The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  The convalescent, it could be said, is also ‘foetalized’, because he has not fully acquired the character armour that can equip him to cope once more with reality, especially the reality of the city. He must sit quietly on a bench, like de Chirico; observe the street from the protective safety of a café; or cautiously circumambulate the city at night. It is as if his battered carapace is still too soft to resist the countless shocks of urban life.

  The trope that Lacan employs to summarize the infant’s prematurity is that of ‘dehiscence’, a predominantly botanical term meaning to open up, to gape, to burst.41 The convalescent, whose pores have only recently opened up, rendering him painfully responsive to his environment, is dehiscent too, though in a potentially redemptive sense. His ‘small hungry shivering self’ – to take an image from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1872) – cannot completely insulate itself from the constant concussions, the perpetual compulsions and repulsions of metropolitan life in an industrial society. At the same time, however, it is exquisitely sensitive to the almost imperceptible aesthetics of the quotidian, so that consciousness, in Eliot’s language again, is ‘rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought’.42

  The Rev. Lowry is interested in convalescence as a spiritual condition, one that is specific to ‘the transition period between the storm and tempest and the ordinary voyage of life’; and, in contrast to Lamb, he identifies it, potentially at least, as a state of redemption. For him, in the accelerated conditions of industrial modernity, it represents the possibility of rebirth. Lowry is conscious nonetheless of the individual’s susceptibility, in this uncertain state, to what he calls ‘the dangers of convalescence’ – namely, indifference, shallowness and worldliness. His particular concern is that, once the patient returns from ‘the cloistered seclusion’ of the sickroom to ‘the busy duties of life’, the repentant attitude he has acquired thanks to illness will be fatally lost. ‘We live at a fast rate these days,’ he notes, ‘and sometimes amid all the engrossing occupations and harassing competitions of life, our souls seem to stand a poor chance.’43

  But if convalescence is susceptible to the spiritual perversion that is inseparable from ‘worldliness’, according to Lowry, then it is also ‘a golden opportunity for definite conversion to God’.44 The former, it should be noted, is for him implicitly associated with urban life, the latter with rural life. In this vision of convalescence, the extent to which it might redeem the patient can be measured by the aesthetic and hence spiritual intensity with which his relationship to nature is reinvented, and made transcendent: ‘The flowers seem to glow with a lovelier radiance, the fields are clothed with a brighter green. The carol of the birds, the rustle of the leaves, the murmur of the stream, fall upon your ears with a fresh meaning.’45

  The ideal convalescent, as Lowry’s onomatopoeic diction no doubt clumsily indicates, is as supremely sensitive, as open to redemptive experience, as a pastoral poet. Lowry’s anti-capitalism, it might be said, is reactionary, rural and romantic.

  The idea of convalescence as an aesthetic disposition probably originates in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). There, the convalescent’s experience of his environment is often directly compared to that of the child, because the convalescent’s openness to unexpected or half-forgotten sensations has something of the fragility and vulnerability, as well as the creativity, of a child.

  For Coleridge, convalescence also has an innate poetic intensity. In the first volume of the Biographia, he characterizes genius as the capacity ‘to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for, perhaps, forty years, had rendered familiar’. The ‘prime merit’ of genius, he continues, and ‘its most unequivocal mode of manifestation’, is ‘so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily convalescence’.46

  In convalescence, then, the whole world is made strange. In this state even the most ordinary individual relates to life like a Romantic poet. Coleridge – at times an almost full-time convalescent himself, especially when living in Highgate, outside London, in the final, drug-addicted decades of his life – captures precisely the state in which I am interested when he refers, rhapsodically, to ‘the voluptuous and joy-trembling nerves of convalescence’.47

  For Charles Baudelaire, the most important proponent of convalescence as an aesthetic disposition emblematic of modernity, the convalescent is in contrast an urban poet, albeit one indebted to the Coleridgean tradition. Convalescence, as he argues, ‘is like a return towards childhood,’ for ‘the convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial’.48

  Baudelaire primarily derives his interest in convalescence, which to him seems inseparable from a state of rapturous, febrile curiosity, from Edgar Allan Poe, and specifically ‘The Man of the Crowd’, a short story first published in Graham’s Magazine in December 1840. This strange fantasia set in London, where Poe had lived and been educated between 1815 and 1820, is the pre-eminent instance of urban convalescence in literature. Poe himself, incidentally, probably derived his theoretical interest in the convalescent from Coleridge, whom he read with passionate attention, and whose conception of convalescence he deliberately urbanizes and modernizes.49

  The narrator of ‘The Man of the Crowd’ first recalls the convalescent state he has recently inhabited in the story’s second paragraph. It was in the ambiguous condition of the convalescent, he explains, that he obsessively pursued an enigmatic old man he happened to glimpse in the street; an old man that, in the end, mentally and physically defeated by this pursuit, the narrator identifies in hopeless or triumphant tones as ‘the type and the genius of deep crime’. I reproduce this paragraph in full:

  Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D— Coffee-House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui – moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs … and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in everything. With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street.50

  This is an exact description of convalescence as an aesthetic: a state of unpredictable, half-repressed euphoria in which, because he is temporarily exempt from the routine demands of everyday life in the city, the individual’s ‘electrified’ intellect, like his senses, becomes preternaturally attuned to experience.

