Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  When Louis Adamic arrived in New York in 1913, his choice of urban identity was clearcut: he would dress like a ‘movie swell’. When I came to London, there was no such dominant single style to follow. Even in the restricted circle of my acquaintances, almost everyone seemed to talk and dress in a different idiom. One man who worked on a literary magazine had the flowing hair and loose colourful clothes of a sedated pop star; another preserved the leather-elbowed jackets, Paisley ties and close-barbered hair of the Oxford and BBC generation of the 1940s. Janine dressed, thanks to the fashion department of her newspaper, in the icy glamour of the current collections; another woman of the same age wore a succession of trouser suits that looked like the discarded wardrobe of a seaside pierrot. A TV producer dressed up as a gangster; the director who worked under him tried to look like a country antiques dealer, with splashy cavalry twill trousers, brogues and neckerchief. A poet-critic lived entirely in black, like Olivier’s Hamlet; a radio producer wore electric blue American suits, while a writer on ballet went about encased in a squeaking chrysalis of pink patent leather. With the clothes came appropriate voices and manners, from mincing camp to laconic Bogartese.

  But one could not rely on the consistency of any of these guises. The next month, or at another time of day, they might be quite different. Hair and beards shrank and grew waywardly . . . significations, certainly, but of what it was impossible to say. The techniques of differentiated production described by Jane Jacobs have taken a large and important sector of city social life into the realm of fantasy and disguise: boutiques, hairdressers and photographers are the court-magicians of the city, experts at changing identity at a stroke. (The photographs of David Bailey are a case in point: his model-girls are used like plasticine, worked by the lens of the camera and the studio lighting into angular symbols, simultaneously much more and much less expressive than real people, converted into dehumanised diagrams of shape and shadow.) These facetious transformations are acted-out proofs of the hypothesis that in the city personal identity has been rendered soft, fluid, endlessly open to the exercise of the will and the imagination.

  Accustomed as we are to an instinctive, convenient belief in a mild social determinism, such arbitrary characterisations and appearances are very worrying. They are so casual, so irresponsibly free, so deliberately superficial, as to be insulting: in an impertinent thumb-nose fashion, they mock the ancient reverences of society for continuity, permanence, and controlled change. They wilfully flout our sense of social reason.

  Mary Douglas, the British anthropologist, has written about the way in which cosmologies find expression at every level, from the control of society, through the structure of its rituals and customs, to the control and management of the body, clothes, and hair. She argues (in Natural Symbols, 1970) that social constraint and bodily control are necessarily linked: that, for example, a loosely organised nomadic society is likely to favour long hair, loose clothes, fuzzy metaphysics and a religion of spontaneous ecstasy. Conversely, a tightly-knit society produces short hair-styles, rigid body controls, a condensed symbolic system, and a reverence for ritual and magic. These cosmological patterns are reflected in society’s art and intellectual life; and Dr Douglas shows how all our activities are shaped by the pressure towards consonance – everything must fit, from beliefs and ideas, to fashions, manners, and the restraint or release of our bodily orifices. Dr Douglas’s basic framework, which is elaborated with great detail and subtlety, is highly relevant to my purpose here. But it seems pointedly and dramatically inapplicable to modern metropolitan life. If it is to work, then any one member of a particular society should have relatively few options open to him. We might expect a big city to display the characteristics of several societies gathered together in one place, but it would be unreasonable to predict a state of promiscuous swapping around, in which people exhibited the signs of two or three separate cosmologies during the course of a year, or a week, or a day. (Indeed, Dr Douglas conspicuously refuses to confine her analysis to small tribal societies, and brings it to the centre of London, where she finds long hair and loose clothes performing their classical expressive role. Had she watched long enough, she might have observed the same people shearing their hair and converting to Roman Catholicism, and, by so doing, communicating exactly the same unconstrained freedom.) It is a characteristic of the city that two or more opposed cosmological sets can grow out of the same social earth: lax and hairy Rockers used to emerge from neighbouring doors in the East End to trim and finicky Mods, as did Hell’s Angels and Skinheads. Sociologists have usually tried to explain these seeming-contradictions by unearthing smaller and smaller levels and distinctions in the internal stratification of the working class. It is an unfortunate assumption that wherever the city evades the rhetoric of class-analysis, then it must be the details, not the nature, of the rhetoric which is at fault. For class-determinism simply does not help us very much when we confront the random and wilful patterns of personal style and behaviour in the city. One is always in the position of stating categorically that people ought to be living in one way, and discovering that in fact they are living in quite another.

  Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theatre of society at large. The city is one such situation. Its conditions effectively break down many of the conventional distinctions between dream life and real life; the city inside the head can be transformed, with the aid of the technology of style, into the city on the streets. To a very large degree, people can create their cosmologies at will, liberating themselves from the deterministic schemes which ought to have led them into a wholly different style of life. To have a platonic conception of oneself, and to make it spring forth, fully clothed, out of one’s head, is one of the most dangerous and essential city freedoms, and it is a freedom which has been ignored and underestimated by almost everyone except novelists.

