Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  To stay here is to be a rarity. I have lived on the square for over a year now, and the milkman, the postman and some of the shopkeepers and restaurateurs know my name, and they use it as if they and I were accomplices, sticking it out while the rest of the world goes by. In most places, a year is a very short time, but in Earl’s Court it is an unusual stretch of continuity, a hint of unaccustomed order. It often seems that here all the divisive and fragmentary qualities, intrinsic to the life of a metropolitan city, have come to a pustular head: Earl’s Court is the acid test – people who can like it are true city-dwellers, I think.

  It commands a form, a way of thinking and feeling, quite different from that of Islington. It is possible to tell the story of the square in north London; it has a history, and its fortunes have been relatively consistent, just as they have been wholly dependent on the manner in which the square has been regarded as property to be bought or leased. But the square in Earl’s Court does not lend itself to narrative. Its history stopped when householders could no longer afford squads of servants – somewhere between 1920 and 1930. Now it needs a patchwork quilt of intrusions, guesses and observations to get anywhere near its truth. It is diverse, random, out of time, even out of place (it is too many different times and places). It is nearly all show, and it is impossible to root for the ‘real’ faces behind the carnival masks. Casual consumption and extravagance – the air of a perverted and garish resort – have endowed it with a deeply pervasive unreality. There are no community sanctions, except of the most official kind, and even formal agencies like the police seem lax and ready to turn a number of blind eyes. It is as easy to drown here unnoticed as it is to evade the law, the social authorities, or one’s family. You are on your own, on your wits. Living here is lonely, potentially dangerous even. It is all possibility. In this quarter, one is plagued by the intuition that you are free to destroy yourself with your own fantasies, and that, in a large city, the most free of all communities, nobody – unless you fall grossly foul of the Inland Revenue or the police – will do very much to rescue or deter you.

  But this is always a necessary consequence of individual freedom; and people who hate cities (they would be certain to loathe Earl’s Court and see it as living evidence of the dystopia they believe industrial cities are leading us towards) are surely right when they interpret them as the enemies of decent family life, of community constraints, of ‘public morals’. It is possible, however, to prefer the freedom of a place like this, with all its hazards, to the forced constrictions of the small town or organically conceived suburb. No one in their right mind would see anything utopian in Earl’s Court: its freedom is badly scarred, commercially exploited, licentious. It affords indifference not tolerance; it is a tribal wilderness not a community. On a summer night here you catch the rank stink of decadence – a combination of greasy banknotes, hasty expensive sex and stale whisky – a city smell, pungent and sweet, like the bad air of ancient Rome which Gibbon tasted as a prophecy. Yet here, for the lucky and the provident, a kind of private life is possible, a life of small freedoms away from curiosity and censure. That, given we have lost so much elsewhere, seems a good which should not be undervalued.

  NINE

  One American City

  At ten o’clock on Saturday night, the old black man and his wife set up their piles of Boston Sunday Herald-Americans at the corner of Inman Square. But this is not a square; it’s a deserted intersection, eerily darkened because of the Energy Crisis. The blacks, wrapped up like parcels against the December weather, have no customers. They flap their arms forlornly to keep warm, mooch five steps up the street, and five steps back. A big yellow car with a jagged fender skips the red light and heads towards whatever action there may be in downtown Boston. Crossing the road to get to the Gaslight Pub, I notice a laundry-bundle in a doorway which, seeing me, gets up and turns into the remains of a woman; a stunted thing with a big head and a frizzy mop of ochre-coloured hair. She starts singing gibberish first at me, then at her reflection in the glass of a shop door. Only the word ‘babylove’ is distinguishable.

  ‘Babyloveshamingamingaliveaplingalove.’ And cackles at me, her face as creased as Auden’s. But something about the mouth is still only in its late teens or very early twenties; it has the raw-meat floppiness of adolescence.

  ‘Is-scher-schplitzer-mishder-kwicks-a-schpearer-quarter.’

  I hurry past.

  ‘Fuck you!’

