Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  Alcohol, the approved drug of ‘straight’ society, makes its users voluble and communicative; in moderate quantities it increases social participation, fortifies one’s conviction that one is part of a consensual community. But pot and acid intensify the sense of privacy to the point where the outside world becomes almost entirely blotted out. Smoking hash, I have watched the people I was with growing smaller, heard their conversation as a fading hum of nonsense syllables. One’s vision contracts, one becomes acutely conscious of one’s own body, feels the ‘buzz’ in one’s limbs as if one was coated with electric fur. Music, paintings, words turn into disembodied stimuli. They lose their contexts, and you can appropriate them for your own mental furniture. An improvisation by Miles Davis turns into a long squeeze of toothpaste; you watch it thinning and thickening, coiling on itself as it falls. The image, like most images in psychedelic writing (R. D. Laing’s The Bird of Paradise, for instance), does not at all illuminate the music, rather it deprives the trumpeter of his creation and makes it over for the smoker’s fantasy. The automatic surrealism, which is an inevitable accompaniment to being high, tears experience out of the real world by the roots and uses it for play or decoration or as a mystical aid, like a watergong, for seeing not it but the perceiving self.

  In such a state of mind, it is not hard to believe that the world is a dream, a three-dimensional moving panorama by Beardsley and Rossetti. What matters is that this egotistical and aesthetic view of life converts everything into food for the omnivorous I. Much of the hotch-potch of San Francisco Buddhism, dotty nutritional science, dope mysticism and star gazing is half-baked and second hand; its claims to being a culture or counter-culture are both pompous and impoverished. But these ingredients, however silly they may seem in themselves, add up to something more: they are the feathers, samples of blood and urine, and charred twigs of a magical ritual – and the magic in whose service they are employed is not to be so lightly dismissed.

  The childish manner, the affected spontaneity, the baby clothes (shawls, loose dresses, and, for men, jean outfits that look like overgrown romper suits) of Annette and her kind have a special significance here. Lévy-Bruhl saw magic as a ‘pre-logical’ habit of mind: childhood is the pre-logical state of human development, and at the Gate it is used as a symbol of disaffection for the rational adult world. Annette still sleeps with a felt rabbit, plays with melting candlewax, gazes distractedly at comics (Oz, the English ‘head comic’, is a watered down version of a spectacularly savage American genre, whose most notable examples have been the deranged expressionist strips of Robert Crumb); but she is a bug-eyed innocent. Her play is whimsical and contrived; it is performed as much for the benefit of spectators as for herself.

  Playing at being a Red Indian in a bandanna, or an Asian peasant in a tie-dyed sari, or a workman in a boiler suit, is a carefully stage-managed announcement. It trumpets a commonplace city freedom – the freedom to be who you want to be, without bonds of class, nationality, education, occupation, or even sex. It further expresses an allegiance to the irrational, mystical or magical values which the Red Indian, the peasant or the labourer are presumed to possess. The Mohawks and Cherokees of Notting Hill Gate belong among the lofty savages of Fenimore Cooper, not in the downtrodden reservations of the real USA. It is also a homage to ‘dressing-up’. Grown-ups don’t dress up and indulge in make-believe; children do, and the boutique is the industrial equivalent to the Edwardian dressing-up box, that grotto of old wedding dresses, turbans, yashmaks collected by a grandfather on furlough, and clumpy shoes all buckles and straps. There is something of the same coy, schmaltzily ‘fetching’ little-girlishness in the way the young rig themselves out in their incongruous costumes on the Portobello Road – elderly children smirking complacently under broad-brimmed hats. But they take childhood seriously, more seriously than politics, at least. The tradition of childhood represents their only real foray into history; they see themselves as terrible Blakean infants, or as Wordsworth’s boy evading the growing shades of the prison house, or as Alice, wise in her naïveté. To be a child is to be in touch with dark, para-rational, para-urban forces, and to see the equivocations, arrangements, and compromises of adulthood as a lunatic charade.