  The convalescent is painfully sensitive to his environment and at the same time feels oddly distanced from it. The film has departed from his mental vision but he nonetheless peers at the life of the city through ‘smoky panes’. His empty, appetitive mood is at once the opposite of boredom and oddly characteristic of its restless calm: it is ‘the converse of ennui’, or its obverse. His consciousness processes the shocks of urban life, the traffic on the roads and pavements, as concussions that seem almost exquisite because he can remain detached and half-insulated from them.

  Poe’s urban fable locates his convalescent on the margins of a mass of people. Detached from the ‘dense and continuous tides of population’ that flow past the café as the evening closes in, and from the rhythms of routine production they collectively embody, his convalescent describes his fascination with the people he sees commuting home. He is s
oon lost in contemplation of them: ‘At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion’ (84).

  Initially he examines in the abstract the mass of human forms that pass him. He is particularly interested in those that seem unconfident on the street, those that ‘were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around’ (85). These are the people for whom everyday life in the city is a kind of sickness or fever.

  Then Poe’s convalescent examines the passers-by in more concrete detail, as if they inhabit some grimy aquarium. Sliding down ‘the scale of what is termed gentility’, as the light thickens, he classifies their physiognomies, their clothes and step, carefully sifting through the aristocrats, businessmen, clerks, artisans, ‘exhausted labourers’, pie-men, dandies, conmen, pickpockets, beggars and prostitutes (85). From the café he sees innumerable drunkards – their countenances pale, their eyes a livid red – who clutch at passing objects ‘with quivering fingers’ as they stride though the crowd (87).

  It is ‘thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob’, his forehead pressed against the glass beside his seat, that the convalescent glimpses the ‘decrepid old man’ whose physiologie he is completely unable to taxonomize (87–8). He stumbles into the street, his curiosity heightened by the snatched sight of a diamond and a dagger beneath the old man’s cloak, resolving in a moment of heated decision to follow him. ‘For my own part I did not much regard the rain,’ he notes, ‘the lurking of an old fever in my system rendering the moisture somewhat too dangerously pleasant’ (88). Convalescence itself is a ‘dangerously pleasant’ state.

  Poe’s narrator then records the man’s mysterious movements as he roams the city, throughout the night and into the day, in an apparently futile attempt to understand what motivates him; but finally only tracks him back, on the evening of the second day, to the coffee house from which they had first set out. The old man, who appears completely unconscious of the narrator, seems to be more than human – as if his labyrinthine path through the streets had traced not the arbitrary trajectory of an individual but the secret form or logic of the corrupt, decrepit metropolitan city itself. So, the convalescent abandons his pursuit, making this declaration of defeat: ‘He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds’ (91).

  The old man incarnates the industrial capitalist city in its anti-heroic rather than heroic form. In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939), composed exactly one hundred years after this short story was first published, Benjamin decides that he cannot finally identify Poe’s ‘man of the crowd’ as a flâneur, mainly because in him ‘composure has given way to manic behavior’. Instead, according to Benjamin, he exemplifies the destiny of the flâneur once this intrinsically urbane figure has been ‘deprived of the milieu to which he belonged’ (a milieu, he implies, that London probably never provided).51

  The same might be said of Poe’s convalescent, in whom composure must compete with a positively monomaniacal mood. Indeed, it might be argued that ‘The Man of the Crowd’ allegorizes the process by which, in the hectic conditions of a metropolis like London in the mid-nineteenth century, the flâneur splits apart and produces two further metropolitan archetypes, one almost pathologically peripatetic, the other static to the point of being a sort of cripple.

  The former is the nightwalker, a disreputable, indeterminately criminal type who hypostasizes that half of the flâneur characterized by a state of restless mobility. The latter is the convalescent, who hypostasizes the half of him characterized by a state of immobile curiosity. For Poe, these characters are spectral doubles.

