The Walker
Page 19
How did Ford’s agoraphobia impinge on his writing? Max Saunders, his most authoritative biographer, has suggested that Granger, the narrator of The Inheritors (1901), a political romance Ford co-authored with Joseph Conrad, is his ‘first fictional agoraphobic’.34 I assume he is thinking of descriptions like this one from Chapter 5, in which Granger steps out into the city at night:
All around me stretched an immense town – an immense blackness. People – thousands of people hurried past me [–] had errands, had aims, had others to talk to, to trifle with. But I had nobody. This immense city, this immense blackness, had no interiors for me. There were house fronts, staring windows, closed doors, but nothing within: no rooms, no hollow places.35
Saunders’s insight is persuasive, not least because it identifies this phobia as a problem for Ford even before it directly contributes to his breakdown in 1904. So is his hint that Dowell’s vision, in The Good Soldier, of an ‘immense plain’ (like the one at Salisbury perhaps) that is ‘the hand of God, stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above it and below it’, is also informed by Ford’s agoraphobia.36
Trotter, too, has briefly traced signs of agoraphobia in his fiction. In a characteristically sophisticated reading of Chapter 6 of Some Do Not … (1924), the first volume of Ford’s war tetralogy Parade’s End (1924–28), he reflects on the incident in which Tietjens, Ford’s protagonist, suffers a sudden agoraphobic attack on a road in the countryside. Agoraphobia, Trotter observes, ‘is one of the various ways in which the two main protagonists think about, and move edgily towards, each other’.37 It is also, perhaps, one of the various ways in which the psychopathologies associated with the spaces of the First World War, spaces of hitherto unimaginable devastation, are transposed to England.
But if Granger is Ford’s first agoraphobic character, and Tietjens his final one, then The Soul of London, his most direct attempt to represent metropolitan modernity, is probably the first of his books to be shaped throughout by an agoraphobic aesthetic. It was after all composed at the time of his most acute phobic attack, in 1904. Indeed, it is tempting to propose that, in its calculated refusal to be ‘encyclopaedic, topographical, or archaeological’ in portraying the capital, and its insistence on filtering everything it reconstructs through the consciousness of its author, it is his first agoraphobic fiction (3).
The first chapter, ‘From a Distance’, captures the book’s agoraphobic aesthetic from the opening. ‘Thought of from sufficiently far,’ Ford begins, ‘London offers to the mind’s eye singularly little of a picture’ (7). London is not a unified phenomenon; it is instead comprised of the infinitely different perspectives with which individuals apprehend it: ‘It remains in the end always a matter of approaches’ (7). It depends, he argues, on one’s preconceptions, on the point at which one enters the city, and innumerable other contingencies. It is impossible to gain a general impression of London, and for the provincial visiting it for the first time, for example, ‘the dominant note of his first impression will be that of his own alone-ness’ (9). Indeed, he ‘will not ever have been so alone’ (10).
London is, according to Ford, ‘essentially a background, a matter so much more of masses than of individuals’ (11). The individual that he subsequently idealized in Return to Yesterday, the suave novelist who actively dissolves his identity in the masses, is notably absent from this account of the metropolis. He is replaced by a neurotic or neurasthenic for whom ‘an awakened sense of observation is in London bewildering and nerve-shattering, because there are so many things to see and because these things flicker by so quickly’ (96). He is a broken kaleidoscope, to echo Baudelaire, endowed with consciousness.
In Ford’s cityscape, the inhibited urban subject stands intimidated before ‘the limitless stretches of roofs that you have never seen, the streets that you will never travel, the miles and miles of buildings, the myriads of plane-trees, of almonds, of elms – all these appalling regions of London that to every individual of us must remain unknown and untraversed’ (102). Instead, the urban subject implicitly constructed in The Soul of London is far more fearful of what Ford identifies as the ‘assimilative powers’ of the city, its vast, indiscriminate appetite for effacing social difference (13).
