Searching for New States of Being: the
Cultural Energies and Contested Spaces of Colin MacInnes’ London
(this article is also available at http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/springautumn2015/wiseman.pdf)
Colin MacInnes is, in
several ways, a figure whose identity and existence embodies transience, liminality,
marginality and transgression. Born in London in 1914, his early years were
overshadowed by war; in 1917 his parents divorced, and his mother Angela
married an Australian, George Thirkell. The family moved to Australia in 1920,
and MacInnes lived there for ten formative years before moving to Brussels at
the age of sixteen. It was only in 1935 that MacInnes, then aged twenty-one,
returned to London. As the title of Tony Gould’s 1983 biography, Inside Outsider, indicates, MacInnes’
work—as both a journalist and novelist—is characterized by a simultaneous
determination to document hidden socio-cultural worlds, and a sense of being
apart from any particular group identity, be it hegemonic or subcultural. Gould’s
title comes from a comment of MacInnes’ regarding his return from Australia: ‘Born
in London, but not reared there for so many vital years, my feeling for the
city has perforce become that of an inside-outsider: everything in London is
familiar; yet everything in it seems to me as strange’ (quoted in McLeod 2004: 40).
This
identity and perceptual position can help us to understand MacInnes’
distinctive relationship with the places and subcultures of 1950s London, and
the particular character of his attempts to document them. Those early
experiences of the wartime city, coupled with ten years of childhood and
adolescence in Australia—a country that stood in marked environmental, social
and cultural contrast—underpinned his perspective upon the city of his birth. Moreover,
he was openly gay in a period when homosexuality was still illegal and taboo,
and this consciousness is reflected in his work’s sympathy with minorities and
marginalised groups of various kinds. In what follows, I argue that MacInnes’
London fictions combine a sense of journalistic distance, assisted by his
outsider consciousness, with a portrayal of the city that is by turns
sentimental, romantic, dreamlike and unapologetically subjective. He thus
embodies two seemingly contradictory facets of outsider consciousness: a
certain immunity or resistance to the prejudices and assumptions of the culture
he describes, and a tendency to romanticise or idealise some elements of that
culture. In MacInnes’ case, of course, those elements tend to be subcultural
and, in Absolute Beginners,
consciously countercultural.
In
spite, or perhaps because of, his outsider’s view of 1950s London, MacInnes’
‘London trilogy’ is seen as one of the definitive fictional documents of the
capital in this transitional period. It is a time of volatility, instability
and realignment in terms of class, generational grouping, gender, sexuality and
ethnicity, and MacInnes’ trilogy addresses all of these identities. 1957’s City of Spades attempts to document the
experiences of African and West Indian immigrants; 1959’s Absolute Beginners focuses upon the emergent archetype of the
teenager, but also explores ethnic minority and queer subcultures; while 1960’s
Mr Love and Justice presents a
cosmopolitan underworld of pimps, prostitutes and corrupt vice squad police.
Underlying all of this is what we now retrospectively recognise as the decline
or fragmentation of what is sometimes called the ‘postwar settlement’, the
period in which the Labour government of 1945-1951 established the NHS and
other institutions of the Welfare State, and embarked upon a large-scale
construction programme of modernist social housing. As Alan Sinfield notes, in
this period
the promise of full employment, a health
service, universal full-time secondary education, nearly universal pension rights
and public responsibility for housing were established. These were the good
things of life that, traditionally, the upper classes had secured for
themselves. Now the state was proposing to make them available to everyone. All
the people were to have a stake in society, an adequate share of its resources
as of right. It was an alternative conception of the social order. (15)
Sinfield points out
that what makes this conception unique, above all, is that this social order is
secured by consent, rather than force. This is, therefore, a period of British
history often seen as a ‘golden age’ by the left, as exemplified in Ken Loach’s
2013 documentary The Spirit of ’45,
which presents itself as a celebration of a socialist current in British
society that may—even in the current neoliberal climate—be summoned and revived.
