JONATHAN RABAN
SOFT CITY
With an introduction by Iain Sinclair
PICADOR CLASSIC
INTRODUCTION
Jonathan Raban, Man of the Crowd
‘Formica kebab-house . . . alone after lunch . . . waiting to cross at the lights . . . forgetful and jet-shocked, I have to hunt in my head for the language spoken here.’
Muscling into his stride, Jonathan Raban launches his Soft City with the classic first gambit of the genre. But which genre? On which shelf of the bookstore should this impassioned report be displayed? The form has not yet been fixed. The book is of its own time, 1974, right on the lingering comet’s tail of the Sixties. But it is still very much alive and kicking now, challenging us to come up with new categories for our library cards. In a Granta interview with Helen Gordon in July 2008, Raban describes travel writing as ‘a too-big umbrella, full of holes . . . Anyone commissioned by a newspaper to write up meals and hotels in foreign holiday resorts is a travel writer.’ He enlists Bruce Chatwin, Naipaul, Theroux and Sebald to plead his cause. He is about to set off on a complicated journey of investigation, reminiscence, confession and observation, around a city of his own invention. Here, he says, is a map of damage; a pathology with no beginning and no end for a disease called London.
Raban is sailing under suspect documentation, composing a displaced novel. A metafiction richer and riper than commentators were prepared to recognize in the economic pinch of the Three-Day Week. And he writes, as he must, with earlier texts open on his knees: poetry, sociology and hardboiled crime. He furnishes a working model for those who attempt to follow in his echoing footsteps across the stretched town; footsteps that were never really there, beyond the seductive splatter of ink marks on the page. The myth-maker lets the thread play out, hoping perceptive readers will notice ‘undercurrents of literary allusion and patterning work’ teasing the unconscious, ‘without calling undue attention to their existence’. He is venturing into the unknown, accepting risk, allowing the nudge of coincidence and fruitful digression to guide him out of the swamp.
‘This exploration of the discontinuities of city life has provided a steady line of continuity for me – a plot for my own personal scenario,’ Raban concluded as he completed Soft City, his first urban voyage. ‘For the city and the book are opposed forms: to force the city’s spread, contingency, and aimless motion into a tight progression of a narrative is to risk a total falsehood.’ If we expected, or hoped for, further London episodes, we would be disappointed. This was a premature travel book, sailing into a maelstrom of smoke and mirrors, alienation and brief encounters: London, city of disappearances and disappointments. The lost and the lonely of our termite colony, crossing and recrossing without touch or tenderness, are willing to accept some form of addiction as the price of admittance to a kaffeeklatsch in Hampstead. Junkies and alcoholics anonymous. Like actors, the solitaries emerge from their burrows to try the mask of activism, as Fabians, Socialist Workers, theosophists and concrete poets, in order to find companionship. Before the invention of the internet, such gatherings were London’s surest dating agency, refuges from the night.
‘When I went,’ Raban says, ‘it was as much to look for a Friend as to meditate on the future of socialism, and I felt kin to others there; the same stutter, words spilling out for the first time in the day, the same nervous glance at the watch and wrench at going back out into the dark street.’
Coming to Hull University in 1960, long before there were dreams of transformation into a City of Culture, Raban conceived a role as the sole representative of the Students’ Union library committee in order to engineer regular meetings with the reclusive librarian and owl in residence, Philip Larkin. Something of the tang and taint of Larkin’s narrow craft remains: dirty reflections in train windows, landscape at one remove, the human animal as awkward and absurd. Soft City opens itself to the self-appointed researcher through the passport of poetry, the quiet ecstasy of the undeceived. Larkin was about staying away, opting out, securing his provincial base, binoculars in the high window. Jonathan Raban travelled the other, braver way, into the heart of the plural city: multiculturalism, collisions, confusions, momentum. Identity abandoned, lost, reformed.
