It is hard not to feel both scared and guilty. One should not trespass, and this is no place for tourists. This is not my country, my city, or my quarter; probably the most one can learn from a voyeuristic trip like this is that there are parts of other people’s cities that are as inhospitable and remote as moon-craters. If I had believed before in a city-freedom that permits everyone to roam into other social worlds, here was proof of the reality of those boundaries about which I’d been so sceptical. I was in the wrong place and anxious to get out.
Yet Roxbury was like an optical maladjustment, a troubling double image; each time one looked at it one saw a pretty tranquil suburb and an angry wound – each image stubbornly refused to take precedence. Its prettiness turned into an insult, its anger into an irony. Much of its incongruity seemed perversely deliberate. The word KILL spray-gunned on a wall had been executed with a sign-painter’s shapely precision. A family on the sidewalk arranged itself as formally as a portrait-group in an early American painting. The speed of the traffic was slow and stately in comparison to the precipitate, shoving style of most Boston driving. A very slight blurring of vision, and one might be in that ideal pastoral place which Cambridge has tried so hard to be and failed.
I got back to our apartment block. The air in the corridors is thick, burnt and biscuity; the walls are thin, the lifts shudder and creak. With the mythological arbitrariness that is Boston’s special gift, it has been consecrated as a respectable middle-class place in a ‘good area’. But were a blindfolded man to be driven to it, and allowed to look only when he was inside the hall, he would say with some certainty that he was in a ruinous tenement. It might just as well be a den of thieves living off welfare and plunder as a den of teachers, psychoanalysts, secretaries and small-businessmen. What counts here, though, is the mythology. There is a logic that dictates why rich Bostonians should cluster in the splendid Georgian houses round Louisberg Square on Beacon Hill. But why should the Italians all cram themselves behind the expressway in the North End? Why should Negroes live in Roxbury, and Jews in Chelsea? By what law do Boston suburbs turn into rigidly circumscribed ghettoes, when they look so much alike, so quaintly attractive, so prim, so dull? For it is as if someone had taken a map of the city and, resolutely blind to its topography, had coloured in irregularly shaped lumps labelled ‘Blacks’, ‘Jews’, ‘Irish’, ‘Academics’, ‘Gentry’, ‘Italians’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Assorted Others’.
Clearly the civic authorities are very keen on ghettoes. On the Fitzgerald Expressway, there is an exit sign marked ‘To Chinatown’. One then has to weave through a signposted maze, one’s expectations rising as the trip to this obviously important place lengthens. Just off Washington Street, there are a few Chinese restaurants, oriental groceries and Hong Kong kitsch shops. They are dwarfed by looming warehouses, and one would barely notice them if one had not been alerted by the string of signs. The Bell Telephone Company has chipped in with phone boxes rigged out as pagodas, and the National Shawmut Bank advertises itself with illuminated Mandarin characters. ‘Chinatown’ is a fake ghetto, an exercise in official image-projection. But in a city that has so many real ghettoes, why should it have seemed desirable to fabricate one?
There are some answers to these questions to be sniffed out in the ghetto in which I was staying. All Cambridge academic life bears down on Harvard Square, a queer grey tangle of spotlights, kiosks, pretentious neo-Georgian architecture and telegraph wires. Winds collect here, laden with garbage; so do automobiles, hippie-entrepreneurs selling political stick-ons, candles, pottery and fortunes, Salvation Army bands, boys waiting for their girls, and sandwich-board men grim with cold, deep in conversation with topknotted religious fanatics. Here all routes collide, and one might on first glance mistake the square for the local version of Piccadilly Circus. But it is not. Rather it is Cambridge’s village green. Here one bumps into the people one was having dinner with last night; the phrase ‘Oh, hi’ whines and tinkles all round. In the tobacconist’s, a drink is fixed, at the subway entrance, a supper-date for next week.
