When the black hero of Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man (1952), migrates from the South to New York he finds himself repeatedly mistaken for a contrary and ubiquitous character called Rinehart. This other invisible man seems to the narrator to embody all the baffling characteristics of the city itself:
Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? And I knew that it was. I had heard of it before but I’d never come so close. Still, could he be all of them: Rine the Runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? What is real anyway? But how could I doubt it? He was a broad man, a man of parts who got around. Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the Rascal was at home. Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in it. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
Of course we are disturbed when the city throws up a Rinehart or a Ronnie Kray as its corrupted hero. We are shocked that such men are possible; worse, we see that they are the people who make most use of the intrinsic possibilities of the city. ‘London’, said Henry James, ‘is, on the whole, the most possible form of life’; but, while it is possible for the reclusive novelist, how much more possible is it for the enterprising con-man who is able to exploit the gullible innocence of society with more flair and cold cheek than James ever dared to endow his own urban villains with.
The Krays and Rineharts are extreme examples: they belong as spectacular textbook cases in the psychopathology of city life, living out a full arc of possibility which few of us begin to scale. Thankfully, our dreams are meaner, more cautious and constrained. With my two suits and gulping manner, I’m in no sort of competition with these adroit tricksters. Yet the vivid flashes of their careers – each time they fire, they burn another colour – light up the smaller, more abashed and secretive details of our own lives.
During the course of a day, one passes from identity to identity. These roles are nothing like as glamorous and deliberate as Ronnie Kray’s, but they do compare with his in number and variety. I have contact with perhaps thirty people every day, and I lead a sedentary and relatively isolated life. Some are just voices over the phone, some are casual strangers (cab drivers, shop assistants), some distant acquaintances, some close friends. In addition, there are the crowds one passes through: faces across the carriage of a tube train, bodies moving in a street. Some of these anonymous figures will become suddenly and temporarily sharp; they will take on a fleeting, partial personality – a look of complicity or interrogation, a sly shove, moments in which identity is asserted then as quickly withdrawn. Even of my basic thirty people, I may see or talk to only fifteen ever again. In the city, nearly everyone disappears into the dark, and to emerge again is to participate in that peculiarly urban trick of coincidence.
Yet in every contact with every stranger, the self is projected and exhibited – or, at least, a version of the self, a convenient mask which can be looked at and listened to, quickly comprehended, easily forgotten. My first morning phone call is from my agent; I try to sound a man of business, and not to spill my coffee on the floor. I talk fees and reminder letters, and slide into gossip. Then the absent-minded euphoria of work, when one hardly seems to be anyone at all, just a hand moving, eyes following print, dead from below the shoulder. A phone call from a friend, gushing and over-sprightly for my dim morning mood; a letter written, ‘Dear Sir, With reference to . . .’; then, stiff suited, I take a tube for lunch at a club. In transit, a brown girl and I eye each other and read the titles of each other’s closed books on our knees . . . an anaemic Don Juan on an empty stomach. Suddenly, through the swing door of the club, I am a Gentleman; I have things I had forgotten . . . an old school, an awkward nodding bonhomie, the gentleman’s ducklike walk, waddling over swathes of maroon carpeting. There are other parts to come: one shifts from dullard to smoothie, from customer to salesman, from high-minded speculator to fryer-up of mince and onions. And between all these lie stretches of unbeing, minutes out of time, out of character, periods in which it seems as if you are simply waiting for the next script to be delivered, the next performance to begin. Hypochondria brings one back to oneself; the tug at the throat, the twist of pain in a knee joint . . . symptoms to remind one that one is alive. Always it feels possible that these dead patches of ennui might be arbitrarily protracted into whole days or weeks of empty rolelessness. Sometimes I gawp mindlessly at afternoon TV programmes, just waiting to become someone again, and envying that sense of vulgar destiny which possessed Ronnie Kray.