London is a sublime phenomenon, and Ford’s urban subject is almost completely overwhelmed by the fact that, ‘if in its tolerance it finds a place for all eccentricities of physiognomy, of costume, of cult, it does so because it crushes out and floods over the significance of those eccentricities.’ ‘It is one gigantic pantheon of the dead level of democracy,’ he concludes (12). In the context of this account, in which to pass unobserved in the city is by implication to capitulate to its death-like levelling of individuality, it seems positively defensive to ascribe London the identity of ‘an incomparable background’ (22).
In representing the metropolis as a background, ‘with its sense of immensity that we must hurry through to keep unceasing appointments’, or that we must simply hurry through in order to cope with this sense of immensity, Ford is engaged in a deliberate act of repression (10). He is stepping back from it, and pushing it to the edges of his consciousness, like an agoraphobic standing beside a chaotic road who cautiously retreats from the kerb.
Symptomatically, the vision of the city evoked by Ford in this book is often tangential or marginal to the life of its streets. For example, in the first chapter he describes an archetypal man looking down ‘out of dim windows upon the slaty, black, wet misery of a squalid street’ (22). And in the second chapter, he recalls the experience of arriving in London by train, which presents the capital as a series of unconnected glimpses, as ‘so many bits of uncompleted life’: ‘I looked down upon black and tiny yards that were like the cells in an electric battery’ (42). Ford repeatedly uses this word ‘bits’. ‘London’, he declares at one point in Chapter 1, ‘is a thing of these bits’ (23).
The agoraphobic cannot see the city in its entirety, its immensity, for this panoramic perspective is overwhelming. He or she must instead glimpse it in the form of a series of ‘fleeting impressions and chance encounters’, as Siegfried Kracauer phrased it when capturing the aesthetics of the street in his Theory of Film.38
Far from being immersed in the mass of people, Ford’s melancholic narrator is typically detached from it. This is the aesthetic of someone who loves the city but must preserve a safe distance from the life of its streets in order to protect his sense of identity. It is an Impressionist aesthetic, shaped by the contradictory imperative both to embrace the metropolis and to repudiate its oppressive advances. Ford’s attempt to apprehend London in prose cannot in short be separated from the agoraphobic impulses that he was combating at the time of this book’s composition. In the urban environment, Kracauer continues, ‘the kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out’; it thus ‘remains an unfixable flow which carries fearful uncertainties and alluring excitements’.39
It is these dynamics that Ford seeks to capture in The Soul of London, rejecting the apparent certainties of nineteenth-century realist narration, especially in its omniscient mode, and affirming an Impressionist form that, in its emphasis on ‘bits’, communicates both the kinetic, kaleidoscopic experience of being inside the city, or on its streets, and the psychopathological difficulty of comprehending it in its immensity.
Ford did half-overcome his agoraphobia. In Return to Yesterday, he recalls that, soon after his return from Germany in 1904, Conrad forced him to see a doctor called Tebb. Ford asked this doctor whether he thought it advisable, given his medical condition, to finish the biography of Holbein he had begun. The man peremptorily informed him, he records, that he might as well attempt it since he would be dead in a month.
According to Ford’s triumphant account of this incident, as soon as Tebb was gone he dressed himself and leapt into a hansom cab that took him to Piccadilly Circus:
You are to remember that my chief trouble was t
hat I imagined that I could not walk. Well, I walked backwards and forwards across the Circus for an hour and a half. I kept on saying: ‘Damn that brute. I will not be dead in a month.’ And walking across the Circus through the traffic was no joke. Motors are comparatively controllable but the traffic then was mostly horse-drawn and horses in motion are much more difficult to check than automobiles. (206–7)
Ford makes no further comment, but the reader is obviously intended to infer that, thanks to this cathartic treatment, he successfully cured himself.