For the first few days, this smallness seems delightful, then it starts to suffocate. For Cambridge, with its intense, pressured containedness, repeats itself like a mouse’s wheel. At dinner after dinner, the same knot of intelligent, ironic faces; the same topics of conversation; the same wry jokes. There are half a dozen celebrities held in common by the village, and in gossip they loom infinitely larger than life; practice and study have made their every twitch and gesture famous, so that stories about them hinge on the teller’s discovery of a new tiny detail that will become public and accrete to the myth. On those rare occasions when the celebrities are actually present (they are heavily in demand, greedily hoarded, and unwillingly shared around among the villagers), there is a breathless unease: with X leaning heavily over the claret at the far end of the table, Jack has to be kicked by his wife before he stops telling his great story about X which went down so well at the Herzbergers last week. The famous village dead still live on in gossip, like the ancestors who brood over conversations in the bars of Irish hamlets. Professor Perry Miller stalks by candlelight nightly, at a score of Harvard parties. Every inflection of his has been perfected and preserved in mimicry; and the manner of his dying is told, again and again, with a reverent Shakespearian regard for irony, narrative and pathos. As Longfellow knew, there are great consolations for the man who dies popular at Harvard; one kind of immortality, at least, guaranteed for him.
The tightly circumscribed limits of conversation correspond exactly to those limits which forbade me to travel to Somerville and Roxbury. They stake out Cambridge and its confines against the rest of Boston. But I was not at Harvard, I was a visitor on its fringes and lacked the anchor of a position to keep me safe inside the walls. I made a point of breaking bounds, lunching several days a week in Boston proper. ‘You go to lunch in Boston?’ I might as well have said that I was going to a favourite Howard Johnson’s in Woonsocket. The journey takes twelve minutes, and costs a dime, on the subway – about half the cost and half the time of a trip from where I live in England to a lunch-date in London.
But there is a deep suspicion in Cambridge that the name of Perry Miller might lose some of its shine at the wrong end of the subway – that in Boston certain persons might not even have heard of Professor Miller.
Indeed, in Boston, Cambridge does seem to recede into a far, upriver distance. Sometimes I lunched at the Tavern Club, a generous, genial, timbered place in a secret alley off Boston Common. Its members are lawyers, painters, publishers, newspapermen; its tone is worldly and jovial. Under a chandelier at a huge round table, it is easy to slide crabwise back into the old, compact, genteel city of the nineteenth century. Talk here is much more rangy and unbuttoned than in Cambridge; appetites, of every kind, are more expansive. Yet there is still a curious sense that one is somehow living in miniature. Across the Common, with its frozen, greying turf and modest statuary, lie the State House, law courts and Athenaeum Library. The offices of the two major Boston publishers, Little, Brown and Houghton Mifflin, are close by; so are the headquarters of the Boston Globe and Christian Science Monitor. For most of the men at lunch, work is only a digestive stroll away. Many of them now live in the country or the outer suburbs, but a good number still have houses on Beacon Hill, or, another short step across the public Gardens, in Back Bay. ‘Oh, you’ve come in from Cambridge?’ The candles flicker on the chandelier; the wine passes round the table. I feel like a traveller, short of suitable tales about the land from which I’ve come; perhaps a remark or two about how the weather was when I left Cambridge would be in order.
In London, villaging is an expensive game, played self-consciously, with a constant sense that it is an enjoyable indulgence, that it goes against the grain of the city. In Canonbury and Camden Town, it’s largely an evening hobby valued precisely because most people spend most of the day trekking through areas of the city far from their own quarter. But the Boston ‘village’ is stiflingly
real – and the word village, fitting enough, perhaps, for privileged places like Harvard and the Tavern Club, turns into a bleak irony when tagged to Roxbury, Dorchester or Somerville. One man’s village is another’s ghetto, and both proceed from a single vision of what the city ought to be.
During the 1860s and 1870s there was real local pride in Boston’s success as a metropolis. The suburbs of Roxbury and Dorchester voted to annex themselves to the central city, to share its bigness and bustle, to help pay for the new civic amenities – the concert halls, monuments, transit systems. But the ‘annexation movement’ soon wore through. Brookline voted to stay separate, so did Cambridge, Somerville and the others. Enthusiasm for the city is not an American weakness. The independent township, ‘the small, self-contained center of life’ (in the words of the southern agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand), is where most Americans would prefer to stake out the perimeters of their backyards. They may need the enlarged economy and technology of the big city to earn their living, but, by hook or crook, they’ll sleep where the grass and the trees are. The neighbourhood is all-important; the city is a mere abstraction – vague, threatening, impersonal. The crazy-quilt of town-lines that enmeshes Greater Boston flies in the face of visible fact. But the further the city spreads and congeals, the more passionately do people cling to ‘communities’ which are really only nostalgic dreams and historical relics.
