I can see why people sometimes paint things on walls. I wouldn’t want to encourage it in general, but sometimes it can be educational. In my English childhood you might still see the words SECOND FRONT NOW! inscribed, quite neatly, on the sides of factories. These led to me to find out something interesting about the second World War which I would not otherwise have known. On the road from Oxford to London, for many years, the simple slogan TORIES OUT, dating from 1964, could be seen on an abandoned railway bridge, now demolished. I suppose it survived for so long because it was bound to come in handy again each time the Tories got back in. For many years I was secretly amused by the incomplete demand NO F which was to be seen in foot-high letters on a corner near Oxford’s Playhouse Theatre. While it was not my handiwork, I knew whose it was, what it would have said if finished (NO FILES) and what had caused the painter to flee, paint in hand, before it was completed, that long ago summer night. I was sorry to see it disappear a year or so ago and have often wondered why anyone bothered.
I also miss the plangent, beautifully painted lines, “Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere,” which survived for decades on a wall overlooking the Great Western Railway line as you came into Paddington station in London. I think it was preserved after the great satirist, calling himself Peter Simple in the London Daily Telegraph, took up its cause and started referring to its unknown author as “The Master of Paddington.” It has gone now. But along the same stretch, among acres of spray-painted drivel in a language mostly unknown to man, you may see the unattractive suggestion EAT DA RICH in enormous characters on the gritty flanks of a concrete freeway.
Sometimes advertisements also became interesting in a way that was never intended. On the side of a house in a scruffy district of Cambridge, large and beautifully-painted lettering once proclaimed “Sunday isn’t Sunday without the Empire News.” If true, this meant that Sunday had not been Sunday since 1960, when that newspaper was merged out of existence. Train passengers on their way through Reading, after a brief glimpse of ballad-haunted Reading Gaol, would also be treated to the faintly menacing and indelible lineside advertisement asking, “RU a Co-Operator? If not, why not?” which was supposed to encourage people to join their local Co-Operative society. I learned later that it was in fact the wall of a busy slaughterhouse. Modernization has swept it away.
But I feel threatened and disturbed by the thing which is nowadays pretentiously called “graffiti.” This is a strangely elegant, even complimentary name for an ugly, threatening thing. I try not to use it. The term doesn’t even appear in my pre-revolutionary, early 1950s Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. All you find there is the singular, “graffito,” defined as “a drawing or writing scratched on a wall or other surface, as at Pompeii and Rome.” The use of this arty term to dignify vandalism seems to date from 1954, pioneered by the Detroit Free Press.
When I came to live in London for the first time in 1977, I knew I didn’t like this crazy scrawling. To me it signaled drugs, crime, squalor, and the cold indifference of one human being to another. My first metropolitan home was a small flat in a tranquil street of tall Victorian houses not far from the Abbey Road recording studios, in the foothills of grand and faintly intellectual Hampstead, on the edge of a district known as Swiss Cottage. It was not then an especially rich part of town, but it was a settled, orderly one. There was a time when almost everyone I knew had at some point lived there on his or her way up the property ladder. I liked it. So did many others, for whom it was a refuge from evil. In 1938 many Jewish refugees from newly-Nazified Vienna had settled there. Forty years on, it still had little bars selling Austrian Goesser Beer, and attractively old-fashioned, stately cafés—one defiantly known as “the Cosmopolitan”—where interlopers felt that they had trespassed into a secret society. Bus conductors, intending to be funny, would sometimes call out as they entered the district, “Swiss Cottage—passports please.” I can’t help thinking that any Viennese exile passengers would not have enjoyed the joke all that much. Sigmund Freud had settled nearby, and I recall a statue of him, defaced with the words, “My ideas have spawned a monstrous tyranny.” The spray paint was at least literate and thoughtful.
One evening on my way home I noticed that someone had been scrawling things on the expensive new enameled street signs which the local town hall had recently installed in our small corner of the capital. It was distorted with all kinds of arrows and twiddles but seemed to say “Nobodyz.” Well, I didn’t think the street was nobody’s, and I felt a whisper of menace from the deliberate chaos of the distorted lettering. This was some years before James Q. Wilson set out his “Broken Windows Theory”—that ignoring small crimes leads to greater ones. But I instinctively sensed that this was something worth stopping, and I would slip out of my flat on Sundays with a cloth and a bottle of a fluid called “Liquid Gumption,” which was very effective at removing these scribbles. Like Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost, (who strove for weeks to maintain an ancient bloodstain in the venerable house he haunted, despite the efforts of modern-minded American tenants to remove it) the scribbler felt it was his duty to renew his work however many times I erased it.