MacInnes’ protagonists and narrators often espouse a sceptical or pessimistic
attitude towards the British state, and from a leftist perspective we might see
this as an articulation of dismay at the gradual shift away from the idealism
of the immediate postwar period. Sinfield, again, notes that
by the late 1950s, it was apparent that the
postwar world was characterized not by a new fairness and dignity for most
people, but by an economic system which J.K. Galbraith likened to a squirrel
wheel, as people chased endlessly round a self-defeating circle of production
and consumption. (21)
However, any
interpretation of MacInnes’ texts as critiques of the growth of consumerist
free-market capitalism is complicated by the novels’ ambiguous attitudes
towards the places and institutions of the Welfare State. For the marginalised
groups and individuals who inhabit MacInnes’ London, the postwar settlement
often appears to be little more than a patronizing and misguided intrusion; the
passing of which need not be mourned, since it was never particularly helpful
in the first place.
This
refusal to adhere to a single explanation for the problems facing late-1950s
Britain reflects MacInnes’ outsider identity. As his nameless teenage narrator
explains in Absolute Beginners, with
reference to the choice between Labour and the Conservatives, ‘“Whoever [...]
is working out my destinies, you can be quite sure it’s not those parliamentary
numbers”’ (252). Here, in 1958, the
kind of disillusionment with Britain’s two-party democracy that has since
become widespread is already evident. While the narrator has a healthy
scepticism towards the nascent industries of teenage marketing and
consumerism—which he dismisses as ‘“telly witch-doctors, and advertising pimps,
and show business pop song pirates”’ who ‘“sell us cutprice sequins when we
think we’re getting diamonds”’—he tends
to be equally dismissive of the institutions of consensus-based social
democracy (1134). The places of this new London, such as new modernist housing
estates, are seen as alienating in their scale: the narrator feels like ‘an ant
upon a chessboard’ among high-rise buildings, which ‘towered all around like
monsters’ (561, 552). This endowment of the new Britain with a monstrous life
contrasts with a fading dignity attributed to London’s older districts: ‘in
Pimlico’, we are told, ‘the old, old city raised her bashed grey head again,
like she was ashamed of her modern daughter down by the river’ (565). The
comparison with Pimlico, however, is telling; rather than choose one of
London’s unarguably genteel districts, MacInnes focuses upon one that betrays
the grime (literal and figurative) which accumulates in lower middle-class
suburbs. Despite his parents’ insistence upon referring to the area as
‘Belgravia South’, in an attempt to escape the relatively deprived connotations
of Pimlico, its unappealing qualities remain inescapable; as Jerry White notes,
it was at the time ‘seedy, shabby-genteel at best, outright slummy at worst’. Our
narrator describes its streets as ‘dark purple and vomit green, all set at
angles like ham sandwiches’—a description which demonstrates the novel’s
idiosyncratic combination of the sneering and the surreal—and his disdain for
it undoubtedly reflects MacInnes’ own loathing for the small-minded, secretive
and petty qualities of English suburban life (564).
The
other texts in the trilogy also reveal an ambivalent attitude towards the
institutions of the postwar state. Mr
Love and Justice focuses on an underworld of characters united by ‘their
total rejection alike of the left-ish Welfare State and the right-ish
Property-owning democracy: a sort of Jacobean underground movement in the age
of planned respectability from grave to cradle’ (106). And in City of Spades, the efforts of the state
to provide spaces for colonial migrants are scathingly dismissed: a hostel for
new arrivals ‘smelt high [...] with the odour of good intentions. The communal
rooms were like those on ships—to be drifted in and out of, then abandoned.
[...] And over the whole building there hung an aura of pared Welfare budgets,
of tact restraining antipathies, and of a late attempt to right centuries of
still unadmitted wrongs’ (42). The ship metaphor is apposite in a trilogy which
portrays London at this time as a city characterised by transience and
instability; docklands are one of the key narrative zones in the novels,
synecdoches of globalisation, cosmopolitanism and crime. This is exemplified in
places like the Pakistani cafe at the beginning of Mr Love and Justice, with its ‘smell of stale spices’ and ‘broken
fruit-machine’ (8). For the novel’s ex-sailor protagonist Frankie Love, ‘the
sea, certainly, came first—and far away so—if it would have him back. No woman
and no fortune would hold him from that great and utterly dependable she’ (42).
