If architects tend to see us as opaque wisps or rude diagrams, they are, perhaps, doing no more than falling into a characteristically urban habit of mind, a way of thinking and feeling about other people which the conditions of the city make particularly easy. Finding the city a bad place, and suspiciously viewing its citizens as potential wastrels and villains, are responses which proceed out of a basic and widespread nervousness about the kind of moral drama which the city forces us to participate in.
For in a community of strangers, we need a quick, easy-to-use set of stereotypes, cartoon outlines, with which to classify the people we encounter. In a village, most of the people you deal with have been known to you (or to someone in your family circle) for a long time; they have matured subtly and slowly as characters, and are painted in varying shades of grey. You will probably have seen them in more than one role: the milkman or the postman is not just the man who delivers milk or mail, he is known too for a variety of off-duty interests and occupations. He is, you happen to know, a keen gardener, his marriage is reputed to be rocky; he is just out of hospital after an operation. My city milkman, though, happens fully fledged: a uniform hat, a smudge of moustache, a rounding belly . . . I have no more to go on. Most of the time I need no more: the city is a great deadener of curiosity. But if, for instance, I am thinking of buying something from one of these patchy strangers, I have to guess at his history, try instantly to gauge his moral and emotional qualities. All I have to help me is my subjective knowledge of accents, clothes, brands of car, my reactions to endomorphic or ectomorphic figures: external signs and signals from which I construct the character with whom I am going to deal. Is he good or bad? A truth-teller or a liar? Lecherous or chaste? An actor, a bookie, a clerk, a dimwit, an enemy . . . ?
People who live in cities become expert at making these rapid, subconscious decisions. At any large party, one can see people ‘reading’ strangers with the abstracted speed of a blind man tracing over a book in Braille. Mechanical aids to such character-reading are at a premium in cities. The rise of the industrial city in the nineteenth century coincided with the craze for phrenology and palmistry. At any bookstall today one can find several cheap pamphlets on graphology and quasi-scientific disquisitions on the relationship between body-shape and moral character. There is a vast market for cranky guides to person-spotting, guides that correspond, worryingly closely, to those charts designed for idle children showing the silhouettes of every aeroplane in the world. Judgments have to be made fast, and almost any judgment will do. The riot of amateur astrology we have suffered from recently is one of the more annoying expressions of this city hunger for quick ways of classifying people.
‘What are you?’ says the girl in the caftan, then, impatiently, ‘No, I mean what’s your sign?’
Gemini, Taurus, Aries, Libra . . . a character synopsis for everyone. Margot has initiative and tact, a strong sense of loyalty and a need to conform; Derek is creative, ambitious, and self-confident, seeks harmony in personal relationships, but needs help in money matters.
The great urban visual art is the cartoon. In Gillray, Hogarth, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, the people of the city are portrayed with exactly that physical and moral exaggeration with which girls who are ‘into’ astrology endow the men they meet at parties. They are very thin or very fat, giants or dwarfs, excessively angelic or excessively corrupted. Emblems tell everything: Hogarth’s idle apprentice, for example, is known by his clay pipe, his open collar, the jug of ale on his loom, and the page from Moll Flanders pinned up over his head. These public signs compose all that we need to know of his character.
In Dickens, our greatest urban novelist, the physical shape of someone is a continuing part of his personality. People appear in his novels as they might appear on a street or in a party, equipped with a set of dimensions and a name which we learn later. In Our Mutual Friend, Bradley Headstone is huge, coarse and slablike; Jenny Wren is a tiny cripple; Rumty Wilfer is pink and roly-poly. And, however much the characters change and emerge during the course of the novel, we are constantly reminded of these initial cartoon images. They carry their personal stereotypes with them like grotesque, gaily-painted husks – even when, morally, they have outgrown them. How different this is from a novelist like Jane Austen, in whose work the closer you get to a character, the less visible is his external, easy-to-spot carapace. Most writers use caricature for their background characters: Dickens foregrounds the technique, and makes caricature something which the characters themselves have to lug, often unhappily, through the plot. R. Wilfer wishes he wasn’t so infuriatingly round, pink, and ineffectual; Bradley Headstone rages against being so damningly associated with graveyards and dark, thickset emotions. Yet that is how people in cities are recognised again and again by every new acquaintance, by every observer of the crowd; and Dickens’s characters simply have to put up with their dwarfishness, their wooden legs, and their toppling craggy heights. To be merely grey, especially subtly grey, in a city, is not to be seen at all.
Both cities themselves and the people who live in them are subject to this convenient distortion and exaggeration. Both fall easy prey to that impulse, which besets almost everyone who writes about urban life, to find a fixing synecdoche, to substitute a simple lurid part for a bafflingly complex whole. In a world of crowds and strangers, where things happen at speed, are glimpsed and cannot be recalled – a world, in short, which is simply too big to be held at one time in one’s imagination – synecdoche is much more than a rhetorical figure, it is a means of survival.