  In a brilliant essay written in 1958, Robert Warshow described the movie gangster as a contemporary urban tragic hero:

  The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club. For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world – in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and brightly lit country – but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world. And the gangster – though there are real gangsters – is also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination. The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster; he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.

  This seems to me to be an inspired analysis of the Bogartian hero; but in the last two sentences the moralist and the rationalist in Warshow get the better of him. His distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ cities funks the important truth that the city we actually live in lends itself to displays of lurid artistry – flesh and blood ‘criminals’ can, all too easily, turn themselves into ‘gangsters’, living out the Bogartian fantasy in real bullets, real knowledge. The city as a form is uniquely prone to erode that boundary between the province of the imagination and the province of fact.

  During the 1960s, the twins Reggie and Ronnie Kray dominated the London underworld until their trial in 1968, when they were brought down in an extended public ritual and sent to prison for thirty years. Their biographer John Pearson, who was initially commissioned to write about them by the twins themselves, has produced a quantity of fascinating evidence about the way in which they managed their careers in his book, The Profession of Violence (1972). I want to concentrate on the dimmer of the two, Ronnie Kray
; a man whose grasp on reality was so slight and pathologically deranged that he was able to live out a crude, primary-coloured fiction, twisting the city into the shape of a bad thriller. His story is an urban morality tale, and to understand it is to understand one of the deepest of all the wellsprings of city life: he shows how a style, cheaply come by in the emporium of the city, may completely supplant every forecastable reality, every determinable social pattern. He is city man as wilful artist; and those of us who live in cities are perhaps a good deal closer to him than we like to think.

  He grew up in Vallance Road, Bethnal Green, one of a close tangle of working-class streets in the East End, where, before high-rise rehousing projects broke it up during the 1960s, there was a tightly loyal, if sometimes violent, community life. Ronnie’s mother dominated the family, dressing the twins in matching angora woollen hats and coats on the money which his father raised as a minor baron of the street markets. Ronnie was slower than Reggie, but he did learn to read; in his teens he pored over books about Lawrence of Arabia and Orde Wingate, and got into street-fights. He collected a library of biographies of Al Capone and stories of gang warfare in Chicago in the ’twenties. Equipped merely with a low IQ and the background of Vallance Road, he might have become a seedy small-time protection thug; as it was, he was determined to make his story books come alive and, amazingly, for a remarkably long time, he succeeded.

  At twenty-one, he was still living with his mother, cosseted, homosexual, given to fits of savage petulance. He was comfortably off, on a steady dribble of protection money and the profits of various street-market fiddles; and he rigged himself out in gangster-style clothes – dark double-breasted suits, tightly knotted ties and shoulder-padded overcoats. He had a large gold ring, a thick gold wristwatch and diamond cufflinks; it was a classic uniform, and he followed the books slavishly. When he learned that Chicago mobsters had their own barbers, he arranged for an East End hairdresser to turn up at Vallance Road every morning. He ordered shirts and shoes over the telephone, practised yoga, and tried living on a diet of raw eggs. He bought a dog, and started a collection of guns. Whenever he went out, he had a swordstick and a .32 Biretta.

  When the twins took control of a local billiard hall which they used as their headquarters, Ronnie made himself responsible for the atmosphere. He turned it into a poolroom out of an American novel, with low lights and swirling cigar smoke (assiduously blown about the place by Ronnie before it opened). By this time they had become successful racketeers. Reggie bought a Mercedes – symbol of a rather conventional kind of middle-class affluence – while Ronnie bought a series of American cars, Buicks and Pontiacs, low-slung, bulbous, bemedalled in chrome. Reggie stuck to the East End, Ronnie moved around the city, first to Chelsea (to a flat he won in a gambling game), later to a luxury flat in Walthamstow. John Pearson describes its glories:

  The decor was cockney Moroccan: rugs, leathercraft, silk hangings, brass trays had all been purchased on a recent visit to North Africa. Some of the rooms were without curtains or carpets, but in the living-room there was a large screen television, several big bright-flowered china vases, gilt mirrors, a yard-long plaster figure of a recumbent alsatian and an oil painting of a naked boy in a Victorian gold frame.

  ‘I feel happy’, he told people, ‘now I’ve got a place of my own.’

  Ronnie’s trigger-happy over-enthusiasm brought him a jail sentence from which he was soon sprung by his twin. Prison psychiatrists found him, variously, educationally subnormal, psychopathic, schizophrenic, and insane. Photographs show his face to be as heavy as an Easter Island sculpture, with the cruel soft mouth of the sentimental bully. No one in his right mind would trust him, one would think. But one would be wrong. Outside of prison clothes, able to afford the costumes for his roles, he was brilliantly plausible.