  What about Baudelaire? The French poet’s discussion of ‘The Man of the Crowd’ is contained in the third section of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), his encomium to the artist Constantin Guys, ‘a passionate lover of crowds and incognitos’ (5). He portrays Guys as someone whose genius resides in a childlike curiosity, suggestive of ‘the fixed and animally ecstatic gaze of a child confronted with something new, whatever it be’ (8).

  Like the child, who actually ‘sees everything in a state of newness’, and who is consequently ‘always drunk’, Guys is exquisitely susceptible to impressions (8). For him, ‘sensibility is almost the whole being’ (8). Ordinarily, Baudelaire emphasizes, adults can only recover this spontaneously poetic disposition temporarily, during a period of convalescence. Guys, however, positively personifies this disposition, because he is ‘an eternal convalescent’ (8). ‘Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of that convalescent,’ Baudelaire commands his reader, ‘and you will have the key to the nature of Monsieur G’ (7).

  Baudelaire identifies Poe’s convalescent as his inspiration for this claim:

  Do you remember a picture (it really is a picture!), painted – or rather written – by the most powerful pen of our age, and entitled The Man of the Crowd? In the window of a coffee house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing all the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance, that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity had become a fatal, irresistible passion! (7)

  It is immediately apparent from this paragraph that Baudelaire’s principal interest does not lie in the drama described by Poe’s narrative. Instead, he seems more interested in the scene in which the story is initially set. He insists on representing Poe’s narrative, in fact, as a relatively static picture, as if he is himself examining the convalescent through a frame.

  Perhaps it is most accurate to state that Baudelaire reconstructs the story as a sort of diptych. In the first panel, the convalescent is passively seated in the coffee house. As he observes the street life through the pane of glass, he simultaneously introjects the scenes outside, assimilating them to his consciousness, and projects his consciousness onto the scenes outside, assimilating his consciousness to them. He is ‘pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him’. The convalescent ‘rapturously breath[es] in all the odours and essences of life’, making the surface of his body seem absolutely porous, even as the solid pane of glass that he sits beside has apparently been rendered completely permeable.

  In the second panel, Baudelaire’s description captures Poe’s protagonist, as if in a photograph, in the act of flinging himself into the street – like the Baudelairean protagonist who, according to Benjamin, ‘plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of energy’.52 He is freeze-framed, so to speak, as he ‘hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng’. The convalescent thus metamorphoses into a nightwalker.

  The second of these portraits is in effect an image of the convalescent as hero, actively seeking to satisfy his feverish curiosity, even if it could be ultimately fatal to do so (as if Baudelaire had resolved to stalk the seductive widow he wistfully describes in his famous poem ‘À une passante’ [1855]). Baudelaire’s convalescent is thus spared the humiliating defeat that Poe visits on his convalescent at the end of ‘The Man of the Crowd’, when he is forced to admit that he has failed to identify the figure he has so assiduously pursued through the metropolis, at least as an individual.

  Poe’s spectral convalescent, more spiritually decrepit than Baudelaire’s and less rapturous, is not as deeply indebted to the Coleridgean tradition, even though Baudelaire probably encountered this tradition through the mediation of Poe. But, like Poe’s convalescent and in contrast to the flâneur, Ba
udelaire’s convalescent remains terminally peripheral to the life of the street. The flâneur, according to Baudelaire, in the same section of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, is situated ‘at the centre of the world’ even though he also ‘remain[s] hidden from the world’ (9). In this respect, as in others, he is like the commodity, so pervasive as to be invisible. The convalescent, Baudelaire implies, on the contrary resists the performative aspect of the flâneur’s life in the streets and refuses the spectacular logic of the marketplace.

  It is implicitly Poe, however, and not Constantin Guys, who embodies in the end the spirit of convalescence for Baudelaire. Baudelaire had first referred to what he so evocatively describes as ‘convalescence, with its fevers of curiosity’ in ‘Edgar Poe: His Life and Works’ (1853).53 In this piece, which subsequently reappeared as the introduction to his translations in the Histoires extraordinaires (1856), Baudelaire locates the ‘single character’ that populates Poe’s numerous narratives as ‘the man of razorsharp perceptions and slackened nerves’. He concludes that ‘this man is Poe himself’ (91).

  This description perfectly captures the constitution of the convalescent, who is acutely sensitive to the life of the streets but at the same time oddly anaesthetized to it. The poetics of convalescence that are perceptible in Poe, and which Baudelaire elaborated, make him absolutely central to the process by which Romanticism, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, became urbanized. Poe is for Baudelaire one of the patron saints of metropolitan modernity because, as ‘the writer of the nerves’, he too is a perpetual convalescent (90). In the urban sensorium described by Poe and Baudelaire, the sick are too sensitive to cope with the shocks of everyday life, and the healthy are constitutionally insensitive to its secret aesthetics.