To call a city a slough of despond, or a great wen, or a cesspool, is to give it a functional identity, to fix it in the mind as surely as Bradley Headstone is fixed in Dickens’s novel. The city, like the people in it, lends itself to this sort of moral abstraction. Oddly enough, cities, for all their bigness and complexity, get tagged with hard-edged images much more readily than small towns. What mental picture is conjured by, say, Chicago or Sheffield? Isn’t it more definite, more dominant, than that of Banbury? A line of cattle trucks, a lamplit street, a waterfront of cranes, are emblematic substitutes for the contrary lines of millions of individual lives. Moral fervour – seeing a particular city as especially evil, a sink of quite unprecedented iniquity – may be a simple convenience, a way of glueing together those visual fragments that compose the city in our head. The sheer imaginative cumbersomeness of the city makes us frequently incapable of distinguishing its parts from its whole; and moral synecdoche, the utopia/dystopia syndrome, is part of our essential habit of mind when we think about it. One might add that, in England, the single feature of the city which has adhered most strongly to writers’ minds is its dirt, and dirt is one of the few objects whose moral connotation is as definite and public as its physical characteristics. The presence of dirt provides us with the elusive key we have been seeking, and the English have been quick to seize on dirt as the single defining quality of the big city. Charles Kingsley, who was no slouch on inner cleanliness, wrote in 1857:
The social state of a city depends directly on its moral state, and – I fear dissenting voices, but I must say what I believe to be truth – that the moral state of a city depends – how far I know not, but frightfully, to an extent uncalculated, and perhaps uncalculable – on the physical state of that city; on the food, water, air, and lodging of its inhabitants.
Kingsley wrote a series of bad novels in which he explored the filth and disease of London and, by way of contrast, sketchily adumbrated the alternative kingdom of sweetness and light. The original metaphor was Augustine’s, but Kingsley worked at it with fanatical literal-mindedness. Fogs, smogs, stinks, suppurations, chimneys (swept by consumptively angelic little boys), stains, lumps of raw sewage . . . this was London, and very convenient it was too. Seeing the city in its turds was the simple synecdoche of a simple moralist, and Kingsley throve on it hysterically. (The most vivid, and clearly most enjoyably written, chapter of Alton Locke concerns a delirious victim of cholera sitting by the
side of a reeking open sewer and talking of the rats which have grossly disfigured the bodies of his wife and children.)
People with more elaborate minds have been more inventive with the form. Dickens loves and exploits synecdoche, and identifies it especially with the new energetic middle class who were making over the industrial city for their own ends. They were – and are – the people quickest to label others simply by their functions, who saw that the city offered a ready-made theatre for fast, opportunistic self-aggrandisement. These people could capitalise on the speed and superficiality of London’s social and business life; people who acted on appearances, who, to all intents and purposes, were appearances. Dickens called these ‘bran-new’ people the Veneerings, nicely linking them with that other Victorian craze for marquetry.
Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch on him, French-polished to the crown of his head.
When the Veneerings give a dinner party, they do not invite people: rather, they acquire, ‘an innocent piece of dinner furniture’ called Twemlow, ‘a Member, an Engineer, a Payer-off of the National Debt, a Poem on Shakespeare, a Grievance, and a Public Office’. How simplified does society thus become, its members concisely labelled by the single role you want them to play and which, hopefully, you may exploit. Here Dickens is satirising a whole way of seeing and acting in the city: we pick someone out from the crowd because they possess one significant functional quality. This feature turns into all the person is: it turns him into a living Rowlandson grotesque – a walking nose, a pair of sated bulbous lips let out on their own, while their parent mind and body stay home minding the dog.
It is no coincidence that synecdoche provides the basis of the moral melodrama – the play in which Envy, Sloth, Anger, Lust, Pride, Virtue, and Heroism compete for the soul of Everyman. Once we treat people, morally and functionally, in terms of single synecdochal roles, we turn both our lives and theirs into a formal drama. The city itself becomes an allegorical backdrop, painted with symbols of the very good and the very evil. The characters who strut before it similarly take on exaggerated colourings. Isolated from their personal histories, glaringly illuminated by the concentrated light of a single defining concern, under constant interrogation from their fellows, these urban people turn, unwittingly, into actors. They saw the air, their faces are thick in greasepaint, they live the disembodied stage-life of pierrots – who knows or cares where they sleep or eat? Their reality lies solely in their performance. When Saint Augustine castigated the Romans for going to the theatre, he accused them of ‘playing a madder part now than ever before’, as if a double theatre was involved – as if the audience at the circus was itself enacting a riotous drama. The dutch-picture recedes into infinitude: actors applaud actors applauding actors . . .
It is surely in recognition of this intrinsic theatricality of city life that public places in the city so often resemble lit stages awaiting a scenario. At dinner time in London, people strip off their working clothes and uniforms, and put on the costumes that go with being a character. Out come bangles, neckerchiefs, broad-brimmed hats, wild coloured jackets with jackboots to match. In any restaurant, one can find people taking to self-expression with histrionic fervour, giving themselves over to monologues and dramatic scenes which, to judge by their volume, seem to be intended not for their immediate companions at all, but for the city at large – that uncountable audience of strangers.
