Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  The idea that the city is in essence a rational structure, and that evidence of irrationality is a sign of decadent deviation from its intrinsic cityness is entirely comprehensible; it is even perhaps administratively and psychologically necessary. But it seems intuitively wrong. It also accounts for the curious sense of unreality that pervades so much of the literature of town planning and sociology. Reading Mumford, Howard, Geddes, Corbusier, Park, Weber, I can never manage to believe in their cities or their citizens. It is not that people and social lives in these books are too schematised and sketchy, but that they seem to belong to an entirely different culture from mine; they are Houyhnhnms burdened with a few problematic Yahoos; and the import of a great deal of conventional writing about the city is the complex necessity of persuading apes to turn into horses. The city I live in is one where hobos and loners are thoroughly representative of the place, where superstition thrives, and where people often have to live by reading the signs and surfaces of their environment and interpreting them in terms of private, near-magical codes. Moreover, these people seem to me to be not sports or freaks, but to have responded with instinctive accuracy to the conditions of the city. It seems worthwhile – at least as a corrective measure – to stress and explore some of the magical properties of city life at the expense of the customary rational ones, and to treat the evidence on this issue not as a vestige of some inferior, pre-city stage of human development, but as a possibly organic constituent of urban experience.

  Park’s essay, ‘Magic, Mentality, and City Life’, offers an ideal springboard for a discussion of magic in the city, because it is persuasive in everything except its conclusions, which seem so forced as to be capriciously untruthful. Park borrows his terminology and definitions from Lévy-Bruhl, calling magic a ‘pre-logical’ habit of mind and describing it as ‘a method of interpreting as wilful acts the incidents, accidents and unsuspected changes of the world.’ The primitive man, he argues, interprets everything according to his own impulses and purposes; by dramatising the universe in a way that is personal to the point of being solipsistic, he evolves a mental style of ‘participation’, of continuous imaginative gatecrashing on external processes. He has ‘no mental patterns except those offered by the mutations of his own inner life’ and sees the universe as a ‘society of wilful personalities, not an irrefragible chain of cause and effect’. Park observes, ‘We are all disposed to think in magical terms in those regions of our experience that have not been rationalised, and where our control is uncertain and incomplete’; and it is this statement which effectively prevents him, as a prisoner of his own axioms, from relating the mental style he has been describing to the urban condition he is trying to analyse. Indeed, he drives a blunt hatchet between the two:

  The reason the modern man is a more rational animal than his more primitive ancestor is possibly because he lives in a city, where most of the interests and values of life have been rationalised, reduced to measurable units, and even made objects of barter and sale. In the city – and particularly in great cities – the external conditions of existence are so evidently contrived to meet man’s most clearly recognised needs that the least intellectual of people are inevitably led to think in deterministic and mechanistic terms.

  Of course Park was writing (in 1924) at a time when anthropologists were interested in the savagery rather than the modernity of the savage mind, before Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists taught us all to hear the primitive dialogues rehearsed by civilised life. But Park is tethered here by more than an anthropological tradition: he cannot rid himself of the belief that Chicago is simply a megapolitan form of Plato’s city-state, an arrangement not a fate, a rational structure arrived at by rational men. Cities, he assumes (and his assumption is shared by most of his contemporary successors), belong to culture not nature.

  Yet to live in a real city is to live in just as indomitable an environment as any valley full of rocks and stones and trees. Streets, shops, cafés, houses, underground railways, office blocks are not, for most of us, matters of choice and reason merely because someone built them out of bricks and mortar and decided that they would be useful there. The city-dweller is constantly coming up against the absolute mysteriousness of other people’s reasons. To get from my flat to the nearest tube station, I have to walk round two sides of a grassy square full of pigeons, then cross a tumultuous main road on which heavy trucks persistently thunder. Park seems to suggest that because these trucks fulfil someone else’s ‘recognised needs’ I ought to say to myself: ‘I don’t mind being kept hopping in fear of my life for ten minutes at the side of the road, because quite clearly Mr X needs to transport his tractor parts to the Continent in container lorries, and I recognise his rights as a fellow-citizen to temporarily inconvenience me.’ In fact I feel about the road much as a primitive tribesman might feel about a dangerous ravine with a killer river given to unpredictable floods. I personify and apostrophise it, I attribute mysterious and malign volitions to its traffic, and it frequently disturbs my dreams. The example is perhaps frivolous: the general point is not. When the needs and reasons for things of ‘culture’ become sufficiently divorced from our own personal needs and wishes, they turn as intractably alien as anything in nature. A road full of container trucks blocking my path seems to me, at the time of barely-avoided impact, almost uniquely irrational; a park full of grass, trees and pigeons strikes me as a thoroughly sensible arrangement.