  The mind of the child, as it imposes order on the abandoned scatter of the city, is superstitious, egocentric, full of taboos. In a moving autobiographical essay on the growth of sensibility in a city-bred child, Adrian Stokes described how he reconstructed Hyde Park out of a bundle of parental prejudices and overheard rumours, and from lurid scraps of theology borrowed from his nannies. The park sheep were ‘wicked and guilty’, the keeper an omnipresent ‘magician’. The boy Stokes practised a continual, and characteristically urban, habit of synaesthesia; learning to arrange visual scenes in terms of their accompanying noises – ‘a street became informed for me by the sounds of a barrel organ . . . Thus the street was not only organised; it became an organism, it became alive.’ The traffic on the misty rim of the park was absorbed into the gloomy metaphysics of low-church Anglicanism:

  ‘Time like an ever-rolling stream, bears all her sons away.’ We used to sing that hymn, the thin sounds torn by the wind. I had never seen a rolling stream. I thought of it as the low thunder of the London traffic. And Time was the gloomy sky over the Park, which, by turning into night, bore away the soiled fretfulness of all happenings there each day. The Park monuments, then, especially the would-be works of art, possessed in my eyes an almost masochist quality in their utter poverty; impotent under the lash of Time, borne away each night to build their grimy ugliness anew each dawn. Between Marble Arch and Albion Gate there is a kind of Gothic steeple whose function is to provide several vents of drinking water. To this globuled monstrosity in particular I attributed a horrible masochism. There lingered no romance in its poverty nor in the poor frequenters; and as I was not allowed to drink such public water, I shunned it for being something blind and grey.

  Here is a world laid out arbitrarily and passionately in terms of the self. The ‘public water’ which he is forbidden to drink, and the monstrous fountain from which it springs, are especially taboo: they belong to the Others – the impoverished tramps and wicked sheep, figures of all that the polite child is not. The water, traditional symbol of life, is ‘blind’, like the insensible sheeplike class of men whose thirst it slakes. It is a passage of considerable power and complexity, impregnated with an unconsciously ferocious snobbery, as well as with the charge of imaginative invention of the lonely child. I think it provides a very exact model of the way in which isolated, desocialised people respond to the city, putting up a grand scaffolding of theology and superstition around quite small situations of social placement and distance. Strangers turn into evil untouchables, there are uncrossable boundaries and monumental symbols. A hymn sung by a religiomanic nanny, or a few words found at random in the I-Ching, might reveal the inner structure of the whole city, with oneself at its centre.

  The young tribalists of Notting Hill, approaching the city with their mishmash of half-read Blake, oriental mysticism and self-conscious babyishness, try for the same vision, even though their efforts are much less intelligent and articulate than Adrian Stokes’s elaborate demonology. An anthology of poems, Children of Albion, brings together a rag-bag of verses from the ‘underground’, mostly written by people in their twenties at the time of publication. A very large number of these poems are simply about living in London, and, more particularly, about living in Notting Hill. They are full of borrowed apocalyptic images; they render their authors’ dazed emotional states in a turgid flow of substantives. The Blakean ‘&’ sign is used to join up the sounds, smells and sights of an environment too fecund to articulate, and through this swill of sensations there runs a steady thread of homemade magic, a squinny-eyed view of London as a wizard’s coat of occult signs. A poem called ‘vision of Portobello Road’ finishes up with a whimsical exclamation mark at the impossibility of decoding it all:

  Screaming tricycles and mel
ons

  lettuces and ripe negroes,

  stripe shirt,

  and others proud walking.

  It’s gay and sad and rich enough!

  Grammar has dropped out of this language altogether, and we are left with a string of mechanically surrealist transferred epithets and lazy antitheses. This is not poetry so much as a symptom of a condition; like much else in the anthology, it betrays the acutely taxed state of the writer’s imagination – his fuses are blowing, and only abstraction and exclamation can save him from combustion. Beyond his last line lies, to take a phrase from another poem in the book, ‘the sunpyre fire city’ . . . the city of primitive magical apocalypse where reason and order are futile checks against the electric storm of sensations.