  Local papers portrayed him as a benevolent businessman, always the first to give colour TV sets to children’s charities; he liked to be seen (and reported in gossip columns) in the company of well-known actors and politicians. He lunched at the House of Commons dining-room, courted Tom Driberg, MP, and made a thoroughly favourable impression on Emanuel Shinwell, who arranged for him to make a VIP trip to Nigeria, where he was going to help finance the building of a new city. A famous photograph showed him sitting side by side with Lord Boothby on a sofa; and in a letter to The Times designed to squash the scandal which had bloomed round the photo, Boothby described Ronnie as the ‘gentleman who came to see me, accompanied by two friends, in order to ask me to take an active part in a business venture which seemed to me of interest and importance’. When Ronnie went into hiding in a flat on the Edgware Road, he solaced himself with long-playing records of Churchill’s wartime speeches. His two favourite books of this period were both archly sentimental: Boys’ Town and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. He wept over Charlton Heston’s film portrayal of Gordon of Khartoum.

  But, depressed at the failure of his scheme to build the Nigerian city, Ronnie knifed a black boxer in a Fulham Road drinking club, before being driven out to dinner by his chauffeur. The man was said to have ‘half his face beside him on the floor’, needed seventy stitches, and got nicknamed ‘Tramlines’.

  Ronnie’s behaviour was gloriously inconsistent. He was a thug, a respectable businessman, a philanthropist, a socialite, a mother’s boy, a patriot, a strong-man-with-a-heart-of-marshmallow, a gunman, an animal lover, a queen, at the end, a tweedy country squire with his own estate in Suffolk. Caught at any one moment, his identity had a perverse dramatic perfection. An astonishing number of people never doubted that he was what he seemed. For every audience, he had a different voice and face, and people who saw him performing in one role did not guess the existence of others. His repertoire would have been the envy of many versatile professional actors, and he could effortlessly slip from part to part during the course of a single day. The secret lay in keeping his audiences separated; it was only when he was in the dock that they came together, and then it was to destroy him. Yet neither of the twins seems to have grasped at the time that their art was essentially illusionism; that, once the strings and connections had been exposed only contempt, ridicule and revenge could lie ahead. Pearson writes of their showing in court:

  The twins seemed far more concerned with the appearance they made than with mere details of defence. Since they believed the outcome was now more or less decided, they would concentrate on the impression they would leave posterity. This was the moment when they sealed their myth. What they wanted was to be remembered as the great undefeated heavyweights of crime.

  In the words of the prosecuting counsel, there was ‘a terrifying effrontery’ in the twins’ deeds: they had made an ass of society, and in the dead factuality of the courtroom, society would get its own back. The trial did not ‘seal the myth’ of the Krays; rather, it broke it down into a long rehearsal of sordid facts. The dream smashed up, the daring impersonation turned into the mere lie, and society gave Ronnie only one identity in exchange for the many he had invented to exploit and puncture it. There is no elasticity in the part of a convicted murderer.

  By all conventional standards, Ronnie Kray was an extremely stupid man. Yet in the lucky disconnections of the city, he was able to turn his infantile fantasies into realities which, for many years, were unquestioned, even seriously respected, by the most worthy of establishment greybeards. It would be silly to say that people like Shinwell and Boothby should have had more sense when they took Ronnie at his face value. In the world of business and affairs, most things have to be done on the strength of appearances: the problem is that in the city – unlike a village, a club, or a Rotarian fraternity – appearances are easy to come by, and very hard to test for authenticity. For any one citizen, outside the immediate community of his work and family, the city is nearly all dark: moments of exposure are bright and fleeting . . . a face here, a handshake there, a glimpse of the cut of a suit, the loudness of a tie, the sound of an accent, a quick association between the make of a car and it
s corresponding social type. The city is a natural territory for a psychopath with histrionic gifts. Closed societies live on history and continuity; reputation there comes hard and slowly. But the life of a city happens in discontinuous moments, its continuity is a continuity of appearances, of style. And style, in this sense, is quite neutral, equally at the command of the intelligent and the stupid, the upright and the vicious. Since the Kray trial, a special police detachment has been working to ensure that never again will such large-scale criminal enterprises flourish in the gang-land of the East End. (Actually, the Krays’ major offence appears to be that they did not confine themselves to that quarter, but moved ‘out west’ into Mayfair and Soho. They wanted more of the city than the police were prepared to recognise as their due.) If the police are really serious in their intentions, they will probably have to begin by demolishing London.

  Ronnie Kray, precisely because he possessed the psychopath’s freedom from the usual constraints of consonance and continuity which afflict most of us, was able to shop wantonly around in the emporium, choosing whatever stylistic attributes took his fancy at that moment. He thrived on mobility, changing roles, locales, social groups, boyfriends, with unflustered, bullish energy. Endlessly on the move, he never stayed long enough for his roles to catch up with him and bog him down. When he was forcibly kept in one place – once in prison, twice when he was hiding out from the police – he fell into a state of acute, maudlin, paranoid depression.