Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labour. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as in Paris the remunerative occupation of the quatorzième. They are persons who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons.

  Freelance writers, like professional diners out, live off the slack in the metropolitan economy; their uses are etiolated and hard to define, and they tend to drift to the peripheral fringe of things, habitual onlookers and overhearers. My flat is pitched on the western edge of my private version of London, a place to make forays from, scavenging eastwards for material and odd jobs. I am on the rim, both geographically and socially, and this marginal position suits me very well. The villager who drifts to the outskirts of his society soon finds himself the target for a hail of small sharp stones; there marginality is mistrusted and derided as a destructive anti-social force. It is different in cities. Nearly everyone feels himself to be marginal in a metropolis, and he is inclined to be indifferent to the eccentricities of other people. That is something to be grateful for. My friends are mostly expatriates and anomalies, people who have come unstuck from their original countries and communities, for whom the city is benign because it makes no special demands on their loyalties. Me too. I find it hard to think of myself as ‘a citizen’, but I belong to the city in a way that I have been able to belong to very little else. I respect its rules and special skills. Competence in the uniquely imaginative and creative life of a big city is something to be proud of, and even the oddest, most ramshackle characters can possess it. More than anything else, I would like, sometime, to be a capable citizen.

  It is an ambition few people ever realise. Cities are scary and impersonal, and the best most of us can manage is a fragile hold on our route through the streets. We cling to friends and institutions, exaggerate the importance of belonging, fear being alone too much. The freedom of the city is enormous. Here one can choose and invent one’s society, and live more deliberately than anywhere else. Nothing is fixed, the possibilities of personal change and renewal are endless and open. But it is hard to learn to live as generously as real citizenship demands. I spot in others the same mouse-like caution which keeps me hugging the edge of the pavement, running from bolthole to bolthole, unequipped to embrace that spaciousness and privacy of city life which so often presents itself as mere emptiness and fog.

  For me, a city day is a succession of guarded moves, as if one was crossing a peat bog. Today I have a morning recording at the BBC, and take the District Line east across the city. Between tunnels there are stunted trees growing out of the crumbling brickwork of the cuttings, and short stretches of greasy sky. On this line, one keeps a tenuous contact with the city up above, a stronger sense of direction, a feeling that there is some connection between the different locations which one turns up at then disappears from. South Kensington goes by, a derelict skeleton of Victorian railway whimsy, then Chelsea, and Victoria where I change for Oxford Circus. On tube stations one sees the really mad and abandoned. Astraddle an iron flight of steps, her cotton dress blowing in the draught from the trains, a drunken woman croons about religion. ‘Jesus hasn’t forgotten you,’ she slurs at the quickening back of an embarrassed accountant. But I have a purpose in view, am going somewhere, and push past her with the rest of the crowd. We haven’t come to that, yet.

  Up from underground, on the jam of Regent Street, the crowd changes from workers to shoppers, a fair field of carrier bags crammed with blouses, lingerie and gewgaws. Carried away on the tide of middle-aged women, past Peter Robinson’s and the Lyons snack bar, I go soggy with sweat and scent. People on a crowded street create their own climate and season – this has the high temperature and smelly, feverish sirocco of a subtropical swamp. One looks up to the sky to discover with surprise that it is April; a weak, misty lozenge of sun over All Souls, Langham Place, barely lights the street. A single abstracted face from the crowd: a woman with a raspberry patch spreading from nose to ear, with a quiff of dyed flaxen hair pulled half over it in an ashamed, ineffective gesture of concealment. Few details reach one while one is on the move through the crowd, and those which do are extreme and cruel. One remembers the grotesques, ranged along one’s route like waxworks. In a crowd, Rowlandson turns into a realist, the caricature a measure of the sated urban perception which is woken only by deformity and gross extravagance. Even teashops here are neon-lighted, painted scarlet, and thick with stereo tapes of acid rock. The Russian travel agency is lost completely in the crowd; too ideologically pure to condescend to the city knack of self-advertisement and bizarre display. It needs a flashing troika, ten feet tall, or Lenin’s tomb in luminous coloured perspex. The bored women, plunging among the latest dress materials and Mickey Mouse clocks, shove at each other, all mottled elbows and ringed fingers. Not much more than a century ago, they might have been able to round off their day with a good public hanging. I push through them, a tired swimmer, my head filling with noise and nonsense, going soft.