I have in mind an expensive mock-up of an Italian trattoria in South Kensington: low-slung lighting, strings of empty Chianti bottles, bread-sticks in tumblers, and conically folded napkins of unearthly whiteness and rigidity. Although the tables are arranged in a maze of low, white-wood cubicles with potted ferns growing out of ice buckets, this is not at all a private place. The fanciful cubicles rather enhance the atmosphere of a public spectacle, like chalk marks on a stage showing where separate blocks or groups of actors ought to stand. Everyone is visible and within earshot of everybody else. To enter, one has to be checked in by a florid waiter at the desk, one’s way barred by a sumptuously scrolled hatstand. Thus newcomers are subjected to a ritual which calls everyone’s attention to the arrival of these new characters in the drama; and the crosstalk of the waiters – delivered in a style of gamey operatic recitatif – makes the waiting group an embarrassed centre of disturbance.
At one table, I am sitting with a girl; in the cubicle across the narrow aisle, a middle-aged couple are with a younger woman; they’re in their trim early fifties, scented, polished and silver grey, she is in her thirties, tangled, nervous, chain-smoking. At my side glance, her voice pauses, then intensifies in volume and expression.
‘My thing was self-absorption. Eric couldn’t take it.’ The couple with her look across at us, a little abashed. But the woman is set for her aria, and the addition of an audience of strangers turns the story of her divorce into a vibrant, plotted skein, a work of dramatic self-exposure.
‘. . . a twenty-two-year-old acid freak who’d gone through a whole shipful of sailors between Algiers and Southampton!’
The man comes in, lugubriously jovial, trying his voice out for pitch: ‘Ghastly. Oh, ghastly. But what exactly did you do about the bottle of rose hip syrup?’
‘. . . I wouldn’t have minded so awfully if he hadn’t sneaked off in the Cortina. I’d got everything at Sainsbury’s that morning and the bastard didn’t even take the shopping out of the boot.’
My friend picks sourly at her cocktail. The middle-aged woman across the way finds something to hunt for in her handbag. But the man, the divorcée and I are set for a three-act meal. Everybody’s voice rises. I start telling a boring restaurant story to my companion, but I can feel it growing loud and contrived, intended for public consumption. My friend responds with an exaggeratedly intimate whisper so that I have to bend to her face to listen. The younger woman does a proficient travesty of her husband’s hippie mistress, loose-mouthed, blurry-eyed. The man, a little uneasy now at the extravagance of his friend’s display, turns to his wife and tries to involve her in the conversation, but she won’t be drawn. At a particularly juicy moment in the divorce story, his eyes click up to my friend, who registers him with a tight smile. At another juncture the woman is apparently delivering her monologue for me alone, and I grin cautiously.
This particular dinner ended with a suitably outrageous symbol. The waiter had brought round a plate of those Italian bon-bons wrapped in patterned rice-paper. The divorcée wanted to watch her paper burn. She smoothed it out, folded it into a squat cylinder, and stood it on end in a saucer. The waiter lit it. It was a piece of pure ritual: the paper flared green and blue, then flounced into the air, hovering for a moment between the two tables in the dark space above the hanging lamps. The divorcée laughed, the man laughed, his wife pulled a polite grimace, I laughed, my friend smiled in complicity with the wife. The waiter (an expert stage manager, tipped heavily for his collusion in the show) stood tolerantly by. It was a burst of rigged applause at the end of a performance.
Such improvised, crass theatre could only have happened amongst strangers. Like real theatre, it broke with social conventions, allowed the participants to communicate things to each other which are not licit in normal circumstances. But a city, judged in terms of our social behaviour inside it, is not a normal circumstance; and its public arenas – restaurants, late night tube trains, certain streets and squares, like Piccadilly Circus in London – are licensed for a degree of theatrical abnormality.
In cities, people are given to acting, putting on a show of themselves. And it was in recognitio
n of this fact that Plato saw imitation as a major vice to be stamped out from the city. He was convinced that drama, spontaneous or rehearsed, corrupts the actor. The role you play, he argued, too easily turns into all you are. In Book Three of The Republic, Socrates says: ‘Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?’ He goes on to describe the lowest sort of actor, the man who will accept any part he is offered:
Nothing will be too bad for him: and he will be ready to imitate anything, in right good earnest and before a large company. As I was just now saying, he will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels and pulleys, and the various sounds of flutes, pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments: he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like a cock; his entire art will consist of imitation of voice and gesture, or will be but slightly blended with narration.
The condition of chronic impersonation portrayed by Plato has always afflicted the city. As we try to grasp it as an imaginative whole, we endow it with exaggerated, Manichean qualities of unique goodness and unique evil. Our own characters distort; we grow in size, but the growth is of a single feature. At any one time, we are likely to perform like the gross types of a comedy of humours: Lechery now, tomorrow Wit, or Sentiment, or Melancholy. The newcomer to the city has to learn to live on a perpetually inflated scale, to adapt himself to these highly-coloured projections of spontaneous melodrama.
THREE
Soft City Page 4
