Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  That ‘different point of view’ is one from which the world offers no continuity, no future to invest in. It belongs very specially to the city, whose particular social discontinuities have exacerbated – or confirmed – the conviction of our age that temporariness is a fate we have been condemned to by history. The consumer is the hero of a life considered as a series of fleeting occasions. He lives as if both past and future had been foreshortened to residual stumps: both the beginning and the end of things are in stifling proximity to each other. Ecstasy, terror and insouciance combine in him into a permanent style. The doom which Nicole carries with her is her familiar; it infects every action, makes survival miraculous. Like Nicole (and like both of those urban, supremely temporarist artistic communities, the Yellow Book group of the 1890s and the Dadaists of the 1920s) the consumer’s habitual form, in both art and life, is the epigram – that compressed, disconnected, transistorised circuit of language which transcends history and continuity by the exactitude with which it illuminates the instant. Buying a rubber alligator is an epigram: a rapid, oblique, witty gesture that transforms an object into an idea by the mere act of acquisition.

  There are examples of this impulse all around us. Most of the goods we consume come in two kinds: as objects of nutrition and investment, or, in a slightly modified form, as epigrammatic ideas, liberated from their strict function. In the domain of food, for instance, whimsical and exotic eatables – foods whose consumption conveys an idea about the consumer as much as it nourishes him – are usually very close relatives of cheap commonplace foods. Thus the melon shares its texture, its flavourlessness and its botanical genre with the vegetable marrow. Melons, however (like the elusive sturgeon, whose roe when potted turns into caviare), come from faraway places and are luxuriously expensive. Beef is the staple family meat; in its immature, synthetically anaemic and notably less nutritious form as veal, it belongs to a style of cuisine. Marrows, cods’ roes and sirloin steaks are investments, bought for their nutritive value; melons, caviare and veal escalopes are, like Moroccan birdcages and rubber alligators, objects whose consumption is its own point. Their most important function is to tell us something about the people who buy them; they belong to the hazardous but necessary urban art of self-projection.

  I am beginning to trespass here on the ground of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1972), but I should like to explore this general idea a little further, and broaden it to include two centrally important classes of objects, cars and houses. Cars clearly provide a highly developed communicating code, ranging from superfluously durable investment objects to the most flimsily transient of stylistic affectations (the vintage Rolls to the Bond ‘Fun Bug’). But the melon–marrow pattern of generic similarity, combined with a sharp distinction between investment and consumption, still holds true. When British Fords introduced their new Capri model at the 1968 Motor Show, it had broadly the same mechanical layout and basic capacity as their long-running Cortina. But the Cortina, a sensible-looking boxlike car, is thoroughly functional: it might most readily be associated with commercial travellers and fathers of families – it is efficient, upright, thrifty without being cheeseparing, a middle-class utility object endowed with about as much glamour as a washing machine. The Capri, happily echoing the name of the holiday resort and ‘caprice’, was really no more than a body-shell, impressionistically reminiscent of the high-haunched shape and ‘spring’ of the American Ford Mustang. This pretty carapace was locked over the guts of the prim Cortina. Its most original feature was the way in which the company advertised and sold it. The minimum price purchased a standard model; then, for increasing sums, all sorts of extras, accessories and boosts of engine capacity could be clipped on. These were registered in prominent chrome insignia on the car’s rear end. The purchaser of a Capri is thus able to advertise a sequence of personal choices; in a neat antithesis, the Ford Motor Company are able to market both a mass-produced vehicle built to a single design and a symbol of discriminatory consumption – the actual symbols of this discrimination are such things as dummy air scoops and strips of chromium plate which are pinned up along the side of the car.