As
a journalist, MacInnes wanted to see himself as a dispassionate, objective and
balanced recorder of events, and these wry, cynical observations reveal a
narrative voice at pains not to be taken in by the rhetoric and ideology of
welfare capitalism. This determination creates a narrative tone and attitude
that can feel wilfully spiteful towards the institutions and practices of
mainstream culture, on the one hand, and naive or romanticising towards
subcultural groups on the other. His combination of a perceptive ability to
debunk the myths that surround traditional English culture with a tendency to
generate new myths regarding the era’s emergent subcultures is exemplified, for
example, in City of Spades’ comparison of white, working-class pubs
with those now frequented by Africans and West Indians. For Montgomery Pew (a
socially liberal, awkward welfare officer in London’s colonial department), despite
the ‘legend of the gaiety, the heart-warming homeliness’ of English pubs, ‘all
a dispassionate eye can see in them is the grim spectacle of “regulars” at
their belching back-slapping beside the counter or, as is more often, sitting
morosely eyeing one another, in private silence, before their half-drained
gassy pints’ (48). In contrast, a pub full of black immigrants has ‘a prodigious
bubble and clatter of sound, and what is rare in purely English gatherings—a
constant movement of person to person, and group to group, as though some great
invisible spoon were perpetually stirring a hot human soup’ (49). This kind of
vitality and sociability is central to MacInnes’ celebration of ethnic minority
subcultures.
However,
the ethical difficulties of any attempt to speak on behalf of marginalised
groups, and the particular problems this raises for a narrative that aims (at
least in certain respects) at a supposed journalistic objectivity, are evident
throughout the novel. While City of
Spades’ dismissals of traditional
white British institutions are witty but tinged with bitterness, the novel’s
portrayals of West Indian and African culture in London occasionally slide into
a problematic exoticizing and primitivizing of these groups. Pew describes
Africans as ‘wild’ at one point, arguing that ‘they bring an element of joy and
fantasy and violence into our cautious, ordered lives’; while the dancefloor in
the Moonbeam club is ‘sticky, promiscuous and cloying—a hot grass hut in the
centre of our town’ (74, 77, 94). Most striking of all is Pew’s sustained
epiphanic monologue towards the novel’s close, while watching black dancers in
a theatre performance:
... they were clothed in what seemed the
antique innocence and wisdom of humanity before the Fall—the ancient, simple
splendour of the millennially distant days before thought began, and
civilizations ... before the glories of conscious creation, and the horrors of
conscious debasement, came into the world! In the theatre, they were savages again: but the savage is no
barbarian—he is an entire man of a complete, forgotten world, intense and
mindless for which we, with all our conquests, must feel a disturbing, deep
nostalgia. These immensely adult children, who’d carried into a later age a
precious vestige of our former life, could throw off all their
twentieth-century garments, and all their ruthlessness and avarice and spleen,
and radiate, on the stage, an atmosphere of goodness! of happiness! of love!
And I thought I saw at last what was the mystery of the deep attraction to us
of the Spades—the fact that they were still a mystery to themselves. (206)
Pew’s association of
white European culture with consciousness, mindfulness and disenchantment,
which are unfavourably contrasted with a kind of unthinking instinctiveness and
negative capability in black cultures—an innocent lack of knowledge, even of
‘themselves’—recalls D.H. Lawrence in both its fevered insistence (particularly
the use of exclamation marks), and its primitivist views on non-European civilizations.
As Kate Houlden notes, Pew makes ‘the lazy assumption that the jungle has come
to town’, and demonstrates ‘a worrying tendency to essentialise, recycling
long-standing myths of black musicality, physicality and unreliability’. However
we feel about the ethics of passages like this being expressed by a generally
sympathetic narrator, it is indisputable that they reveal an author concerned
with more than simple journalistic objectivity (even if that were attainable).
Instead, at such points MacInnes reveals a consciousness driven by a intensely
powerful imagination and an undercurrent of hedonistic, volatile desire—characteristics
which perhaps explain his acerbic attacks on mainstream culture as much as his
celebration of subcultures.
