Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  The film is in constant movement now. As they approach the Parc Montsouris at the bottom of the 14th, Cléo puns on the name of the park, which sounds like it’s saying souris, smile.

  C’est comme cheeeeeese!

  she says, as if an English photographer were taking her picture. (She hasn’t lost all of her instincts for self-presentation.) Dorothée is a refreshing tonic.7 She reminds Cléo of the time before they were famous, when they and Bob used to hang out in Montparnasse trying to make something of themselves; she brings Cléo down to earth. But undoubtedly it is the soldier, Antoine, bound for Algeria that night, who best puts things in perspective for her.

  * * *

  As she walks through the park, she comes upon a flight of stairs. The camera waits at the bottom, the soundtrack silent, as Cléo walks down the steps, whistling. Then she begins to dance down them, as if she were the star of a Busby Berkeley musical, one step at a time, singing.8

  So much is happening during this moment. For one thing, she has no audience; she’s singing and dancing for her own entertainment, just for the love of it. But also, she’s singing one of her hit singles, one that we’ve heard on the radio earlier in the film. But we’re hearing a different verse this time, one about ‘mon corps precieux et capricieux’ (‘my precious capricious body’). It’s no longer Cléo herself who is capricious, but her body. It can’t be relied on. She stops singing at the bottom of the steps, and walks along quietly, hands behind her back. We follow her from behind. She’s alone. The singing and dancing was for fun, for the love of it. But she can stop the performance.

  Varda does love her symbolism, and so it is as Cléo walks over a Japanese bridge in the park that she meets a man, wearing the bottom half of a soldier’s uniform; the water all around them serves as another mirror, but one that, were it to be broken, would quickly restore itself. The soldier is chatty; Cléo forgets to snub him. They talk for a while, and she finds herself confiding all sorts of things to him: her medical woes, her real name. He tells her he’s been on military leave for three weeks, but that he’s going back to Algeria that night. He comforts her and she him; he helps her to laugh at herself, at him, at her fears. Both archetypes (like the tarot cards), the little princess and the good soldier, they quickly prove that who they are and what they mean depends on more than mere appearances.

  * * *

  To Antoine she confides that her real name is Florence: another Varda-esque displacement. He plays with this, free-associating.

  ANTOINE

  Florence is Italy, the Renaissance, Botticelli, a rose; Cleopatra is Egypt, the Sphinx, the asp, a tigress. I prefer Florence. I prefer flora to fauna.

  On the bus they go past the Place d’Italie, in the 13th arrondissement.

  ANTOINE

  Florence. It’s almost home for you.

  As they drive, Antoine tells her that the trees that grow there are Paulownia trees, that they flourish in China and Japan but they come from Poland. We hear Varda’s playful love of displacements here too, in Antoine’s observations of the city, as if Varda herself were accompanying and comforting her heroine – which she is and has been doing the whole film. An Italian guitar quavers the melody of the film’s main theme.

  * * *

  Antoine prompts one more reflection on images and their meanings when he asks for a picture of her to take to war with him. She gives it to him, not like a star giving out a signed photograph, but bashfully, like a young girl giving one to her sweetheart. Derrida, in The Post Card, writes that postcards are the confirmation of the ineluctable distance between one person and another: ‘I want to address myself to you, directly, without a courier, only to you, but I can’t [je n’y arrive pas, literally I don’t arrive there], and it’s the very depths of misery. A tragedy, my love, of destination. Everything becomes a postcard.’9 The photograph is as well, and so is film; as Barthes points out, the image is the uncrossable distance between then and now, we can’t arrive back there. Time can’t unspool; it only goes forward, leaving our earlier selves, and the people we’ve loved, imprinted on the past. Every photograph, every film, is haunted by death; ‘every photograph is this catastrophe’.10 The city is the inverse of this imprint: some leave their names to a street (there are a handful of streets in France named after Jacques Demy), but as Cléo would have it, the streets would only be named after people who are alive, and changed after their death, lending the streets a sad kind of mutability. Most of us, alive or dead, won’t leave our names anywhere. Our apartments, our streets, the places we’ve loved, we leave invisible traces there, perceptible only to the most sensitive of our descendants, who may feel the slightest atmospheric shift as they walk over some subway grate or threshold, without knowing why or who has crossed there before them. ‘Environments inhabit us,’ Varda said.11 These places that we take into ourselves and make part of us, so that we are made of all the places we’ve loved, or of all the places where we’ve changed. We pick up bits and pieces from each of them, and hold them all in ourselves.

