Wendy Cope: A Formula for Intimacy in East London. Also, Baudelaire.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Male biker seeks female for touring fun.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Gay vegetarian whose friends are few,
I'm into music, Shakespeare and the sun.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Executive in search of something new—
Perhaps bisexual woman, arty, young.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Successful, straight and solvent? I am too—
Attractive Jewish lady with a son.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
I'm Libran, inexperienced and blue—
Need slim, non-smoker, under twenty-one.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Please write (with photo) to Box 152.
Who knows where it may lead once we've begun?
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
I found Wendy Cope’s villanelle, “Lonely Hearts,” particularly resonant of a kind of universal urban experience that finds expression and recurrence not just in London, but in all the great, swarming cities. Just from my initial reading, I thought the nature of the villanelle lent itself so well to the task of encapsulating the city as a reservoir of isolation. The poem’s structure, specifically, --a predictable, repetitive, and measured crescendo-- issues a very discernable ruefulness. And in the context of that familiar, modern sensibility --this disconnect and lack of intimacy-- Cope calls to mind Baudelaire’s doomed encounter in “A une passante,” where amidst the din of the “deafening street,” the poet is transfixed by a fugitive beauté, and her devastating, ephemeral glance. He is left with nothing but a fatalistic question: Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité? (Will I see you no more before eternity?).
It has also occurred to me that Cope’s choice in deploying a structured poem is a possible remark on the formulaic approach a contemporary urban dweller might take in meeting other singles. There is this practice (found in dating services or classifieds, etc.) wherein people are expected to provide (or seek) a list of “traits,” thus demoting human intimacy to a secondary role in the romantic equation. Glorified in its stead is “compatibility.”
The title of the poem further substantiates this point. Cope dismembers the humans of the city; she has reduced them to single organs. The hearts are lonely; the “hearts” are detached from the complexities of the individuals to whom they belong. The refrains carry on the failure in indicating human depth. The first impressions these people have of each other are marked by a brevity that denies fulfillment; nothing but itemizations -- two or three agreeable attributes at best. There is almost a sense of commodification inherent in this dynamic; they might as well be speaking of car models or curtain patterns. “Can someone make my simple wish come true?/Do you live in North London? Is it you?” also implies passivity, a lack of enterprise or willingness to go out of one’s comfort zone (out of one’s neighborhood, even) and take action.
In “Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin cites Valéry, who quite aptly remarked on this notion of overt simplification/alienation of urban life: “‘The inhabitant of the great urban centers reverts to a state of savagery --that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism. Any improvement of this mechanism eliminate certain modes of behavior and emotions.’ (now Benjamin) Comfort isolates; on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization.” [Benjamin 327-28]
I cannot wholly take Cope’s words as my own, because I’ve never actually tried this approach to meeting other people. I think what I would make mine from all of this is the melancholia: the heaviness of urban alienation, the dubiousness, the desperate hopes --all these things that Cope has invoked, albeit in the guise/framework of a seemingly lighthearted, slightly satirical parody of contemporary dating culture, are to an extent expressive of my own fragmented encounters with love and attraction in the big city.
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Author’s Note: A draft of this essay was first published in 2012.