  These people at the Gate have clearly embraced the idea of a magical city. Their clothes, their language, their religious beliefs, their folk art belong to a synthetically-reconstructed tribal culture ruled by superstition, totems and taboos. Most of what they have is borrowed, affected and contrived; it reflects a sturdy unoriginality. But perhaps its very tawdriness is a measure of the urgency of the need which has created it. We live in a society in which magic is supposed to have been outlawed or outgrown, in which secular rationalism is presumed to be the standard by which everyone lives. Yet at the same time we have created an environment in which it is exceedingly hard to be rational, in which people are turning to magic as a natural first resort. Television clergymen fondly interpret the evidence of Notting Hill Gate or the box-office returns of Jesus Christ Superstar as the first twitches of a spiritual reawakening. That seems, to put it mildly, doubtful. The kind of magic I have been examining is profoundly solipsistic, self-bound, inward. Its very ignorance of plan or creation is its most obvious strength. One would not deduce the existence of God from the Portobello Road; but one might register from it the force of the amoral, the relative, the anarchistic. One might also discover, with shock, one’s own isolation, the space-suit of privacy and its attendant rituals, in which one travels in a state of continuous locomotion through the city. Leaning against the spiked railings of the Salvation Army Hall, next door to a Woolworth’s and a Wimpy bar, one could hardly be further away from Plato’s city-state and its supremely intelligible contractual relationships. The Gate opens not on to the gentle pot-smoking whimsy of Gandalf’s Garden, but on a ruined Eden, tangled, exotic and overgrown, where people see signs in scraps of junk and motley. It may look like affectation, a boasting juvenile pretence, but perhaps it is real – a state of natural magic to which the fragmented industrial city unconsciously aspires.

  EIGHT

  Two Quarters

  It is, perhaps, a symptom of our superstitious habitation of the city that we map it, quarter by quarter, postal district by postal district, into a patchwork quilt of differently coloured neighbourhoods and localities. For in fact urban man is less of a robin, less tied to rigid territorial boundaries, than his country cousin. The ‘Italian’, or ‘Jewish’, or ‘black’ quarters are not exclusively inhabited by Italians, Jews and blacks; they are more or less arbitrary patches of city space on which several communities are in a constant state of collision. A colourful and closely knit minority can give an area its ‘character’, while its real life lies in the rub of subtle conflicts between all sorts of groups of different people, many of whom are visible only to the denizen. Conversely, a strong cultural community can exist quite outside the geographical definition of a quarter. I live in a community whose members are scattered piecemeal around London (some of them live outside the city altogether); the telephone is our primary connection, backed up by the tube line, the bus route, the private car and a number of restaurants, pubs and clubs. My ‘quarter’ is a network of communication lines with intermittent assembly points; and it cannot be located on a map.

  Yet place is important; it bears down on us, we mythicise it – often it is our greatest comfort, the one reassuringly solid element in an otherwise soft city. As we move across the square to the block of shops on the street, with pigeons and sweetpapers underfoot and the weak sun lighting the tarmac, the city is eclipsed by the here-and-now; the sight and smell and sound of place go to make up the fixed foot of life in the metropolis. Place, like a mild habitual pain, reminds one that one is; its familiar details and faces – even the parked cars which you recognise as having been there in that spot for months – assure us of a life of repetitions, of things that will endure and survive us, when the city at large seems all change and flux. Loyalty to and hunger for place are among the keenest of city feelings, reverenced and prized precisely because they go against the grain of that drift towards the formless and unstable which the city seems to encourage in us. My two quarters are parts of London where I have lived; a square in the north east of the city on the border of Islington and Holloway, and a square in Earl’s Court, on the scruffy western fringe of Chelsea and Kensington. They are not ghettoes, and to prise them apart from the rest of the city entails a considerable amount of surgery on the veins and arteries which, in real life, keep them organically joined to the messier and much larger entity of London. (This is not merely a problem of piety. The outstanding weakness of much classical sociological study of the city, from Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto to Willmott and Young’s Family and Kinship in East London, is its insistence on the neighbourhood as a culturally self-sufficient community – as if it really was a village inside the city. My quarters are both chronically dependent places, and when they look most like villages or ghettoes it usually means that some people are trying very hard to play at being villagers or persecuted refugees, which is not at all the same thing.)

