The Walker
The Walker
On Finding and
Losing Yourself in
the Modern City
Matthew Beaumont
First published by Verso 2020
© Matthew Beaumont 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-891-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-894-1 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-893-4 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beaumont, Matthew, 1972– author.
Title: The walker : on finding and losing yourself in the modern city / Matthew Beaumont.
Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: ‘Whether one considers Dickens’s insomniac night-time perambulations or restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life’ – Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020024743 (print) | LCCN 2020024744 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788738910 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788738941 (US ebk) | ISBN 9781788738934 (UK ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. | Walking in literature. | City and town life in literature. | Pedestrians in literature. | Walking – England – History – 19th century. |
England – Civilization – 19th century. | Modernism (Literature) – Great Britain.
Classification: LCC PR468.W35 B43 2020 (print) | LCC PR468.W35
(ebook) |
DDC 820.9 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024743
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024744
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
For Jordan and Aleem again;
and for Jake, Ruby, Jasmine and Max
– As I walk, solitary, unattended,
Around me I hear that eclat of the world
Walt Whitman, ‘As I Walk
These Broad Majestic Days’
Contents
Introduction: Lost and Unlost Steps
1. Convalescing
EDGAR ALLAN POE’S ‘THE MAN IN THE CROWD’
2. Going Astray
CHARLES DICKENS’S THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
3. Disappearing
EDWARD BELLAMY’S LOOKING BACKWARD
4. Fleeing
H. G. WELLS’S THE INVISIBLE MAN
5. Wandering
G. K. CHESTERTON’S THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
6. Collapsing
FORD MADOX FORD’S RETURN TO YESTERDAY
7. Striding, Staring
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS DALLOWAY
8. Beginning
GEORGE BATAILLE’S ‘BIG TOE’
9. Stumbling
RAY BRADBURY’S ‘THE PEDESTRIAN’
10. Not Belonging
ON THE ARCHITECTURAL LOGIC OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM
Afterword: Walking in London and Paris at Night
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Introduction
Lost and Unlost Steps
What are the politics of walking in the city? What are its poetics?
In Nadja (1928), André Breton’s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus (1924), The Lost Steps, Breton’s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. ‘Lost steps?’ Nadja exclaims on seeing its title. ‘But there’s no such thing!’1
There’s no such thing as lost steps! If one were to search for the principle that epitomizes what, in an echo of the title of a book by the late Marshall Berman, might be called ‘modernism in the streets’, one could probably find it in this exclamation.2 It informs the writings of all those authors whose various, sometimes countervailing commitments to walking as a socially and psychologically meaningful activity I examine or reconstruct in this book. Those authors, that is, who consistently sought to make the cities with which they were familiar seem new or strange by traversing them aimlessly, sometimes desperately, on foot, in a state of heightened susceptibility to the relentless stimuli of the streets. But it is also a doctrine that, almost a century later, still resonates in the cities of today.
Certainly, it is the article of faith according to which, as a committed, even devout pedestrian, I like to live. No walk, as far as I am concerned, is ever wasted. In contrast, for example, to a car journey. In a city – especially one dominated by cars, by individualistic rather than collective, private rather than public modes of transport – it is walking that habitually makes me feel alive. It makes me feel both vitally connected to the city’s ceaseless circuits of energy and, at the same time, delicately detached from them. Stimulant, then, and narcotic.
In the twenty-first century, in cities that are the site of acutely disorienting cycles of creative destruction, where pedestrians are increasingly inured to the environment they more and more mechanically inhabit, not least because of their dependence on the technology of smartphones and other hand-held devices, we need another modernism of the streets. And we need to celebrate some of those embattled individuals for whom, in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, at the high tide of industrial modernity, this activity was a sort of spiritual imperative; a vocation.
There’s no such thing as lost steps … Nadja does a lot of loitering on the streets of Paris, so her reaction to the title of Breton’s book, which I take to be spontaneously triumphant rather than merely defensive, is understandable. If you wander around the city, or hang about at street corners, things happen.
Of course, people might think as a result that you’re a pimp or a prostitute or some other undesirable, and if you’re a woman you’ll be especially exposed to demeaning assumptions of this sort; but things still happen. With any luck, in fact, you might encounter a Surrealist, as Nadja does. Or, thirty or forty years later, a situationist. These avant-gardists are committed to the idea that it is the street, above all other venues, that provides what Breton, in the essay that opens Les pas perdus, calls the ‘surprising detours’ that shape a life in the conditions of capitalist modernity.3
‘The street, with its cares and its glances, was my true element,’ Breton declares: ‘there I could test like nowhere else the winds of possibility.’4 The street, site of the most routine practicalities, such as shopping, is also a social laboratory in which all sorts of utopian potentialities can be tested. The street is the domain of the trivial; but – as the etymological origin of this word suggests, derived from the Latin for a place at which three roads meet, typically at the volatile margins of the city where immigrants of all ki
nds congregate and circulate – it is also a site of dynamic social experiment. It is a point of intersection, criss-crossed with restless feet, bristling with creative possibilities for collective life.
