Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  By nature an unmanageable sight,

  It is not wholly so to him who looks

  In steadiness, who hath among least things

  An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts

  As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.

  It isn’t very convincing. If you are used to teasing out the nature of the world from a single stone, or a tree, or an old Cumberland beggar, the city offers an unparalleled resistance to your habits of mind. One sympathises with Wordsworth’s bafflement and feels vicarious relief for him when he returns to Helvellyn. (The much more successful ‘Sonnet Composed on Westminster Bridge’ manages to deal with London by appropriating it for nature, by looking to the horizon beyond the city, and by viewing it in the depopulated and silent light of dawn. It is a hard-won celebration of all the unurban qualities of the city, caught in an uncharacteristic hushed moment.)

  But Wordsworth does convey the amazement and the incipient terror of the newcomer to the city: his dazed mental abstraction, his sense of loss, his vain attempts to find forms and precedents for an experience that seems to go far beyond his capacity to respond sensibly to it. Experienced city-dwellers have always delighted in rubbing the nose of the greenhorn in his own inadequacy. To be initiated, the newcomer must first be stripped of his past; he has to become a child again, innocent of everything except a humbling consciousness of his own innocence and vulnerability.

  In 1912, the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution commissioned a pamphlet guide to the United States for the Jewish immigrant. It was printed in Yiddish, and distributed amongst the steerage passengers on the Atlantic steamers. Imagine how, propped on one’s bed-roll, one might have responded to this first paragraph, under the heading ‘Special Advice to the Immigrant’:

  BEWARE of swindling expressmen, cabmen, guides, agents of steamships and hotels, solicitors, porters, men who say they are journalists or lawyers. BEWARE of loan sharks and usurers.

  The New York which rises from the pages of the pamphlet is a nightmare-city; a place of strangers where every stranger is to be distrusted (‘BEWARE of people whose friendship is too easily made’), where the penalties of innocence are injury or worse:

  Every year hundreds of immigrants are hurt or killed in America, because they do not understand the shout of warning, or do not know how to read danger signals, when a few English words might have saved their lives.

  The immigrant is told that the currency of the new country may be counterfeit, that men who propose to girls are probably swindlers, that he must bathe daily or die of pneumonia or consumption, that he is likely to lose himself in the subway system, that in America Jews who have divorced and remarried may be regarded as criminal bigamists, that lawyers and real estate agents are frequently crooked, and that Jews are best advised (against all actual immigration patterns) to go off to the Midwest and become farmers. So much for the Promised City. By this stage, the prospective citizen would not have been surprised to learn that:

  A great many immigrants who have been strong and well on their arrival in this country have died from tuberculosis within three years of their coming.

  The city enchants, baffles, and kills. Burdened with all these warnings, the greenhorn still, somehow, has to make his way, serve his apprenticeship as a city-dweller.

  He finds himself in a world of symbols and signals, every one arcane. Adamic tells of his first friend in America, another Bohunk called Steve, who spent his first day in New York still wearing his peasant clogs:

  All morning he walked in the streets of Brooklyn, not a little confused by the traffic and turmoil. His wooden shoes clattering on the pavement added to the noise, and passers-by, amused, paused to grin at him. This suffused him with a pleasant glow. People seemed very kind in America.

  Your clothes, never thought of till now, your accent, the way you do your hair (one of the first stages of the Jew’s assimilation was the loss of his earlocks), turn suddenly and alarmingly into advertisements for yourself. You become a walking legible code, to be read, and as often misinterpreted, by strangers. You are frighteningly exposed. You walk the streets in innocence, and people mistake you for a clown. The freezing self-consciousness which is liable to grip the urban immigrant is, like Adam’s shame, the first intimation of urban knowledge.