  The northern square is not actually a square at all. It is three sides, each with its own rather odd, cheapskate style of Victorian architecture – one grand with balconies and rotting porticoes, one derelict-gothic, and one orotund fake-Georgian terrace. It looks as if it had been put together by a shady and squabbling trio of speculative builders, while their fourth friend found a more profitable racket: the south side of the square is a cutting, in which the goods trains of the North London Line from Broad Street to Richmond rattle through where the slaveys ought to have been steaming in a line of basement washrooms. In the centre of the square, there is an ornamental garden, mostly grass and flowering shrubs that never seem to be in flower, a children’s playground, the superstructure of a bomb shelter which has been turned into a pair of public lavatories, and a padlocked tennis court whose gravelled surface has cracked and subsided as if it had had its own earthquake. It is a square that architectural writers about the area leave conspicuously alone; it shows its own history, of unimaginative enterprises, both private and civic, all too well. Lots of people have had ideas for it at one time or another; none of them have been very bright ones. On the Georgian side, someone thought he would smarten his house up by slapping a coat of gravel-stucco on it three inches deep and painting it nightdress pink; and just by the railway line, on the central space, a truck owner built a large wooden-and-corrugated-iron hangar to unload his lorries in. Floodlit, on a winter evening, it looks as if he is putting on a passion play, a ghostly Islington Oberammergau.

  Yet in the late nineteen-sixties, the council put a conservation order on the square – perhaps because it was, almost, a square and squares are in fashion; perhaps because no one from the council had ever seen it (or maybe because they all lived in it); perhaps because Islington Council has a perversely sophisticated taste in architectural curiosities – and it was this, the most recent idea, which dominated the life of the square while I lived there, skunklike, in a newly converted basement on the west side. For eighty years the square had been deserted by the middle classes for whom it had originally been built. They fled north, scared of their proximity to the East End and its suppurating brew of cholera and typhoid germs. By Edwardian times, their only relics were the kept women of gentlemen in the City, who sat out, so people remembered, on the sunny balconies of the north side, waiting for the clank of carriage wheels
coming up Liverpool Road from the Angel. But the carriages stopped coming. The houses were broken up into flats. It was a cheap place for immigrants to get a peeling room; and it bulged with Irishmen who had come to London to burrow tunnels for the underground railways, with Greeks who were in the tailoring trade as machinists and hoped to open cafés, with Poles, and West Indians, and the more feckless members of the Cockney working class for whom the square was a vague stopover, a place they had landed up in on the way to somewhere else.

  Since 1900, the square, like so many metropolitan districts, had been a shabby entrepôt, steadily declining as more and more shipments of people washed up in it for no special reason except that it was cheap and close to the centre of things. That was how I found myself there, too; I didn’t feel I had to love it or be randy for its local colour . . . it was just a place to tie up until something better happened, it commanded no particular loyalty. But the conservation order changed that; it slapped a sudden value on all the fungoid stucco fronts, and young couples with a little money to put down on a deposit took to patrolling the square on Sunday afternoons. They stared at it squint-eyed and, after their first blank shock at the mean disorder of the place, they learned to look at it with affection. They saw a uniform line of white fronts, with brass knockers in place of the tangle of electric bells; they put leaves on the trees; they stripped the pavements of fish-and-chip papers; they looked at the people on the streets, thought for a while, and came up with the word cosmopolitan. Tennis in the evenings, dinner on the balcony in the sun . . . the rippling, laden branches of the elms . . . the clicking wheels of smart prams parading on the shady walk between the trees . . . this vision was at a long remove from what one could actually see, but the city is a stage for transformation scenes, and the square was a challenge to the imagination. It had sunk so low that it could only be rescued, restored like one of General Booth’s street-harlots to rosy-cheeked prosperity by evangelism and a change of diet.