Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  There is another characteristic style in the personal column: knowing, jokey, defensively ironic: Of course I should not be here and neither .should you, it says, overloudly:

  Female, 27, blonde, buxom, brainy/Virginia Woolf, seeks independent amusing, vastly intelligent male/or Leonard Woolf character . . .

  Bald, bearded male, full of Prufrockian hesitation, seeks shy, gentle, literate woman 30–40.

  The aggressively partying manner of these advertisements makes them communicate even less than the hollow descriptions of professional men in search of idylls; they are joshing, shyly vain, too hard-worked in their humour. This is the language of bruisedness, of feeling too exposed and brittle to venture more than a nervous thrust-and-retraction of oneself, like a snail trying the air with a tentative horn. In the cold definition of print they sound thin and shrill, and the people behind them seem to shrink lamely from the boldness of their own sallies.

  One of the darker freedoms of the city is the way in which it puts the individual at liberty to barely exist, and the personal columns bear witness to the stunted conception of character which the city permits at its worst. ‘Man 50, div. New Statesman-reader’ and ‘Attractive f., youthful 40s’ are the other side of the coin to the gangsters and dandies; people who have dwindled, even in their own eyes, to rudimentary stumps of identity, like peripheral characters in a novel. For them, their isolation has become their most distinctive feature, and they are possessed by it as wholly as junkies. The latent discontinuity, emptiness and hapless solipsism which the city always threatens have consumed them. They merge into the fog, self-immolated shadows in search of the beam of light which will give them their identity back again. It is significant that both the personal column advertisements and the computer dating slogans continually harp on the theme of love as twinship: the aim is not so much to find someone who is your complementary opposite, but on coming across your double. Is there anyone quite like you? Only the genitals should differ: in every other respect, your imagined partner looks like your own reflection in the mirror. Love turns into a way of awakening and establishing the self, yet another mode of desperate self-projection.

  For in the fog we all become solipsists, creatures of the mirror. Confirming our own existence preoccupies us; every action is bent to that end of self-revelation and exposure. In T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, Sweeney, the prototypical corrupted city hero, knowing, bored and irredeemably alone says:

  I knew a man once did a girl in –

  Any man might do a girl in

  Any man has to, needs to, wants to

  Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.

  Well he kept her there in a bath

  With a gallon of Lysol in a bath

  Nobody came. And nobody went

  But he took in the milk and he paid the rent.

  He didn’t know if he was alive and the girl was dead

  He didn’t know if the girl was alive and he was dead

  He didn’t know if they both were alive or both were dead

  If he was alive then the milkman wasn’t and the rent-collector wasn’t

  And if they were alive then he was dead.

  For this man, who may or may not be Sweeney himself, the most final and dramatic of all actes gratuites serves only to further ambiguate his own existence, sending him packing into the solipsist’s limbo where the I is both the only reality and the source of the growing conviction that there isn’t any reality at all. Sweeney is led by these delicate and depressing convolutions into a state of sluggardliness, lapsing, like the murderer Barnadine in Measure for Measure, into a gross boredom with and contempt for the world.

  But if you understand or if you don’t

  That’s nothing to me and nothing to you

  We all gotta do what we gotta do

  We’re gona sit here and drink this booze . . .

  Stirrings of the self – advertising for your double, doing a girl in, writing a poem or going on a pub crawl – tend, too frequently for comfort, to expire in a Sweeneylike brutish lassitude; the world contracts to the shape of the immediate local situation. Time is splintered and foreshortened, space becomes the sleazy here-and-now; the urban antihero, ugly, knowing and indifferent, emerges. He inhabits the city as if it were hell and he a fallen angel, too immoralised even to notice that it is a bad place. This, at least is the customary, official version of the consequences of isolation in the city. The urban honeycomb by its very nature clearly threatens to subvert the structure of society at large. If society needs continuity, cohesion, interdependence, the collective life, to go on functioning as a working body, the city encourages discontinuity, fragmentation, privacy and an egocentric personal life – and the loner, whether isolated by fate or by choice, is a constant symbol and reminder of the city as an intrinsically antisocial mechanism. Concern with isolation need not spring from philanthropic motives; a place seething with lonely people is the most dangerously atavistic territory in the world. Nor need isolation be confined to individuals; the most frightening of all urban images, from the point of view of the social administrator, is of whole groups of people behaving with the self-immersion and foreshortened perspectives of the loner or outcast.

  In the nineteenth century, the growth of the sprawling tenements in Bethnal Green, Mile End, Hackney, Bow, to the east of the financial centre of the City of London, caused enormous apprehension amongst the middle class. For their own health and safety, the affluent moved as fast as possible to the northern and western suburbs during the 1880s, drawing a broad cordon sanitaire around the proles in the marshy east. Yet, thus isolated, the working class seemed even more alarming. Mayhew saw them as an exotic tribe with differently shaped skulls from those of respectable people. Charles Booth, whose survey of London was otherwise remarkably sympathetic to the poor, was able to say of the poorest of the East Enders:

  They render no useful service, they create no wealth; more often they destroy it . . . They degrade whatever they touch and as individuals are perhaps incapable of improvement; they may be to some extent a necessary evil in every large city . . .