By sheer force of will, Bostonians have made these ancient cartographers’ divisions real, mythologising them into actuality by a massive conspiracy of Cartesian concentration. They have had local taxes to help them, so that Brookline, for instance, was able to spend $1,470 per pupil in its schools in 1970–71, while Somerville only managed $756. There were comparable inequalities of expenditure on policing, streetlighting, garbage disposal and fire services. Taxes diverted in the interests of an ideology are powerful weapons. As one stands on Beacon Street, midway between Cambridge and Somerville, one is suspended between two quite different worlds. Behind one, there are shady avenues and handsome houses; new cars, faces bathed in all the creams that keep skin soft and youthful, an air of proper and discreet prosperity. In front, the streets narrow to alleys, the temperature is colder, rubbish skids across soiled sidewalks, and people have the bent, furtive look of habitual scurriers, always on the lookout for trouble. To a European, these sudden abrupt transitions within the city are amazing; he can measure to the inch where poverty stops and starts, and soon learns to translate these maplike lines into other, more subtle divisions of race and nationality. It takes much longer to realise that these boundaries are simply and effectively enforced by a mad system of tax differentials.
Yet behind the madness lies a dream of an independent life away from the destructive abstraction of the city The ghettoes – or villages – are real because Boston, in common with the majority of American cities, feared the unmanageable bigness of New York or London. It has tried to remain a little city on a hill, surrounded by a pretty cluster of small towns and villages. To do so, it has had, like the city-elders in Plato’s Republic, to conscientiously fake its history, its geography, its economy, even the individual memories of its citizens. A painter in Cambridge, whom I spoke to because he was mounting a campaign to shift the Kennedy Memorial Library to the far side of the river Charles (where it would turn into Boston’s problem), said sadly: ‘Ten years ago, Cambridge was a village. Everybody knew each other. Now look at it.’ Ten years? That was not true fifty years ago, or even a hundred years ago, when W. D. Howells used the place as a setting for his Suburban Sketches. Mythological taboos and hectic rounds of dinner parties make ghettoes, not villages.
Nor am I using ‘ghetto’ lightly. The preserved, exemplary lives of Cambridge and Beacon Hill have been instrumental in making Roxbury what it is. And Roxbury is a real ghetto. Brookline, Cambridge, and the rich end of Boston have dug a deep moat around it, isolating it with fear and rumour. The constituent parts of Boston are now so separated, and so inequitably served, that it is almost impossible to imagine the place ever coming together again as a city. Expressways and rapid transit systems will not connect it up when the Bostonian’s whole habit of mind is superstitiously bent on staying out, on sticking to his village, on loathing what ‘the city’ stands for in America at present. Ironically, Boston has succeeded in attracting big-city problems to itself like flies, while it lacks nearly all of the big-city virtues. There is no freedom of movement in it; socially, it is as tight as three separate drawing-rooms with a warren of unspeakable quarters below stairs. It has no flair, and its surprises are nearly always unpleasant ones. In Harvard and MIT it has two of the best universities in the country, it has a superb symphony orchestra, some of the finest libraries, a marvellously varied architectural texture in its individual buildings (though they, too, never cohere into a recognisable city). Yet it stays stubbornly beset by the conviction that it is better not to be a city; it is a great, sluggardly, anomalous Peter Pan of a place, which has preferred never to grow up.
If one belongs somewhere in it, one is very lucky. The people in the Gaslight Pub had the weary, peculiarly Boston look of those who fit nowhere. They too were on the boundary line between Cambridge and Somerville, but they had fallen through. Without a village, without even a ghetto, they were people of the gaps between, with little more than their dislocation in common. That may be the hardest of all Boston fates, even, perhaps the most frequent, certainly the strongest charge with which the place might be indicted – to be a citizen without a city.
TEN
The Foreign Girl
Can I say my thinkings now?