  There is a similar degree of deliberate uselessness or inefficiency built in to some of the most solid ‘investment’ cars; an inefficiency which effectively advertises their owners’ wealth while at the same time playing its small part in the diminishment of that wealth. The motoring correspondent of the Guardian recently pointed out that the slab-fronted shapes of the Rolls and the Daimler make them ‘aerodynamicists’ nightmares’. Like the bleeding-out process applied to expensive cuts of veal, these imposingly solid porticos of bumpers, radiator grilles and windscreens (not unlike the fronts of the Victorian town houses of wealthy merchants announcing their encastellated position above the mob) impair the vehicles’ nutritional value. Presumably anyone who buys a Rolls or a Daimler can afford to ignore the loss of maximum speed and increased amount of petrol required to haul its fortifications through the resisting air. His indifference is a part of what he has paid for, a symbol of his freedom to choose independently of the constraints of utility and economy.

  Cars have had to carry an excessive burden of symbolism; they have been decked out with every sort of frippery, used as promiscuously as tailors’ dummies to promote a style. The car is a special simulacrum of the self; it goes where its owner goes; it forms his outer suit, his most visible and ubiquitous expression of choice and taste; it is most often seen briefly, on the move – like the citizen himself, it has to make its message plain in an instant. The epigrammatic possibilities of automobile design have been realised in a handful of models; the best known are, perhaps, the Mustang, the Volkswagen, the Morris Minor, the Rolls, the Jaguar, the Citröen 2CV, the Cadillac – and all these cars have been used as cult objects, to make a condensed statement about the people who drive them, as legible as the symbols on a medieval shield seen in the thick of a battle. Earlier this century, before over-population and suffocating traffic jams alerted us to the fact that the motor car is one of the city’s greatest menaces, the city was seen as the special province of the automobile. An imaginary city, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, and a real one, Los Angeles, were built as shrines to the vision of the citizen as motorist. His changed scale of speed and distance gave rise to a city plan in which individuals were perceived as voyagers: the neighbourhood and the street were replaced by the superhighway, and the old supportive systems in which one knew who one was by the reflections given back by familiar faces from next door or the corner shop gave way to the bold, curt announcement of identity made by the motor car. On an eight-lane carriageway, travelling to the city at 60 mph, a Cadillac running side by side with a Volkswagen is as eloquently wordless a dialogue as the modern city often affords. The peculiar fakery of the car-customising business – the air vents which take in no air, the superfluous body-bulge over a drive shaft which has no need of that extra space, the extended bonnet projected over a short engine – deftly transforms a sense of self into a series of easily-read slogans. This one is powerful and ambitious, this one rich and secure, this one sensible and down-to-earth, this one sensitive to line and colour. Small adjustments, ironies and qualifications can be clipped on, until the car is a working model of how you see your self, a stand-in, able to communicate at speed without any further effort on your part.

  With houses, in the city at least, their epigrammatic possibilities reside primarily in the postal district in which they are located. Certain areas at both ends of the property market, clearly belong to the ‘investment’ category: Belgravia, whose denizens talk of it as ‘just round the back of Harrods’, or, several tens of thousands of pounds lower down, Hounslow or Catford. Some London suburbs are traditional class ghettoes; ownership of a house in, say, Golders Green or Cockfosters, merely reflects the income bracket and status within the middle class of the purchaser. But there is a great deal of soft territory where people buy houses to announce something distinctive about themselves, and not just that t
hey have a certain quantity of money. I have already mentioned Islington and Camden Town as places of this kind; as I write, it is becoming a very clear signal of personal identity to buy a house in Kentish Town, a recently resurrected dark quarter of the city, to which those who are discriminatory, left of centre, but scornful of the swarm of Islington camp-followers, are currently flocking. The NW5 postal district is moving into the pantheon of style, where it joins N1, NW1, NW3, SW6, W8 and others. A year or two ago it had all the characteristics of an area awaiting rediscovery: heavy dilapidation, absentee landlords, houses let off in single rooms, a high proportion of immigrants and students, and relatively low property prices. As these things go, it was a junk quarter, a natural piece of raw material for the stylistic entrepreneurs. Its very unlikeliness was part of its charm. Kentish Town is a mess of hilly streets around a tube station, sliced into segments by noisy through-roads. Most of the houses are survivals of the most notorious period of Victorian speculative jerry-building. They were erected in short terraces of what were accurately described by their builders as ‘fourth-rate residences’, at a cost of about £200 for a single house. Their doors and windows are cheaply gabled and scalloped, and in line on the terrace they look like brick railway carriages, their decorations skimped, their narrow front strips of garden a long balding patch of tarry grass with motor scooters parked under flapping tarpaulins with holes in them. In 1885, the magazine The Builder said of the contemporary jerry-builder that ‘he found a solitude and leaves a slum’. Kentish Town is one such slum; but time, and the pressure on metropolitan living space, have rendered its cramped terraces quaint . . . it now has ‘possibilities’. Like the Moroccan birdcage, it is ripe for transformation. Jeremy and Nicola, out on Sunday for a trip around the house-agents’ boards, find its ugliness lovable; for the first time in its history, Kentish Town is being chosen, adopted, an object to advertise not to conceal.