Breton, it can safely be assumed, agrees with Nadja that there are no lost steps. For her, as he formulates it in a sentence that Walter Benjamin later cited as the epigraph to his essay on ‘Marseilles’ (1929), the streets are ‘the only region of valid experience’ (‘la rue, pour elle seul champ d’expérience valable’).5 And walking, implicitly, is the only valid means of traversing this region or, better, ‘field’ of experience (it is surely important, paradoxically, not to erase the ancient pastoral associations of this phrase). More specifically, that errant, meandering form of walking that is often classified as wandering is the only valid means of traversing this field of experience.
Like other Surrealists, and indeed like other modernists of every stripe, Breton believed that the footstep, as Michael Sheringham puts it in a phrase to which I will return, is the ‘emblem of the free everyday’.6 The footstep is an opportunity to escape the logic of abstraction, the logic of exchange-value constitutive of those modes of transport with which, in the industrial metropolis, the walker must compete, from automobiles to buses to trains. Every footfall, then, in contrast to the revolution of a set of wheels that travels along roads or tracks, is an adventure. A flight. It is open to ‘surprising detours’. And it is, at the same time, a faint imprint, on the pavements and other surfaces of the city, of these necessarily individual escapades.
It is in this sense that the lost steps shaping the essays in Breton’s Les pas perdus are not in fact lost steps at all. They are affirmations of the surrealist’s freedom simply to drift through the streets and through the corridors of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French literature, opening himself up to the everyday excitements of chance experience. The polemics, reviews, and sketches of comrades associated with Dadaism and Surrealism that comprise Les pas perdus don’t go anywhere immediately obvious. They are diversions, meaning both deviations from the predictable or prescribed route and distractions. Recreational distractions that, as deviations from normative expectations, are in some fundamental sense re-creational …
In so far as Breton’s collection, both its title and its surrealist spirit, was subsequently ‘modified in the guts of the living’, to echo Auden’s poem about Yeats, it certainly proved creative and regenerative: the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (1953), The Lost Steps, in some respects a post-colonial critique of Surrealism, brilliantly explores not only what it means to get lost in the jungle but also just how difficult it is both to move on foot in the streets of a city and to live according to the ‘laws of collective motion’ that prevail in them.7 As individual pedestrians, isn’t this what we are all trying to do in our everyday lives? Aren’t we fighting, in effect, to coordinate the city’s ‘laws of collective motion’? Like a conductor who arrives at their podium halfway through the fourth movement of the symphony?
Les pas perdus includes the account of an adventure Breton and Louis Aragon had on a Parisian street when, to absolutely no narrative consequence, they became intrigued by an enigmatic and oddly disorientated woman. This passante, the object of those ‘cares’ and ‘glances’ apparently legitimated, in a patriarchal society, by the sightlines and the sexual-political dynamics of the street, is a Baudelairean passer-by who unlike Nadja resists with considerable insouciance the Surrealists’ more or less predatory attempts to recruit her to their schemes. Refusing to audition for the part of Nadja the two men are effectively hoping to cast, this anonymous woman ignores or, still more gloriously, remains completely unconscious of them: ‘Louis Aragon and André Breton,’ the piece concludes, ‘unable to give up the idea of finding the key to the riddle, searched through part of the sixth arrondissement – but in vain.’8
But Breton’s article, titled ‘The New Spirit’ and first published in 1922 in the surrealist periodical Littérature, is itself proof that their search was not in vain. For the surrealists, all experiences on the streets take the form of experiments, and no experiments are unsuccessful. Furthermore, if the point of this sketch is that it goes nowhere, Breton himself was clearly confident that he was going somewhere. The essays and fragments collected in Les pas perdus, which announce an arrival and a departure, function as important preparatory exercises. After all, the Manifesto of Surrealism, representing a signal departure for the avant-garde, appeared in the same year. There are no lost steps.
