Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  From Archway Bridge, London in summer looks like a primitive lake city on stilts: only the top storeys of the new tower blocks stick out from the turquoise mirror of exhaust fumes – the pre-1960 city, in which St Paul’s was the dominant architectural landmark, is completely submerged. Human life down there is mysterious, subaqueous; the traffic disappears down into the blue, rippling and steaming as it goes. It was from this hill that Whittington turned again (a pub and a milestone mark the spot), and a mile to the west Guy Fawkes’s fellow conspirators sat it out on Parliament Hill Fields, waiting for the brilliant splash on the sky that never came. They must have seen it in their heads again and again, painfully slow, a dream sequence in a movie cranked at half speed. The city itself is a mirage from here: one might see or hear anything – promises, revolutions, ancestral phantoms – in that immense, ambiguous ripple of population and power.

  For me, it promised release and a libidinous surge of adrenalin. I wanted London as I’d once lain awake wanting a glassy, enamelled split-cane trout rod . . . both took one to dark pools and the grey silhouetted backs of fish too big to catch. I was shy, vain and bristling: I was writing for the television and books came to review in thick wadded parcels. I had left my job at a provincial university, and it was as if school was out, and there were days of truancy and fishing ahead. I sent my phone number and new London address to every literary editor I’d heard of, bought a velvet suit at the cheap end of the King’s Road, and swapped a district-nurse-style Wolseley for a worn-out Sunbeam Alpine whose resprayed cream paint fizzed on the bonnet. The phone rang, infrequently, but just often enough to keep my euphoria on the boil. A radio programme sent me off with free tickets to theatres. From the rim of Highgate Hill, I could cast into the city and wait for my float to bob under, for the long rolling pull of the fish under the mirage.

  For the first time in my life I felt I was in tune; following through the coils of a myth, happily in flight from the institutional paranoia of university corridors and grim sniping parties. London was pure make-believe, a city I could belong to because I could invent it. And in Highgate, I was in the company of people whose lives seemed as theatrical and dreamlike as my own, a whole society of truant players and fishermen. Some were acting out a pastoral comedy, others a self-projecting Bildungsroman or thievish picaresque novel.

  On the clear windy top of Highgate Hill there is a community of ardent villagers. They wear country clothes – riding macs and headscarves, tweeds and Wellington boots – and talk in gentry voices, braying bravely over the tops of taxis. They have their church, their teashop, their family grocer, their village green, three village pubs, and the Highgate Society with its coffee-mornings, its knighted president and its evening lectures delivered by distinguished FRS’s. By the standards of a real village, their style of life has the exaggerated quaintness of one of those 1930s family comedies beloved of amateur dramatic societies – George and Margaret, ferociously hammed through by the rector, the retired colonel and the lady of independent means from the WVS. They are not less but more of a village because of their beleaguered position in a suburb of one of the world’s largest cities. Where real villagers drift away to the towns, and are forcibly cosmopolitanised by the culture of juke-box and TV, the Highgate villagers have frozen a version of village life into the sepia tints of an Edwardian postcard; as embarrassed, exaggerated and sentimental as ‘There’ll always be an England’. In Highgate there is honey still for tea, though its price has vastly inflated. Villaging is a recreation for the very rich indeed; if you can buy a house with trellis and cottage-garden in Highgate Village, you could probably afford Cannes and polo ponies too.

  I had thought it natural to be on the run from villages; the real ones where I had grown up had been close and sticky places, reservoirs of prejudice and refined malice. The quasi-gentry of the private bar, sheltering behind wet dogs and shaggy pipes, had been loud and philistine. The dog was called Ajax, and its owner was himself a kind of muddy-booted Greek, standing the verger drinks and roaring through the fog. Yet the Highgate villagers made this despised life precious; they were pickling it with the same wonder that I reserved for the Dickensian labyrinth of colour and coincidence. If I was unable to respond to the style itself, at least I could recognise the yearning and affection which went into its making.