  And Charles Kingsley, lecturing to an audience of Bristolean ladies in 1857, conjured that evil chimera of the mob which was to haunt late Victorian England:

  We have . . . to face the existence of a dangerous class . . . into which the weaker as well as the worst members of society have a continual tendency to sink. A class which, not respecting itself, does not respect others; which has nothing to lose and all to gain by anarchy; in which the lowest passions, seldom gratified, are ready to burst out and avenge themselves by frightful methods.

  It is the generalism of this rhetoric which gives it away; the most basic power possessed by the working class – the power to menace – grew in direct proportion to its isolation from the rest of city society. Decent people simply did not know the tenement dwellers of Stepney, and what they did not know they feared, and turned into figures, phantoms, of nightmare or worse. People who live in city ghettoes are liable to have hostile and paranoid myths built up around them; some make their own ghettoes, some find themselves ghetto-dwellers perforce. Once the blacks, the Jews, the poor have been isolated, they turn into the bogeymen of society’s most disturbed dreams. In England, the dream took on a seemingly traumatic reality on 17 May 1900, when the working class took to the streets in extravagant celebration of the relief of Mafeking. Drunken louts stormed into august clubs and offices, and the mob looked as the mob was expected to look – alien, conspiratorial, uncontrollable, capable of destroying civilisation in an orgy of thuggery. The word Maffiking passed into the language as an active participle expressing the hyperactivity of holidaying ghouls.

  Since then, it has been an axiomatic principle of public housing that a policy of dispersal and infiltration should be pursued. The isolation of the blacks or the lower working class in large urban ghettoes has been widely felt to be tantamount to inviting a revolution. The idea of ‘mixed housing’ has been heavily propagandised, and
suburban high-rise developments scatter their inhabitants in innocuous units of a few thousand here, a few thousand there. A great deal of English social legislation has been motivated by fear of the terrors of the mob; and in the United States, ‘urban renewal’ has consistently proved to be simply a process of concreting-out the undesirable elements who have begun to take over the centres of large cities.

  People who are isolated from the mainstream of social dependencies and ambitions are always potential subversives, and it is in society’s best interests to keep them as closely in touch as possible. ‘Marriages’, said Charles Booth, observing the destructive patterns of behaviour which obtained among single people of both sexes in London, ‘are to be encouraged’; and he went on to quote a Congregationalist minister of his acquaintance who described marriages among the poor as ‘permanent moralities’. We have come a long way since then. Isolation is promoted as a deeply shameful condition, and the twentieth-century family – a uniquely constricted institution of unprecedentedly small numbers and avid powers of rapid and expensive consumption – is canvassed as the optimum standard of human life. In America, the process has gone so far that it is hard for an unmarried person over the age of twenty-five to watch television without feeling he is a freak. One is barraged with advertisements which announce that you should have a baby, a small boy to take to the ball park on Saturdays, a dog to guzzle something called Alpo, and a wife with an unremitting interest in the workings, needs, whims, and occasional breakdowns of the digestive tracts of all members of the family, not excluding the dog. After a few hours of this, torn between panic and nausea, you start looking around the room for the bassinet. In the world of TV ads, loneliness is worn like a Scarlet A; it is the prerogative of the man whose breath smells bad, whose nervous system has pooped, and who, through his own fecklessness, stays feebly on the bottom rung, scorned by the boss and the toothpaste-sparkling stenographers alike. To be alone is to fail yourself and society; away from the family or the boys at the office, you are not likely to consume enough, you may think too much, and you should certainly be made to feel guilty and perverse if you take any pleasure at all in your predicament.

  Yet despite this insistent plugging of the oppressively collective life, people clearly do enjoy the privacy and anonymity of the city. Not knowing one’s neighbours may be a privilege, not a dreadful fate; to be without a family is, for some, a luxurious escape, and an honourable one, from a state of repressive social bondage. The rules and condition of isolation, like those of other arts, may be liberating and invigorating to those who properly understand them and a straitjacket only to those who don’t. Taught to fear the isolation both of ourselves and of others, commanded and cajoled to seek the cosiness of the herd, aloneness is an increasingly difficult craft to practise.

  The isolate in the city may either find his loneliness so intolerable that it erodes his identity into a vestigial cipher, or he may discover that it offers him the most complete personal freedom that can be had in modern society. The instruments of communications technology, which to the unhappy loner can seem as wounding as racks and thumbscrews, can be pleasant tools for keeping one’s distance, managing one’s appearances and disappearances, making deliberate and controlled social choices. The telephone, the post, the subway or underground system, the newspaper and coterie magazine ought to be the arteries of urban life, not symbols of its capacity to starve and alienate the individual.

  It is only a seeming paradox that the city, with its enormously high density of habitation, should give rise to feelings of such intense solitude. Lonely people often feel sick with guilt that they are suffering in the middle of such apparent abundance; what is wrong with them that they should be singled out to watch TV while millions are on the street below their window? At night, when the roisterers come out of the pubs, the loner hears their laughter as a cacophony of maniacal shrieks. He hates their jokes, their girls, their disturbances of the peace as they call good night to each other across streets. The slam of their car doors enlarges in his head to a wave of thunderclaps, and they are doors which are always closing on him.

