothic whimsy, built in brick of inky scarlet, crowding behind giant signboards on which airlines promise you that the earth is yours. BOAC TAKES GOOD CARE OF YOU sprouts in front of a castle of pinnacles and leaded windows. The stretch of road from Chiswick to Earl’s Court, where, by the 1880s, London really began, is an anthology of inspirational monuments. Here, more than anywhere else in the city, one feels an exotic spirit of architectural licence. Indeed, what better function for the late gothic style could be imagined, than to adorn the entrance to a dream. Gross marble pillars are pushed up against slit-eyed chambers; mock-Tudor beams are worked in stone; flying buttresses fly free, supporting nothing; slender blackened pinnacles spike the low industrial sky. And if you come to London from the north, there is the heady, baroque span of Archway Bridge on the scarp-face of Highgate Hill and Hampstead Heath – the ‘northern heights’ as they were grandly known in the nineteenth century. The Archway has the best view of London as it drops down to the Thames, five miles south. It is also the best place to commit suicide; and nearly every week someone takes that plunge into the swirl of container trucks below, and Archway Road is noisy with klaxons of ambulances and fire engines – a macabre living theatre of urban promise, urban disillusion.

  But in Lo
ndon, the most splendid boasts and promises are made in the architecture of its railway stations. When they were built, you arrived in the city at rococo palaces of steel and glass, trellised with curving girders and brilliant with sunlight on the hanging, forsythia coils of smoke. Designers like Sir Gilbert Scott turned the Victorian railway termini into technological wonderlands, half giant mock-medieval castles, half working exhibitions of the peculiarly Victorian science of engineering. Until 1964, when it was knocked down in typical access of official vandalism, you left Euston Station through a massive, triumphal Doric arch. The city lay before you like an anticipated victory, celebrated before it had been won.

  Every big city has a particular entrance, a route inwards which is established by mythology, a point of focus which endows the whole complex with a clear shape and pattern. Cities built on the sea have a special advantage: New York needs to be approached from the Atlantic, not through the suburban grizzle along the Merritt Parkway, Route 15, and its slow trail through half-built overpasses and the wasteland of the Bronx. In New York, as once in Venice and Amsterdam, the city grows out of the water all around you, turned twice as tall by its own reflection, a perpendicular city on a horizontal sea. One should enter London from the north, either through one of the great stations – Euston, King’s Cross or St Pancras – or down the ragged, gouged-out crevasse of the Great North Road. Then the heart of the city becomes the cluster of buildings ranged against the north bank of the Thames, in a line from St Paul’s to the Houses of Parliament. As you descend into the valley and across the plain, the metropolis gradually intensifies; it grows taller, grander, more thickly populated, until, at the riverside, it suddenly reveals itself, and one understands the disorder one has travelled through as a pattern, marked out and bounded by monuments. Such entrances owe their origins to economic usage – but they have been substantiated by that sense of dramatic occasion which always enlivens the best urban architecture. Once established, they are adhered to superstitiously; for they offer us the beginnings of an understanding of the city, the first inkling of scale and direction in the maze. Furthermore, they assure us that the city really is a new and different place, and that the ceremony of entrance leads us across the threshold of a new life with its own rules and possibilities.

  The ‘greenhorn’ is the central character in this mythology of initiation to the city; he is the prototypical stranger, the raw innocent. He is the shy figure on the dockside, with his money sewn into his underclothes and his docketed cardboard luggage roped with frayed manila. He wears the wrong clothes, he speaks the wrong language, he comes from a village or shtetl, expert at some craft – shoemaking, tailoring, ploughing – which, if it is practised at all in the city, is to be found only in the mass-production methods of the factory assembly-line. Myths are attempts to explain contradictions in nature. The myth of the greenhorn tries to reassure us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is a real continuity between the culture of the country and the culture of the town – between, in effect, our rural past and our urban future. The greenhorn at the dockside, like the grandiloquent architectural slogans at city entries, marks a boundary which is as historically and biographically important as it is geographically. Where does (or did) the country end and the city begin? The most important and most ordinary city miracle is its capacity to transform the greenhorn into just another face in the crowd. He will learn the language, make his way, become a citizen. The very hay-chewing oddity of his appearance at the outset is a tribute to the city’s power to change us all.

  The greenhorn has everything to lose: his phylacteries, his innate convictions about the nature of human community, even the language in which he thinks and feels. We relish his loss, his poignant sense of displacement. For he is the past we have somehow survived: and he may tell us, in innocence or naive imitation, who we are now, because our present is his future. So city writing lavishes attention on the newcomer at that point of entrance: the greenhorn, at once the city’s hero and its most vulnerable victim, is urban man at the crucial stage of emergence and transformation.