  But if the immigrant himself finds that he has been transformed willy-nilly into a coatstand of symbols, how much more puzzling is the elaborate code by which the inhabitants of the city communicate with each other. Billboards pass, a maze of exhortations and obscure references. (Adamic taught himself English by studying them, and the Connecticut Daughters of the Revolution advise their readers to do the same.) The simplest of actions – buying a ticket on the underground, catching a bus, locating an address – become complex rituals to be shyly and awkwardly imitated. Not long ago, London Transport installed automatic ticket machines at entry and exit points in tube stations. They are minefields for strangers to the city, who can be watched going through balletic routines with the machines, of slow encounter, and rejection, and entrapment.

  On the streets, people wear strange clothes and cosmetics. On my own first morning in Manhattan, I was astonished by the made-up faces of expensively dressed black women. Every feature was exaggerated: lips of lurid ultra-violet, scarlet tinted cheekbones, turquoise eye sockets . . . bright and electronic as the illuminated headboards of pinball machines. They were faces designed for long-range action; close-to, they had the same unnaturalness as actors glimpsed in a theatre bar still in their greasepaint. The proper way of seeing these women would have been through the window of a speeding car: they left a vivid after-image, like an unpeeled Polaroid colour print with its violent blues. But, like all newcomers, I was in the wrong place, didn’t know where to stand to get the correct perspective. As it was, I walked among so many gargoyles, and felt my own dim pallor was a dishonourable badge of my blistering newness in the city. My pace was different, my English clothes were all wrong for February in New York, my focus was too haphazard, too promiscuously inclusive, to adjust to the narrow, known routes and angles of a genuine inhabitant. Warned of muggers, I kept my head swivelling on my shoulders, hawking for figures in doorways. Had any Puerto Rican junkie, desperate for his next fix, been in my vicinity, he could hardly have asked for a riper victim. I was transmitting signals as unmistakable as the bleeps from a bugging device. If the black whores, with their hipswinging walk and their Greek-mask faces, belonged there, then I was in clogs and earlocks, green as a comic-strip Martian.

  In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes. Before anything else, he must dress the part. The city is a world of bewildering surfaces, and it is in surfaces that he must learn to be an artist. (The process works both ways. When weekending Londoners, randy for Tudor beams and flagstone floors, descended on the Hampshire village where I grew up, their first rural gesture was to rig themselves out in ghastly pepper-and-salt tweeds. We regarded these sportive costumes with considerable contempt. Uniforms aren’t important in villages; and they are seen as the mark of irredeemable townees, signs of an obsession with symbols which the countryman finds incomprehensible and absurd.)

  So the Slovenian peasants in New York in 1913 ‘developed a taste for striped shirts and fancy ties, the kind that they saw the swells wear in the movies. They wanted to lose no time in getting Americanised, and thought that to dress in the American fashion was the initial and most important step in that direction.’ It was no coincidence that one of New York’s great economic growth-industries in the nineteenth century had been the garment manufacturing business. What Jane Jacobs has called ‘differentiated production’ (in The Economy of Cities) – the output of cheap, mass-produced, yet fashion-styled clothes – made a variety of inexpensive, glossy identities available to the immigrant. For fifteen dollars, a greenhorn peasant just off the boat could transform himself into a city slicker, in a gangster suit, a s
nap-brim hat and a loud tie. It was the first proof of the miracle of the American experience. The New York garment industry, writes Jacobs:

  . . . used to amaze visiting Europeans; they took back the extraordinary news that even shopgirls and factory girls in the United States were fashionably clothed in a dazzling variety of dresses. Europeans now use this kind of manufacturing themselves. In America it is this manufacturing that renders the poor deceptively invisible, as Michael Harrington has pointed out. They do not wear a uniform of the poor, nor do they dress in rags. Because of their clothes they look more prosperous than they are.

  Indeed, the garment industry fed as well as clothed many of the immigrants to the city. Thousands of Jews who had had their own tailor’s shops in Europe took jobs on the assembly lines, as machine-operators, cutting and sewing. All over the Lower East Side, people set up small sweatshops in tenement buildings. As the city itself fattened on successive waves of immigration, the garment industry absorbed many of the newcomers it was clothing. It mass-produced symbols, badges of rank and affiliation. This was a time when educational hucksters were making an easy living by running back-room classes in civics for immigrants (in preparation for the naturalisation exam); the garment industry, in a more practical and immediate fashion, Americanised a generation of European peasants, turning them, in a single fast deal, into New Yorkers and Chicagoans. To the eye, at least, they were indistinguishable from the rest of the citizenry – an amazing achievement, when one considers that the Jews especially had been accustomed to centuries of stigmatisation, and had been the most involuntarily visible of peoples.