  And cities, by their nature, as nature, grow out of just such processes of separation of ends from means. The industrial megapolis is a direct product of the division of labour; its politics and economics dictate that each of us must find the purposes and directions of most of our fellow citizens increasingly incomprehensible, and often apparently hostile. Mutual self-interest in a modern city means nothing more elevated than that we have to put up with the goings-on of the neighbours in a spirit of reluctant, because finally impotent, toleration. If there was the faintest chance of you personally recognising the driver behind the truck window, or of him recognising you, things might be very different. As it is, we live in a world which is patently not of our own devising, in which we are perpetually baffled and inconvenienced by people we don’t know and whom we suspect we wouldn’t like. By contrast, the supposedly irrational life of the village seems logical and simple, its causes and effects clear and direct, its patterns of friendship, deference and hostility reassuringly predictable. (Surely a major reason for the passion of the urban middle class to possess country cottages is that, from the perspective of the city, life in the country has a refreshingly basic reasonableness – its rhythms, far from being primitive and magical, seem much saner and more straightforward than the perverse and complicated metres of city life.) For most of their inhabitants, cities like New York and London are nature, and are as unpredictable, threatening, intermittently beautiful and benign as a tropical rain forest. That they are in point of fact constructs is a mighty and deluding irrelevance. Park’s description of the savage mind groping with a universe of unrelated episodes and phenomenal accidents may apply as well in Earl’s Court as in the Congo. That ‘uncertain and incomplete’ area of experience which is especially vulnerable to magical explanation may – at this notably uncertain and apprehensive period of history – turn out to be the very city whose ills are the major insoluble affliction of our century.

  As we lose the immigrant’s habit of mind, as we cease to see the city in perpetual contrast to the alternative life of the country (which diminishes in area even faster than cities grow), so more and more does the city come to usurp and so resemble nature. There is a dramatic illustration of this process in the series of paintings which Claude Monet made of London between 1871 and 1914. The earliest paintings represent the city as a castellated frieze on the horizon, seen from across the wooded meadows of Hyde Park; a jagged rectangular construct imposed on a lyrical nature of sweeping curves and intense greens. One painting of this period shows the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridg
e, half-shrouded in mist in the distance, their gothic pinnacles and curlicues softened, as if they might fade altogether into the sky; while in the foreground, the violent hard-edged outlines of a half built jetty stand out against a river of pretty ripples. At this stage, the main content of each painting is the play of nature against culture, the arrogant rigidity of man-made shapes against the soft, diverse and promiscuous activity of things in nature. Later, in the brilliant studies of Westminster Bridge, painted between 1899 and 1904, Monet explored the visual osmosis which seemed to take place in the heavy industrial smog of the city; the bridge, an unearthly blue, soft in shape but strident and surreal in colour, exchanges its characteristics with the river and the sky. Its colour spreads into nature, while it borrows from nature the rusty oranges and yellows which might come either from the sun or from the flame of some giant industrial retort. The freest shapes come from the smoke from chimneys; the most intricate colours from the traffic crossing the bridge. It is impossible to know where nature ends and culture begins. Later still, probably in 1918, Monet painted three night portraits of Leicester Square in a style close to abstract expressionism. From a distance, they look like pictures of a murky field full of flowers; close to, we see a human drift of colour, left behind like a sediment on a ground of the kind of oily grey-green to which all the colours on the palette might repair if they were left to themselves. Illuminated signs and people’s faces provide the only points at which the paintings come defined and alive; the city is all movement, and the nature-culture opposition slides into unimportance compared to the tidal waves of social life which the paintings record.

  Monet’s progression rehearses a sequence of changes in the heart common, I think, to most people who come to live in a great city. As we adapt to it, it becomes our nature; we learn to feel about its docks, warehouses, neon signs, bridges, streets, squares, not that they are gross superimpositions (as we felt when we first arrived), but that they are as inevitable, as possessed of an intrinsic life of their own, as mountains and rivers. The currents of society which pass through them are, finally, as impersonal as the pressures, winds, and precipitations on a weather map.

  As surely as any mountain face, the city throws us back on ourselves; it isolates us, both as individuals and as tribal groups. Just as it constrains the expression of individuality, threatens us with absorption into total anonymity, so it makes self-assertion and projection into overwhelming necessities. As Georg Simmel observes in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, ‘man is tempted to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice and preciousness.’ Implicit in Simmel’s statement is the suggestion of utter arbitrariness: the city is so large, so amorphous, its ends so remote from us as individual members of it, that any eccentricity or gewgaw might function as a token of our personal uniqueness. The nature of the city precludes, or at least makes unnecessary, a causal relationship between personal and corporate life. The extravagances of Wilde and Beerbohm, of Tristan Tzara, of Fitzgerald’s doomed rich butterflies, were played against cities which had so lost their fixity of definition and purpose that they had reverted to inchoate jungles. And when reason is lost, magic is there to take its place; when people can no longer relate themselves to the overall scheme of things, to civic life as a programme and consensus, then they take to private attic-superstitions, charms, token spells to win their personal fortune from the mysterious, florid abundance of the city.

