According to the agency, their clients are nearly all city-dwellers and fall into two peak age groups: 23–25 and 38–42. They live most typically in rented flats, are predominantly middle class and unusually mobile, the upper crust of the nomadic tribes, shifting from job to job and place to place, leaving the continuities of families and friends behind. While their university- and school-fellows acquire mortgages, spouses, and the latest in artbooks and kitchenware, computer datables come to rest stacked in the memory bank, waiting for an electronic coincidence to liberate them back into normality.
For the very temporary, willing to go blindfold into the fog, there is always the prostitute, an essential character of the city whose existence excited nineteenth-century writers about London to a pitch of rhetorical extremity which combined moralism and lasciviousness in equal parts. But emphasis on the ‘viciousness’ of the ‘harlot’ obscured the real function which she performed in the city – a refuge, however brief and depersonalised, for the acutely lonely, a reminder of intimacy and warmth. Flaubert, who understood human nature rather more than General Booth, wrote to his mistress Louise Colet, ‘One learns so many things in a brothel, and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love!’
Alone in the city, off the main roads where one might be spotted by acquaintances, one can find advertisements for call-girls in hundreds of newsagents’ windows. Between the rooms to let and Electroluxes for sale, there are invitations to bed couched in whimsically thin double-entendres. ‘Young French Canadian Lady Gives Expert Tuition In French . . . Elocution Lessons Given Daily . . . Blonde Model Seeks Interesting Position . . . Ladies Theatrical Wardrobe For Sale . . . Miss Penny Gives Lessons In Dancing . . . Massage by Miss-Tress.’ If you ring the numbers on these inky cards, they are nearly always answered by the ‘maid’, a middle-aged woman who keeps the flat and makes appointments for the girl or girls.
‘I’ll give you the details, dear,’ she said, flat-voiced, tired and businesslike. ‘Height five-foot seven, dark hair, age twenty-three, waist twenty-four, bust forty. The price starts at £3.50.’
‘What do you get for £3.50?’
‘Full service.’
‘And after that?’
‘By arrangement.’
Then the address and the time. It is as formal as a Health and Social Security office. Indeed, in Earl’s Court most of the call-girls I tried ringing all lived on one square which looks more like a barracks or a prison than a residential quarter. Here loneliness is treated with spartan efficiency. The maids shield the girls from the closer human demands of their clients; and the professional conduct of prostitution has as rigid codes as those of lawyers. It is necessary, perhaps. The stranded and the desperate, lurching through the fog in search of someone – anyone – need the protection of the code as much from themselves as for the girls whom they pump. The sadness of the punter, cruising from advertisement to advertisement, comparing lists of figures to find his special girl, goes deeper than the most expensive service can set right. But he himself is a more pressing, more significant city figure than the girls he hires.
For the really lonely individual in the city, life becomes a string of disconnected occasions; each present moment is exaggerated, and its theatrical glare seems designed to illuminate and isolate his aloneness. Eating by himself in a restaurant he feels conspicuous; he catches the eyes of other lone diners, imagines himself the subject of other people’s conversations, sees a world divided into two groups – the majority, complacent couples, parties and families, and an envious parasitical minority of single people, all with the picky eyes of gunfighters. He prickles at the imagined snubs or cursory service of the waiter. He calls for his bill with his coffee, knowing he has no further excuse to stay on. In a phone booth, he makes a cliffhanger out of the ringing tone, and gulps with relief when it is answered. When his own phone stays silent for a day, he suspects a conspiracy to drop him, and pesters the operator to check his bell. At a party, he stays too long, since there is nothing to follow it. Walking on the street at night, he sees himself in the third person, hero of a scenario without a plot, only an unending series of empty locations. He ransacks crowds for faces he knows, drinks alone close to the bar where the action is in pubs, resists obvious palliatives like cinemas for he feels that there he would be shamefully advertising his loneliness. People detect in him something strained and over-bright; his talk is hectic, his condemnations too strident to be convincing. His brief oases of evenings in other people’s houses are hoarded and counted; each engagement that he makes marks a small sod of safe ground in the bog of the future. He criss-crosses the city, moving fast and purposelessly; little surprises him, but then neither is anything – outside, perhaps, of his job and his sleeping-quarters – predictable. It lacks both causes and results. He begins to see his time as a pin-board which every week must be filled with scraps . . . cuttings, bottle-tops, anything to take the edge off emptiness. He is wholehearted about nothing; he is a skimmer and a flitter. It is comfortably married and socialised men who take to drink with conviction: for him there will be a couple of whiskies before the next shift in location, and a new tube station, dull as the last, slides into place in the carriage window.