In
this light, MacInnes’ efforts to provide a sense of objectivity in his
narratives can be seen not as reflective of journalistic instincts, but rather
as conscious attempts to check an imaginative and romantic consciousness. This
provides one way of understanding the schematic and carefully-structured
approaches to narrative he takes in the London trilogy, revealing different
solutions to the problem of balance (although, of course, the very fact that
MacInnes experiments with so many different narrative approaches only serves to
highlight the fact that no ‘true’, unbiased perspective or structure is
available to the novelist). City of Spades uses a split first-person
narrative, alternating between Pew and Johnny Fortune, a young Nigerian student
of meteorology. These characters’ alternating sections are occasionally
punctuated by sections called ‘interludes’, sometimes narrated in the third
person. Here, then, MacInnes offers one possible solution to the problem of
depicting the spaces of a huge city from differing perspectives. Although this
kind of cinematic jump-cutting technique goes back at least as far as Joyce’s Ulysses, it is worth noting MacInnes’
use of such approaches in a period often seen as wary of narrative
experimentation. Mr Love and Justice
uses a similar approach, alternating between sections following the pimp
Frankie Love and the vice-squad policeman Ted Justice. While the third person
is used here, MacInnes often employs free indirect discourse to blur the line
between the positions of narrator and protagonist.
These
techniques are effective in creating a sense of cinematic tension and a kind of
balance in the London of the novels, between black and white experience, and
between characters on both sides of the law. Absolute Beginners features a structural approach similarly
indebted to MacInnes’ journalistic mindset, with its nameless narrator and
division into four sections. These are simply titled ‘In June’, ‘In July’, ‘In
August’ and ‘In September’, with each one covering a single day of the month in
question, as the summer of 1958 progresses. Again, a modernist innovation—the
day-book of Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway—is developed here,
apparently in the interests of journalistic balance and objectivity. Where
modernism rejected realist aspirations as illusory, MacInnes investigates the
ways in which the movement’s innovations can serve the more pragmatic literary
aims of his time, to represent an increasingly cosmopolitan Britain. Nick
Bentley explains that the novels represent ‘a hybrid form in 1950s writing that
can best be described as an “experimental realism”’, driven by ‘the
journalistic and sociological impulse behind the writing.’ As MacInnes knows,
however, there are limits to the extent that a successful novel can maintain a
supposedly objective perspective, since this aim tends to thwart or ignore the
reader’s tendency to empathise with a protagonist; thus, it is in Absolute Beginners—the only novel to
feature a single first-person narrator throughout—that he creates his most
compelling character and narrative. With a tone that both echoes the defiant
anti-authoritarianism of The Catcher in
the Rye’s Holden Caulfield, and anticipates the invented teenspeak of Alex
in A Clockwork Orange (published
three years later), this figure describes the atmosphere of 1950s London in
strikingly original, and often comic, imagery and neologisms:
The air was sweet as a cool bath, the stars
were peeping noisily beyond the neons, and the citizens of the Queendom, in
their jeans and separates, were floating down the Shaftesbury Avenue canals,
like gondolas. [...] In fact, the capital was a night-horse dream. And I thought,
‘My lord, one thing is certain, and that’s that they’ll make musicals one day about
the glamour-studded 1950s.’ (1103)
The faintly surreal,
dreamlike imagery here betrays a romantic sensibility underlying MacInnes’
ostensibly realist, journalistic approach. The personification of stars, the
wry nod to London’s gay subcultures in the dual meaning of ‘Queendom’, and the
evocation of Venice, all work to give the city the qualities of a fable or
fairytale. Moreover, as MacInnes’ friend Francis Wyndham suggests, the narrator
himself is a ‘fantasy figure, really, not a real character at all’; and while
he is often seen as an archetypal teenager, the novel’s linguistic
inventiveness demonstrates that MacInnes embraces the self-consciously creative
possibilities of fiction in his creation, rather than striving for documentary
realism (Vulliamy).
We
can also, in fact, see this kind of mindset in the other novels’ structuring,
characterization and narrative approach. A nameless narrator may suggest some
kind of aspiration to objectivity, but it also carries the semiotic simplicity
of a children’s morality tale. The same can be said of the alternate voicings
of Mr Love and Justice and City of Spades, as well as the character
names in those novels: Johnny Fortune’s surname an ironic acknowledgement of
his difficulties in a new country, and Frankie Love and Edward Justice’s
surnames denoting their respective professions. Similarly, the simple
structural divisions of the novels betray a desire to capture this sprawling,
cosmopolitan world within the parameters of something that is self-consciously
a story, rather than a piece of
fictionalised reportage. MacInnes’ narrative decisions in these texts are
therefore more influenced by a romantic, lyrical and dramatic mindset than they
initially appear.