Everyone has his own rhythm, and I don’t know how representative is my own chronic cycle of performances interspersed with stretches of near-complete vacancy. But it does seem to me to be a logical product of the way in which cities make us live in them, of the urban necessity of playing many parts to a succession of short-order audiences. The twin components of the cycle have the effect of illuminating and exaggerating one another: by contrast, the vacancies seem overwhelmingly blank, the performances florid and strident. The invisible man’s awful suspicion that, beneath the disguises, there may be nothing there at all, a rind without a heart, a reality of lies, is one that comes disturbingly easily and often to the city-dweller.
The city has shaken our confidence in reality. As a result we have tended to become excessively knowing and breezy about role playing and sham. (One copy of the Times Literary Supplement yields five examples of the phrase ‘not spurious’ to describe books admired by their reviewers – as if it was a generally acknowledged fact that most books are spurious . . . which, if true, ought to shock the writers out of the coolly complacent tone of their reviews.) The junkie’s habitual question about anyone who behaves differently from himself – ‘What’s he on?’ – is bandied about in society at large. ‘Isn’t everyone in on some sort of act . . . what part is he playing?’ People readily label others as ‘pseudos’, and the metropolis is habitually presented as a place full of cut-out cardboard humans jigging about to the call of some bland synthetic puppeteer.
Such gestures proceed out of a genuinely felt anxiety that the city may have made human identity mechanical and crude, an artefact not a product of nature. It is significant that the Yellow Book ‘decadents’ of the 1890s – perhaps the most self-consciously urban group of artists in our history – should have elevated that anxiety into a style. In the drawings of Beardsley, the writing of Wilde, and the clothes and ironic self-projection of Max Beerbohm, the lie became an art form: its elaborate stylisation, its capacity to make fantasies come true, its preference for the plausible over the truthful, led the decadent movement into a rapturous embrace of the spurious. In architecture, the grotesque affectation of Pont Street Dutch . . . or the joyous parodies of horse-and-trap combinations which were executed by the early designers of automobiles . . . For the first, euphoric burst of urban technological development, such fanciful impersonations and departures from the truth were gestures of liberation. The artistic extravaganzas of the late nineteenth century suggested that city life might be a gravity-defying dance against nature. The fashion, the role, the lie, the daring fantasy, were assertions of the human – living proofs that in a world of machines and city streets the machine could be man’s toy not his master, and that the street, far from being a jungle of anonymity, could be the stage for a uniquely personal performance. If the gangster represents one side of the peculiar knowledge of the city, the dandy stands for another, just as important; with his silver-handled cane, silk hat and ruffled lace, he shows us that it is possible to survive – lazily, gorgeously and eloquently – on the very lip of the abyss.
But now the point seems fudged. Far from proving that we can deny nature, we are frightened that somewhere – on the street . . . in some dark labyrinth of technology . .
. in our own over-fertile reproductive system . . . – we may have lost nature altogether. The dandy-gangsters of the King’s Road and Greenwich Village do not strike most of us as optimistic symbols. The garish goods on sale at the emporium weigh us down as heavily as if they had themselves replaced the burden of nature and its attendant constraints. We are overloaded with their intrusions, sick of their gleaming surfaces. The opportunities for fakery and versatile impersonation which the city affords are, we suspect, more likely to favour a Ronnie Kray than an Incomparable Max.
Techniques of mass production, mass communication and rapid movement from one part of the city to another have made it very easy for us to drift into being dandies and gangsters. The price of maintaining an identity is cheap; appearances come ready-made and packaged, do-it-yourself kits. It sometimes seems as if one might flip over the edge into a deliriously fragmented confusion of postures and roles. In this maelstrom of possibilities, it is a pressing problem merely to find out who one is – to tease out at least the semblance of a nature from this heap of masks and rejected scraps of artifice.
Beneath the old uniforms, old voices and expressions, last year’s poster hero, last month’s craze in chic baubles or party line in ideology . . . a shrivelled self, raw, barely recognisable, like the hideous dwarf king stripped of his finery in the famous revolutionary cartoon, ‘Le roi . . . soleil’. Techniques of self-determination have themselves turned into fashionable crazes: astrology, acid, casting sticks for the I-Ching . . . the inspirational and non-rational have been hawked about as spy-glasses through which the elusive self might be discerned. Nature, sincerity, self-expression are all words we have seen over-used at a time when nature and the self have been leading a conspicuously dubious and diminished existence. The more we try to reject machine-turned styles and rhetorical embellishments, the more firmly trapped in their grasp we seem to get.
