Not long ago I heard the singer and poet Patti Smith answer a radio interviewer’s question about what she did to prepare for her performances onstage with “I would roam the streets for a few hours.” With that brief comment she summoned up her own outlaw romanticism and the way such walking might toughen and sharpen the sensibility, wrap one in an isolation out of which might come songs fierce enough, words sharp enough, to break that musing silence. Probably her roaming the streets didn’t work so well in a lot of American cities, where the hotel was moated by a parking lot surrounded by six-lane roads without sidewalks, but she spoke as a New Yorker. Speaking as a Londoner, Virginia Woolf described anonymity as a fine and desirable thing, in her 1930 essay “Street Haunting.” Daughter of the great alpinist Leslie Stephen, she had once declared to a friend, “How could I think mountains and climbing romantic? Wasn’t I brought up with alpenstocks in my nursery, and a raised map of the Alps, showing every peak my father had climbed? Of course, London and the marshes are the places I like best.” London had more than doubled in size since Dickens’s night walks, and the streets had changed again to become a refuge. Woolf wrote of the confining oppression of one’s own identity, of the way the objects in one’s home “enforce the memories of our own experience.” And so she set out to buy a pencil in a city where safety and propriety were no longer considerations for a no-longer-young woman on a winter evening, and in recounting—or inventing—her journey, wrote one of the great essays on urban walking.
“As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six,” she wrote, “we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room.” Of the people she observes she says, “Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give one the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer.” In this anonymous state, “the shell-like covering which our souls have excreted for themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured.” She walked down the same Oxford Street De Quincey and Ann had, now lined with windows full of luxuries with which she furnished an imaginary house and life and then banished both to return to her walk. The language of introspection that Wordsworth helped develop and De Quincey and Dickens refined was her language, and the smallest incidents—birds rustling in the shrubbery, a dwarf woman trying on shoes—let her imagination roam farther than her feet, into digressions from which she reluctantly returns to the actualities of her excursion. Walking the streets had come into its own, and the solitude and introspection that had been harrowing for her predecessors was a joy for her. That it was a joy because her identity had become a burden makes it modern.
Like London, New York has seldom prompted unalloyed praise. It is too big, too harsh. As one who knows only smaller cities intimately, I continually underestimate its expanse and wear myself out on distances, just as I do by car in Los Angeles. But I admire Manhattan: the synchronized beehive dance of Grand Central Station, the fast pace people set on the long grids of streets, the jaywalkers, the slower strollers in the squares, the dark-skinned nannies pushing pallid babies before them through the gracious paths of Central Park. Wandering without a clear purpose or sense of direction, I have often disrupted the fast flow of passersby intent on some clear errand or commute, as though I were a butterfly strayed into the beehive, a snag in the stream. Two-thirds of all journeys around downtown and midtown Manhattan are still made on foot, and New York, like London, remains a city of people walking for practical purposes, pouring up and down subway stairs, across intersections—but musers and the nocturnal strollers move to a different tempo. Cities make walking into true travel: danger, exile, discovery, transformation, wrap all around one’s home and come right up to the doorstep.
The Italophile Rudofsky uses London to scorn New York: “On the whole North America’s Anglo-Saxomania has had a withering effect on its formative years. Surely, the English are not a desirable model for an urban society. No other nation developed such a fierce devotion to country life as they did. And with good reason; their cities have been traditionally among Europe’s least wholesome. Englishmen may be intensely loyal to their towns, but the street—the very gauge of urbanity—does not figure large in their affections.” New York’s streets do figure large in the work of some of its writers. “Paris, c’est une blonde,” goes the French song, and Parisian poets have often made their city a woman. New York, with its gridded layout, its dark buildings and looming skyscrapers, its famous toughness, is a masculine city, and if cities are muses, it is no wonder this one’s praises have been sung best by its gay poets—Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and the prose-poet David Wojnarowicz (though everyone from Edith Wharton to Patti Smith has paid homage to this city and its streets).
In Whitman’s poems, though he often speaks of himself as happy in the arms of a lover, the passages in which he appears as a solitary walking the streets in quest of that lover—a precursor of the gay cruiser—ring more true. In “Recorders Ages Hence,” the immodest Whitman states for the record that he was one “Who often walk’d lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers.” A few poems later in the final version of Leaves of Grass, he begins another poem with the oratorical address “City of orgies, walks and joys.” After listing all the possible criteria for a city’s illustriousness—houses, ships, parades—he chooses “not these, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love”: the walks rather than the orgies, the promises rather than the delivery, are the joys. Whitman was a great maker of inventories and lists to describe variety and quantity and one of the first to love the crowd. It promised new liaisons; it expressed his democratic ideals and oceanic enthusiasms. A few poems past “City of Orgies” comes “To a Stranger”: “Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look upon you. . . .” For Whitman the momentary glimpse and the intimacy of love were complementary, as were his own emphatic ego and the anonymous mass of crowds. Thus he sang the praises of the swelling metropolis of Manhattan and the new possibilities of urban scale.