This sorry character has a central place in the literature of the city. For George Gissing, he was Edwin Reardon in New Grub Street, and he stood for the lonely self-immolation of the writer in an industrial society. For Sartre, he was Roquentin in La Nausée, the cipher-man of absolute gratuitousness, absolute contingency. For Saul Bellow, he was Jacob in Dangling Man, a condensed Chicago version of Roquentin, the shadow of a supremely lonely shade. Sartre prefaced La Nausée with an epigraph from Céline: ‘He is a fellow without any collective significance, barely an individual.’ It is a comment of great pertinence to the condition of all these heroes. Our existence in society is vested in the collective and connective significance of all our actions; but in the city, sheer loneliness and physical dislocation from other people can turn us into petty Roquentins, sharing his experience without having his philosophy to support it. City life easily fosters a bleakly contingent view of the self and the world, an impoverished, home-made existentialism, as morbidly gay as a Juliette Greco song.
But being alone in a city does not of itself constitute a philosophy – a fact which seems to have escaped too many novelists in their enthusiasm for an abstracted version of the urban hero. The superb sketches of life in London and Paris published by Jean Rhys in the 1930s are almost alone in their accuracy and honesty to the real texture of the loner’s private world. Her heroines are utterly isolated and disconnected, but they are not yet solipsists. Miss Rhys attended patiently to their rhythms of living and feeling, and the contingency out of which her novels are made is something that happens to you, not a construct which you make to make sense of the world. Her syntax has the painful clarity of a hangover; sentence comes after sentence, event after event, with truthful, distressing illogicality. Acquaintances, lovers and friends pass in a moving frieze, often incomprehensible, always unstoppable. People are lost, found, and got rid of. The landscape of the city is hard-edged, like the smooth walls of a labyrinth. Loneliness is so essential that love and friendship invariably seem artificial and untrustworthy, matters more of rhetoric than of life. Encounters with other people are stiff with evasions and pretences. Here is one from After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, in which Julia, the central character, has been approached by a lonely South African on a tube train:
The man said, ‘Will you write or telephone me at this address? I shall be here for another couple of weeks.’
He gave her a card, on which were his name and the address of a club. Without looking at it, Julia let it drop into her lap, and said, ‘Yes,’ smiling mechanically, and: ‘Yes, of course. Yes.’
When the train stopped at Notting Hill Gate Station she got up quickly, and the card fell from her lap onto the floor. The man stared after her, and reddened. Then he looked hastily about him. No one was watching. He picked the card up
, brushed it, and put it back into his pocket, crossed his legs, and composed his countenance.
The slightly creaky formality of tone here is part of the style of isolation. In Jean Rhys’s novels, communication of any kind is awkward and hard-won; often all language allows is an embarrassed escape into cliché. Her defensive, chronically ironic heroines handle their words like explosives; they know that language can get you into trouble. And they live in the city knowing it to be a dangerous place where to be hurt and alone is the most one can reasonably expect. The flash of a romantic affair, a candlelit dinner party or a drunken spree through the cafés are gifts of unreal and unrepresentative connection, and Miss Rhys’s heroines have to learn to treat them with proper scepticism – even though these occasions are the only glimpses they are given of a collective life within society.
