Divergent views

In Robert Frost’s 1916 poem “The Road Not Taken”, he wrote:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both”.

A dilemma that applies in cities as much as in forests, and metaphorically in life in general. The eternal “what ifs?”, the junctions and forking paths of decisions and fate. However, though one may not be able to journey along both routes, at least for the time being, there are occasions when it is possible to view both, taking a slightly boz-eyed  and divergent perspective to the scene. One of the most famous artistic renditions of this situation is surely “Paris Street: Rainy Day” painted in 1877 by the French Impressionist, Gustave Caillebotte, depicting a complex street intersection in the Quartier de l’Europe in the 8th arrondissement, and recently star of the show at a disappointingly meagre exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, whence the photo below:

Curiously, there’s a very similar work called “Rainy Day Boston”, painted in 1885 by the American artist Childe Hassam. Quite apart from both portraying a wet day in a city, these paintings share a surprisingly overall similarity in terms of structure and perspective, showing divergent streets with sharply angled buildings between them, in effect, offering to the eyes two focal points. Hassam was aware of Caillebotte’s work in general terms, although I don’t know if he had seen this particular painting, from eight years earlier, and there is no suggestion of plagiarism. 

And then there’s my own, done with full awareness of both of the above, but based on a photograph I took five years ago in the Place de Dublin, just a short distance up the rue de St Petersbourg from the Place de l’Europe:

Such works may sensitise us to one not uncommon theme of urban infrastructure and groundplan. Once we have seen these paintings, such arrangements are rendered more easily noticeable, and we become more aware of them. They are to be found at Times Square, for instance, at the Flatiron Building, and at other intersections where Broadway crosses north-south avenues in Manhattan, and they abound in Haussmannised Paris and, especially, in other rigidly planned cities and city districts. Anywhere that an orthogonal grid of streets admits an angled intruder you’ll find them: in Barcelona, Rome and Washington, DC, for instance, and even in Pimlico, SW1.

Once alerted, one starts looking for this pattern elsewhere, recognising how it features, for instance, in many of the photorealist paintings by Anthony Brunelli, in works such as “Court and Chenango” and “Main Street”, both from 1994. Diagonals, acute corners, divergent perspectives. This particular geometric feature lends itself to an odd species of energetic and visual excitement, for those so inclined, and often makes for an attractive fragment of cityscape. It doesn’t really have a name, it’s merely a minor subjectively geographical trope, just one component in the syntax of the streets which, when pointed out, can encourage our everyday perceptions to be organised a little differently, and perhaps made more enjoyable. One might even dream up a modern day equivalent of the “I Spy” or “Observer’s” book, probably an app that you could consult as you flâneured your way around – so you could declare to your companion, “oh look, it’s one of those”, and score yourself twenty five points.

An Outsider’s London

Though I’ve written quite a lot, surely far too much, throughout my life – hypergraphia as befits a temporal lobe personality – it never gets any easier. With increasing age most things take longer, and writing is no exception. Becoming more self-critical is a handy excuse for this, as is being more than ready to avail oneself of the endless tinkering that word processing software encourages. Whatever the explanation, for me, these days writing takes longer than it used to, and longer than I want or expect it to. Nor is there any guarantee that prolonged gestation and fiddling will result in a better end product, or even of having anything worthwhile to say.

Never mind. Today, the last day of the first six months of the year, I completed, on schedule, what is meant to be the penultimate revision of “An Outsider’s London”, an approximately 200-page account of a lifetime’s provincial fascination with the world’s greatest city. I ran the Microsoft spellchecker across the text, the shocking unfamiliarity with words such as “Profumo”, “Carnaby”, “Belsen” and “Hockney” stoking my disdain for this current era of parochially crass and juvenile Americanised information technology. Be that as it may, I’m pleased to have reached this stage.

Knowing of my fondness for London, and for scribbling, over the years several of my friends have suggested a project of this sort, unaware that I’d planned such a thing anyway and that, indeed, I’d made an initial attempt almost forty years ago. The original version, circa 1978, was a brave foray into a kind of multimedia – essays, poems, drawings, maps and diagrams – and was a thoroughly naïve, opinionated, uninformed and generally misguided personal take on a city that I adored, but knew only superficially. A city I loved for its complexity and variety, its senses of place and of past, its visual appearance, its inhabitants and its infrastructures, and its role in the British psyche. Before the theme got popularly named as such, this was an early outing in psychogeography. Like most things I’ve attempted, it went nowhere.

The new version keeps the old title but takes a different tack, a more chronologically autobiographical one, focusing principally on childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. It describes how, from people I knew, from radio and television, from books and newspapers, from paintings and photographs and songs, and from anything that came my way, I formed impressions and acquired information about the great city. Major components of the book concern processes of understanding and misunderstanding, of gradual clarification, of imagining and fantasising, of learning my way around from maps and personal exploration, discovering the “good bits” of the city as I perceived them to be, and subsequently using London as a focus for drawings and paintings. Inevitably, being personal, being me, it’s a little odd in places.

While unavoidably personal and place-specific, though, “An Outsider’s London” is an exercise in the whole business of how we begin to understand and learn a large and complex metropolis, and of how one’s impressions and reactions evolve and modify with age and experience, while simultaneously the city changes too. The London I first thought about in those distant postwar days is not the city it is today. So it’s also a book about education and social change, about perception, about likes and dislikes in city structure. Any realistic book about London is bound to have to face a great many themes, and so it is with this one. What we have in “An Outsider’s London” is a mix of autobiography, psychology and urban geography, a representation of what one might call a “lifetime metropolitan learning curve”. I wouldn’t, of course, call it that. I’d call it a rattling good read.

 
Tomorrow, the first day of the second half of the year, I shall start on the “final final” revision, knowing full well that it is unlikely to be the last, and I shall be enjoying every moment.