  In London in the 1950s and 1960s, a new class of urban immigrant created a parallel boom in the cheap fashion industry. As wages for very young workers rose, and parental restraints eased, boys and girls in their teens migrated to the city, filling bedsitters several to a room, and spending more on clothes than on any other single item. A rash of boutiques, loud with pop music, crammed with mock gilt mirrors and day-glo colours, spread outwards from the King’s Road and Carnaby Street towards the squally suburbs.

  In the early 1950s when the post-war squeeze relaxed under the Conservative government, the ‘teddy-boys’ had created a market for that curious style which was half Edwardian, half Edward G. Robinson: drainpipe trousers, velveteen-lapelled jackets which came down to the knee, bootlace ties, and shirts like lacy meringues. Ten years later, the ‘mods’ established Carnaby Street as their fashion centre. They wore dapper Italianate suits and short haircuts, and looked like chocolate soldiers wrapped in tinfoil. Just as the Jewish immigrants to New York found a welcome invisibility in their new flashy city clothes, so these English working class children abandoned, symbolically at least, the stratified system of class deference into which they had been born. Their folk heroes, on whom they modelled their own style of dress, were pop singers and photographers – people like David Bailey and the Beatles, who had used the city as an escalator, rising into a glamorous, classless stratosphere, a publicity-world of images and trends, where money was extravagantly spent rather than accumulated. Their clothes reflected this casual, ironic stance towards established social values; they were parodies – of a period, as in the teddy-boy look, or of the fashions of another country, as in the craze for Italian, and later Indian and Moroccan clothes.

  In the last ten years, following the rise and decline of Carnaby Street, the clothes business has erupted in a splatter of camp irony, romantic nostalgia, and outright grotesquerie. Motheaten furs from the Oxfam shop, ‘granny’ glasses, sailor trousers, Dr Zhivago boots, clown suits, corespondent shoes, trailing gowns, ponchos, caftans, floppy hats, suits with Union Jacks all over them, and other emblems of imperial decline . . . each one a uniform, freed from its strict function, available, at low cost, to enhance an identity, give life to a dream of achieved selfhood. The dullest youth in the city can buy himself the trappings of a mincing gigolo, a ’thirties gangster or a frock-coated, ginger-whiskered Victorian rake.

  The newcomer to the city finds that, though uniform is of central importance in city life, its nature is bafflingly diverse. Your new city clothes are quite unlike the occupational, regional or class uniforms of the countryside and small town. They aren’t at all like peasant costumes, butcher’s aprons or the flannel trousers hitched about the knee of the agricultural labourer in cartoons in old volumes of Punch. Nor are they like the commuter’s pinstripe suit, bowler, and umbrella, the school-teacher’s leather-elbowed Harris tweed jacket, or the duffel-coat and long sweater which was the universal uniform of the university student when I was an undergraduate. All these sets of clothes are geared to a known function, to one’s place in a hierarchy which is thoroughly and instinctively understood. In many areas of the city, of course, the hierarchy still holds good: the lawyer, the broker on the Stock Exchange, the gentleman-publisher, wear rigid uniforms which announce their adherence to a firm tradition which yet survives in a naughty fluid world. But for the young without a profession, without precedents, the clothes they wear register the city’s immense and arbitrary range of choice. They announce simply that you have chosen, made your personal bid for a fantasy. Adamic and his friends turned themselves into fifteen-dollar movie swells; on the King’s Road, the bright young things of the 1970s (the grandchildren, perhaps, of the domestic servants of Evelyn Waugh’s original Mayfair set) transform themselves into witty parodies of the nineteenth-century upper class or the Hindoo peasantry. They are whimsical make-believe aristocrats and make-believe slaves; not long ago, there was a brisk trade in old policemen’s uniforms . . . anything goes. As I write, it is fashionable to clump like a Bohunk through the streets of London on brightly enamelled clogs – but only because there is no likelihood of anyone mistaking the smart secretaries who do so for real Slovenian peasants.