  It has become an idea, the most precious of all commodities in this curious system. Three years ago I lived just above Kentish Town, and it was merely a place to be crossed in order to arrive at somewhere more interesting. Now it has an exact identity; it communicates thrift, intelligence, foresight, a refusal to be taken in by the showy charms of more obvious quarters. Thus transformed, it can now be used as a badge of affiliation to a caste, a symbol not of status but of taste and identity.

  Just as things can be converted into ideas, so ideas may be used as commodities. In his 1972 Thomas Jefferson Lecture, the American critic Lionel Trilling remarked:

  It can be said of ideas that they are, like money, a mobile and mobilizing form of property. They are, to be sure, accessible to all and held in common, but as they come to have power in the world, it is plain that a peculiar power or, at least, status accrues to the individuals who first conceive them, or recognise them, or make them public. Men of ideas, perhaps even more rapidly than men of money, move towards equality with men of birth. Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot appear on the eighteenth-century scene as sovereign princes of intellect.

  But it was not until late in the nineteenth century that ideas, like so many other things, became cheap and mass-produced, and entered the urban industrial market. With the creation of the penny paper with its enormous circulation and trade in bizarre disconnected facts, the notion of the ‘man of ideas’ became available in an inexpensive popular form. The press barons, Harmsworth and Northcliffe, virtually invented a new kind of proletarian reading matter, aimed at the undifferentiated mass of city workers. (One indication of the overwhelmingly urban circulation of these papers is the fact that they consistently treat the country either as a weekend play-park or as the habitat of hay-chewing bumpkins who arrive in London asking policemen where the church is. The editorial slant, the jokes, the gossip columns of Tit-Bits and the Daily Mail were exclusively directed at readers who were self-conscious city-dwellers.) Unlike the sensational stories of the Police Gazette and other early precursors of the popular newspaper, Tit-Bits, and the vastly successful Harmsworth encyclopedias, built their circulations on the growing craze for popular knowledge, conveniently chopped up for instant consumption in two-sentence, short-worded paragraphlets. Strings of ‘astounding facts’ – the highest mountain in Asia, the heaviest man in history, the latest figures for Brazilian coffee production, the eating habits of the peregrine falcon – trailed down column after column of cheap, rather hairy and smelly newsprint. By memorising these useless scraps of information, one might become an ‘educated man’, possessed of those commodities which, in this age of expertise and skills, promised wealth and success. Insofar as these newspapers seriously pretended to be a force of mass education, they cynically exploited a gullible public; they flung a pigswill of silly statistics at their readers – perhaps it was the cheapest and laziest way of finding something to print. It required no reporters, only a rack of encyclopedias and HMSO reports. For the man on the train or the tram, anything would do – all he was presumed to want was a page full of words to hide behind.

  But it was an astute strategy. Tit-Bits seemed to offer every man the chance to make himself an expert in something. He could find his own private corner of the learned world. Rather than devouring the columns wholesale, he could pick from them certain obscure fields and cultivate them intensely – everything about falcons, or mountains, or Brazil. Expertise, in this form, was the most accessible kind of individuality. From the outside, one might look no different from one’s fellows, but inside, in the head, there one might be – if not a prince of the intellect – at least a junior executive, a figure of some real, if secret, authority. It was an illusion pathetically and hypocritically fostered by the tycoons: the strongest recommendation for Tit-Bits was that it was innocuous. At a time when the masses were widely feared to be capable of some unspeakable revolution, the paper offered them a soft, anaesthetic pap which actively prevented the possibility of thought and the intelligent exercise of reason. The longer the working class were kept interested in the trivial, the exotic and the worthless, the better the middle classes slept at nights. Few readers of these papers had any other standards to judge them by, and habit and repetition were the surest guarantees that the working class would grow to love what it was given (a stage-managed coincidence which has, unhappily, survived into our own time and into other media as the classic and incontrovertible argument for every new tub of dirty bathwater).

  Yet these papers did help to assuage a genuine deep hurt: the tragic conviction that in a city mass, alone, unnoticed, one has lost one’s personal identity, become just another blank face in the crowd. The encyclopedia offered a balm to this profoundly private anxiety. Like the city itself, it was available to everyone, an impersonal mass product; but what lay inside, your individual reading of its pages, could be yours alone, endowing you with the dignity of a solitary empire. George Gissing opened a short story – called, with heavy irony, ‘The Salt of the Earth’ – on a description of the ‘morning tide of humanity’ passing over Blackfriars Bridge. Then, zooming in on a single clerk, arbitrarily picked out from this wave of identical faces, Gissing says: ‘No eye surveying this procession would have paused for a moment on Thomas Bird.’ But Gissing, as attentive as God to the humblest of creatures in his world, does pause, and he describes the contents of Mr Bird’s head:

  He delighted in stories of adventure, of bravery by flood or field, and might have posed – had he ever posed at all – as something of an authority on North Pole expeditions and the geography of Polynesia.

  This is Tit-Bits stuff; a parcel of trifling odds and ends of information, yet desperately precious to its possessor for it is the only thing which gives him a place in the world, a sense of who he is, an individual status in the crowd. The Thames, for Gissing as for Dickens, is the supreme symbol of London the city – a place where it is easy to drown in the stream, and in which survival depends on finding some raft, however thin or precarious, to keep one’s head above water. Such snippets of knowledge and dim intimations of personal uniqueness
do provide a raft, and the conditions of the city make us cling to them with a hope and a vanity which can, from the outside, seem pathetic or absurd.

  Ideas are both the cheapest and the most intensely private objects with which a man may furnish an identity. They are also uniquely clubbable: groups of devotees huddle cosily behind them, ‘like-minded people’, coteries, cliques, cells. In the city, there are clubs for people to have weekly discussions of the work of Pushkin, or Theosophy, or Buddhism, or Humanism. The back page of the New Statesman is the London noticeboard for groups like this; here the Muswell Hill Humanists and the South Place Ethical Society advise that this Friday they will be considering the future of internationalism, the role of the free school, the origins of anti-semitism. Eleanor Rigby, a keen Fabian, puts on her hat and the face which she keeps in a jar by the door, and takes a tube to a rented hall with browning photos of obscure dignitaries on its walls; at the break for coffee, kindly provided by mesdames Lovegrove and Massingham, Miss Rigby is ardent on the issue of workers’ control. November is the happiest month for these covens: at the darkening of the afternoons and the first frosts, people come in out of the cold, glad for the chance to talk of the world; but by spring, these gatherings thin out, and halting friendships, made over dry petit beurre biscuits and argots as occult as Mayhew’s thieves’ slangs, die in the April sun. At the meetings I have been to, the groups of people have looked much the same; single women with worried faces and genteel accents, bearded balding men in duffel coats and threadbare university scarves, doomed to a perpetual studentdom, and grizzled men of impoverished distinction, like unemployed bishops. When I went, it was as much to look for a Friend as to meditate on the future of socialism, and I felt kin to others there; the same stutter, words spilling out for the first time in the day, the same nervous glance at the watch and wrench at going back out into the dark street. For us, ideas were an excuse to gather; they filled out the dead spaces, protected us from too much of ourselves, made us, for the space of the evening, people with a purpose, with cards of identity. In the Fabian Society – and perhaps in the Theosophical Society too – you become a citizen.