  Broadcasting House is safe ground: John Reith dedicated this ‘temple of the arts and sciences’ to Almighty God, no less; and its severe wedge front looks down Regent Street like a long, disapproving Presbyterian nose. One can sit here in the lobby watching people come in out of the crowd. Past the swing doors, they turn into somebodies; persons of opinion and authority, with gestures and expressions that will make secretaries remember them. This is a place for Christian names and gossip, for talking of people one hardly knows with people one knows even less. In front of the microphone, one’s identity is magically enhanced, cushioned on drink and recognition. Here the shyest and dullest men turn waggish; their recorded laughter chortles portily on discussion programmes, while their long jokes are mostly edited out. Out of the crowd, we double in size, figures of carnival, bursting with impressions of the latest experimental novel and the newest piece of Hungarian cinema verité.

  But the street is a great leveller, and, returned to the crowd, one shrinks back to normal. This is the time to seek out phone boxes, to set oneself up with some immediate destinations. Pubs and sandwich bars soon make one fizzle out to nothing in the crush, and I run to ground, nosing acquaintances from out of the woodwork. A drinking club in Greek Street, a billiards club in Frith Street, the Savile Club on Brook Street, are my corners-off from the city, sanctuaries to head for when I feel myself going soft. They hold friends and, with friends, the assurance that one belongs, not just to the club, but to the city.

  The drinking club is a long dim room which always has its curtains drawn against the public world beyond. A trades-union leader, his face familiar from the TV screen, is at the bar telling a long dirty story. On TV, he always wears an expression of unnatural sententious sobriety and moral indignation – he looks as unionists are expected to look, and his cover is a good and practised one. But here, a step away from the street and the screen, his old actor’s face lets go. ‘Then it’s the Greek’s turn. Well the Greek, he goes up there, and there’s a hell of a banging . . . furniture falling, legs off the bed . . .’ A far cry from parity and exploitation but truer, in its fashion. My friend is slopping beer in a corner under a scarlet bulb; a private person in black, another escapee. Meetings in the city, even when you have arranged them beforehand, are always small coincidences to be glad of and surprised about.

  But on the far edge of each engagement there is always the unfathomed area of panic, when you know that you have to flop back again into the crowd. These moments of privacy and recognition and intense communicativeness are delicate bubbles, and in time they burst. You sustain your conversation, or the perfect angle of the cue ball on the black against the city. I keep most things going too long, am reluctant to leave. Back among strangers – the essential condition of metropolitan life – strap-hanging in a rush hour tube, everyone avoids each other’s eyes. I lurch between an Indian with perfectly pared fingern
ails and a straw-hatted lady with a Harrods green plastic bag. Who belong to what? Guesses do not take one far. Yet each city-life is an intricate pattern of belonging interspersed with these stretches of locomotion when one is stripped of credentials and credibility, when one sees oneself as just another moon-face in the crowd.

  It is surely because of this that the city exaggerates our sexuality. In the crowd, I catch the eyes of girls – that rapid, casual, essentially urban interrogation: a glance held between a man and a woman fixes each for a moment, gives them back at least the minimal identity of their sex. The train pulls away from the platform, and she too, behind the double glass of the carriage window, but we have made each other exist for an instant; another belonging, of a kind. A big city is an encyclopedia of sexual possibility, and the eye-language of the crowd asserts this possibility without the risk of real encounters. It happens best at a distance – when you are on an up-escalator while the girl is travelling down; through carriage windows; across streets thick with traffic. These are not invitations to an assignation. They are simply the small, reassuring services which men and women can render for each other, and they are particularly precious when we are sucked in and reduced by the crowd.