So he would soon afterwards return and repeat his little act of vandalism. And I would slip out in the dark, armed with my Liquid Gumption dispenser and ever-so-slightly hoping to meet the culprit.
Though I wouldn’t at all have minded a confrontation with him, I would have been terribly embarrassed if anyone I knew had found out what I was doing. I thought most people would view my preoccupation as crazy—especially after the right-on local authorities actually helped set up a “workshop” at which people could learn how to spray-paint mental slurry around the streets. That was when I knew my clean-up efforts would never get anywhere. Since then, vast parts of London—walls, bridges, trains, buses, dingy pedestrian tunnels, shop windows—have been carpeted with this semi-official endorsement of chaos, mental indiscipline and ugliness. Have you ever noticed how it is increasingly a caricature of writing? The symbols look at first glance as if they are literate, arranged like words and sentences. But they are not so much illiterate as counter-literate. If they made a sound, it would be wordless yelling punctuated with discordant random thumps.
At some time in the 1980s I think I read the story of a young police constable in London who had made it his business to track down the culprits of much of this mess and to arrest them for criminal damage offenses. It was real detective work: hard, grueling, and long. But he succeeded. The response of his superiors was to treat him as if he were a bit crazy and to move him to other duties. I say I think this happened because I can now find no trace of it in the records which exist. As this happened before the Internet, I have so far been unable to trace the details and check my memory. But I remember so clearly the distress that I felt when all that effort went unrewarded, that I feel sure it is true.
Simon and Garfunkel had first sung “The words of the prophets are written on subway walls” in 1964, but it took quite a while for that level of menacing social disorder to arrive and establish itself in smaller, more ordered Britain. As with so many other things, the end of the Cold War accelerated the revolt against calm and reason. The great film The Lives of Others cleverly portrays the dismal surveillance state of the German Democratic Republic, whose Berlin Wall was plastered on its western face with half-witted scrawls. The Communist side, of course, was quite clean, on pain of death. But the contrast made a worrying point about the sort of freedom we would eventually offer the peoples we liberated from Communism. In a postscript to the film, we see its hero haunting newly free East Berlin. And every surface in that formerly ordered city is covered in mindless scrawls. It is of course one of the prices of liberation. Was Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the movie’s Roman Catholic aristocratic director, making any kind of point? Or was he just filming the obvious truth, that post-Christian liberal freedom is always served up with a large side-order of howling tripe?
After I had decided to write about this, news came to me that the caretakers of Canterbury Cathedral, one of the most glorious buildings in the world, full of thought and truth, had decided to decorate its interior with stickers designed to look like wall-scribbles. When you look at them closely they contain actual words, which I suppose is something, though these are in fact rather dull objections to Theistic religion, readily available in all British schools. So why put them in the mother cathedral of the Church of England? The most perceptive critic of the desecration said it made the cathedral look rather like an underground parking lot in a rough area. It is, supposedly, an “art installation.” The Very Rev. David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury, explained its supposed purpose, saying “There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style which is disruptive.” Yes, of course.
Who do these people think they are, and what do they think they are doing? It is bad enough that this deliberate rejection of beauty, thought, and language spreads like a sinister rash over our streets and into our minds. Why then invite its repellent shapes and styles into the house of God? Do they know what they are trifling with? Many of us still recall the story of Belshazzar’s feast, in which the foolish king’s crime was to take sacred vessels plundered from the Temple in Jerusalem, and use them to carouse merrily with his toadies. As they did so “they praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone . . . which see not, nor hear, nor know: and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified.” Then it was that there “came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.” The prophet Daniel, brought to interpret the writing, tells him, “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” I wonder if this portion of scripture is read often in Canterbury Cathedral nowadays. I suspect that any nation which neglects it will sooner or later face its own writing on the wall, as we do. And we will then find out in detail what it means.