  In the pub that is not a pub in the square that is not a square, there is an amiable seedy huddle around the bar. Plaid donkey jackets, a couple of tarts who look as though they’ve strayed in from the 1950s, one or two crimped underfed faces from the Great Depression and a man with a watch chain and hat from another era altogether. The rest of the place is laid out like a workman’s café, in barren lines of tables and chairs. There’s an unplayed-at club pool table with bald baize, a glass phone kiosk that looks as if it had been smuggled in off the street, and an electric tennis machine that has a cardiogram for a face and is hungry for quarters. Everything is out of kilter. Nothing in the room, except for the plaid jackets, comes together.

  It takes a few minutes to notice the three men at separate tables, they are so still, so much a part of the bar furniture. Each one has his head sunk into his chest, an empty bottle of Schlitz on the table in front of him. Their coats trail in straight lines from shoulders to floor. Their eyes are closed tight as zip-fasteners. The man nearest to me seems to have forgotten his lips; they twitch and blink as if he were speaking in tongues. His thumb mashes what’s left of a stale bagel to dust on the tabletop.

  Outside on the street, the black couple are doing a joyless shuffle-dance on the sidewalk, like a lumpish parody of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Business is bad. They blow on their hands and gaze uptown for car lights. Nothing doing.

  The Gaslight Pub, with its browbeaten collection of people and things in the wrong time and the wrong place, is true to the spirit of Boston as a city – a raw, dislocated place that never seems to quite come right. It is not even a city, exactly; rather, it is a shabby galaxy of more or less independent townships. Boston proper has less than three-quarters of a million inhabitants, but ‘metropolitan Boston’ is as big as Birmingham, swollen by more than a dozen separate ‘communities’ which have kept their autonomy ever since the Puritans settled in the area in the seventeenth century. They have their own town meetings, their own police forces, schools, courts, newspapers. Boston has a metropolitan economy and metropolitan-scale commuter routes – a gigantic tangle of expressways, subways and streetcar lines. But it has never coalesced into a metropolitan city. Its style is resolutely small-town – small-town emptiness, small-town sprawl, small-town isolation; it exudes the wet Sunday afternoon atmosphere of the dull province where there’s no place to go, no big-city freedom, no glamour. Everything about Boston – its architecture and size, its strange concentration of eccentric talents – should have made it an exciting city. But no. That is not what Boston wanted. It craved discreet uneventfulness, the calm of a vast, woody suburb. Like so many American cities, it has succeeded in landing itself up in a terrible, anomalous mess.

  When I first arrived here for a three-month stay, I was lost in a labyrinth of names and boundaries that were quite incomprehensible to an outsider. There was a fifteen-minute taxi ride from the airport on a looping expressway, through tunnels, on flyovers, past an architecture of ruddy brick, white-painted wood, sharp angles, bowfronts, balconies, pretty spires and small clusters of skyscrapers that looked as if they had been hired from New York for the day. There were changes of colour and texture in the journey, but were these the outskirts or the city centre? I couldn’t tell. We crossed a river, and on all sides I saw the same jerky, up-and-down look. There must be the centre . . . no there, but there was no area of sufficient intensity on the skyline to be sure. We stopped at the great redbrick shoebox of an apartment house where I was to be living. This was . . . Boston? No, Cambridge. But isn’t Cambridge a p
art of Boston? No, Cambridge is Cambridge. A few days before, I’d read in the English papers of the murder of a woman by immolation on a vacant lot in Boston. Was that near here? No, that was in Roxbury. Is Roxbury part of Boston? Well, sort of . . . yes, you could say Roxbury is a part of Boston. How far from here? About, oh, three miles. My second night, still giddy with these names, there was a huge fire in Chelsea; we could see the flames from the top of our block. But Chelsea, of course, is not in Boston, and it’s not even next door to Cambridge, so the fire was none of our business: it was an interesting blaze in another country, to hear about on the radio.

  Never have I been so confined to quarters. It was like being back at boarding school, for nearly everywhere turned out to be out of bounds. The newcomer to the American city finds himself being constantly buttonholed by his acquaintances. ‘How well do you actually know Boston?’ they inquire, as if you were not to be trusted with your frivolous European idea of the freedom of the city. Then come the warnings. ‘You mustn’t think it’s like London, you know.’ By the end of the first day, I had learned that I was not to cross the river, go on to or beyond the Cambridge Common; that I could go to Harvard Square, but not as far as Central Square, a mile further down. Somerville, the neighbouring ‘community’, was unsafe. I must not take taxis, they were much too expensive, and I mustn’t ride on the subway because a lot of people were getting mugged there. I found that I was stuck, and that during daylight hours only, with an area of about a square mile; a small, frustrating cell of city space, beset by phantoms on every side.