‘But this is where you live; it’s your city – London, or New York, or wherever – and its language is the language you’ve always known, the language from which being you, being me, are inseparable. In those dazed moments at stoplights, it’s possible to be a stranger to yourself, to be so doubtful as to who you are that you have to check on things like the placards round the news-vendors’ kiosks.’
This is quite another poetic, anonymously composed: as if the city had decided to publish its secret notebook of dementia. TV STAR BITES HOMELESS MAN. LESBIAN SEX ASSAULT ON PENSIONER. TAROT READER CAUGHT OUT PAEDOPHILE. MOTHER KEPT ‘KILLING MACHINE’ AT HOME.
Dizzy, deracinated, buffeted in the volatile currents of streets where he is unlanguaged, divorced from family and home, Raban discovers that the intervention of the unexpected is violence. A young man, stepping away from the culture hub of the ICA, at Nash House on the Mall, just a bowling ball’s length from Buckingham Palace, was assaulted by two thugs. His spinal cord was severed with a short blade. This random and unexplained attack would become another sensationalist haiku on a news-vendor’s placard. Here is the poetry in which the hard city trades.
Raban witnesses one of those cameos familiar to all London wanderers: a madman raging at the air, ranting on the escalator at Oxford Circus, beating at the furies that oppress him. ‘What was surprising,’ Raban notes, ‘was that nobody showed surprise: a slight speeding-up in the pace of the crowd . . . Inside we were all cursing each other.’ Figures crumple to the ground and we step over them. Rough-sleepers are street furniture. Beggars in occupation accept a toll at the entrance to every Overground station. With forgiving dog companions, they squat beside cash machines, thanking indifferent texters and fist-phone monologuists, and wishing them a ‘nice day’. Raban, an elective outsider making his comprehensive inventory of London’s quirks and singularities, is a valued guide to the fracture that is advancing so fast; that chasm between the entitled and the great swaying mass of urban invisibles.
He is between places, between occupations in a stalled time, this university teacher, author, in-demand literary journalist known as Jonathan Raban. He is between projects. Soft City is a book about waiting, suspension; a stop-start navigation of liminal territory by way of field notes, walks, encounters, conversations during which the witness, the record-keeper realizes that he is becoming a performer. A face in the crowd. A voice on the radio. A commentator. To pull off the trick, Raban must become a special kind of tourist. Like Jack London picking up directions to the wilderness of Whitechapel from the travel agent Thomas Cook. Before acquiring a set of workman’s clothes as his disguise for a season of lost nights and recovered statistics, in support of the documentary photographs that bind together The People of the Abyss in 1903. This is what it is about, all it is about: coming out, alive and well, on the far side of experience.
Soft City declares itself, right away, with that opening move: a detective story as filtered through Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Walter Benjamin, strolling and annotating, in the certain knowledge that great projects should never be completed.
There is a man sitting in a bar, an obscure restaurant, a ‘formica kebab-house’, before moving out and disappearing into the traffic: the busy pavements, markets, stations, deserted night squares and overgrown graveyards. The story is about solitude and witness. And the model is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’. Already in 1845, deep in the swagger of London’s pride as the imperial capital of a trading nation, Poe perfects the form: a blend of occulted mystery tale, sociol
ogy and vinous reverie. The leisured but troubled watcher – Dr Watson before he meets Sherlock Holmes or John Clare trapped in his publisher’s window, staring down at the torrent of Fleet Street – learns how to read the passing figures in the crowd. A forensic gaze separates the undifferentiated mass into categories. Eventually, the voyeur’s role changes. He is seduced into following one of the fugitive flâneurs. He is no long the critic, the observer; he becomes the story.