These
qualities of the London trilogy are also evident in the novels’ sense of
mysterious chthonic energies at work beneath the veneer of everyday life. The
different cultural and architectural currents that run through MacInnes’ London
include the Victorian (characterised by a sense of drab, stubborn rationality,
at times oppressive, lurid and shadowy); the African/West Indian, as discussed
above; the teenage (irreverent, blasé and streetwise); and the
welfare-capitalist, manifested in the city’s new, modernist buildings and
institutions. Characters like Edward Justice thrive on this sense of contested
cultural energies swirling beneath the surface of things, being ‘something of
an anarch: a lover of stress and strain and conflict, wherein he himself may operate
behind that outward, visible order he admires’ (82–3). For Montgomery Pew, this
‘visible order’ is always in danger of being reclaimed by a latent, pre-human
history of place, as on a night-time cab ride: ‘we drove home between rotting
Georgian terraces, and the ominous green of the thick trees in Regent’s park
which, when night falls, are reclaimed from man by a jealous, antique Nature’
(74). Here the sense of a ‘rotting’ city, like the decaying ‘Napoli’ district
in which Absolute Beginners’ narrator
resides, combines with a sense of an ancient, active and hostile nonhuman
presence, ready to overwhelm London’s fragile built environment. Of course,
this sense of fragility—of buildings, institutions, and of British culture
itself—is common in novels of the wartime and immediate postwar periods:
consider Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of
the Day (1948) and Rose Macaulay’s The
World My Wilderness (1950). It is perhaps intentional that Pew’s musings on
a ‘jealous, antique Nature’ occur alongside his ‘wild Africans’ comment,
suggesting some connection between the city’s new migrant population and this
sense of a latent, primeval force that threatens to engulf London’s traditional
buildings, institutions and cultures. In such ways, the different currents and
energies MacInnes identifies within the city by turns entwine, separate and
conflict.
The
instinct for storytelling, then, is linked to MacInnes’ sensitivity to the
histories of place in London, his awareness of the city as a palimpsest, which
may in turn be connected to his youth in Australia, a period that preserved the
atmosphere of the World War One-era capital in his imagination. If his novels
often appear pessimistic regarding the ideals of welfare capitalism, this
doesn’t only reflect a general cynicism towards the state; it is also a product
of MacInnes’ intuitive feeling for the city’s past, how it lives on among sites
of transience and progress. Fittingly, the hero of Absolute Beginners sees his W10 neighbourhood of Notting Dale as a
district ‘left behind by the Welfare era and
the Property-owning whatsit, both of them’ (599). The sense of the past is
strong in this area between Kensal Green and Notting Hill, which the narrator
calls ‘Napoli’: a name which, as White notes, ‘marks it out as at once lawless
in the context of metropolitan authority but living to its own rules’; it
signifies transgression of state legality and the presence of an older moral
code, as well as the sense of Italian romance alluded to in the reference to
Venice’s gondolas. In a tone that anticipates psychogeographical biographers of
the city like Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, MacInnes’ narrator revels in the
murky histories suggested by the area’s street names:
A whole festoon of what I think must really
be the sinisterest highways in our city, well, just listen to their names:
Blechynden, Silchester, Walmer, Testerton and Bramley—can’t you just smell
them, as you hurry to get through the cats-cradle of these blocks? In this
part, the houses are old Victorian lower-middle tumble-down, built I dare say
for grocers and bank clerks and horse-omnibus inspectors who’ve died and gone
and their descendants evacuated to the outer suburbs, but these houses live on
like shells. (599)
This is one of the
main areas of West Indian immigration in the 1950s, and the Notting Hill race
riots of 1958 form the backdrop of the novel’s climax; the narrator is talking
about the phenomenon of white middle-class residents leaving such areas. Yet
his choice of evocative wartime language—the area has been ‘evacuated’, and the
buildings are now mere ‘shells’—is significant. In MacInnes’ London,
cosmopolitanism and social change are celebrated as opportunities to revive a
decaying city, and the communities, subcultures and individuals that drive
these processes are often found in districts still recovering from wartime
bombing. The sense of liminality and transience that the novels explore partly
evolves out of the interaction between these new communities and the histories
of the war-damaged spaces they occupy, and this should go some way to
explaining MacInnes’ apparent ambivalence towards postwar redevelopment. The
attitude of the narrator in Mr Love and
Justice to a modernist housing project is typical: it is ‘one of those
countless anonymous 1950 blocks which, in spite of their proliferation, have as
yet entirely failed to transform London from what it still after years of
bombing essentially remains—a late-Victorian city. The block was tall and
oblong-square, and bleak and thoroughly adequate’ (83). These traces or
energies of Victorian London persist, despite postwar efforts to remodel the
city according to the values of welfare capitalism, and the distinctive
character of MacInnes’ London derives from the different ways in which the
city’s diverse subcultures engage with that sense of the past.