Whitman died in 1892, just as everyone else was beginning to celebrate the city. For the first half of the new century, the city seemed emblematic—the capital of the twentieth century, as Paris had been of the nineteenth century. Destiny and hope were urban for both radicals and plutocrats in those days, and New York with its luxury steamers docking and immigrants pouring off Ellis Island, with its skyscrapers even Georgia O’Keeffe couldn’t resist painting during her time as a New Yorker, was the definitive modern city. In the 1920s a magazine was devoted to it, the New Yorker, whose Talk of the Town section compiled minor street incidents made incandescent by its writers in the tradition of eighteenth-century London’s Spectator and Rambler essays, and it had jazz and the Harlem Renaissance uptown and radical Bohemia down in the Village (and in Central Park was the Ramble, an area so well known for gay cruising it was nicknamed “the fruited plain”). Before World War II, Berenice Abbott roamed New York’s streets photographing buildings, and after it, Helen Levitt photographed children playing in the streets while Weegee photographed the underworld of fresh corpses on sidewalks and prostitutes in paddy wagons. One imagines them wandering purposefully like hunter-gatherers with the camera a sort of basket laden with the day’s spectacles, the photographers leaving us not their walks, as poets do, but the fruits of those walks. Whitman, however, had no successor until after the war, when Allen Ginsberg stepped into his shoes, or at least his loose long lines of celebratory ranting.
Ginsberg is sometimes claimed as a San Franciscan, and he found his poetic voice during his time there and in Berkeley in the 1950s,
but he is a New York poet, and the cities of his poems are big, harsh cities. He and his peers were passionate urbanists at a time when the white middle class was abandoning city life for the suburbs (and though many of the so-called Beats gathered in San Francisco, most wrote poetry about things more personal or more general than the streets they thronged, or used the city as a gateway to Asia and the western landscape). He did write about suburbs, notably in his “Supermarket in California,” in which he summoned up a supermarket where the abundance of produce and shopping families makes wry comedy of the dead gay poets—Whitman and Federico García Lorca (a New Yorker from 1929 to 1930)—cruising the aisles. But otherwise his early poems burst with snow, tenements, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Ginsberg walked considerably in San Francisco and in New York, but in his poems walking is always turning into something else, since the sidewalk is always turning into a bed or a Buddhist paradise or some other apparition. The best minds of his generation were “dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” but they immediately commenced to see angels staggering on tenement roofs, eat fire, hallucinate Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy, and so on, even if they did afterward stumble to unemployment offices and walk “all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open. . . .”
For the Beats, motion or travel was enormously important, but its exact nature was not (save for Snyder, the true peripatetic of the bunch). They caught the tail end of the 1930s romance of freighthoppers, hobos, and railroad yards, they led the way to the new car culture in which restlessness was assuaged by hundreds of miles at 70 m.p.h. rather than dozens at 3 or 4 on foot, and they blended such physical travel with chemically induced ramblings of the imagination and a whole new kind of rampaging language. San Francisco and New York seem pedestrian anchors on either side of the long rope of the open road they traveled. In the same mode, one can see the shift in country ballads: sometime in the 1950s disappointed lovers stopped walking away or catching the midnight train and began driving, and by the 1970s the apotheosis of eighteen-wheeler songs had arrived. Had he lived that long, Kerouac would’ve loved them. Only in the first section of Kaddish, when Ginsberg gives over singing of his generation and his pals to mourn his mother, do the act and the place remain particular. The streets are repositories of history, walking a way to read that history. “Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,” it opens, and as he walks Seventh Avenue he thinks of Naomi Ginsberg in the Lower East Side, “where you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia / . . . then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what? / —toward Newark—” in an antiphony of her city and his, joined in later sections by their shared experiences during his childhood.
Handsome as a marble statue, Frank O’Hara was as unlike Ginsberg as a gay poet born the same year could be, and he wrote about far more delicate diurnal adventures. Ginsberg’s poetry was oratorical—jeremiads and hymns to be shouted from the rooftops; O’Hara’s poetry is as casual as conversation and sequenced by strolls in the street (among his book titles are Lunch Poems—not about eating but about lunchtime excursions from his job at the Museum of Modern Art—Second Avenue, and the essay collection Standing Still and Walking in New York). While Ginsberg tended to speak to America, O’Hara’s remarks often addressed a “you” who seemed to be an absent lover in a silent soliloquy or a companion on a stroll. The painter Larry Rivers recalls, “It was the most extraordinary thing, a simple walk” with O’Hara, and O’Hara wrote a poem titled “Walking with Larry Rivers.” Walking seems to have been a major part of his daily repertoire, as well as a kind of syntax organizing thought, emotion, and encounter, and the city was the only conceivable site for his tender, street-smart, and sometimes campy voice celebrating the incidental and the inconsequential. In the prose-poem “Meditations in an Emergency” he affirmed, “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is. . . . “The poem “Walking to Work” ends
I’m becoming
the street.
