We happy few
Jan Morris
Soft City Jonathan Raban (Hamish Hamilton £3.00) "Who has not fantasised," asks Mr Jonathan Raban somewhere in this book, "a conversation spontaneously struck between two devotees, mutally enthralled by the brushwork of Nicholas Hilliard?" In returning a diffident well, actually, not me. I am not mocking the question or the book, only declaring a non-interest. I am sure heaps of Mr Raban's readers have fantasised that conversation, but I am not one of them. I share almost none of the responses to urban living which are the theme of Soft City, and I find myself almost totally out of rapport with its author's own reactions. When he first went to London he felt, it seems, at once excited and uncertain: when I first went to London I thought I owned the place. When he sees a stranger reading the New Statesman in the underground, he feels a brotherly sympathy or collusion: I acknowledge no such bonds of caste or ideology, and feel myself in the great city, now as always, altogether sui generis. But perhaps because of this personal antithesis, I do most eagerly recognise the authenticity of Mr Raban's approach, and the dazzling accuracy of his reportage. Though it purports to be a book about cities in general, Soft City is really a book about London, and I would judge it to be, not in the whole but in its several parts, one of the best books ever written about that most ungraspable of capitals. I think some of its chapters may enter the classic repertoire, and it contains flashes Of perception so exact, so lucid, so funny and so beautifully written that time and again I found myself laughing out loud with delight.
Soft City is essentially a writer's book. 'What Cities Do To Us,' says the explanatory sub-title on its jacket, but it more truly concerns what one city does to Mr Raban. It runs along the edge of fiction, and sometimes crosses it. Its vocabulary is enviably large and exuberant and its images are sometimes lovely — especially when Mr Raban, drawing upon his Hampshire boyhood, uses some gentle country simile to illuminate the scowling city. The book's sense of social irony and pathos is more Dickensian than Mayhewian, say, and its small comedies of social affectation would do credit, give or take a phrase or two, to Miss Austen herself.
Being an ex-don, Mr Raban is inclined to lose himself in analysis, in syndrome and synecdoche and statutory mid-Atlantic parallels. The general theme of the book, though, insofar as I kept track of it, is simple. It is this: that living in great cities is fine, if you like living in great cities. Mr Raban is fiercely if obscurely opposed to the Corbusier, Geddes, Mumford line on cities, which maintains that the dirty shambles of urban life is evil, but can be controlled by logical planning and green belts. Mr Raban actually likes the metropolitan mess — the Soft City — and he argues that it offers the suitable city-dweller a freedom and privacy unknown anywhere else. As I say, he worries this not very striking contention rather, and distracts us with generalisations and displays of wide reading. But it does not matter. This is a tour de force of social observation, by a truly inspired reporter, and the academic blarney only intermittently intrudes. Mr Raban is marvellously entertaining on London tribes and types: the landed gentry of Highgate Village, in their riding macs and headscarves, "braying bravely over the tops of taxis"; the emancipated homosexuals of the Earls Court clubs, upon whose knees cultivated elderly gentlemen lay indulgent hands, "twinkling as uncles will"; the Hare Krishna folk, whose diets and preoccupations give them "a curiously protuberant, root-vegetable look"; or Annette the macrobiotic freak-out, who reads vague poems with horses and bullrushes in them, and whose library of paperbacks ranges from Troutfish Fishing In America by way of Blake and Leonard Cohen to The Book of the Pony.
But his real speciality is the inter-class intelligentsia, earnest, enlightened, Labour-voting, Guardian-reading, illuminated by Japanese lanterns, decor'd in stripped pine. trangported in baby Citroens, floppy-moustached and floppy-hatted with names like Nicola, Jeremy, and Nigel, and just-converted houses in whatever part of London is about to become middlingly fashionable, Islington one year, Kentish Town the next. These are soft people, of course, in soft trades: people afraid of extremes, people who want to be liked, playgroup people, liberal, pacifist, belonging people, people who would never eat chips in Spain, people who care, people who call their char-ladies Mrs H., people who perhaps exist in most capitals of the world but who, thanks to the intricacies of the English class system, are probably most influential and most numerous in London.
Mr Raban is not one of them, except by literary osmosis. He sees his own community as a community without place, distributed across Loicion, linked chiefly by the telephone and by those ritual signs and gestures that he recognises in tube trains and at cocktail parties. But he presents Nicola, Jeremy and friends as ideal citizens of London — almost archetypal citizens, now that the Cockney is deep submerged and the bowler hats and rolled umbrellas have disappeared from St James's. Their ephemeral fads and transient aspirations suit the Great Soft City, for there life itself is as fluid as fashion, and the days pass in a kind of card-game, each player peering at the other man's hand. Suspended as they are perpetually between classes, between convictions, between loyalties, in London they may be sure that whatever else may happen, nobody will bother to make fun of them Mr Raban has flawed his book, in my view, with too much theorising, and by the misguided decision to include, apparently lock, stock and comic dialogue, a short story already published elsewhere: but when it comes to his own particular corners of London life, when he sits in his room beside the Archway Bridge and sees the great city below him like a pool awaiting the cast of his fly, he seems to me unbeatable. Though I have never met him, I rang him up the other night to tell him so: but there was no reply, and insistently though that melancholy buzzing pursued him, Canonbury to W6, Notting Hill to Highgate, even tentatively across the river to up-andcoming Clapham Common, it never caught uP with him. He was out on the streets, no doubt, or down at the Health Store with his carrier bag, choosing seaweed with Annette.
Jan Morris's latest book is Heaven's Command, the second part of a trilogy publishrtl by Faber.
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