  Nosing about in my new urban uniform of crushed velvet and clotted-cream Alpine, an apprentice to the city, I found other aspirants, more to my taste. On the lee of the hill there were eager fashionables, avid for the demi-monde. They had David Hockney prints in their halls; they experimented with batik and oxblood paint on the walls of their living-rooms; they cooked out of raggy Elizabeth David Penguins; they hung huge Japanese paper lampshades from their ceilings, and squatted on brilliant polystyrene-chipping sag-bags. Angela, Liz, Janey, Michael, Robert, Ann, Joyce . . . names of people born in the dimmer parts of Surrey and the Home Counties in the late 1930s and early 1940s, who had come to the city from university. They worked in journalism, publishing, TV; they did whatever management consultants do; they were into anti-psychiatry, smoked pot at weekends, and talked in jangling voices which at dinner time carried all the way down to Crouch End, and floated across, like scraps of burnt paper, to Muswell Hill. A frantic, christian-naming talk, anxiously knowing, painfully vulnerable to the least breath of satire. In it, newspaper columnists and TV personalities lived like spooks, their familiar diminutives trotting in and out like lazy susans, there to furnish an identity not their own.

  Janine, who’d been at Oxford and wrote feature articles for a tabloid paper; earnest, prickly, divorced . . . she glowed in amazement at the glamour of her life, and as quickly subsided into dramatic desperation. For her the city was a rollercoaster: one moment up with names famous enough to be embalmed with the dead, the next sunk in the immense, untravelable distance between her station and theirs. She wanted to be gay, in a swizzle-stick, Café Royal, champagne and midnight swims in Highgate Ponds way; then to be fierce, bespectacled and serious, a Simone de Beauvoir for our times; to be a mother; to be a mistress, heading for Rome in a silver Trident; to retire to a cottage in the country; to write a novel about the plight of Woman; to collect Persian carpets, to not live on an overdraft, to go on television, to work for the Labour Party, to be gay . . . This cycle of conflicting spiritual necessities kept her in a state of continuous brilliance. Even her depressions were exciting. She gasped at her own enormity: reading a bank statement, she thrilled to its impossibility, and for the next three weeks trailed in penance every Saturday by taxi to a distant supermarket reputed to be fractionally cheaper than everywhere else. She was a democrat: for her the city was a source of such amazing booms and reversals of fortune, of identity-changes, coincidence and mad twists in the plot, that she assumed surprise as a norm. You could not rely on the milkman not turning out to be a genius; in this world of fable, he might write the greatest novel of the mid-century, or be invited by London Weekend Television to host a late-night chat-show (distinctions between the two activities had long since ceased to be visible).

  Janine embraced the Wordsworth urban flux with a generous passion; like all her affairs, it kept her in an electric trance of bliss and despair. She flowered on it: her voice gathered in edge and resonance, her cheekbones grew more prominent, her eyes larger. On the phone, she carolled, full of wonder, and sent flowers to everyone by puzzled messenger boys. She was the immigrant as heroine, and had succeeded in transforming her life into a spectacular drama, to which all her friends were invited as honoured witnesses.

  Her friends in their turn aspired to a style of bland insouciance; they knew everybody, from promising undiscovered painters to recently deposed cabinet ministers. This gave them a curious geriatric air; they had foresuffered all, nothing could surprise them. To have accused them of naïveté would have been the most cutting imaginable slight, and they loved Janine’s constant theatrical wonder because, perhaps, it distanced them from their own innocent apprenticeships to the city. A
consistent feature of the urban autobiography is its synthetically historical tone: Adamic wrote Laughing In The Jungle only sixteen years after he first arrived in America, when he was thirty; yet the boy in the book might be half a century or more away from the tough experienced reporter who chronicles his initiation. So, at Highgate dinner parties, I often felt amazed and incompetent in the presence of these immensely elderly young people – they had been born in much the same year as I, but they acquired an unruffled blasé that turned me into a gulping greenhorn, perpetually out of the know. We were peculiarly essential to each other.