In French, the phrase pas perdus, ‘lost steps,’ recalls the phrase salle des pas perdus – the common, peculiarly rich name for the waiting room of a railway station. At once drearily prosaic and poignantly poetic, it evokes the aimless, restless pacing of those who kill time before the departure of their train, tracing a circular, almost self-cancelling movement that collapses walking into waiting, the active into the passive. But, read with a different inflection, the phrase les pas perdus can also mean ‘the not lost’. It connotes the unlost (the poet Paul Celan once referred to himself, in a beautiful if painful formulation, as ‘unlost amid the losses’9).
Breton’s essay collection is, then, about an intellectual and spiritual elect: Apollinaire, Duchamp, Jarry, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Vaché, etc. This elect, moreover, which is comprised of the not-lost, or the sort-of saved, is implicitly recruited from the ranks of those who aimlessly pace the streets in pursuit of adventure. Wanderers. Fugueurs. For Breton, and for friends such as Aragon and Philippe Soupault, themselves the authors of fine surrealist novels driven by the logic of what the situationists will subsequently call the dérive, or psychogeographic ‘drift’, people who loiter or pace or wander are precisely not lost.10 On the contrary, they are preoccupied, consciously or unconsciously, with finding themselves.
And they do find themselves – in contrast, for example, to the inhabitants of that infernal cylindrical salle des pas perdus at the centre of Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1970), where the tortured relationship between waiting and walking acquires both mathematical and mythical overtones. Beckett’s vision is shaped in part by Dante’s account of the dead massed on the banks of the Acheron in the third canto of the Inferno. Perhaps it is also a recollection of the night he spent in the waiting room of Nuremberg station in 1931, an incident that informed a scene in his novel Watt (1953). Certainly, it is a vision of the damned: ‘Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.’11
Breton’s more redemptive vision is of the not-damned. Those who like him inhabit the immense salle des pas perdus that is the metropolitan city might look like lost bodies, lost souls, but they are secretly the chosen ones.12 For they discover the marvellous in the everyday, reveal enchantment in the disenchanted spaces of urban life, find redemption in everyday forms of perdition. No doubt there are lost soles in the city, just as there are discarded gloves such as the one Breton’s autobiographical narrator fetishizes in Nadja; but there are no lost souls. The street redeems everyone. Indeed, its least bourgeois inhabitants, the bohemians, bums and criminals, are for Breton and the other surrealists its saints and martyrs.
In the city, then, for the surrealists and other ‘modernists of the street’, every aimless step counts – precisely because it cannot be counted. The more aimless the better … The American novelist Henry Miller, who made the streets of Paris his home throughout the 1930s, offers an almost programmatic statement about the opportunities that open up to those who drift through the city on foot when, on the opening page of his novel Black Spring (1936), he announces that ‘to be born on the street’ – as he himself claims he was because of his origins in working-class Brooklyn – ‘means to wander all your life, to be free.’ ‘It means accident and incident, drama, movement,’ he elaborates. ‘It means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a metaphysical certitude.’13
Here is the early twentieth-century equivalent, in the conditions of the industrial and metropolit
an city, of the picaresque hero – an individual for whom, in Miller’s words, ‘nothing of what is called “adventure” ever approaches the flavour of the street.’14 ‘It takes a heroic constitution to live modernity,’ Walter Benjamin writes in ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ (1938).15 Modernists of the street such as Benjamin and Miller live capitalist modernity heroically by committing to walking or wandering the precincts of the city as if this activity were nothing less than a spiritual vocation. Each accident or incident, relevant or irrelevant, affirms the creativity and freedom of what might, in Baudelairean phrase, be characterized as the walker’s kaleidoscopic consciousness.
It is the lost steps, then, that are not lost. For the modernists of the street, lost steps are, paradoxically, unlost, and only the steps that follow a specific, prescribed trajectory are lost. Those who commute on foot, for instance, marching in the morning from station to office and in the evening from office to station, trace lost steps through the city precisely because such steps do not commute these commuters, in the literal sense of that verb: they do not altogether change or transmute them. They confirm rather than transform these pedestrians’ alienated relations to the city.
The canonical image of these people as the damned, or the undead, is no doubt T. S. Eliot’s evocation of the crowd flowing over London Bridge, ‘so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many’, in The Waste Land (1922): ‘Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.’16 These lines, for all that they reflect Eliot’s elitism, his contempt for the mass of people, brilliantly encapsulate the contradictory state of concentration and distraction that typifies the commuter’s consciousness. Fixated on their feet, or on the piece of pavement in front of them, these commuters have closed themselves off from the ‘harmony of irrelevant facts’, in Miller’s phrase, that makes the act of walking both aimlessly and attentively through the streets into an everyday affirmation of individual, even of collective, freedom.
The Walker Page 1