It is out of this conviction that one has become logically, chronologically, syntactically and sexually and socially disconnected that the deepest and most painful feelings of loneliness spring. It is dreadfully possible to be persuaded that one has, in effect, fallen out of the world, dropped through the wide and raggy mesh of the collective net. Then only the I is real, and solipsism, like suicide, taunts and tantalises. An ex-convict describes being let out of jail into the London streets after a long sentence. At 7.30 in the morning of the Thursday before Easter, he heads for the nearest tobacconist, then for an ‘early house’ – a pub in Covent Garden market. Later there will be the Labour Exchange and the trail round landladies letting cheap rooms. There are queues and forms to fill in, but every action seems hopelessly divorced from its consequences, the rest of the world alien and darkly conspiratorial:
I was given a letter to go to the Ministry of Social Security, the queue was so long I gave up in disgust and as I had paid my rent, I was not worried. I then had to pay for certain things people had been looking after for me but found quite a few things missing; I have written regarding these and hope that they will come to light.
Friday, Saturday and Monday were holidays so I was without assistance during this time. I did call on a relation but had the door closed on me; this I did not really expect though my father and certainly most of my relations want nothing to do with me. It would have been pleasant if I had had someone to talk to over the Easter period.
Objects, personal possessions become disproportionate in their significance; and one feels here the looming, nightmare connections of paranoia. The collective world seems to have links that are all too strong; what is impossible is to relate oneself to that bitterly exclusive net of relationships. Like most writing about isolation, this passage is stiff with a kind of brutal innocence; everything down to the days of the week has to be listed and named – the simplest things have become strange and untrustworthy. The hardest thing to speak of is oneself. For the identity which routine, occasional, institutional encounters confer upon the individual is enragingly incomplete. You crave recognition; all you receive is treatment – as an applicant, a prospective tenant, a potential employee, a case, a customer. The lonely person in the city finds himself regarded as a disconnected string of such bare functions; he feels himself swelling incoherently over the top of them, bulging in places where no bulge should be. Odd intimacies spill out at inappropriate moments; to a stranger in a bar, he suddenly says that he chucked out his wife two years ago after finding her underclothes in a saucepan, or that his sister has invited him to her home for Christmas . . . then he shuts up, instantly ashamed of his candour. In cities, the personal is constantly being suppressed; and it is often the personal – the bottled intimacy, the pride in one’s own name and own feelings – which bursts out in poems, petty crimes, letters to strangers, drunken communications in bars and the interior movies of which one makes oneself the hero as one walks the streets.
Coming out of the fog, making oneself visible and available is prickly and difficult. The routes out are as formalised – as consecrated by custom – as other routes in the city. Certain public areas are set apart for loners to signal to each other: and it is significant that those groups which have become most accustomed to stigmatisation, to being isolated by society at large, have evolved the most ritualised forms of contact. In London, homosexuals have a number of clubs and pubs where it is very easy for strangers to make one another’s acquaintance. Even compared to the bars in Chelsea where boys and girls pick each other up, there is an astonishing freedom of eye-contact in gay pubs. Within the ghetto (and in London there is an acre or so of streets in the Earl’s Court district which is at night so densely populated with homosexuals that it assumes many of the characteristics of a real ghetto), direct invitations and interrogations are the convention. You may catch someone’s eye across the length of a crowded bar or basement discotheque and make an instant assignation – at least to talk. People move freely about the floor areas of these places, switching from group to group and person to person. As an outsider, my first impression of these clubs and pubs was that everyone knew everybody else; but that was quite untrue. They are used primarily by people cruising on their own, rare privileged corners of the city where the stranger is approachable. They are sad places, full of fervid hothouse intensity, because they are so specialised; most of their clientele live outside the ghetto, and the over-bright friendliness of their atmosphere springs in large part from the fact that everywhere else the homosexual is condemned to a form of stigmatised solitude by society. I shall deal with them in greater detail in Chapter Eight.