  Within a few days, these boundaries had become as real and oppressive as the walls of a ghetto. They enclosed Harvard University and a few leafy suburban streets of wooden mansions, their fronts as full of rigging, balconies and quarter-decks as Mississippi steamboats. There were lots of nice old ladies who got blown along the sidewalks with the fall leaves, their voices dry and querulous – the characteristic note of the old Boston accent, genteel as an embroidery needle stitching a sampler. There were rangy students, and triumphantly androgynous young women, and squat European sages in berets and mufflers, but there was no sense at all of a city. Here was ‘The Square’, ‘The Yard’; one department store, two cinemas, a clutch of second-rate restaurants . . . enough, perhaps, to make a life, but the life would have the small, defensive certitude of a scholarly village parson’s. You could enclose it in a little glass dome, adding water and a snowstorm of plastic chips, then sell it in the gift shop on Brattle Street: ‘A Souvenir from Harvard College.’

  It is a pretty toy ghetto. Like a nanny’s frightening stories of the outside world, designed to keep the children safe inside the nursery, there are scary rumours about the rest of the city. Everywhere else in Greater Boston, so it would seem, is the exclusive territory of some group, patrolled by vigilantes on the lookout for strangers like you. Never go to Roxbury or Dorchester, or you will be murdered by ‘the blacks’ . . . in the North End, the Italians will get you . . . in Somerville, the poor whites . . . in Chelsea, the poor Jews . . . in Brookline, the rich Jews . . . on the back of Beacon Hill, the junkies . . . on the front of Beacon Hill, the Brahmins . . . and if you go near water, you will be bitten by the snapping turtles. A graduate student, who had displayed no other signs of insane paranoia, solemnly asserted that the Back Bay ‘had been taken over by the Jews’. From the perspective of Cambridge, Boston is a chequerboard of enemy camps, and anyone who moves from his square is taking his life in his hands.

  Yet, looking over the city from the safe vantage point of the restaurant on the fifty-second floor of the Prudential Center, all I could see was miles and miles of the same, infinitely extended small town – low, bricky, sprouting elms and maples in every available gap between the buildings. The two tallest blocks in Boston are owned by rival insurance companies – the stockily provincial Prudential building and the rakish, slender, very New York, John Hancock Tower – and that seems appropriate for the city, with its detached suburban spaciousness, its deceptive owner-occupier air. Dogs . . . year-old cars . . . the funny-sections of the Sunday Globe . . . a night out at a family movie, followed by the weary exotica of sweet-and-sour pork and chicken chop suey. I went underground, to Filene’s basement, where women squabble over cut-price frocks, upending themselves in floral heaps of mark-downs. It all seemed a long way from the nightmare city I had been warned of by experienced Bostonians; a place where, I would have thought, one was more likely to die from dullness than from gunshot wounds.

  Crime figures, of all statistics, are the most misusable; but Boston’s do raise an ugly question mark over my innocent perception of the city’s tedious homeliness. There were 136 murders here in 1973, a number that climbs appallingly close to the annual death toll in the Ulster war (something over 200). Even inside Cambridge’s glass globe, with the snow settling prettily over the Colonial churches, the nightmare was coming real. Across the street from Longfellow’s house with its elegant pilasters, a Harvard professor’s wife was dragged screaming into a park and shot. Another woman was blinded when a man rammed a broken brick into her face. On Thanksgiving Day, a robber with a gun was threatening people in the apartment house where I was staying; he rode away with his loot on a yellow ten-speed bicycle, a travelling man, from another part of town. In November, the fire-raisers were on our avenue, setting light to heaps of gasoline-soaked newspapers in garages.