  * * *

  And sometimes we hold on with both hands to things we really want to release.

  This is a hard thing to admit. How do we know what to keep, and what is just an old idea we had about ourselves?

  * * *

  We have no objectivity on our own lives, so we turn to the cards. We like games of divination, just as we like divining rods. Lead the way. Tell me where there’s gold. I used to do something I saw in a movie once. I would pick up a book, open it to a random page and put my finger down, and whichever word it landed on I regarded as prophecy or counsel. This is called stichomancy, and it is an ancient divining practice. But there is no book, no tarot card and no GPS on earth that can tell us where to go next. I think of Marcel Duchamp, who according to André Breton once flipped a coin to decide if he should go to New York or stay in Paris. ‘And this without the slightest indifference,’ Breton wrote.12

  But I think what Varda’s films suggest is that nothing, no situation, is ever static. Everything is always changing. Beauty, life, meaning is about the unexpected, in Varda’s universe; it comes from flux. What matters to Varda, the film critic Phil Powrie observes, ‘is not where you are, nor where you are going, but movement, transformation, becoming’.13 Inside the hospital gates Cléo is disoriented; she has never come on foot, only by taxi. On learning that her doctor has most likely left for the evening, she decides not to bother looking for the doctor, but to sit with Antoine in the garden. She has reconciled herself, even if only momentarily, to not knowing the future.

  Varda has said that the first feminist act is to gaze, to say, ‘I am looked at, but I can also look.’ Her films do just this, looking askance at the world and our places within it, we gleaners, flâneuses, vagabonds, neighbours. There is no such thing as objectivity. L’objectif: French for the lens, through which we can see only one way, even if we turn it on ourselves. This is a comfort; if it’s true then nothing can be objectively bad, not even illness.

  The doctor does show up, driving by in his convertible.

  DOCTOR

  Don’t worry too much. Two months of radiation therapy will set you right again.

  The car pulls away and the camera with it: Cléo’s shock rendered in movement, a quick back zoom travelling. Travelling shots for a travelling director.

  * * *

  And so although what she’s been fearing for two days has actually come to pass, Cléo is no longer afraid.

  CLÉO

  It seems like I’m happy.

  She and Antoine say nothing further, and there is no music, just the bells of the chapel ringing, and their footfalls on the gravel. The camera walks in front of them, framing their two faces as they hold each other’s gaze, and the film ends.

  anywhere at all, cross the street, open your eyes

  EVERYWHERE

  THE VIEW FROM THE GROUND

  There is too much space in the world. I am bewildered by it, and mad with it.

  – Martha Gellhorn,
letter to Stanley Pennell

  Robert Capa has his camera on the ground, angled up at Martha Gellhorn, who stands among the ruins of the Greek temple of Cerere in Paestum, Italy. Or perhaps he’s simply standing a little ways away, down the steps that surround the temple on all sides, and is resting his camera on one of the stone walls for stability. Either way, it’s a strange angle; she looks larger than life. The composition frames her within the stone structure, the same height as the Doric columns, a living caryatid, her head just meeting the architrave, as she concentrates on a book. It is as if she belongs there, here, in this Greek temple in Italy, mistakenly attributed to Ceres, goddess of fertility. But looking at the photograph, it’s clear both subject and photographer know this is actually a temple to the goddess of wisdom. Grey-eyed Athena turned grey-trousered Gellhorn, in the city once known as Poseidonia, the city by the sea. She pauses, but she could take off at any moment, in who knows which direction, propelled by whatever it is she’s reading, some stray thought, some unknown impulse. She squints in the sunlight, scrutinising her guidebook, if it is a guidebook. But she is not a dutiful American tourist abroad: this is Martha Gellhorn, famous war correspondent, permanently home-building, permanently homeless, novelist, runaway, divorcee, a brash, sassy reporter, a broad abroad.