It was not always so. The trade in purchasable identities absorbed Dickens in Our Mutual Friend; yet, by modern standards, the industry is primitive and circumscribed – hardly even the germ of the situation we have today. Dickens, like Marx, was fascinated by the power of money, its movements, its accumulation, its capacity to change and determine the lives of the people who are touched by it. Throughout the novel, Dickens acts as a shady banker towards his characters, parcelling the stuff out, then arbitrarily withdrawing it, scrutinising its effects on those who lose and receive it. Legacies real and bogus, deals, secrets, impersonations, hidden treasure, usury, speculation . . . the whole book reverberates with the chink of coinage and the rustle of transferred shares. At the centre is the miraculous transformation of Mr and Mrs Boffin, the ‘Golden Dustman’ and his wife. On their sudden rise, from being servants to being plutocrats, the rest of the characters hang like leeches, watching, waiting, begging, embezzling, cantankerously eager to see whether their riches will ‘spoil’ the Boffins.
When the legacy comes to them, the first question to which the Boffins apply themselves in their parlour is whether or not to ‘have a go-in for Fashion’. Set free into a dizzying world of total choice, they decide in the course of a single page how they will live, who they are going to be. Having a go-in for Fashion means, simply, a carriage, a move from grimly genteel Holloway to dashing Mayfair, a quick course in literacy (provided by Silas Wegg declaiming selected passages from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), more velvet and feathers for Mrs Boffin, a pile of copperplate visiting cards on the hall table, and a monstrous amount of paperwork. ‘We have come into a great fortune,’ says Mrs Boffin, ‘and we must do what’s right by our fortune; we must act up to it.’ Much later in the book, she is to accuse Mr Boffin of not being his old self, and Mr Boffin is to reply:
‘Our old selves wouldn’t do here, old lady. Haven’t you found that out yet? Our old selves would be fit for nothing here but to be robbed and imposed upon. Our old selves weren’t people of fortune; our new selves are; it’s a great difference.’
Indeed, all Dickens’s people of insecure fortune have this habit of talking about their selves as if they were determined by the capricious appearance and disappearance of their money. The novel is a satire of genius on the way in which the Victorian middle class equated property and character; and Dickens achieves his boldest and most brilliant effects when he forces his own vision of the stubborn permanency of identity, good and bad, against the quicksilver life of radical change and reversal which the characters themselves believe that they are leading.
Yet in Dickens there is really only one style on sale in the emporium, and it is the style of wealth. When people buy it on credit, or steal it, we know that they will eventually get their comeuppance. They may borrow it temporarily, they can succeed to it rightfully, it may be blown away from them in an unpredictable gust of wind from the stock market; but every movement of money serves only to reinforce that basic, two-tier distinction, between showy affluence and cringing poverty. Poverty is not a style; affluence can be. To live honourably in a Dickens novel, one must reject style except as a decoration; the good character is the man who can use style as a disguise, who can move through society wearing an appropriate mask at every level, but who still knows his essential self, and can listen more closely to his heart than to the call of his possessions. In matters of style, he must never forget that he is an actor, that these are only parts – costumes to be worn and discarded. He may delude the reader – he often seems to delude Dickens – but he must never delude himself.