This is the strategy Raban employs: out in the flow, ventriloquised by London’s neuroses. Soft City was the account we needed in 1974, a companion piece to Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973). Raban slipstreamed Sixties bohemia, referencing Henry Mayhew’s Victorian interrogations of workers and invisibles in parallel with the emerging celebrity-cult gangsters of the East End. He explored territories opening up to adventurous incomers, pioneer gentrifiers: Kentish Town, Notting Hill, Archway. Hipster Dalston, Raban registered, eleven years after The Lowlife, Alexander Baron’s Hackney novel, as a spill zone inhabited ‘by crooked car dealers with pencil moustaches and gold-filled teeth’. The outer limits of Soft City were defined by the parts where Mabey started to take an interest: airport corridors, overgrown canals, landfill dumps with nature reserves. ‘I mark my boundaries,’ Raban wrote, ‘with graveyards, terminal transportation points and wildernesses. Beyond them, nothing is to be trusted and anything might happen.’ Out on the perimeter, where the impatient future cracks weed-infested tarmac and worries at the fabric of brownfield pollution, Raban clears the way for the dystopian fables of J. G. Ballard. High-Rise, that prescient trailer for Docklands, arrived in 1975 – four years before Margaret Thatcher was elected to punch through the wet envelope of the soft city, to put steel in our hearts, and to abolish the concept of society.
The fault lines are clearly visible in Raban’s book. He belongs inside a genealogy of dissent and disaffection. By 1994, the form had shifted to film-essay. Patrick Keiller’s London is fastidious about paying its respects to Poe and ‘Man of the Crowd’. But the fictional narrator, voiced in a strangulated choke by Paul Scofield, navigates a labyrinth directly inherited from Raban; the shifting, malleable city with its centre under attack, soon to be occupied by ghosts, with its theoretical borders everywhere.
*
So what is this conceit, the soft city? London teaches us to mistrust our primitive instincts, to disbelieve the evidence of our eyes. And to accept the CGI promotions, the lies of the boosters and fixers. The wellbeing of the citizen involves wearing away the skin that separates him (or her) from the complex metropolitan organism. To become part of the dream. ‘The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture,’ Raban wrote. The soft city takes whatever form you devise to establish a workable identity. It shape-shifts. London melts into a terrain sculpted from Salvador Dali cheese. A post-traumatic site of violent encounters and mute alienation. A theatre of solitude played out in comfortable flats that have become cells.
In this ‘unique plasticity’ Raban locates the treacherous illusion of privacy as freedom. The choke of softness was a technique of the hallucinogenic era. There was the autistic plasticity of Andy Warhol: be-whatever-you-want celebrity, mask of Marilyn or Mao or a dead Kennedy. And that visible plasticity of plastic itself as style: hard PVC surfaces, geometrical haircuts, Mary Quant, silver balloons. Behind the frivolity, as ever, lurked a sinister magus, reader of signs and symbols: William Burroughs. His cut-up/fold-in assemblage, The Soft Machine, was first published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1961. Here again is a return to the Poe model: the urban mystery unsolved by walking. An outsider waiting for hours in a Hopper diner. ‘In Joe’s Lunch Room drinking coffee with a napkin under the cup which is said to be the mark of someone who does a lot of sitting in cafeterias . . . waiting on the Man.’ The soft city of the addict is sick, yellow at the edges, dying like an old photograph. Burroughs calls the sickness a virus: ‘Invade. Damage. Occupy.’ The film jumps in the gate. The sickness has an ugly side-effect: nostalgia. Attempts to call up privileged versions of the past etched on laminated notices around terminal projects.
But Raban highlights another kind of nostalgia, the way that incomers – all of us – nourish ‘the culture of the home-country in the unlikely soil of a cold-water flat in a tenement block’. So Yeats excavates ‘the Lake Isle of Innisfree out of the autochthonous rumble of Charing Cross.’ John Clare sees the broad Thames as a feeble replica of his lost Whittlesey Mere. ‘They press the soft city into the rural model of a nostalgic dream life.’
Compensatory fantasies take the edge off blight and disillusion. The great problem of the city is not to be solved, simply described: that is the burden of the writer. Raban, sensitized by his solitary peregrinations, the knots of words, sees future atomization, the fracture between occupiers and excluded. ‘The pioneers, the new Brahmins, are there to stay: their money firmly invested, their place assured . . . The square is not – will not be – as “real” as it was . . . If the frontier spirit with which it was colonised is fading, it is being replaced by a sense of imminent history.’
