The Arts: David Simon, on tour to promote two of the non-fiction books about the mean streets of Baltimore that formed the basis for 'The Wire', is surprised to find how resonant that bleak view is in cities from Glasgow to Belfast, writes DAVIN O'DWYER.
BALTIMORE, it is fair to say, was always one of those slightly anonymous American cities on the eastern seaboard that you'd struggle to pick out of a line-up. However, in the wake of the epic HBO TV series The Wire– widely hailed as the greatest television series ever – Baltimore has developed a rather unenviable reputation for drugs, corruption, murder, urban decay and drunken police parties. Furthermore, the man responsible for this characterisation, former Baltimore Sunreporter-turned-TV writer and producer David Simon, has spent much of the past two weeks diligently travelling around the UK and Ireland doing publicity for two recently reprinted works of non-fiction narrative journalism that also paint a picture of death and dereliction, Maryland style. But while it might seem that Simon is determined to ruin Baltimore's image, in truth the two books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streetsand The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood, and indeed The Wire, are born of an intense love for the city, and a determination to lift the veil on the problems that afflict it.
"The books are my children," says Simon, offering an explanation as to why such an acclaimed TV producer is here discussing his early work. "I probably spent three years working on each one. You want them to go out into the world and find lots of friends; you don't want them to be in a warehouse. They really were the source material for some of The Wire, and I'm delighted and amused that it's now worked back from T he Wireto the original journalism."
IT IS THEbelated success of The Wirehere – the fifth and final season finished last year – that has seen the reprinting of Homicideand The Corner. Simon spent 1988 as an embedded member of the homicide unit in the Baltimore police department, and published Homicidein 1991. Then, in 1993, he and Ed Burns, a former police detective, spent a year on the corner of West Fayette and Monroe streets, one of a number of drug markets in west Baltimore. There, they gradually befriended the people in the area, and their often harrowing stories became The Corner. The two volumes offer still-relevant insights into the urban decay that plagues so many US cities, and above all the futility of the so-called war on drugs. As Simon consistently argues, only by rigorous self-examination can institutions, and by extension the modern city, continue to serve people, and the books never flinch from providing such an examination for Baltimore.
" The Cornerand Homicidewere books written about the other America," he says. "My chance of being killed, as a white male in Baltimore, is the same as being killed in Omaha, Nebraska. But if I were black, my chances of being killed are stark and dramatic. There are two different Americas – they live side by side. The drug corner at Monroe and Fayette is 19 blocks from where I live, but it might as well be the other side of the moon." This blend of righteous yet considered indignation is never far from the surface with Simon – indeed, it is the moral code that runs throughout his work. Even sitting in an armchair in the Shelbourne Hotel, he could easily pass for one of the middle-aged detectives wandering in the background of the homicide unit in The Wire– bald and unassuming, with a heavy brow over initially inscrutable eyes that come alive as he becomes animated by some point or other. There is a sardonic edge to his humour, the trademark wit that leavens so much of his writing, and he talks in eloquent, sinuous streams, brimming with ideas and theories. When he starts on a tangent, what at first sounds like a meandering digression is gradually revealed to be an integral part of the argument he is patiently building – not unlike the narrative rhythms of The Wireitself.
That show's great achievement was to create what was ostensibly a police procedural, albeit an unusually dense and intelligent one, while in fact offering viewers what Simon calls "a 60-hour treatise on the modern American city". The first season draws heavily on the two worlds of Homicideand The Corner, as a special police detail sets up an elaborate wiretap to investigate a powerful drug empire, but with every subsequent series, The Wireexpanded its horizons, until the show had examined not just the fraudulent war on drugs, but also the demise of the working class, the inherent corruption of the political system, the endemic failures of the education system, and the decline and ineffectiveness of journalism. Novelistic in form and ambition, The Wireis worlds away from the CSIsor Law and Ordersthat clog up the TV schedules.
“We’re making great demands on audiences,” says Simon with tangible pride. “We’re saying you have to pay attention, there’ll be delayed gratification, but we promise you gratification. But, you may have to go all 13 episodes to get gratification . . . And all that is the promise that a good book makes – it’s not the promise of television.”
The show’s continuing success on this side of the Atlantic genuinely surprises Simon. “It’s jaw-dropping to me. The DVD sales are out of all proportion. We had some sensibility that what we were doing would play in Philadelphia or Detroit or St Louis, post-industrial cities that have lost their manufacturing base – the story is the same wherever you go in my country. But what I was finding was, especially in places like Glasgow or Belfast, the resonance to people was huge. We would have settled to make something that was universal in an American sense, to our own country. But the problems of the western democracies are the problems of the western democracies. We are in the same economic dynamic.”
Those universal resonances are the inevitable reward for dramatising the systemic problems of those postmodern institutions that dominate our lives – in The Wire'sthematic scheme, the institutions are the gods of Greek tragedy, indifferent to people's needs, capriciously striking down characters, who are powerless to help themselves.
“Institutions are all self-preserving,” he says. “They need to be continually challenged, even healthy institutions, from without and within. That’s the only thing that keeps any institution healthy . . . Find an institution in modern America that you need to believe in, and you will be betrayed,” he says emphatically. “A lot of people around the world, at some point in their lives, committed to an institution, either in the form of government, or schools, or police authorities, or religion, or whatever. And many of us felt that, at the end of the day, the institution that we were supposed to be served by or had hoped to serve in a meaningful way, had not treated us with any dignity at all. That’s a commonality in the modern world.”
SIMON'S WORK ISinevitably bleak, and he has regularly been accused of cynicism. "In fairness, The Wireis aggressively cynical about institutions and their capacity for self-reform, or even self-awareness," he concedes. "But I don't think it's cynical about human beings."
As he says this, he glances over to a neighbouring table, where a smiling couple are sitting in the bright sunshine. In the figures of Fran Boyd and Donnie Andrews, Simon has all the evidence he needs to be optimistic about people. Boyd is the matriarch of the family featured in The Corner, while Andrews is the inspiration for Omar Little, the stick-up artist who roams through the streets of The Wire'sBaltimore. Their courtship was made long and difficult by Andrews's incarceration and Boyd's addiction, and later in the day, at a questions and answers session in Eason, they speak with dignity and frankness about how they turned their lives around. It is a moving example of the very sort of self-evaluation that Simon believes most institutions are incapable of, and is a powerful testament to people's capacity to survive the most arduous circumstances.
"This is extraordinary, what happened to these two people," says Simon. "If I wrote this, it would be labelled as maudlin farce. But if everybody else that we wrote about in The Cornerwere in this lounge" – he gestures wistfully around the Shelbourne's tea room – "it would be full of ghosts." A reminder, if any were needed, that happy endings are hard-earned in west Baltimore.
NEXT STOP NEW ORLEANS
Simon's next series is called
Tremé, and examines post-Katrina New Orleans, largely from the perspective of the city's musicians. The pilot has been shot, and principal filming begins in November.
"It speaks to some dynamics in my country about what happened to New Orleans after the levees fell, and what that means, and what our responses in our society to New Orleans is indicative of – all that's political," says Simon. "But there's also some elements in that show that are about ordinary people, extraordinary New Orleans musicians and artists but regular folk, trying to get back and re-establish their lives and community. It's not
The Wirewith a soundtrack. There won't be some guy with a shotgun with a central point of view."
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
and
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-city Neighbourhood
are published by Canongate