I wouldn’t like in your story a unhappy, a misery girl, a sad girl.
Because London can give to a clever girl lots and lots of things to make up. Loud voices, noises, and that terrible crowd (able to make me headache) walking along the streets.
Why not a girl with feelings-melange?
Just like a Gainsborough’s landscape. With shadows and lights in the same time.
Just too, like this Covent Garden’s market and a smart hotel restaurant where a man play piano wonderfully.
But in this case is difficult to know which of the both is the light.
The girl must ask to herself this question living in a town so extravagant and changeable.
It’s the first letter I write in your language.
Why to believe so much in words?
Letter from Mayte
She trailed a silver bag with the name of the Sweet Sixteen Boutique picked out on it in black art-deco letters, and her A–Z of London and Suburbs was always open, bulging over the hump of her thumb. Some places she knew: Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square, Oxford Circus . . . the rest was a labyrinth, this city that spread beyond the final termini of the underground railways like a vast grey slurry of lava. She would come up escalators out of the earth, stunned: each station that she stopped at broke open on the same dull sun, the same vegetable odour of diesel and sweat, the same cramped and blackened houses abutting on 24-hour launderettes. On the Northern and Piccadilly lines, she would make abruptly for the exit doors as another name stopped in the frame of the carriage window. TUFNELL PARK, ARNOS GROVE, MORNINGTON CRESCENT, ARSENAL, EAST FINCHLEY, BRENT . . . but they were all the same. Stepping into the amazing patch of sunlight on concrete, past the man who took tickets and the posters that told how many pence you could earn if you worked for the railway company, she would see that this was not the place. But she no longer felt the heavy sag of disappointment. Her ascents were now formal, mechanical: she would start to puzzle over the tube map on the back of her A–Z even before the sun showed up on the identical, appalling street, full of the old and ugly jabbering at each other in a language that sounded as if they were chewing over mouthfuls of broken glass.
On her first day in London, she asked newsagents for papers in her own language.
‘Die Welt?’
‘No, no, not that a-one.’
Osservatore Romano, Der Spiegel, Paris Match, Pravda
. . . they flashed by, quicker and quicker at each showing, a waterfall of languages. Then came ones in characters she only dimly recognised – Arabic, Greek, even Chinese.
‘No. Is not the one.’
‘It’d be a blackie lingo, then? Or one of them Middle Eastern tongues?’
‘Pardon?’
‘We have them regularly on order for the Persians and the Paki Stans.’
She listened carefully, trying the sounds out again in her head, but they didn’t seem to make sense. The man looked pleased with himself in the sun. He had a tattoo. A low-class man.
‘I . . .’ he pointed to himself, ‘no . . .’ he shook his head, ‘help . . .’ he paused, thought, and just repeated the word, but more loudly, ‘you . . .’ and he stabbed his forefinger at her, grinned at his performance, hawking around the passers-by for an audience.
‘Is okay. Thank you.’
On the down-escalator of Queensway station, she had to dab at her eyes with a used Kleenex. It came away carboned with mascara. She rode to Marble Arch and looked up the name in her dictionary. An axtl made of chzlim. And then, in the sun again, across a smoky ravine of automobiles, she saw the axtl chzlimbo by itself on an island, like an illustration of a word in an elementary schoolbook. It was lovely. It had no reasons attached to it: nothing went through it, it wasn’t a gate to anywhere . . . it was just there, solid, sunlit, a marvel. She leaned on the railing, took out her notebook from the Sweet Sixteen bag, and wrote carefully: MARBLE ARCH AXTL CHZLIMBO. She would come here again.
In the wide street of shops, there were many windows. She passed rich ladies stepping out of limousines, youths with rucksacks stuck over with flags, men in livery, a state politzer who smiled and did not show his gun. At Bourne and Hollingsworth’s, she saw a belt of pigskin with a silver buckle. It winked at her. She wanted it. Behind the glass, the furry surface of the suede looked as supple, soft and breathing as a living animal. Already she could feel it, tightening around her own waist. But the distance between her and the belt was enormous; a scrubland of mines and tripwires. There would be escalators, commissionaires, words with arrows telling you to go here and there and down and up, shrugs, shouts, gibbering.
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