  Both the villagers and the media sophisticates watched themselves living: they were all actors, and their performances were subject to a continual, wry critical scrutiny. The studied gesture, the hand cupped round the igniting tip of the cigarette, the flounce of a caftan, the muddy stride across the Green, these were part of a calculated repertoire. To be part of the city, you needed a city style – an economic grammar of identity through which you could project yourself. Clearly this was something to be learned; an expertise, a code with clear conventions. If you could not get the surface right, what hope was there of expressing whatever lay beneath it? This language which extended from living-room decor to the furniture of the imagination and the intellect – preoccupied the society I lived in at Highgate. Some people dealt so finely in its niceties that they lived out a kind of vulgar poetry. (Who’s in, who’s out . . . the latest fashionable idea, from eco-systems and zoological notions of human aggression, through participatory politics to the merits of Acapulco Gold and concrete verse . . .)

  It may sound fraudulent and blatant, this fragile theatre of surfaces. Yet, like all rituals, it enshrines a body of unexposed feelings that are neither superficial nor dishonourable. The newcomer to the city is beset by a terror of not belonging, of being left out alone on the hill. All round him, he sees evidence of failure and rejection. On the tube, the ads for computer-dating agencies: they mix an unnaturally jolly, keep-your-pecker-up tone with a salt-in-the-wound probe into the most lonely and anxious corners of the heart. One displays a pencil sketch of a crowd, with two people widely separated within it drawn in more detail; their faces, male and female, wear brave smiles that look as if they have been pasted on. Without a computer, they’ll never reach each other through the crush. American singles bars, packed with deodorised divorcées . . . the personal columns, with their plaintive appeals, as lacking in human detail as a radar scanner . . . isolated people in the fluorescent brightness of a late-night launderette . . . the urban flat, empty except for the flicker of the TV screen . . . the suicide, careering from the smugly gothic railing of the Archway Bridge . . . the bum on methylated spirits, picking his way through garbage bins like a lumbering racoon . . . everywhere there are people who have failed to belong; severed from their families, without sexual partners, lacking a tribe to identify with, or a style in which to consummate a shared culture. These are the greenhorns who never found the right uniform to wear, for whom the promised freedom of the city turned bitterly cold and sour.

  The gossip, the fashionability, the studied play-acting and the arch cosiness of the Highgate I have tried to describe are the inevitable responses of strangers and newcomers who have felt that possibility of being left in the cold. Most of my acquaintances there had no real precedents for the life they were leading; they wanted to be ‘in London’ without knowing where London really was. And so they conspired to build a metropolis as glamorous, witty, and up-to-date as the place they’d imagined as sixth formers in some small town or suburb in the bleak 1950s.

  It had not worked out quite the way they had planned. They seemed to have arrived too early or too late. They found that they were on their own. And the immigrant, unlike the city-bred who have been able to take friends and community for granted, never forgets that the city has the capacity to isolate and belittle him. In his anxiety he builds up a community in words and symbols; he peoples his own tribe. He knows that if he can’t keep out the cold with these stylistic acrobatics, there are plenty of basement rooms with rising damp and rotting net curtains, and a score of dubious computer-dating schemes, waiting to give him an icy welcome.

  FOUR

  The Emporium of Styles

  In the city, we are barraged with images of the people we might become. Identity is presented as plastic, a matter of possessions and appearances; and a very large proportion of the urban landscape is taken up by slogans, advertisements, flatly photographed images of folk heroes – the man who turned into a sophisticated dandy overnight by drinking a particular brand of vodka, the girl who transformed herself into a latter-day Mata Hari with a squirt of cheap scent. The tone of the wording of these advertisements is usually pert and facetious, comically drowning in its own hyperbole. But the photographs (and photography has largely replaced drawing in this business of image-projection) are brutally exact: they reproduce every detail of a style of life, down to the brand of cigarette-lighter, the stone in the ring, and the economic row of books on the shelf. Yet, if one studies a line of ads across from where one is sitting in a tube train, these images radically conflict with each other. Swap the details about between the pictures, and they are instantly made illegible. If the characters they represent really are heroes, then they clearly have no individual claim to speak for society as a whole. The clean-cut and the shaggy, rakes, innocents, brutes, home-lovers, adventurers, clowns, all compete for our attention and invite emulation. As a gallery, they do provide a glossy mirror of the aspirations of a representative city crowd; but it is exceedingly hard to discern a single dominant style, an image of how most people would like to see themselves.