  Yet his solitude, which he has been taught to think of as an illness which he has brought upon himself, is the prize as well as the penalty of city life. And some of the people of the metropolis have learned, in spite of the weight of propaganda and ideology which has been stacked against it, to value solitude and manipulate it creatively. It will take a new chapter to continue the discussion into the territory of inner space, and the mental cosmologies of people who have adjusted to the isolation, the essential privacy of the city.

  SEVEN

  The Magical City

  It has been a traditional axiom of classical writing about the city that urban structures are the domain of reason; that they are emancipated from the primitive, magical life of rural society. Lewis Mumford, following his mentor Patrick Geddes, saw the city as the natural habitat of civilised man; an environment of artifice, it was the highest expression of communal rationalism, and the problems it spawned could be solved by the exercise of reason. It was a question of finding the right transportation system, the logical pattern of urban housing, the right balance between work and play areas, the correct proportion of green space, and so forth. To all of these, Mumford applied himself with assiduity and vision, and he has infected several generations of architects and planners with his logical, level-headed optimism. Understand technics, he argues, and you will understand the underlying rational forces of the city as a human community. It is simply an exercise in controlling these forces rather than letting them control us. Mumford’s essential tone is now part of the bloodstream of town planning, and his voice is audible whenever new schemes for improving the city are introduced. In January 1973, an editorial in The Times summarised the Greater London Council’s programme for the ‘renewal’ of Covent Garden:

  The plan drawn up was for the area as a whole. The number of places to live within the area was to be doubled; the uses of leisure and pleasure were to be cultivated; a differently aligned road system was to be supplied; vehicles and pedestrians were to be vertically segregated; a ‘line of character’, in which old buildings and spaces were preserved, was to stretch in a middle band from east to west, otherwise, it was to be largely a matter of demolition and rebuilding.

  This is a fair measure of planners’ rationalism, a diluted compound of Geddes, Mumford and Corbusier. What is important about it is the fundamental assumption which it makes about the nature of city man – that convenient, hypothetical creature whose needs are being so logically and economically satisfied in the Covent Garden programme.

  The founders of the most influential group of urban sociologists, the Chicago School, were confident of the unassailable truth of the axiomatic rationality of city man – a notion which they had inherited, as they inherited much else, from the theoretical writing of Max Weber. In the bibliography of the Chicago School compilation, The City (1925), Louis Wirth flatly asserted that:

  There is a city mentality which is clearly differentiated from the rural mind. The city man thinks in mechanistic terms, in rational terms, while the rustic thinks in naturalistic, magical terms.

  Robert E. Park, the co-founder of the school, contributed two articles to the symposium which are of special interest here; one on magic and one on the mind of the hobo. He saw both as vestigial relics of a rural past; the hobo mentality and the superstitious magical cosmology were impediments to urban assimilation, and new American citizens must be weaned from them, or reasoned out of them, if they were to succeed in the city. Cities, in other words, were not places for negroes to practise obeah with other people’s nail-parings, nor for pensioned-off frontiersmen to ride imaginary ranges. More recently, a latter-day Boston Augustinian, the Christian sociologist Harvey Cox, has argued (in The Secular City) that the mobility, ‘desacralisation’, and ‘disenchantment’ of city life have effectively liberated us into reason, and have exorcised the mystificatory spins of tribalism.


  This overweening emphasis on the intrinsic rationality of the city offers a tantalising clue as to why urban isolation is regarded as such a dirty secret. In a rational community, the disconnected loner is a sport, a mutant; he exists in the minority statistics of the outcast and the maladjusted, as someone who has failed to recognise the consensus on which civic life is founded. Since Plato, definitions of the city have been essentially political: a place became a city by virtue of its legislative autonomy, and its economic power and complexity. Like a house of cards, the city was seen to depend on a featherweight balancing of interests and agreements. The myth of the fallen city, of Babylon and Byzantium, still haunts us: cities grow on reason and interdependence, they fall when private and sectarian interests swell without regard for the community as a whole, when people give themselves over to the egotistical pleasure of buggery and paganism. Mr Boffin took Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as the starting point for his education; and there was good reason for the Victorian obsession with classical decadence. As London grew at a spectacularly faster rate than any other city in history, so, perhaps, it fostered the seeds of an even more dramatic collapse than those of Babylon, Byzantium or Rome. The city was to be saved by reason and Blue Books, and government bodies and private philanthropists invested vast amounts of time and money in social surveys, plans, projects, hypotheses. Victorian literature on London, Manchester and Birmingham is voluminous and dull, an ocean of statistics. Its sheer bulk reflects both the depths of our great-grandfathers’ fears of the inherent susceptibility of the city to corruption, and the strength of their conviction that it could be rescued from that fate by knowledge, by taking thought. Speeding towards the millennium, what one needed most to decelerate ones progress was more research. Isolation, superstition and tribalism – the mortal enemies of citizenship – could, so it was thought, be eliminated by education and rational planning.