  As the catalogue of these events, some tragic, others merely ominous and dispiriting, grew longer, so they seemed to thicken the brickwork of the walls of our ghetto. Illogically, they made the boundaries even tighter. They did not so much make Cambridge a bad place, as strengthen our terrors of Roxbury and Dorchester and Somerville. Evil deeds were attributed to outsiders; they were taken as signs of what happens when the rottenness of the city beyond the walls reaches into the protected Eden of ‘our neighbourhood’. They just went to show that Nanny was right. As the fall wore on, we huddled closer to each other, telling bloodcurdling stories at dinner parties, praying that the phantoms of the city at large would withdraw to their proper quarters and leave us safe inside our globe.

  With a borrowed car, all windows up and doors securely locked from the inside, I did some timid trespassing. I crossed the river into a scrawny landscape of marsh, abandoned gas stations, and craven redbrick public housing projects that looked like vandalised urinals. Wire-mesh fencing bulged and tottered; the sidewalks were cracked and broken, and the roads seemed subject to a continuous, mild volcanic action – subterranean bubbling of earth and water which might at any moment simply swallow what little human life was left. The people I saw looked too vanquished for violence. A great deal of English poverty is borne amiably, with the air of long, tolerant habituation. No London slum has the raw, exposed, beaten appearance of these sinks of American urban poverty. Nobody was making an attempt to keep up, to put on their best face; there were no lone geraniums, no flowers of any kind. Broken glass lay where it had fallen out of windows, half-covered with straggling tendrils of tangleweed. Black women were leading their children to an evangelist’s shack (it was a Sunday afternoon); their faces had gone to the livid purple of a bruise in the cold.

  But this was not a place in Boston’s mythology; it was a nowhere, a bit of seedy emptiness in the shadow of an expressway, too dead and desolate to warrant a name. An American woman was scornful of my shock. ‘It’s just a public housing project; you’ve seen nothing. They’re all like that. That’s not Roxbury.’ I had thought it was – at least, I wanted to go nowhere that was worse. I like cities on principle; but in America, my liking was rapidly turning sour, my enthusiasm was beginning to seem to me glib and blinkered.

  Roxbury – real Roxbury – shocks in the most unexpected way of all. I knew exactly what a ‘black ghetto’ was. It was the steep scabrous tenements of Harlem, the intense, murky street-life, as thick with infection and activity as a slide of pond mud under a microscope. It was close clumps of grey concrete high rises, built on the ash-and-brick ruins of older s
lums. I was not prepared for a ghetto that was a precise mirror image of the ghetto from which I had come – another dainty suburb fresh from the gift shop in the December sun.

  Roxbury was the first and the sweetest of the nineteenth-century ‘streetcar suburbs’ of Boston. Every wooden cottage had a baby country estate for its backyard; its whiteness shone through a tangle of greenery, and, rocking on the balconied porch with the Evening Transcript, one would have looked out over a dreamland where all the nicest people lived in the nicest possible American way. This was the garden where Adam could buy a tidy lot with a gabled doll’s house set square in its centre. He could fall asleep with green shutters murmuring in a country breeze and, in the morning, ride the car into town. To his ear, ‘Roxbury’ and ‘rus in urbe’ ran tranquilly into a single word. The commanding spires of the Unitarian churches, with their genial ethical theology of God, Man, and Nature all in harmony, were fitting landmarks in this innocently prelapsarian quarter of the city.

  The churches, the houses, the tall trees on the streets, are there still. The paint is pocky, much of the wood is rotten, and slats of shingling have fallen away exposing the skeletal frames, but the basic lineaments of the old dream are clear enough even now. It takes a few minutes before you notice that the windows are mostly gone and only a few shutters are left. Each house stares blindly through eyes of cardboard and torn newspaper. Burn marks run in tongues up their sides, and on most blocks there is a gutted shell, sinking onto its knees in a flapping ruin of blackened lath and tar-paper. Our own century has added rows of single-storey brick shacks, where bail-bondsmen and pawnbrokers do their business. What were once front lawns are now oily patches of bare earth. The carcases of wrecked Buicks, Chevrolets and Fords are jacked up on bricks, their hoods open like mouths, their guts looted. No one is white. Stopped at the lights, I am inspected blankly by the drivers alongside me. A kid on the sidewalk yells, ‘Honky! . . . Hey, Honky!’