  The urban uniform, whose sole function is differentiation and arbitrary variety, is an important symptom of that condition of seemingly meaningless flux which Wordsworth diagnosed as the great disease of the city – ‘differences that have no law, no meaning, and no end’. Certainly their law, meaning, and end were not – could not be – apparent to someone equipped with the social logic of Cumberland and the romantic doctrine of Nature. In Cumberland’s, and Nature’s, terms such gratuitous diversity makes no sense at all: but in the city it may be the most important way of making possible the individual life, the personal identity. Such manic plurality may not be necessary in the single-industry city, but in the metropolis it is essential. The problem of the greenhorn is to make that leap, from a society in which each person and thing has its own set place, to a society which is in essence unfixed, plastic, and amenable – a society on which you are called to impose your choice, rather than a society which imposes its historical and customary order upon you. The greenhorn is the mythical figure who proves that it is possible to move from one state to the other; who, in effect, demonstrates that the laws and meanings of city life can be learned and understood just as thoroughly as those of the country. His ventures into role-playing and fashion attest to the intrinsic differentness of the metropolis; and in a world where the word ‘urban’ is becoming an umbrella of ever-increasing spread, his function is surely more not less crucial, for he explains by example why social life in Hull is so different from that of London.

  Yet there is something inherently puzzling and squashy about the initiation rites which attend the immigrant’s entry to the society of the city. In institutions and other small closed societies, such rites are organised by the elders, who then confer badges of identity on the successful entrant. (One thinks of degree-giving ceremonies, or the ritual ‘blooding’ of children that used, until recently, to go on at hunts.) Indeed, this was the function of the city guild, the Freemasons’ Lodge, and the gentleman’s club in St James’s. But the non-professional city immigrant has to make up his own tests and design his own badges. Society at large leaves him in no doubt that he is an initiate; he is deluged with jokes, stories, and warnings that perpetually remind
him of his unblooded status. But where is the test, and how can he know that he has passed it? Distinguished strangers are granted the Freedom of the City as an ancient civic honour, but how does the ordinary citizen set about obtaining this most ordinary of rights?

  Like so many things in cities, the test, and the subsequent granting of honours, happen inside the head. Some urban immigrants, with the mentality of the ghetto ingrained into them, never take it, never pass; they live in the city, decade after decade, nourishing the culture of the home-country in the unlikely soil of a cold-water flat in a tenement block. Like Yeats creating the Lake Isle of Innisfree out of the autochthonous rumble of Charing Cross, they press the soft city into the rural mould of a nostalgic dream life. Right under Piccadilly Circus, there is the yellow cavern of Ward’s Irish House, and it is full of people who had never thought to be greenhorns. In the slop of Guinness and Jameson’s they drink and talk in Ireland not in London; but one feels that this too is peculiar to the life of a metropolis, an expression of a freedom which any smaller city would curtail. By contrast, Adamic and the Jewish immigrants of American fact and fiction turn into urban aficionados within hours of stepping off the boat. For them, the real greenhorns, the city offers a destiny and identity that have lain chrysalid-like in the heart, waiting for that sudden blast of heat and light and change of scale to set them free.

  When I came to London, I took a room in a friend’s flat in Highgate, a few steps from the spectacular wrought-iron Archway Bridge which carries a sedate Edwardian avenue high over the ravine of the A1. Up on the crest of the hill, one is in the world of the forever fading glory of sober, middle class prosperity. Down in the thick chemical air of the ravine, one is in the quick-penny land of used-car dealers, betting shops, grave Irish bar-loungers, and men who stop you in the street with offers of second-hand shirts. I lived for a few months midway between the two; it was perfect territory for an immigrant, a place at once inside and out of the city, a hill with a view.