The
Victorian era thus forms the bedrock of this version of London, or at least one
of the most prominent layers of the city’s palimpsest. Yet it is not a period
for which MacInnes’ narrators express affection, so much as wariness or wry
mockery. Victorian and Edwardian public toilets, for example, are described by
the narrator of Mr Love and Justice
as places of ‘ludicrous solemnity’:
For this simplest of acts, what one can only
describe as temples, or shrines, have been erected [...] on an Egyptian scale.
Each visitor is isolated from his neighbour, though so close to him and in such
physical communion, as if in a sort of lay confessional. [...] All this seems
to bear witness to a really sensational and alarming fear and hatred of the flesh,
even in its most natural functions, that inspired the municipal Pharaohs who
designed these places. (84)
This kind of
Englishness is thus ridiculed, but it also holds a sinister sway over MacInnes’
characters as they seek to reinvent themselves and their locale in the postwar
era. The aura of pre-First World War London lingers on in this new world of
postcolonial cosmopolitanism and welfare capitalism. White middle-class
culture, for MacInnes, is epitomized in Kilburn, described in Mr Love and Justice as an area of
‘straight-laced seediness’, a ‘primped-up exterior behind which lurks something
dubious and occasionally horrifying [...] the peculiar English mixture of
lunacy and violence’ (82). While such descriptions of place are very far from
nostalgia, they nonetheless evince a grudging recognition of some of the
hegemonic forces that have shaped London’s streets and buildings: forces which
have not simply been swept away by a tide of postwar egalitarianism and social
democracy.
In
City of Spades, the influence of the
new institutions of the Welfare State is dimly felt in comparison to this sense
of older energies of place. Instead, the black subcultures of the novel are
shaping a new London in a kind of dialogue with these currents, in places like
the Moonbeam club. This is located in what Pew calls the ‘entrails’ of a
‘bombed site alive with awnings, naked lights, and throngs of coloured men’
(86). Upon entering and descending two floors, he wonders ‘Can London be so
deep?’ (87). MacInnes’ fascination with depth, and the sense of this being
related to London’s temporal palimpsest, the accessing of previously dormant
energies that run through the city’s literal and figurative underworld,
anticipates one strand of later psychogeographical writings on the city. Iain
Sinclair has recently discussed how the inexorable spread of the forces of
capital throughout London is now evident even at this subterranean level:
‘Underworld is the coming battleground’, he notes, citing the development of
the Crossrail project and the growth of ‘the domestic mining fetish’, luxury
underground extensions. In MacInnes’ London, these spaces are still contested:
the hostility experienced by his ethnic minority characters in the city’s
visible, above-ground mainstream drives the growth of these subcultures. For
Pew, this is ‘a world where you’ve never set foot before, even though it’s
always existed under your nose’ (85).
As
MacInnes’ metaphor of depth suggests, his characters are engaging not only with
a diversity in terms of currently existing subcultures, but also in terms of
temporality: an awareness of the layers of history that comprise London’s
subterranean worlds. This is indicated again later in the novel when Johnny
Fortune is on a boat trip on the Thames with his girlfriend Muriel, and the
tour guide informs them that ‘“beneath the boat and underneath the river bed
[...] is the oldest of the numerous Thames tunnels, now disused, constructed
between 1825 and 1843 by Sir Marc Isambard Brunel”’; the boat proceeds ‘between
Venetian facades of eyeless warehouses, dropping into ancient Roman mud’ (115, 116).