Ford’s condition unquestionably improved. From roughly 1906 to 1914, as he proudly reports in the final part of Return to Yesterday, ‘The Last of London’, he even became something of a flâneur – as if he continued to feel the need to demonstrate, in the most performative terms possible, that he was not an agoraphobic. ‘You are to think of me then as rather a dandy,’ he tells the reader. He describes himself issuing from the door of his London apartment wearing ‘a very long morning-coat, a perfectly immaculate high hat, lavender trousers, a near-Gladstone collar and a black satin frock’, and carrying ‘a malacca cane with a gold knob’ (270). Note that the cloth cap, mark of his former determination not to ‘high-hat’ humanity, has silently been replaced by a … high hat.
‘As often as not,’ Ford adds, ‘I should be followed by a Great Dane’ (270). This dog – like the lobsters or turtles that, according to the legend loved by Benjamin, accompanied the most fashionable Parisian flâneurs in 1840 – was obviously intended as a dandiacal accessory.40 I suspect, though, that it also acted as one of those props that agoraphobics habitually employ to help them negotiate the fearsome open spaces of the metropolis.
In his intervention about agoraphobia in the Lancet at the turn of the century, Neale observed that the agoraphobic is recognizable, not only because of ‘his sudden pausing to lay hold of a paling or to place his hand upon a wall’, but because ‘he will hardly ever be without a stick or umbrella, which you will notice he will plant at each step at some distance from him, in order to increase his base line of support’.41 Freud, among later psychologists, confirmed that agoraphobics ‘feel protected if they are accompanied by an acquaintance or followed by a vehicle, and so on’.42 A dog offers an analogous means of increasing one’s ‘base line of support’ when negotiating the city on foot. Ford had finally found a performance that, as Trotter puts it in his discussion of Tietjens’s agoraphobic incident, ‘enable[d] him to out-manoeuvre his anxiety’.43
Ford nonetheless remained haunted by his agoraphobic experiences. The Coda to Return to Yesterday, in which he describes Britain in 1914, revisits Piccadilly Circus, the scene of his therapeutic triumph a decade before. In this setting, Ford consciously or unconsciously uses an autobiographical image that is manifestly agoraphobic in order to explore a sense of imminent social cataclysm. Standing ‘on the edge of the kerb’ on 28 June, the date on which Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, he confronts a Circus that is ‘blocked and blocked and blocked again with vehicles’ (311).
‘I did not know it but I was taking my last look at the city – as a Londoner’, Ford writes. ‘And yet perhaps I did know it’ (311). The kerb on which he stands symbolizes clearly enough the brink of war. ‘I was feeling free and as it were without weight,’ he continues, as if experiencing the vertiginous euphoria of a sudden suicidal impulse. Later in the Coda, after discussing his association with the Vorticists, he modifies the image slightly: ‘So I stood on the kerb in the Circus and felt adrift’ (317).
‘The places are countless in the great cities where one stands on the edge of the void’, Benjamin wrote in his ‘Berlin Chronicle’ (1932).44 Ford’s hesitation on the pavement stands in for a global paralysis. ‘There’s such a lot of nervous breakdown in the land,’ he had written to Elsie. Piccadilly Circus implicitly opens up onto the terrifying expanses of the battlefields of France. He comes to terms with his phobia, then, in so far as this is possible, by universalizing it as an historical condition. Ford’s agoraphobia and the mania that besets the ‘entire habitable globe’, as he phrases it in Return to Yesterday, are finally one.