Who are you in love with?
me?
Straight against the light I cross.
Yet another walking poem begins:
I’m getting tired of not wearing underwear
And then again I like it
strolling along
feeling the wind blow softly on my genitals
and goes on to speculate on “who dropped that empty carton / of cracker jacks,” before turning to the clouds, the bus, his destination, the “you” to whom he speaks, Central Park. The texture is that of everyday life and of a connoisseur’s eye settling on small things, small epiphanies, but the same kind of inventory that studs Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s poems recurs in O’Hara’s. Cities are forever spawning lists.
David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration reads like a summary of all the urban experience that came before him. Like De Quincey he was a runaway, but like De Quincey’s friend Ann he supported himself as a child prostitute, and like Dickens and Ginsberg he brought an incandescant, hallucinatory clarity to the moods and scenes of his city. Most who took up the Beat subject of the urban underworld of the erotic, the intoxicated, and the illegal took it up in William Burroughs’s amoral vein, more interested in its coolness than its consequences or its politics, but Wojnarowicz raged at the system that created such suffering, that created his suffering as a runaway child, a gay man, a person with AIDS (of which he died in 1991). He writes in a collage of memories, encounters, dreams, fantasies, and outbursts studded with startling metaphors and painful images, and in his writings walking appears like a refrain, a beat: he always returns to the image of himself walking alone down a New York street or a corridor. “Some nights we’d walk seven or eight hundred blocks, practically the whole island of Manhattan,” he wrote of his hustling years, for walking remained the recourse for those with nowhere to sleep, as it had been for Johnson and Savage.
Wojnarowicz’s 1980s New York had come full circle to resemble Gay’s early eighteenth-century London. It had the scourges of AIDS, of the vast new population of homeless people, and of the drug-damaged staggering around like something out of William Hogarth’s Gin Lane, and it was notoriously violent, so that the well-to-do feared its streets as they once had London’s. Wojnarowicz writes of seeing “long legs and spiky boots and elegant high heels and three prostitutes suddenly surround a business man from the waldorf and they’re saying: ‘Come on honey’ and rubbing his dick . . . and his wallet appears behind his back in the hands of one of them and they all drop away as he continues to giggle” and we’re back to Moll Flanders stripping a passed-out trick of his silver gloves, snuffbox, and even his periwig. He writes of the years when he was suffering from malnutrition and exposure, living on the streets until he was eighteen, “I had almost died three times at the hands of people I’d sold my body to in those days and after coming off the street. . . . I could barely speak when in the company of other people. . . . That weight of image and sensation wouldn’t come out until I picked up a pencil and started putting it down on paper.” “Coming off the street”: the phrase describes all streets as one street and that street as a whole world, with its own citizenry, laws, language. “The street” is a world where people in flight from the traumas that happen inside houses become natives of the outside.
One of the book’s sections, “Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration,” is as tidy a chronicle of the uses of walking for a queer man of the streets in 1980s urban America as Pride and Prejudice is of the uses of walking for a country lady almost two centuries before. “I’m walking through these hallways where the windows break apart a slow dying sky and a quiet wind follows the heels of the kid as he suddenly steps through a door frame ten
rooms down,” it opens. He follows the kid into the room, which resembles the long wharves and warehouses he used to cruise, sucks him off, and a few sections later his walking becomes mourning for his friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, dead of AIDS. “I walked for hours through the streets after he died, through the gathering darkness and traffic, down into the dying section of town where bodies litter the curbsides and dogs tear apart the stinking garbage by the doorways. There was a green swell to the clouds above the buildings. . . . I turned and left, walking back into the gray haze of traffic and exhaust, past a skinny prostitute doing the junkie walk bent over at the waist with knuckles dragging the sidewalk.” He meets a friend—“man on second avenue at 2:00 am”—who tells him about a third man being jumped on West Street by a carload of kids from Jersey and brutally beaten for being gay. And then comes his refrain, “I walk this hallway twenty-seven times and all I can see are the cool white walls. A hand rubbing slowly across a face, but my hands are empty. Walking back and forth from room to room trailing bluish shadows I feel weak. . . .” His city is not hell but limbo, the place in which restless souls swirl forever, and only passion, friendship, and visionary capacity redeem it for him.
I began walking my own city’s streets as a teenager and walked them so long that both they and I changed, the desperate pacing of adolescence when the present seemed an eternal ordeal giving way to the musing walks and innumerable errands of someone no longer wound up so tight, so isolated, so poor, and my walks have now often become reviews of my own and the city’s history together. Vacant lots become new buildings, old geezer bars are taken over by young hipsters, the Castro’s discos become vitamin stores, whole streets and neighborhoods change their complexion. Even my own neighborhood has changed so much it sometimes seems as though I have moved two or three times from the raucous corner I started out on just before I turned twenty. The urban walkers I have surveyed suggest a kind of scale of walking, and on it, I have moved from near the Ginsberg-Wojnarowicz end of the spectrum to that of a low-rent Virginia Woolf.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 26