The investigator of the soft city has been confirmed in his isolation, his rootlessness. He witnesses, but he does not belong. Raban, with his establishment upbringing and clergyman father, is a double man from the le Carré stable. He would slip very easily into the bleak terrain of Our Game (1995). Empires are breaking up. London is available to oligarchs, corporate entities and money-launderers of every stripe. The urban explorer, like a damaged cold-war warrior, finds a deeper solitude now on what Wallace Stevens calls ‘the high interiors of the sea’. Coasting (1986) is a measured and digressive circumnavigation of the ragged fringes of Britain. The meditation darkens. Coming ashore, returning like a ghost to his abandoned chamber in the soft city, Raban endures one of the most chilling London seizures. You can’t go back.
‘Then there it was. It was a low, bubbling cry of fright, repeated twice . . . This was a London nightmare, transmitted like a virus from sleeping stranger to sleeping stranger, working its way slowly round and down from the northern heights of Hampstead and Highgate, through Brondesbury, Kilburn, Kensal Rise, sidling off to Westbourne Park and drifting along Ladbroke Grove to Notting Hill. Each screamer was handing the dream on intact to the next victim – and the dream was of London itself, a surreal city in which you tried to run, fell, called for help, and woke to hear the strangled sounds of all the other people who were trying to shout their way out of the labyrinth.’
Edgar Allan Poe approves. The Man of the Crowd, exhausted by his furious expedition, stalking the truth, has sweated into fitful sleep, where the true nightmare begins.
IAIN SINCLAIR
For Robert and Caroline Lowell
Contents
Introduction Jonathan Raban, Man of the Crowd
One The Soft City
Two The City as Melodrama
Three Greenhorns
Four The Emporium of Styles
Five The Moroccan Birdcage
Six No Fixed Address
Seven The Magical City
Eight Two Quarters
Nine One American City
Ten The Foreign Girl
Eleven A City Man
ONE
The Soft City
I come out of a formica kebab-house alone after lunch, my head prickly with retsina. The air outside is a sunny swirl of exhaust fumes; that faint, smoky-turquoise big city colour. I stand on the pavement waiting to cross at the lights. Suddenly I know that I don’t know the direction of the traffic. Do cars here drive on the left or the right hand side of the road? A cluster of Italian au pair girls, their voices mellow and labial, like a chorus escaped from an opera, pass me; I hear, in the crowd, an adenoidal Nebraskan contralto, twangy as a jew’s-harp. Turned to a dizzied tourist myself, forgetful and jet-shocked, I have to hunt in m
y head for the language spoken here.
But this is where you live; it’s your city – London, or New York, or wherever – and its language is the language you’ve always known, the language from which being you, being me, are inseparable. In those dazed moments at stop-lights, it’s possible to be a stranger to yourself, to be so doubtful as to who you are that you have to check on things like the placards round the news-vendors’ kiosks or the uniforms of the traffic policemen. You’re a balloonist adrift, and you need anchors to tether you down.
A sociologist, I suppose, would see these as classic symptoms of alienation, more evidence to add to the already fat dossier on the evils of urban life. I feel more hospitable towards them. For at moments like this, the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or worse, it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form round you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a position on a map fixed by triangulation. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.
Yet the hard facts of cities tend to be large, clear and brutal. A hundred years ago they were the facts of appalling poverty, grimly documented by outside observers like Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and, a little later in America, Jacob Riis. Today the overwhelming fact of life in New York, if not in London is the violence brewing in its streets. Indeed, poverty and violence are clearly related: both are primarily dependent on the attitudes people hold towards strangers. The indifference that generates the one, and the hatred that animates the other, stem from the same root feeling. If a city can estrange you from yourself, how much more powerfully can it detach you from the lives of other people, and how deeply immersed you may become in the inaccessibly private community of your own head.
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