7
Striding, Staring
Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs Dalloway
In a scene from Mrs Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf’s most sustained attempt to grasp the relationship of consciousness to the conditions of life in the modern metropolis, a solitary, middle-aged man, Peter Walsh, paces north along Whitehall, one of London’s most monumental roads. If Walter Benjamin noted that, ‘in his book on Dickens,’ G. K. Chesterton ‘masterfully captured the man who roams the big city lost in thought’, then the same formulation might be applied to Woolf’s novel, in relation both to Peter and, later in the narrative, his shell-shocked compatriot Septimus.1
The scene in which Peter circulates more or less aimlessly through central London is the one with which Woolf opened ‘The Hours’, the draft of Mrs Dalloway she composed in her notebooks in June 1923. It is in this respect the novel’s inaugural or initiatory incident. Roaming the big city lost in thought, Peter is only half-conscious of his surroundings, which are the administrative centre of the British Empire, because he is preoccupied with clinging to the idea that he is still young. ‘I am not old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his future.’2
Woolf’s narrator describes him, pointedly, as ‘striding, staring’ (65). He is both at home in the imperial metropolis, supremely confident in his negotiation of its space, and oddly detached or displaced from it; not least perhaps because only the previous night he has returned from his colonial existence in India. Peter moves his limbs, he walks the streets, the narrator implies, principally because it stops him from ‘feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within’ – like Wells’s Invisible Man in London (64). To ‘stand’, to ‘stop’, is to apprehend that ‘the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame’ (63).
In spite of Peter’s sudden effusion about ‘his future’, it fails to roll down the road to him as he hopes. Instead, he hears behind him ‘a patter like the patter of leaves in a wood’ – a sound more like death than life. This unsettling, irregular sound is mingled with ‘a rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook him drummed his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his doing’ (65). The city’s sounds infiltrate his consciousness; the rhythms of his consciousness reshape the city. As the thudding noise passes him, Peter glimpses a troop of soldiers:
Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England. (65–6)
These uniformed youths, parading up Whitehall, have been commemorating the dead of the Great War, which ended some four and a half years earlier. They, too, are effectively ‘striding, staring’. Marching ‘with their eyes ahead of them’, they collectively and ritualistically mimic, perhaps even mock, both Peter’s appropriation of the city’s streets and his alienation from them.
Disconcerted, Peter dismisses the boys in uniform. They are ‘weedy for the most part’, he thinks; the embodiment of an enfeebled empire. If the soldiers are youthful, then, they do not necessarily have a ‘vigorous, unending’ future before them either. ‘Drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline,’ the figures that form this troop are like the undead marching up behind him (66). But Peter cannot keep pace with them, and he admits to feeling a rueful sense of admiration for their order and mechanical precision.
I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past everyone, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths … (66)
Hesitating on the edge of the pavement, Peter perceives that their gaze is like the ‘marble stare’ of those statues of
heroic military leaders that stand sentinel along the roads lining the centre of London – ‘the spectacular images of great soldiers [that] stood looking ahead of them’ (66). Standing, staring. Peter respects the capacity of these recruits to renounce the contradictions of life in the metropolitan city, its varieties and – to underline the wonderful word that Woolf herself seems to have devised and first used in Night and Day (1919) – its ‘irreticences’.3
Peter’s admiration for the soldiers’ freedom from responsibility has its limits, however, principally because he himself fears the loss of autonomy it seems to entail:
But the stare Peter Walsh did not want for himself in the least; though he could respect it in others. He could respect it in boys. They don’t know the troubles of the flesh yet, he thought, as the marching boys disappeared in the direction of the Strand … (66–7)
Those who stare when they are negotiating the streets, especially if they lack the soldiers’ excuse for gazing mechanically into the middle distance, implicitly align themselves not with the flâneur, the urbane stroller who appears to be effortlessly in control of his relationship to the city, but the badaud.
The badaud is an early nineteenth-century Parisian archetype defined by his gaping, gawping attitude to its spectacle. As the journalist and historian Victor Fournel explained in Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (1858), in a passage quoted by Benjamin, ‘the simple flâneur [sic] is always in full possession of his individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears.’ ‘Under the influence of the spectacle,’ Fournel continues, ‘the badaud becomes an impersonal creature,’ one who is ‘no longer a human being’.4 No one wants this sort of stare for themselves in the least.
Reminded that he is alone and anonymous in London, Peter is suddenly suffused once again with a sense of excitement. ‘The strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar Square overcame him. What is it? Where am I?’ (67). These vertiginous questions induce not horror but a strange, fragile joy. He is overwhelmed by ‘three great emotions’, namely: