Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  General Booth, whose In Darkest England and The Way Out is a remarkably sensitive and humane study of the nineteenth-century city, suggested that the Salvation Army should set up an ‘Enquiry Office for Lost People’:

  Perhaps nothing more vividly suggests the varied forms of broken-hearted misery in the great city than the statement that 18,000 people are lost in it every year, of whom 9,000 are never heard of any more, anyway in this world . . . Husbands, sons, daughters and mothers are continually disappearing, and leaving no trace behind.

  Some of these people were no doubt embracing the darkness of the city, using its streets as an escape, and holing up in some obscure quarter with an assumed name and a new life. Others must just have fallen through, finding themselves fronted with a terrible dead blankness – because they had lost the bit of paper with a crudely inked address, or it had run in the rain, or they had misheard, or the house had been pulled down . . . no name on the doorbell, no address for forwarding, the mistrustful stare of landlady, or new tenant in braces and shirt open at the neck. Suddenly the city must have changed from a labyrinth with a route to its centre into a hopeless scatter of streets, too many to count or imagine, unsignposted and menacing.

  For the Victorian writer, the industrial fog which hung over London for so much of the year was very much more than a chemical inconvenience, or even a romantic visual effect; it was the supreme symbol of the city’s capacity to make people disappear inside it. At the end of the century Oscar Wilde was complaining that the London peasouper was an invention of the novelists, and that the city would be a notably healthier place if the convention were dropped from literature. ‘The whole metropolis’, says Dickens of a grim morning in Our Mutual Friend, ‘was a heap of vapour charged with the muffled sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.’ It is an image which holds true for Dickens’s vision of London at large – an ectoplasmic soup from which characters can be fished out then dropped back at will. Narrating the novel, he moves about London as if he were its travelling soul, illuminating particular groups of characters then losing them in obscurity. When people separate in Dickens, it is often in fog or mist: lovers literally fade from each other’s sight, just as grotesques emerge in dim silhouette, mistaken at first for tricks of the fancy. The city is always swallowing its citizens, receiving them into a dark opacity which is too thick for even the novelist to penetrate; and it is in this moral fog that the most shabby and evil acts are perpetrated. So Fascination Fledgeby, a scheming cuckoo who has come into a paper fortune, disappears, alas only temporarily:

  The murky fog closed about him and shut him up in its sooty embrace. If it had never let him out any more, the world would have had no irreplaceable loss, but could easily have replaced him from its stock in hand.

  In the sprawling casts of Dickens’s fiction, in which the prolific creation of characters is a by-product of the city itself, it requires a great deal of conscious effort merely to keep the people connected; the fog is omnivorous, and in every novel Dickens is persistently losing his characters then finding them again. Meredith accused him of ‘damnable iteration’; but restatement and repetition are an inevitable part of the fabric of the life of a city in which loss so perpetually threatens.

  Clean Air acts and smokeless zones have largely succeeded in depriving us of the great nineteenth-century symbol for losing people. Our modern means are cleaner, less aesthetic and more brutal. People disappear now behind the smoked-glass rear windows of taxis, or into the tartarously-tiled maws of tube stations. They are taken away. The last we see of them is a raised hand, smudgy over a bobbing crowd of heads, or diminishing in size as the traffic lights turn to green. A few months ago, I lost a friend I’d known for five years when she went into the station at Earl’s Court. It was, I think, a typical city departure: a stiff kiss, a shifty sideways glance, then blank – nothing at all but the polyglot faces of strangers . . . Arabs, Italians, milk-fed Americans, Australians glumly hulking duffel bags, and F. nowhere. In small places, people have to go on living with their social failures; in London there is an uneasy ease of separation. One is so likely to be left only with a phone number in an old address book, and that answered by a strange voice, curt and suspicious. We continually drop each other back into the fog.

  It is no wonder then that making connection should become such a central obsession in the life of big cities. To meet and hold on to other people is to fly in the face of what the city threatens to do to us; when isolation and loss are so casual and likely, we have to work as hard as novelists to keep our society going, to keep in touch. Much of the social work done in cities is of this simple, connective kind. A caseworker in Islington spends nearly all her time introducing members of the Cypriot community to each other. Many of them are single women working as machinists and seamstresses, living almost exactly as Jewish immigrants in the garment district of the Lower East Side did seventy years ago. They work at home, are paid low ‘piecework’ rates. They speak little English, and apparently are often unaware that other Cypriots are living on the same street. For women especially, isolated by language, by the custom of staying in the home, and by bare subsistence wages, it is alarmingly easy to get lost, to drift into a cocoon of uninvited privacy. It may take state agencies and charities to find even their neighbours for them.

  For although the city offers a multitude of contacts, each of them tends to be so brief and dislocated that it involves no more than an elliptical interchange of signals. For the newcomer, this is baffling and infuriating. You want continuity and the possibility, at least, of permanence; what you get is a checkover, so rapid that the encounter is over before it has had time to begin. When I first came to London (and I have felt it since, in two moves within the city), I felt I was clutching at disappearing straws. Every conversation I had seemed as if it might turn into a friendship, or so I hoped at the first flutter of words. I was slow and lumbering; other people all appeared quick, polished and hard – their syntax seemed quite different from mine, a grammar that sped from object to object like the squashed prose of a telegram. It commanded assent and recognition more than argument, and I was lost.

  On tube stations, I still rake the faces in the crowd for one I know. I expect coincidences, can never quite rid myself of the conviction that London is an enormous village, that one day one might wake up to find that one recognised everybody. And if the face is not familiar, then the clothes, the magazine, the book may be. Seeing someone reading the New Statesman or the New York Review on a tube, I quicken absurdly, sensing a friend.

  Such impulses drive one to those parts of the city which are both public and consecrated to a shared cultural taste. Loners foregather in bookshops, especially around the poetry shelves, picking over other people’s reading. To see someone else liking the latest Auden is almost to have a friend already. And on Sunday afternoons, the art galleries fill up; glum isolates wander through the grotto of portrait miniatures at the Victoria and Albert, or around the Day-Glo adventure playground of the Tate. Just looking at and liking the same painting might be sufficient for intimacy; who has not fantasised a conversation spontaneously struck between two devotees, mutually enthralled by the brushwork of Nicholas Hilliard? It may never happen, but in the cathedral atmosphere of the gallery, set aside in parenthesis from the impersonal scatter of the rest of the city, it is an always-tantalising possibility. The blistering isolation of a weekend spent by oneself is softened and mulled in communal contemplation: the gallery, cinema, concert hall fill with the lonely merging selves that have grown as swollen and blubbery as porpoises through the long winter of Saturday night.

  By Sunday, the fog can seem impenetrable. Not surprisingly, it is the favourite day for suicides; for this is the day when everybody is supposed to have a family to go to, a joint on the table, and a woozy afternoon in the rubble of talk, scattered papers and a bad ’fifties film on the TV. But if you are alone, things sharpen unbearably: hypochondriacs remember glands forgotten since last week, the TV set is a
source only of malevolent philistine squawks (nothing is more enraging than Lucille Ball in a smug family comedy), and one is tempted to put a brick through its lined face. It is time for dialling people who have gone to the country for the weekend, and listening to the mocking repetitions of the ringing tone, counting to twelve before hanging up.

  A Christmas evensong in a London church: St Luke’s in Redcliffe Square. The congregation is divided into two groups: the majority are elderly women, in cheap winter coats and shiny plastic basketwork hats. They have rouged mouths and narrow, contracted jaws. One or two are very old indeed, and their silver hair is balding, showing jagged patches of unnaturally pink skull. They do not look like grannies on Christmas cards. Then there are the young: scrubbed, anxious, in pairs rather than couples. Girls who might be secretaries or primary school teachers; a pimply young man whose eyes swim before thick spectacles, and who has the long donkey face of a premature Mr M’Choakumchild. There is hardly anyone between the ages of thirty and sixty. One man is black, and he looks cold, woebegone and a long way from home.

  St Luke’s was built for the prosperous Victorian tradesmen and their families and servants – who originally lived in the square. The fashionables now go to church in Kensington or Chelsea, and the congregation has shrunk away from the wide walls and side aisles into the centre. But each member keeps his distance; few pews have more than one occupant, and the hymn singing is quavery, a ghostly chorus, conducted by a jolly choirmaster whose instructions never quite reach us. He loses a verse from the end of one carol, and the voices wind raggedly down like an exhausted piece of clockwork.

  It seems a dim consolation, dimmer than the Victoria and Albert. To me, a long-unaccustomed churchgoer, the words of hymns – especially carols – have an embarrassing forced intimacy. ‘Love’, ‘bliss’, ‘tender’, ‘baby’, ‘sweet’ are the same words one heard in crooners’ songs in my adolescence. God is addressed as a baby doll, a sentimentalised Jesus with the big eyes of a lap dog or the infant Petula Clark. And the special Christmas language, of fellowship, wassailing and merry gentlemen sounds an acid joke in the grey wintry reaches of Earl’s Court. The vicar talks in his address of ‘the parish’ in an anachronistic Oxford accent, and one wonders if the bounds are still beaten on the far side of the Fulham Road, from the gasworks, up past the council flats to the deserted hospital. Yet this thin fiction – of loving and being loved, in a world nostalgically located in a thatched village of, perhaps, 150 years ago – is still the most evident contribution which sentimental Christianity has to make to society. Each Sunday it draws its thinning congregations of the devout, the home-sick and the lonely. People still go to church to make friends; in a strange city, the church is sometimes their only link with a familiar community, and as Sunday squeezes, they gravitate to these under-heated yellow-lit mausoleums, to sing scrappily together and to pray in icy privacy. In the evening after the service, there is always a knot of people under the illuminated globe over the church door, reluctant to break up and go back to their separate flats and rooms.

  A snapshot from the life: a rocking tube, shuddering through the most deeply subterranean of all London tunnels, the Piccadilly Line. The faces of the passengers hang and shake, each one closed and solemn. A neat girl with a patent leather handbag on her knees has travelling eyes; they come to a stop on an advertisement pasted up opposite from where she is sitting. It says ‘Are you sitting opposite the new man in your life?’ The stretched-out Evening News beneath it stirs and lowers; an elderly West Indian in London Transport uniform stares back at the girl, whose eyes start moving again, over the ads for secretarial agencies and insurance companies. At Green Park, the girl gets off, and the West Indian runs a horny forefinger down the list of runners in a horse race at Newcastle.

  During the last two or three years the computer-dating industry has mushroomed spectacularly in London; a new kind of private-enterprise social service which boldly exploits the shame of loneliness, and answers to the peculiarly big-city condition of sexual isolation. In 1890, General Booth wrote:

  Everything in (a village) community lends itself naturally to the indispensable preliminaries of love-making and courtship, which, however much they may be laughed at, contribute more than most things to the happiness of life. But in a great city all this is destroyed. In London at the present moment how many hundreds, nay thousands, of young men and young women, who are living in lodgings, are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other, or of any of the other sex! The street is no doubt the city substitute for the village green, and what a substitute it is!

  Booth pointed to the importance of the marriage bureau, but he envisaged something too localised, too humanly personal to match the appalling size and scope of the city. Outside of certain close-knit community groups in the metropolis – the Jewish quarter of New York, for instance, where the marriage broker has always performed a respected service – such bureaux have catered to a tiny minority of the lonely. They have been small, eccentric institutions, and they have never really attempted to deal with the city on the city’s terms, finding it easier, I suspect, to stick to country widows and ex-officers stranded in provincial towns. That, at least, is their image: discreet, genteel, prim.

  But the computer-dating agency is brashly citified. It has, so it assures its potential clients, super-modern electronic techniques for reaching into the fog and slotting isolates together. The computer is a streamlined, twenty-four-hour, infallible Dickensian imagination: it knows where everybody is, sees connections invisible to the mere citizen, can summon a plot in a few clicks for the dullest and most ordinary of characters. It is, significantly, largely a creation of its advertising, and it is in the plausible, nagging appeal of its slogans (most of them located on tube trains) that its primary business is done. The image of the city which these slogans promote is of a crowd too numerous and dense for the individuals within it ever to find one another. ‘Only Connect!’ shouts one, confusing E. M. Forster with a martinet station-controller. ‘If the last person to phone you was your mother, isn’t it time you . . .’ insidiously wheedles another, poking like a dentist for the raw nerve. ‘Meet your opposite number’, says another blandly, for in computer city a partner exists for everyone, and right now they are waiting for the phone to ring, telling them their punched card has come up. ‘Is there anyone quite like you?’ has a fingerprint superimposed upon it, simultaneously celebrating personal uniqueness and the ability of the computer to transcend it.

  These slogans imply a close association between the computer and the city. Both are mysterious and impersonal. (One brochure makes great play with ‘flow diagrams’ which explain nothing, but help to mystificate the process of selection with a generous dressing of quasi-technical language.) Both store vast quantities of individuals whose contact with each other is determined by forces beyond their control. Both cities and computers are symbols of what we tend to find most frightening in technology – their workings are equally imcomprehensible, their decisions arbitrary and unarguable. But the dating agency offers us a benign computer, a computer which will take trouble with us as individuals, which will enter our personal lives, not to intimidate or separate us but to bring us together, to find us lovers and friends. It is surely this paradox which makes the slogans effective; the suggestion that the benign computer promises magically to revive the fading dream of a benign city.

  But it works, of course, largely by hokum. The questionnaire of one vastly successful agency which claims to have sixty thousand people in its bank of suitors is a tissue of pretensions to scientific and psychological efficacy. In its ‘Personality Profile’ section, one is asked to mark one’s position on continua between such poles as ‘Introvert–Extrovert . . . Modern–Traditional . . . Generous–Thrifty . . .’; in a series of questions about ‘Attitudes’, one has to register one’s response to questions like ‘Is communism a vice which should be eradicated from the face of the earth?’ and ‘Do you consider money to
be the root of all evil?’ (There is a sinister, strategically placed question here, ‘Do you strongly object to receiving advertising through the post?’, on whose answer more, I suspect, than your prospective soulmate may depend.) There is a colour test in which eight colours have to be listed ‘in order of preference’, and you are asked to state how ‘attractive’ you are. The manager of the agency said to me that the questionnaire ‘has been designed by psychologists to work in a psychological fashion’. Just so. None but the very careless or the very innocent could fill in the form honestly; it is so crude and vague that ‘Personality Profiles’ based on its answers could only be those of monsters or matchstick men. I imagine that the success of the business is based largely on the fact that any lonely man and woman – matched in age and height at least – will have more in common in their loneliness than in their mutual detestation of communism or love of money. One hopes so, anyway. But the pretence of depth-probing and the whiff of the complexities of punched cards and transistorised circuitry makes the operation credible; it convinces the customer that he is up against a system as intricate and baffling as the city which has temporarily defeated him. ‘We exist’, said the manager, ‘to supply the best possible types of dates,’ and – smooth, hygienic pandar – he conjured a hypermarket of gift-wrapped, bed-ready people, ripe for action and instant consumption.