This new temporal and geographical perspective has a Hardyesque quality,
focusing upon London’s Roman history; it makes Muriel see it as ‘a place quite
unfamiliar’, just as it often seemed to the returning native MacInnes (116). As
Houlden notes, Muriel’s words ‘indicate the confusion of native Londoners as
they discover that the city of which they were so confidently in possession is
perhaps not quite their own after all’. But MacInnes is also concerned with the
more general impossibility of really knowing any city—demographic upheavals or not—given the layers of the past
which inevitably accumulate, pervading the places of the present; and given the
fragmentation of perspective and experience which is an intrinsic
characteristic of all metropolitan
life. In Mr Love and Justice, the
City ‘still preserves its Roman quality of ending very abruptly at its ancient
gates [...] so that gruesome Venetian financial palaces abut on to semi-slums’:
again London’s spaces are haunted by their Roman past, and again Italian wealth
and ostentatiousness is evoked in describing the capital’s disconcerting
mixture of glamour and seediness (98).
To
conclude I want to emphasize the importance, in understanding MacInnes’
position upon the relationships between postwar London’s places, politics and
subcultures, of his sense of himself as an outsider, a marginal observer of
events, who cannot be identified with any particular social group. His novels
do not dismiss the achievements of postwar social democracy or the Welfare
State outright: the conclusion of Mr Love
and Justice, for example, sees its two protagonists overcoming their
socially-constructed alienation when they find themselves sharing an NHS
hospital room. Edward seems genuinely amazed by the existence of such
instutitions; as he says, ‘“these hospitals are really terrific. [...] they
treat you whoever you are—no questions asked—not even any money. Just so long
as you’re sick you’re welcome. [...] People should know what goes on inside
these places”’ (202). Yet in these
novels, the creation of such institutions cannot simply brush the past aside.
Instead, they must evolve and develop in tandem with an understanding of
London’s complex, vibrant mix of diverse subcultures, and with the history of
the places they occupy.
The
quintessential centre of this fictional universe is perhaps Stepney as it is
described in Mr Love and Justice: it
‘has a macabre, poetic beauty’, ‘one of those areas of London that is
thoroughly confused about itself, being in transition from various ancient
states of being to new ones it is still busy searching for’ (98). That
amorphous identity is microcosmically symbolised in Spitalfields market, ‘with
its vigorous dawn life and odour of veg, fruit, and flowers—like blended
essences of the citizens’ duties, delights, and fantasies’ (98). Moreover, because
of ‘the markets, seamen, and Commonwealth minorities, in Stepney you can eat
and drink, as well as other things, at any hour you choose to; and thanks to
the alternation of the Jewish sabbath with the Gentile, the shops and markets
never close’ (99). Ultimately, for
MacInnes, this sense of complexity, transition and instability is a sign of a
healthy cosmopolitanism that should be valued above all other aspects of the
city. Central to this is Stepney’s docklands location: not only because of the
ocean’s association with ‘the castaways from Africa and the Caribbean’, who
perform here ‘a perpetual, melancholy, wryly humorous ballet’; but also because
at this point, the river is ‘lined with wharves and cranes’ and carries ‘great
ocean-loving steamers’: ‘no longer the pretty, grubby playground of the higher
reaches but already, by now, the sea’ (99). This thrilling sense of connection
to the cultural energies of the world beyond Britain is part of Frankie Love’s
romanticisation of the sea: it ‘“teaches you the scale of things: what matters
and what really doesn’t”’, as another pimp remarks in conversation with him
(70). Here, as in the minority subcultures that MacInnes celebrates, there is a
sense of transition, liminality, and vital energy that is lacking in both
London’s tired Victorian past, and its bureaucratic postwar present. In these
novels, which neither cling with reactionary instincts to the Britain that
preceded Commonwealth migration, nor celebrate unreservedly the top-down
institutions of the ‘postwar consensus’, the most vital and creative energies
emerge from collisions of past and present, culture and subculture, the surface
and the subterranean.