But stigma does carry a certain perverse privilege in itself, and the homosexual or the ghetto Jew is able to lead a collective life in the metropolis of a kind which many less readily identifiable isolates might envy. One can, if one is sufficiently bold or desperate, advertise one’s loneliness in the newspaper. Print, the most public of media, goes into the most private rooms; and in its impersonality, and the anonymity of the box number, there are real consolations. In the Personal Column, you can reach into the fog by proxy, then see who comes to you through the mailbox: here loneliness has a solidarity, even a kind of respectability; fellow isolates are stacked neatly in columns of fine type, and the language they use is as formalised and restricted as the code of a caste. Its expressiveness lies in its rigid adherence to convention.
The papers which carry most such advertisements are invariably caste organs – the parish magazines of political, literary, sexual, and sub-cultural groupings. The New York Review of Books, the New Statesman, Time Out, Gay News, International Times . . . these are all publications whose tone encourages their readers to see themselves as bands of like-minded souls. Subscribing to the New Statesman is perhaps the weakest of all ways of affiliating oneself to a caste, but in its personal column the phrase ‘New Statesman reader’ crops up again and again, as if it was a magical measure of personal identity. So, if you are acutely lonely, you may fantasise a community of people like yourself, invisibly linked by print; fellow radicals, fellow homosexuals, fellow hippies, secret sharers:
Lonely young man (28) of average looks, interested in the arts, travel, etc.; would like to meet an honest, sensitive and warm-hearted girl with similar interests for genuine friendship . . .
Quiet guy, 28, radical, enjoys classical music, films, seeks girl 18–39 to share life, country weekends, etc. . . .
Attractive, slim widow, young 40s, Jewish, seeks friendship, secure, nice male 50s . . .
Tall fit man, mid-6os, separated (misfortune not fault) needs companionship of sympathetic woman, 50-plus, sharing compulsive love of books and classical music. London, preferably NW . . .
Man, 36, div., no hang-ups, cultured, capital, sks attractive lady pref. in establ. business who needs partner in both senses of word. All answered . . .
Youthful, personable, humorous, competent man, 50+; ex-husband. 12 st., 5'9". All faculties working order. Executive; interested visual arts, town, country, food, wine; non-smoker. Seeks feminine attractive bus/prof. woman in attempt to achieve mutual happiness, London area . . .
Plato
nic friend needed. I am lonely, would like someone who likes going to pubs, clubs etc. Would be a help to have car. I am 26 and honest. Please help . . .
Are you 25–32 and passive? Are you tired of being alone, tired of trolling? I’m a professional man of 33, gay, but masculine in outlook. Have flat in West London and car. If you are looking for a permanent relationship and security, please write with photo to . . .
These people, squashing their lives into abbreviated sentences at so many pence a word, have developed a disturbingly vague grammar of identity. The adjectives which recur most frequently in the columns are oddly impersonal: ‘kind . . . attractive . . . warm . . . sincere . . . personable . . . intelligent . . . cultured . . . sympathetic . . . feminine . . .’ The standard formula for describing hobbies and special interests is ‘interested in travel and the arts’. The relationship sought is ‘genuine . . . secure . . . happy . . . serene . . . peaceful . . .’ Country weekends and listening to music are essential ingredients in these idylls, which sound remarkably untainted by reality.
Yet the loneliness is real enough; and it must take a lot to screw oneself up to place an advertisement of this kind. Most of the people who do so are of an age to know that secure, serene, genuine relationships between cultured, sympathetic and attractive partners do not belong in this world. Many are divorced; more will have been ‘trolling’, in that expressive camp word for fishing for pickups. One can hardly doubt that their search is in earnest, that they are bruised with experience. Yet when they come to put their most intimate selves and needs on paper, the words they use are as empty of meaning as transparent counters. Do ‘attractive slim widow, young 40s, Jewish’, or ‘Man, 36, div., no hang-ups, cultured, capital’ really believe that they have found just the right forms of words to describe themselves? Do they feel the satisfaction of the happy autobiographer, sure that he has got his likeness to a T? Or are these empty shells themselves signs that, in the city, personal life has become so obscure and unavailable that any attempt to communicate its nature is bound to flop?
Soft City Page 16