  Living in a city, one finds oneself unconsciously slipping into magical habits of mind. As I have tried to show in earlier chapters, surfaces are in any case of enormous importance to the city-dweller: he has to learn to respond to a daily cascade of people and places in terms of briefly-exhibited signs and badges. His imagination is always being stretched. In a junky antiques shop, I stop bargaining over what might be a late Georgian chair because the man selling it is wearing a navy-blue peaked Carnaby Street cap; his hair, dyed silver grey, curls coyly in ringlets round its rim. Just that hat and those curls make up a message, and I do not trust it; it belongs to the area of the grammar used by sharpies and plausible perfumed frauds. I know next to nothing about Georgian chairs, but the cap and curls are part of the everyday language of the city, and I understand – believe I understand – them as well as if I had actually seen the man spraying woodworm holes into the furniture with a sawn-off shotgun. All the time, one is isolating such details and acting upon them as if they were epigrams. Only rarely is one able to put one’s assumptions to the test, to discover incongruities between people and the badges which they wear; and one has to believe, however erroneously in fact, that people behave ‘in character’, and to trust one’s own powers as an interpreter of symbols. For me, this gives city life a curiously vertiginous feeling; I move on the streets always a little apprehensive that the whole slender crust of symbolic meaning might give way under my feet. At the same time I collect more and more signs, a jackdaw’s nest of badges and trinkets, continually elaborating the code which I use for deciphering my own world. When new cars come out of motor shows, I watch who buys them: who wears platform heels, buys Time Out or Spare Rib, ostentatiously sports Harrods carrier bags? One becomes as avid for permutations of details of passing fashions as any student of the stars, a Gypsy Petulengro casting horoscopes and predictions out of the colourful trash of urban consumables.

  More than that, we map the city by private benchmarks which are meaningful only to us. The Greater London Council is responsible for a sprawl shaped like a rugby ball about twenty-five miles long and twenty miles wide; my city is a concise kidney-shaped patch within that space, in which no point is more than about seven miles from any other. On the south, it is bounded by the river, on the north by the fat tongue of Hampstead Heath and Highgate Village, on the west by Brompton Cemetery and on the east by Liverpool Street station. I hardly ever trespass beyond those limits, and when I do I feel I’m in foreign territory, a landscape of hazard and rumour. Kilburn, on the far side of my northern and western boundaries, I imagine to be inhabited by vicious drunken Irishmen; Hackney and Dalston by crooked car dealers with pencil moustaches and gold-filled teeth; London south of the Thames still seems impossibly illogical and contingent, a territory of meaningless circles, incomprehensible one-way systems, warehouses and cage-bird shops. Like any tribesman hedging himself in behind a stockade of taboos, I mark my boundaries with graveyards, terminal transportation points and wildernesses. Beyond them, nothing is to be trusted and anything might happen.

  The constrictedness of this private city-within-a-city has the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its boundaries, originally arrived at by chance and usage, grow more not less real the longer I live in London. I have friends who live in Clapham, only three miles away, but to visit them is a definite journey, for it involves crossing the river. I can, though, drop in on friends in Islington, twice as far away as Clapham, since it is within what I feel to be my own territory. When I first came to London, I moved about the city much more freely than I do now; I took the liberties of a tourist and measured distances in miles rather than by the relationship of the known to the unknown. In Manhattan, on my first afternoon in New York, I asked the man I’d lunched with for directions to a part of down-town Brooklyn where I had to make a call. He puzzled over my question and eventually needed to look at my map; he had lived in New York for twenty-five years, and had last been to Brooklyn, just over the bridge from his office, twelve years ago. It is the visitor who goes everywhere; to the resident, a river or a railway track, even if it is bridged every few hundred yards, may be as absolute a boundary as a snakepit or an ocean.

  Inside one’s private city, one builds a grid of reference points, each enshrining a personal attribution of meaning. A black-fronted bookshop in South Kensington, a line of gothic balconies on the Cromwell Road, a devastated recreation ground between Holloway and Camden, a café full of Polish exiles playing chess in Hampstead, a shop window stuffed with Chinese kitsch, illu
minated sampans and revolving perspex table lamps with tassels, in Gerrard Street – these synecdochal symbols, each denoting a particular quarter, become as important as tube stations. And the underground railway itself turns into an object of superstition. People who live on the Northern Line I take to be sensitive citizens; it is a friendly communication route where one notices commuters reading proper books and, when they talk, finishing their sentences. But the Piccadilly Line is full of fly-by-nights and stripe-shirted young men who run dubious agencies, and I go to elaborate lengths to avoid travelling on it. It is an entirely irrational way of imposing order on the city, but it does give it a shape in the mind, takes whole chunks of experience out of the realm of choice and deliberation, and places them in the less strenuous context of habit and prejudice. My mental city is a small Manichean place, divided between the angels and the witches, and I tightrope-walk superstitiously between them. I have found childhood spells coming back to me; I avoid walking on cracks between the paving stones, I count lamp posts in units of seven, at zebra crossings I am especially wary of every third vehicle. From my study window, I see people surreptitiously touching the spikes of the house-railings in some occult combination of their own. In London, postal districts, though often thinly related to the changes of character in individual areas, have been endowed with curiously absolutist values. Prestigious ones, like SW1, SW3, NW1, NW3, are like talismans, more important even than the house or the street, magical guarantees of a certain kind of identity.