It sounds a wise and timely counsel for our plight today. But I suspect that it only serves to underline the difference between Dickens’s city and our own. All round us there are signs that people are trying to reject style, to live as openly and directly as they can without the masks and mannerisms which the city forces on them. In Writing Degree Zero Roland Barthes argued that the central movement of modern literature has been the abandonment of ‘style’ in its bourgeois decorative sense. One solution to the problem of disengaging literary language from the ideological burdens laid on it by the accretions of historical usage is, Barthes says: ‘to create a colourless writing, freed from all bondage to a preordained state of language . . . This transparent form of speech . . . achieves a style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style.’ This is the degree zero, the point of utterly divested confrontation between the self and the world. Barthes discovers this ‘ideal absence of style’ in, amongst many other examples, the narration of Camus’s Outsider. In England, we have less Gallically theoretical equivalents. We have watched the work of George Orwell grow steadily in stature and importance since his death; and it is primarily valued for its tone of flat honesty and unfrilled seriousness – its style of tough unstylishness. We have had enough of dandies (is it possible to imagine Waugh, let alone Firbank, beginning his career in England today?); seriousness is the order of the day, and, dismally often, it is a routine sluggish seriousness, as mannered in its way as the overheated or facetious prose for which it is intended as a corrective. Like Richard Hoggart’s Reith Lectures, it is earnest, bare, complacent in its conspicuous lack of flash and posing. We have taken to according it an undeserved quantity of respect.
This concern for unclothed honesty in writing is part of a wider revolt against style, a search for something like Barthes’s degree zero in life as well as in art, a quest for the kind of uncompromising seriousness which the city threatens to deny. Already this movement has had an able resident satirist, in Mark Boxer, who for several years drew a weekly strip cartoon for The Listener called ‘Life and Times in NW1’. His characters, the Stringalongs and Touch-Paceys, were drawn libellously closely from the life: sceptical, middle-class liberal intellectuals with jobs in journalism and television, who subscribed to strenuously advanced views on politics, art, psychology and education. They were ardent campaigners for every kind of Liberation, they belonged to the intellectual left wing of the Labour Party, they discussed the population problem and the novels of Beckett, they appeared on late-night discussion p
rogrammes as spokesmen for the new enlightenment. Their private life was represented as a continuous, intense, bespectacled debate, an orgy of scrupulous self-questioning. They inspected each other for signs of corruption (acquired in their rapid accumulation of mild wealth and respectable fame), and made ritual trips to university socialist groups to lecture on the progress of the revolution (an eminently rational and unbloody affair, necessary but rather distant). The cartoon was vastly successful. At the time, it seemed to encapsulate the follies of a new and speedily growing class of British intelligentsia – a class that was trying, and failing, to redeem its ancestral sins of swagger, show, conspicuous consumption and extravagant fashionability. Boxer’s point was that such a denial of style constituted a ripe style itself, although many of his audience, I suspect, took the cartoon rather differently, and were simply anxious to keep up with the Stringalongs. Certainly the weekly goings-on at the Crescent found a surprisingly quick echo in the party and dinnertime life of the university town in which I was living at the time.
The cartoon has stopped (although some of its individual characters still turn up in Boxer’s drawings for The Times); the style goes on blithely unchecked. Its most eloquent practitioners have been drawn from the young hereditary middle class; people who have assumed the right and necessity of owning property as an automatic reflex. We may imagine that they grew up in rather grand houses with gravel drives, comfortably distant from the steamy life of their nearest working-class neighbours. As adults, they fumed guiltily on the boldly bourgeois ethos of their parents. Not for them the vulgar exhibition of wealth, or the unthinking defensive conservatism which their income and capital might have led them unthinkingly towards, a generation or two ago. Their professions are vaguely, entrepreneurially ‘cultural’; academics, journalists of a literary turn, television directors and producers, actors, copywriters, publishers, agents, with a few lawyers, accountants and business executives. For them the purchase of a house has become an act of conscience; and they have left the old strongholds of their class behind (believing that their education and judiciously left politics have declassed them anyway), and searched out ‘unspoiled’ areas in the city, where they can live conspicuously cheek-by-jowl with the polyglot poor. They have rejected the suburbs, and found parts near the centre of the city which had been rendered invisible to the bourgeois eye by a century of railway engineering, immigration, and progressive dilapidation. In the blackened, small-windowed brick terraces (built for better-off artisans and the shabbier members of the lower middle class in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century), they have seen an honest unpretension which fits very well their conception of themselves. For they are much shrewder, less driven by illusions, more veiled in their ambition and wholly uninfatuated with the city, than the anxious immigrants on Highgate Hill.
Soft City Page 9
