Taxi

To say that a banana is like a phallus inevitably implies that a phallus is like a banana.  The fact that gondolas have often been called the taxis of Venice therefore tells us something interesting about London cabs.

Both are as black as hearses, and unique to their respective cities.  Both remain aloof from their fellow vehicles: the gondola from the vulgar motor boats and hulking vaporetti which are used for more mundane tasks of transport, and the taxi from the cars and buses which surround it.   Both professions are studiedly closed; the gondolieri are family institutions, while London cabbies often pass on their venerable machines within a narrow circle.  Both above all, are mysterious and luxurious.

Taking a cab is always an adventure; it is never a crass matter of going from A to B.  For a start, the London traversed is never your London.  Apart from the routes and manoeuvres denied lesser mortals in their lesser chariots, cabbies seem to inhabit a city which is structured like a huge Swiss cheese, with curious and useful holes throughout its fabric.  These they use like science fiction wormholes to transport us in strange unknowable ways.  Perhaps there is a conspiracy between them and the map-makers; this would explain the long, almost masonic ritual of initiation called - aptly enough - The Knowledge.  Instead of some tedious and improbable learning by rote of a few routes through London, cabbies are in fact committing to memory the wormholes in London's inner space.

The London cab is invested with mystique not only by virtue of its curious journeys and unusual construction - what other vehicle accommodates five passengers in such a confined space in such luxury? - but also by association.  Taxis are always used by special people and for special purposes.  The constant rubbing together of cabs with the extraordinary has promoted their further use in this way.  Today, the act of hailing and taking a cab is almost like the ritualised start of an Arthurian quest.  To arrive in a cab at an important event is to bring a huge black rabbit's paw, and a way of sanctifying the business of travel.

Cabs thus become holy chariots, carrying a new priesthood who bless and are blessed.  In the past we could recognise them by their tightly furled umbrellas and immaculate bowlers.  Today, it is more likely to be a discreet Filofax or cellular phone.  But the great virtue of taxis is that however patrician their tradition and true clientele may be, they are fundamentally democratic in their availability.  As such we may all taste the illicit pleasures of this mode of transport; for a few pounds we can imagine ourselves one of Them, the powerful ones whose vehicles we have borrowed for a few hours just as a noblemen of yore might have lent his carriage to a plebeian for an afternoon drive.

Taxis are at once personal yet unattainable limousines which are the acme of motorised travel, and at the same time negations of that movement.  From within its curious, womb-like interior, you can almost believe that it is the world that is travelling not you.  As a symbol and vehicle of power, the taxi, like its close cousin the gondola, offers the ultimate trip.  And in this respect it is rather like a banana.

(27.5.86)

Index

The Golden Gate

Originally all novels were in verse.  Except that they used to be called epics: the Iliad, the Aeneid.  The introduction of writing weakened the oral tradition which lay at the root of these works, and allowed the form to be watered down by prose.  Prose was also simpler to write, and better suited to the years following the fall of the Roman Empire when civilisation itself was enfeebled and precarious.

The verse novel made a come-back in the later Middle Ages, when a new spirit of poetry was in the air.  If Dante’s Commedia is backward-looking in its inclusiveness, its attempt to explain everything and assign it its place in an ordered universe, there were many other works which were more modern, and paradoxically truer to their hidden ancient roots.  Works such as Le Roman de la Rose, all the Arthurian poetic cycles, and the new epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso.

Later still, this poetry became merely the heightened form of prose, and produced glittering Augustan gems like Pope’s Essay on Man, or Swift’s diatribes.  It took the passion of the Romantics, heirs to the medieval story-tellers in verse, to marry verse and narrative once more.  The prime examples are probably Byron’s Don Juan, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

And so the cycle goes on.  After falling into decades of neglect, the verse novel has burst upon the scene once more.  Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a tale for our times, an everyday story of yuppies in San Francisco as they battle with the tricky years of their twenties.  If nothing else, the book is a remarkable tour-de-force.  Using Pushkin’s verse form,  Seth manages to produce smooth-running lines which rarely seem short-breathed despite their unusual tetrameter length.  Equally the rhyme scheme is never obtrusive, and there are some masterly matches worthy of Byron.

And yet there is something not quite right about the enterprise.  It would be too easy to lay this at the door of Mr Seth’s English.  He wield a formidable vocabulary with an assurance that passes beyond dictionary definitions.  His dodgem skill at careering round the corners of short lines and awkward rhymes is exemplary.  The problem lies deeper, and has to do with overall pace and structure.

Certain forms require a certain breadth of approach.  It is no accident that Wagner’s operas are monster: he was attempting the largest of themes, and needed space to accommodate them.  Similarly, it is instructive to note that Byron’s Don Juan is conceived on the largest scale.  Seth’s work is not.  A lot happens – these are, after all, yuppies; many characters are introduced, and rounded sketches attempted.  But there is jut not enough space.  This problem is exacerbated by the fine but totally unbalancing sermon in chapter seven.

Having mastered the form so fluently, and writing compellingly about issues which affect even non-yuppies, Seth should have had the courage to write at the length they deserved.  In the end, the book’s worst fault is that there is not enough of it; some fault.

(27.8.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Pushkin’s “What if?”

Index