  Waves of urban immigration have happened at times when the country as a way of life has let people down badly, when ‘the land’, with its associations of primal, organic community, has been seen to fail. The Irish potato famine of 1847–48 led a vast, destitute army of smallholders and agricultural labourers to the steamers that sailed from Cork to London. They paid five shillings for a deck passage, and settled in a widening circle round the Irish lodging houses of Rosemary Lane, a few steps from the jetty where the Cork Packet tied up. London was the place where you could get, according to one of Henry Mayhew’s respondents, ‘plenty of taties – plenty of mate – plenty of porruk’. In Eastern Europe, as the Pale of Settlement closed in a tightening net around the Jewish villages, and as more and more occupations were closed to Jews by Tsarist statute, the Jews fled to Bremen, Hamburg, and Bremerhaven, en route for New York and London. By 1890 there were 135,000 Jewish refugees congregated in Brooklyn’s Lower East Side alone; a community of victims, united by the Yiddish language and a common history of persecution. Between the two world wars, American Negroes, exhausted and bitter at their servile state in the hands of Southern landowners, and made redundant by technological changes in the cotton industry, trekked north to the big cities; up the Mississippi to Detroit and Chicago, across the Alleghenies to Washington, Boston, and New York. From the cantankerous dustbowl of Oklahoma, poor whites set off with their possessions piled on the roof-racks of clanking Model T’s bound for Los Angeles and San Francisco, where you were supposed to awake to a dawn of citrus groves and plenty, but found yourself in a growing, smoggy megalopolis of heavy industry. For all these greenhorns, the soil had refused them a living; in a massive reverse of the Renaissance thirst for virgin land, the last hundred and thirty years or so have seen a great migration of the poor, the disenfranchised and the hopeful to the big cities. It is now the prerogative of the rich to move to the country; the metropolitan immigrant is likely to be hard-up to the point of defeat, cheated by nature or by labour-saving mechanical inventions of the right to live in his birth-place.

  The new arrival is always shown in a stunned state: wide eyed, guileless, reduced to bafflement and incompetence by the strange rules of city behaviour. Louis Adamic, a Slovenian ‘Bohunk’ who arrived in New York at the age of fourteen, later described his first day in the city in Laughing In The Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (1932):

  For minutes at a time, walking . . . through the deep canyon of downtown Broadway, I hardly felt, saw, heard or thought anything. I was a blank. The sensation of being in New York, in the midst of America’s tallest buildings, with trains thundering under my feet, was so overwhelming.

  It is in the nature of the experience that the response to it should be inadequate. Language codifies an order, a hierarchy, a stable view of the world, which is grossly exceeded by the reality of the modern city: and the arrival of the immigrant propels him into abstractions and the contemplation of his own internal state of mind. It is a source of transformations and distortions of scale which can only be received with dumb wonder. In American fiction and autobiography, the townscape of New York is turned into a giant perceptual conundrum, as if it has been deliberately designed as a monstrous challenge to eyes and ears accustomed to the human proportions of village and small-town architecture. (Le Corbusier’s Modulor principle was based on a unitary measurement of 6 ft – the height of the policemen in the English detective stories to which he was addicted.) The gigantism of the Statue of Liberty, with her 4 ft 6 in. nose, her 3 ft mouth and her 42 ft long right arm, sets the scale for the Woolworth Building and Brooklyn Bridge, whose vast and sturdy span might reasonably connect two of Plato’s spheres, and on which an evening spill-out of Liberty-sized commuters would not look inappropriate. Like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, the immigrant suddenly finds himself to be a mini-man. If the city is normal, then he is a dwarf; if he is normal, then the city must be s
ome sort of concrete optical illusion, for what perspective or grammar exists in which such breathtaking heights and breadths are possible? Shifting in size, at once dwarfed and elevated by these amazing confusions of scale, the greenhorn lurches forward into his myopic destiny.

  City architecture is an eloquent proclamation of the absolute strangeness of city life, a reminder that here you must abandon hope of holding on to your old values, your old language. Wordsworth, who, not surprisingly, was rather bad at living in cities, tries and fails to comprehend London in the seventh book of The Prelude. He begins bravely with a fighting, Cobbett-like image, calling the city ‘a monstrous ant-hill on the plain of a too-busy world’. But as he proceeds to catalogue the streets and faces of London, one can feel him unwillingly succumbing to that numbed giddiness of the immigrant at the first stage of his initiation. It is all too huge and too prolific for Wordsworth’s elephantine Cumbrian sensitivities to take hold of, and, having visited Bartholomew Fair – an event which, for Ben Jonson two hundred years before, had triggered off a spectacularly complete urban drama – he resigns himself to a state of orgiastic inebriation at the mind-blowing awfulness of it all:

  Oh, blank confusion! true epitome

  Of what the mighty city is herself,

  To thousands upon thousands of her sons,

  Living amid the same perpetual whirl

  Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

  To one identity, by differences

  That have no law, no meaning, and no end –

  Here the inner and the outer worlds have got hopelessly mixed up: the only way Wordsworth can describe London is by rendering the confusion of his own hyperactive brain, and the city itself seems to drain clean out of the verse. A couple of lines later, he is pulling himself together:

  Though the picture weary out the eye,