  Even in the business of the mass-production of images of identity, this shift from the general to the diverse and particular is quite recent. Consider another line of stills: the back-lit, soft-focus portraits of Valentino, Navarro, Garbo, Gable, Cooper, Lamarr, Colbert, Tracy, Ladd . . . the first and second generations of great movie stars. There is a degree of romantic unparticularity in the face of each one, as if they were communal dream-projections of society at large. Only in the specialised genres of Westerns, farces and gangster movies were stars allowed to have odd, knobbly, cadaverous faces. The hero as loner belonged to history or the underworld: he spoke from the perimeter of society, reminding us of its dangerous edges.

  The stars of the last decade have looked quite different. Soft-focus photography has gone, to be replaced by a style which searches out warts and bumps, emphasises the uniqueness not the generality of the face. Voices, too, are strenuously idiosyncratic; whines, stammers and low rumbles are exploited as features of ‘star quality’. Instead of romantic heroes and heroines, we have Waifs, Drop-Outs, Queens, Dandies, Lowering Sadists. Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mia Farrow, Faye Dunaway, Jeanne Moreau, Jon Voigt, Oliver Reed, Jack Nicholson . . . each one a name for a brutalist, hard-edged style in which isolation and egotism are assumed as natural social conditions.

  In the movies, as in the city, the sense of a stable hierarchy has become increasingly exhausted; we no longer live in a world where we can all share the same values, the same heroes. (It is doubtful whether this world, so beloved of nostalgic moralists, ever existed; but lip-service was paid to it, the pretence, at least, was kept up.) The isolate and the eccentric push towards the centre of the stage; their fashions and mannerisms are presented as having as good a claim to the limelight and the future as those of anyone else. In the crowd on the underground platform, one may observe a honeycomb of fully-worked-out worlds, each private, exclusive, bearing little comparison with its nearest neighbour. What is prized in one is despised in another. There are no clear rules about how one is supposed to manage one’s body, dress, talk, or think. Though there are elaborate protocols and etiquettes among particular cults and groups within the city, they subscribe to no common standard.

  For the new arrival, this disordered abundance is the city’s most evident and alarming quality
. He feels as if he has parachuted into a funfair of contradictory imperatives. There are so many people he might become, and a suit of clothes, a make of car, a brand of cigarettes, will go some way towards turning him into a personage even before he has discovered who that personage is. Personal identity has always been deeply rooted in property, but hitherto the relationship has been a simple one – a question of buying what you could afford, and leaving your wealth to announce your status. In the modern city, there are so many things to buy, such a quantity of different kinds of status, that the choice and its attendant anxieties have created a new pornography of taste. The leisure pages of the Sunday newspapers, fashion magazines, TV plays, popular novels, cookbooks, window displays all nag at the nerve of our uncertainty and snobbery. Should we like American cars, hard-rock hamburger joints, Bauhaus chairs . . . ? Literature and art are promoted as personal accessories: the paintings of Mondrian or the novels of Samuel Beckett ‘go’ with certain styles like matching handbags. There is in the city a creeping imperialism of taste, in which more and more commodities are made over to being mere expressions of personal identity. The piece of furniture, the pair of shoes, the book, the film, are important not so much in themselves but for what they communicate about their owners; and ownership is stretched to include what one likes or believes in as well as what one can buy.

  This is one of the most important ways in which the city becomes legible. To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths-store of differently coloured, similarly priced objects. Yet, just as there are consecrated routes through its labyrinth of streets, so the welter of commodities is ordered by patterns of human usage. They are arranged in clusters around particular personalities; a velvet suit, a string of beads, a furled umbrella, a watch-chain, a caftan, an ivory cigarette-holder, each belongs to a conventionally established ‘character’, and the adept city-dweller is engaged in the constant manipulation of these stylistic quantities, continuously relating his self-presentation to his audience through the medium of such expressive objects.