Paul Barker reviews new book on belonging

Who is the typical Londoner now? A Norwegian married to an Algerian?

Paul Barker, a fellow at the Young Foundation reviews Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things, pen portraits of life in a single street, tackling both our relationship to objects and what it means to belong to our home city in September's issue of the Times Literary Supplement.

MINCE PIES AND A CANE

Paul Barker

TLS review of :

Daniel Miller
The Comfort of Things
Polity  £20
ISBN 978 0 7456 4403 5


George's flat "contained nothing at all, beyond the most basic carpet
and furniture."  Interviewing him, Daniel Miller decided that "the
flat was the man." George had lived in hostels all his life; social
services had now placed him in this South London flat. In his
mid-seventies, he had never lived alone before. There was no
decoration in the flat because there was no one to decorate for.
George's sole excursion was to go up, each year, to watch the
rehearsal for the Trooping of the Colour. Otherwise, his world was
unadorned. The flat didn't even have a radio. Miller and his
fellow-anthropologist Fiona Parrott left in tears. George, they felt,
"had never yet seen his life actually begin. And, worse still, he knew
it."


This is the first of a set of delicately-drawn pen-portraits of  lives
in a singl unnamed South London street, which has the shabbiness of
somewhere like New Cross.  Miller's title The Comfort of Things seems
obliquely to refute Blanche's confession in A Streetcar Named Desire
that "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."  Miller's
argument is that, without things, we are nothing.  He remembers once,
as a young anthropologist, counting all the ornaments in 160 sitting
rooms in a town in Trinidad. Now, as Professor of Material Culture at
University College London,  he is pursuing a parallel quest. What do
the things we surround ourselves with, reveal about us? It is often
assumed that people's relationship to things comes "at the expense of
our relationships to people." Miller hopes that this study will show
that "the opposite is true" : "the closer our relationships are with
objects, the closer our relationships are with people." Again a
powerful opposing voice is Tennessee Williams. In his The Glass
Menagerie (1945), Laura is a young woman who rebuffs all human contact.
"She lives in a world of her own," we are told, "a world of - little glass ornaments."
These fragile animal-figures give the play its governing symbol and its title.


In line with Miller's argument, the chapter giving George's story is
entitled "Empty."  The next, contrasting story is headed "Full."  The
two anthropologists visited the elderly Mr and Mrs Clarke at
Christmas. The Clarkes had 800 separate decorations for the tree, some
handed down, some given, some newly bought, but all with a memory
attached. In personal terms, Miller reckoned, these objects
represented "a century of devotion."  Mrs Clarke was baking 81 mince
pies for friends and family : there were five children and ten
grandchildren. The Clarkes' attitude to both people and things was,
above all, craftsmanlike, Miller decides.  They had "the moral centre
of seeing a job well done"; they exemplified "the aesthetics of care";
their Christmas was "what it has always been and always should be."
They were reticent people, displacing any fraught emotions into
conversations with their cat. They were also deeply religious : "what
they represent in life comes in large measure from previous
generations and needs to live beyond them to pass on to the future."
To Miller this is "the ultimate source of their values."


This is a book quite out of the ordinary. Among other things, it is
further evidence that geographers and anthropologists have picked up
the banner of close social observation which British sociology, once
proud of a heritage which began with Charles Booth, has let drop, in
pursuit of the flashier charms of postmodernism and
post-postmodernism.  Miller and Parrott spent 17 months talking to
people who lived on this street. The 30 life-stories are chosen from
120 in the main survey and an earlier test-run. One or two are not
from the street itself - we are not told which - but they are
included, presumably, because the story was too good to leave out. In
that sense, there is nothing quasi-scientific here (more academic
studies are due to follow). What there is, is empathy. We have to rely
on Miller for how representative these people are.


In trying to nail down our relationship to objects, Miller is also
trying to evoke what it now means to be a Londoner.  Fewer than a
quarter of the people surveyed were born in London. Is the typical
Londoner now, Miller asks, "a Norwegian married to an Algerian"?  The
Chicago urban sociologists called streets like these a zone of
transition. "By and large," Miller says, "it is the kind of area
people move into when they form couples and out when they have
children." By this standard, more and more of inner London is becoming
such a zone. One consequence, as Miller warns,  is that one has to be
cautious about what is called a "neighbourhood." There was nothing
homogeneous about this street; people simply lived next to one
another; they often did not know any other residents' names.  There
was intermittent gentrification,  but the street was not about to turn
into Islington any time soon.


The stories are vivid and memorable; the range is remarkable. A Greek
woman who puts on her lipstick to go to the cemetery to tell off the
dead. A gay couple who, in scouring the atlas for possible locations
for a country cottage regard Estonia as "a kind of very, very outer
London suburb."  The Jamaican woman who visits the island twice a year
to luxuriate in the "real" house she has built there but cannot bear
to live in full-time. The church organist who keeps every greetings
card she has ever been sent, delving for the meanings in every
commercial set of verses. (Miller ends this chapter with his own
doggerel quatrain in her honour.) The man who says he grieves
constantly over the ghosts of the 70 left dead when, as a mercenary,
he blew up an arms dump; he seeks consolation in on-line pornography.
The woman in her early twenties who is tattooed and pierced in every
conceivable place, and sees pain as part of her "sense of control" of
her life. Sometimes, as with the ex-mercenary, you run up against the
usual query about oral history : how true are these memories? But the
sweep of the narrative carries you forward.


And it is very much a narrative. We hear people's actual voices much
less than in, say, Booth or Henry Mayhew, or even in the recent London
Voices, London Lives (Bristol: Policy Press, 2007), brought together
by the geographer and planner Peter Hall.  It is a deeply personal
book; the principal voice is Miller's. We learn a lot about him : how,
though he was brought up Jewish, his family always celebrated
Christmas; how he was sent away at six to a school where the first
thing they showed him was a cane; how his loneliness was only eased by
listening to John Peel's radio shows.


"I have always detested the English attitude to sentimentality," he
says, and admits that a romantic film can trigger off his tears.  The
tone of the book is positive and humane, as in the story of the
Clarkes and their Christmas; he acknowledges his "wide-eyed awe of
what is generally dismissed as boringly familiar."  It is arguable
whether Miller has always proved his theoretical point; some of the
stories seem to present a weaker link between human relationships and
relationships to objects. Sometimes he over-explains what he sees; but
this doesn't undercut the sheer, admirable quality of the detailed
observation. While you read these pages, this is the street where you
live.


[Paul Barker is Senior Research Fellow at the Young Foundation. He is writing a book
about suburbia.]