Raban - Soft City

J ONATHAN R ABAN

SOFT CITY

With an introduction by Iain Sinclair

PICADOR CLASSIC

INTRODUCTION

Jonathan Raban, Man of the Crowd

Formica kebab-house... alone after lunch... waiting to cross at the lights... forgetful and jet-shocked, I have to hunt in my head for the language spoken here.

Muscling into his stride, Jonathan Raban launches his Soft City with the classic first gambit of the genre. But which genre? On which shelf of the bookstore should this impassioned report be displayed? The form has not yet been fixed. The book is of its own time, 1974, right on the lingering comets tail of the Sixties. But it is still very much alive and kicking now, challenging us to come up with new categories for our library cards. In a Granta interview with Helen Gordon in July 2008, Raban describes travel writing as a too-big umbrella, full of holes... Anyone commissioned by a newspaper to write up meals and hotels in foreign holiday resorts is a travel writer. He enlists Bruce Chatwin, Naipaul, Theroux and Sebald to plead his cause. He is about to set off on a complicated journey of investigation, reminiscence, confession and observation, around a city of his own invention. Here, he says, is a map of damage; a pathology with no beginning and no end for a disease called London.

Raban is sailing under suspect documentation, composing a displaced novel. A metafiction richer and riper than commentators were prepared to recognize in the economic pinch of the Three-Day Week. And he writes, as he must, with earlier texts open on his knees: poetry, sociology and hardboiled crime. He furnishes a working model for those who attempt to follow in his echoing footsteps across the stretched town; footsteps that were never really there, beyond the seductive splatter of ink marks on the page. The myth-maker lets the thread play out, hoping perceptive readers will notice undercurrents of literary allusion and patterning work teasing the unconscious, without calling undue attention to their existence. He is venturing into the unknown, accepting risk, allowing the nudge of coincidence and fruitful digression to guide him out of the swamp.

This exploration of the discontinuities of city life has provided a steady line of continuity for me a plot for my own personal scenario, Raban concluded as he completed Soft City, his first urban voyage. For the city and the book are opposed forms: to force the citys spread, contingency, and aimless motion into a tight progression of a narrative is to risk a total falsehood. If we expected, or hoped for, further London episodes, we would be disappointed. This was a premature travel book, sailing into a maelstrom of smoke and mirrors, alienation and brief encounters: London, city of disappearances and disappointments. The lost and the lonely of our termite colony, crossing and recrossing without touch or tenderness, are willing to accept some form of addiction as the price of admittance to a kaffeeklatsch in Hampstead. Junkies and alcoholics anonymous. Like actors, the solitaries emerge from their burrows to try the mask of activism, as Fabians, Socialist Workers, theosophists and concrete poets, in order to find companionship. Before the invention of the internet, such gatherings were Londons surest dating agency, refuges from the night.

When I went, Raban says, it was as much to look for a Friend as to meditate on the future of socialism, and I felt kin to others there; the same stutter, words spilling out for the first time in the day, the same nervous glance at the watch and wrench at going back out into the dark street.

Coming to Hull University in 1960, long before there were dreams of transformation into a City of Culture, Raban conceived a role as the sole representative of the Students Union library committee in order to engineer regular meetings with the reclusive librarian and owl in residence, Philip Larkin. Something of the tang and taint of Larkins narrow craft remains: dirty reflections in train windows, landscape at one remove, the human animal as awkward and absurd. Soft City opens itself to the self-appointed researcher through the passport of poetry, the quiet ecstasy of the undeceived. Larkin was about staying away, opting out, securing his provincial base, binoculars in the high window. Jonathan Raban travelled the other, braver way, into the heart of the plural city: multiculturalism, collisions, confusions, momentum. Identity abandoned, lost, reformed.

But this is where you live; its your city London, or New York, or wherever and its language is the language youve always known, the language from which being you, being me, are inseparable. In those dazed moments at stoplights, its possible to be a stranger to yourself, to be so doubtful as to who you are that you have to check on things like the placards round the news-vendors kiosks.

This is quite another poetic, anonymously composed: as if the city had decided to publish its secret notebook of dementia. TV STAR BITES HOMELESS MAN . LESBIAN SEX ASSAULT ON PENSIONER . TAROT READER CAUGHT OUT PAEDOPHILE . MOTHER KEPT KILLING MACHINE AT HOME .

Dizzy, deracinated, buffeted in the volatile currents of streets where he is unlanguaged, divorced from family and home, Raban discovers that the intervention of the unexpected is violence. A young man, stepping away from the culture hub of the ICA, at Nash House on the Mall, just a bowling balls length from Buckingham Palace, was assaulted by two thugs. His spinal cord was severed with a short blade. This random and unexplained attack would become another sensationalist haiku on a news-vendors placard. Here is the poetry in which the hard city trades.

Raban witnesses one of those cameos familiar to all London wanderers: a madman raging at the air, ranting on the escalator at Oxford Circus, beating at the furies that oppress him. What was surprising, Raban notes, was that nobody showed surprise: a slight speeding-up in the pace of the crowd... Inside we were all cursing each other. Figures crumple to the ground and we step over them. Rough-sleepers are street furniture. Beggars in occupation accept a toll at the entrance to every Overground station. With forgiving dog companions, they squat beside cash machines, thanking indifferent texters and fist-phone monologuists, and wishing them a nice day. Raban, an elective outsider making his comprehensive inventory of Londons quirks and singularities, is a valued guide to the fracture that is advancing so fast; that chasm between the entitled and the great swaying mass of urban invisibles.

He is between places, between occupations in a stalled time, this university teacher, author, in-demand literary journalist known as Jonathan Raban. He is between projects. Soft City is a book about waiting, suspension; a stop-start navigation of liminal territory by way of field notes, walks, encounters, conversations during which the witness, the record-keeper realizes that he is becoming a performer. A face in the crowd. A voice on the radio. A commentator. To pull off the trick, Raban must become a special kind of tourist. Like Jack London picking up directions to the wilderness of Whitechapel from the travel agent Thomas Cook. Before acquiring a set of workmans clothes as his disguise for a season of lost nights and recovered statistics, in support of the documentary photographs that bind together The People of the Abyss in 1903. This is what it is about, all it is about: coming out, alive and well, on the far side of experience.

Soft City declares itself, right away, with that opening move: a detective story as filtered through Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Walter Benjamin, strolling and annotating, in the certain knowledge that great projects should never be completed.