Sounds of the city
London is a place with its own music. The clatter and yell of its streets; the syncopated rhythm of the underground, with its discordant brake-shrieks and deep bass rumblings. Its many voices: the platform manager at Baker Street shouting ‘ready to depart — you are the weakest link, goodbye’. The man who leaned too close and walked behind me down the street with his muttered and strangely courteous request: ‘do you want to have sex, lady?’
It is the myth we all invest in: the grand shadows of the past, the old buildings nestling by the new, the shiny glass grandeur of today’s speculations. It is the seat of systems of government and economy, of commerce and law. It is the place where value is created and ratified, from the Royal Mint to the site of Caxton’s first printing press. London’s music isn’t easy listening — but nor has it ever been. Over 200 years ago, Blake saw its squalor, the desolation that accumulates in the capital, where so many are swept into its sucking beat.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
Written at the time of France’s ‘second revolution’ — of the failed French constitutional monarchy and of the final splintering of the US from Britain, following the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 — Blake understands the fragility of social structures. His is a London whose meaning has been shaken, in which the manacles that keep people in their place — monarchy and religion — are revealed in fact to be ‘mind forg’d’ structures, designed by the privileged to maintain their control of resources, wealth and power. And yet, by this point, events in France have shown the brutal truth of revolution — that there is no simple way to change the power structures that humankind creates. And so the sounds of Blake’s London are both tragic and fearful, a world laid bare without any signs of resolution.
Ten years on, though, the London spied at dawn by Wordsworth takes on a glimmering hope.
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky
The architecture of the city and its signifiers of commerce, law, monarchy, culture and religion are opened to the pastoral images of fields and sky. The ‘smokeless air’ shows a city at a moment of peace and integrity, a London that can impart a ‘calm so deep’. But despite these romantic images, the momentum and power in this poem stoppers any excess of sentiment. London’s mighty heart lies still, not stopped — ready to pound once more with the movement and intensity of a city of influence, in which the newly opened West India docks will continue to strengthen Britain on the world’s stage, at the expense of the many colonies she plunders. These are the opening notes of a love-song to the city in which life might realistically improve. They do not capture the terrible rationale used to justify unspeakable brutality by the British to people around the world; nor the miserable existence of the uneducated slum dwellers for whom a life of servitude and desperation would continue to be the only London they knew.
The lies of Empire only began to be unpicked in literature in Britain more than a hundred and fifty years after Wordsworth wrote his words upon the bridge. But Dickens, born ten years after Westminster Bridge was composed, popularised the stories of the lives of poverty led by many forgotten Londoners from the late 1830s. From the wheedling Fagin in Oliver Twist to the buttoned-up Joe Wemmick in Great Expectations, we see the different sounds of a society whose subjects are defined by commerce. Fagin lives below the line of respectability, running gangs of child pickpockets to a perverse code of glory, bound up in a sense of superiority that leads the Artful Dodger to cry out in the dock when he is tried for pick-pocketing: ‘“I am an Englishman; where are my privileges?” Wemmick, on the other hand, has both a public and a private face: a professional subserviance as a clerk to Jaggers, but a personal monarchy, as king of his very own castle at home.
In the characters of Pip and Oliver we see society at first through the dawn-fresh eyes of a child, reminiscent of Wordsworth looking from Westminster Bridge, observing the outlines of power and being carried along by their meaning, with little regard for the damage that must be wreaked upon someone else in order to sustain such power. Pip’s distain for his sister’s husband, Joe Gargery, springs from judging his value in terms of money and status, instead of kindness and integrity. Pip fixates upon Joe’s crude nature, his poor literacy and low status job, without regard for the skill, strength and patience needed to be a blacksmith, or for what he sacrifices for his family. In Oliver Twist we see the inverse of Pip’s snobbery, as the underbelly of London comes to life, with the Artful Dodger as an alternative vision of a ‘swaggering young gentleman’:
He was a snub-nosed, flat-bowed, common-faced boy enough; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man…He was, altogether, as roistering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in the blushers.
Here, Dickens takes a vaudevillian turn, thumbing an irreverent nose at society through the Dodger’s appearance and code of honour. Ultimately, though, the Dodger is defeated by this alternative system of values; sent to the colonies for stealing a snuff box, without so much as the glory of having robbed an old man of all his riches.
Always a city of arrivals, London in literature is filled with new voices. Jump forward 80 years, to the world of The Lonely Londoners in which citizens from British colonies abroad begin to arrive from the end of the 1940s, invited by the government to work. The Lonely Londoners unveils this world, introducing the London of Moses Aloetta and his ‘boys’ newly arrived from Trinidad, Jamaica and Nigeria (though universally described by white people as being from Jamaica). Sam Selvon in his lyrical prose offers up the sound of the voices that the city so often fell deaf to, shutting doors and putting up signs: No dogs, no Blacks, no Irish.
‘…you know the most hurtful part of it? The Pole who have that restaurant, he ain’t have no more right in this country than we. In fact we is British subjects, and he is a foreigner… is we who bled to make this country prosperous.’
The London here is cold, dismal and unwelcoming, with its sun like a ‘force-ripe orange’. Moses watches as each new arrival settles into resignation at the dissociation that comes from being always on the outside, a deep disjointedness that unsettles him at his core: ‘When you go down a little, you bounce up a kind of misery and pathos and a frightening — what? He don’t know the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart.’
Here is a city shaped by money, commerce and lines of power drawn to sustain a privileged minority. Here is a city that renews and continues to change, absorbing language and culture of the people who make it their home, but failing to overturn the inequalities of its past, so that anger pulses through its veins and its words, never far from the surface. Later it will become the London of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: quick-witted and buzzing; later still, the jagged-edged city of NW where young black men can die on the streets and few people seem to notice. It is a city of ill-fitting futures, where young women like Keisha/Naomi and Leah struggle to realise the expectations of their parents, a generation who imagined once that things might only get better. It is a city of myriad disappointments, constantly in a hurry, but never getting anywhere.
It is the place that explodes on the pages of Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City — the voices of modern London rising in a pounding symphony of concrete and chicken shops and anger and hope. It is a city that is born again and again with every new generation, a city that continues to evolve its own language, which even has its own name: Multi-cultural London English. It is the city forged in Nelson’s internal monologue, defined by and against his memories of Monserrat — what he left behind and what he took with him. Set against a backdrop of extremism and riots following the murder of Lee Rigby, Gunaratne shows us the multitudinous tangle of lives that comprise London’s identity, the glimmer of redemption in Ardan’s rhymes, the beat of Selvon’s feet along the asphalt, the rhythm of life being lived in real time.
‘To live, to have a family in the city. We can know the storm of the place, I will say, fight the tide together and some day, raise a Londoner of we own’ says Nelson, Selvon’s father, who has survived a stroke and can no longer speak, but whose internal narrative holds together history and hope. Despite the fact he cannot talk, it is his voice that best captures the spirit and sound of London, a place as fresh now as it ever was; a place of new voices and new music; a place where things begin.