  Home, alone, is a place for picking thorns out of one’s skin, for finding oneself again. My old chair, the shelves of books, the scatter of weekly magazines, cigarette butts and unanswered mail – these are what we always come back to in the end after the choppy crossings of the city. They survive after most of the people one has met have been swallowed by the fog. And in the other flats in the house, the crash of a door, the distant buzz of a bell, a record put on the gramophone, isolate this room. The crowd starts in the communal hall and its noise is always there to remind me of this small patch of space which is my exclusive corner of the city. I’ve never in the past been so territorially possessive, so conscious of walls and boundaries. It is not just that city life hems us in so closely together that we develop the aggressive animal’s protective instincts towards our own scraps of space; it is rather that the stranger in one’s hall or on the pavement outside is so strange, so culturally different from oneself, so much a member of clubs and castes to which one has no access, that his presence continually forces one to question one’s own identity. Sometimes one treats oneself as one might another stranger in the crowd – in one’s own head, the language of the Personal Column . . . ‘New Statesman-reader, 30, separated, interested in books and the country . . .’ A curious, egoistic way of going on, but, I think, a characteristically metropolitan one. We are on the brink of being strangers to ourselves in the city.

  Blown up one moment, punctured and shrivelled the next we need to hold on tight to avoid going completely soft in a soft city. So much of metropolitan life is just the showing of symptoms of fright. In the city one clings to nostalgic and unreal signs of community, takes forced refuge in codes, badges and coteries; the city’s life, of surfaces and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence. The mad egotism of the man who stops you in Soho Square to tell you he is John the Baptist, or the weird rural delusions of another tramp nearby who fishes hopefully through a grating at the corner of Old Compton Street (‘Caught anything?’ ‘I had some good bites.’), seem not unlikely consequences of the exercise of the freedom of the city. Its discontinuities give one vertigo; few people who aren’t criminals or psychopaths will risk themselves on the rollercoaster ride of change and incongruity which the city offers. So much of city life is an elaborate process of building up defences against the city – the self a fortified town raised against the stranger. We hedge ourselves in behind dreams and illusions, construct make-believe villages and make-believe families. It could perhaps be otherwise; but we shall need more daring, more cool understanding than we are displaying at present. We live in cities badly; we have built them up in culpable innocence and now fret helplessly in a synthetic wilderness of our own construction. We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make a serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

  ‘Marvellous . . . Soft City shows how, in the midst of physical decay, a city can flourish by fulfilling an elemental human need, the need to play out fantasies of self’

  New York Times

  ‘A brilliant book about how we all construct our own different versions of London’

  Evening Standard

  ‘Raban looks at London with the omnivorous, scandalised relish of Dickens and Mayhew and General Booth’

  Sunday Times

  ‘A brilliant hymn to urban disorientation and weirdness . . . Reading it on buses I felt I was looking into my fellow passengers’ minds, which was creepy, and that I was offering them the means to look into mine, which was terrifying’

  Peter Robins

  ‘A highly intelligent enquiry’

  Auberon Waugh, New Statesman

  ‘The self that confronts the city is chameleon and caddis-worm, changing colour, aggrandizing objects and districts; and it tries on masks, a range of personae through which different styles and attitudes can speak . . . Often, Soft City is Walden in reverse; Raban goes to the city to find himself’

  Encounter

  ‘His metropolis is not the rational, order-imposed “hard” city perceived by the logical mind of town planner or traffic engineer, cartographer or demographer. It is the more elusive but no less real city that oozes out from behind the grid lines, smudges and smears the statistics with something messy, irrelevant but impossible to ignore’

  The Times

  ‘His approach is impressionistic rather than quasi-scientific, but his impressions are sensitive and informed and worth any amount of meaningless statistics and academic jargon’

  Washington Post

  SOFT CITY

  JONATHAN RABAN is the author of over a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia, Soft City, Waxwings and Surveillance. His awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, and other magazines.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN RABAN

  Fiction

  Surveillance

  Waxwings

  Foreign Land

  Non-Fiction

  Driving Home

  My Holy War

  Passage to Juneau

  Bad Land

  The Oxford Book of the Sea (editor)

  Hunting Mister Heartbreak

  For Love and Money

  Coasting

  Old Glory

  Arabia

  First published 1974 by Hamish Hamilton

  First published in paperback 1998 by the Harvill Press

  First published by Picador 2008

  This Picador Classic edition first published 2017 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2017 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-2340-6

  Copyright © Jonathan Raban 1974

  Introduction copyright © Iain Sinclair 2017

  Author photo © Michael Doucett

  Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (ele
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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  CHANGE YOUR MIND

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