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I love the atmosphere and visual intensity of The City of Dreadful Night. True, for the poet the city reflects loss of faith, madness, angst; but one can't help feeling that there is for all the intensity of the writing a self regarding attitudinising in these feverish lines, that borders on relish.

One of the most intense and nightmarish visions of London is found in Huysmans' A Rebours. His aesthete hero des Esseintes, on his way to la Gare du Nord en route for London, decides it is no longer necessary for him to go, so intense is his vision of the city:

"Up above trains raced by at full speed; and down in the underground sewers, others rumbled along, occasionally emitting ghastly screams or vomiting floods of smoke through the gaping mouths of airshafts. And meanwhile, along every street, big or small, in an eternal twilight relieved only by the infamies of modern advertising, there flowed an endless stream of traffic, between two columns of earnest, silent Londoners, marching along with eyes fixed ahead and elbows glued to their sides."

This is a fabulous, almost cinematographic evocation of London, an anticipation of images in films such as Metropolis. Another great vision of London fourteen years earlier had been that of Dore. His city is hellish indeed, lurid, nightmarish and claustrophobic.

Jack London is another writer who describes the hell of London. In People of the Abyss he is somewhat histrionically appalled at the London he found in 1903, particularly the East End:

"We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and masonry. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown into the mud for rotten potatoes....while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption."

There is always generalised trauma in the city of course; demonstations, crime; but these in themselves are not always really alarming. As my 90 year old mother said about shootings opposite my flat: "What does it matter if someone 'pops' someone else as long as they keep it amongst themselves?"…( A propos…how come my mother is talking like Tarantino?
'Pops'?)

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