  Gellhorn and Capa had driven down from the film set of John Huston’s Beat the Devil in Ravello, where Capa was working. It was April 1953; she had spent the winter in a bitterly cold Italian farmhouse near Rome with her son, Sandy. She and Capa had been friends since they met in Spain in 1937. Dashing and Hungarian and twice a refugee, having fled Horthy to Berlin and then Hitler to Paris, he called himself ‘Robert Capa’ to sound like an American film star (real name: Endre Friedmann). Seventy years later, Susan Sontag would write that ‘virtually everyone who has heard of [the Spanish Civil War] can summon to mind’ Capa’s iconic photograph of the Republican soldier who’s just been shot, ‘the grainy black-and-white image of a man in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves collapsing backward on a hillock, his right arm flung behind him as his rifle leaves his grip – about to fall, dead, onto his own shadow’.1

  As an American living away from America, Gellhorn was attuned to outsiders; she knew she was one by choice, but she was drawn to those who don’t get to choose, to the exiled, the cast-out, the marginalised; she began her career documenting the devastation wrought by the Great Depression in the United States, interviewing Americans who had become strangers to themselves through deprivation. Her upbringing in St Louis, Missouri, was at once traditional and socially aware. She came from a relatively well-to-do family; her father was a doctor (the only specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics in all of St Louis), and her mother was a suffragette and activist – well known as a campaigner in Washington, and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s. Both of her parents were half-Jewish, although this does not seem to have registered in young Martha’s mind until she was an adolescent. Her biographer, Caroline Moorehead, speculates that her ‘suppressed awareness of bigotry and racial slights may explain the later intensity of her feelings’.2

  When they met in Spain, Capa was twenty-five, Gellhorn thirty. The European Jew posing as an American; the American Jew come to learn something about Europe – they were naturally simpatico, both interested not only in documenting history but in capturing portraits of people in extreme situations. They knew they had encountered each other, and so many others, because the cruel men who were trying to rule the world had ripped up its fabric, starting wars that cast people adrift, out of their homes and into each other’s lives. If you look at Capa’s photographs, read Gellhorn’s reports, the way they each capture the individual within the historic event, it’s clear they were evolving what would become their key styles together, and that these ways of telling about war and history would set the standard for the rest of the century. Gellhorn, in particular, would be driven throughout her life to turn what she saw into something else. Writing helped her process the trauma of what she witnessed; she called it her ‘mind and spirit’s purge: there are things to be eternally rid of’.3

  But her reporting would always be just one way of doing this: fiction-writing would be another. Capa would persist in taking pictures in colour, though that wasn’t what people wanted from him. And Gellhorn went on writing novels, though it was her journalism that won her accolades. Fact and fiction were both indispensable ways of seeing.

  * * *

  Capa had arrived in Spain in 1936 with his partner, Gerda Taro, who set about documenting with her Rolleiflex the impact of the war on the people she saw around her on the streets of Barcelona. She was accidentally killed by a Republican tank a few months after Gellhorn arrived. Perhaps Gellhorn took her cue from Taro. Reporting from Madrid, where you could walk to the front line, right there in the middle of the city, Gellhorn wrote about her daily walks around the besieged capital, detailing the everyday impact of war on the city and the people who lived there. She wanted to know how people lived in those circumstances, what it felt like, what they did, how they coped.

  She would later describe her war reporting as ‘a gesture of solidarity’. But in order to go to war, she often had to detach herself from her home life – first from her family, then from her husband, eventually from her son. Although she could never stay for long in one place, she tried again and again to make homes for herself, and abandoned each of them in turn – like Sandy, whom she adopted in Italy, and would frequently leave in the care of friends, nannies and assorted caregivers. All in all she set up house eleven times in seven different countries, buying houses, or renting them, or building them. This homemaking seems at odds with all the travelling, as if she needed a reliable spot to return to, a nest between flights. But it also suggests Gellhorn felt a strong double pull in both directions, home and abroad. She would contend her whole life with the immenseness of the world, its great and overwhelming promise. ‘There is too much space in the world. I am bewildered by it, and mad with it. And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.’4

  She saw travel and flânerie as extensions of the same impulse: to flâner, she told Victoria Glendinning, ‘is as necessary as solitude: that is how the compost keeps growing in the mind’.5 She offered her own definition of the word, which she called ‘the best French verb’: ‘It is a need for occupation, done sitting down or moving.’6 Gellhorn directly contradicts the solitary, disassociated image we have of the flâneur, and redefines it as oriented towards some goal, some revelation, some way of recording and sharing what she had seen. Faced with war and suffering, she could not stand by and watch. She preferred to ‘jump into the general misery, where you have almost no choices left, but a lot of solitary company’.7 In her dedication to exposing misery, Gellhorn turned flânerie into testimony.

  According to Moorehead, Gellhorn ‘drove herself into brick walls searching for a balance between love and independence, society and solitude, outwardness and inwardness, and was beset by a profoundly American indecision between the road and the homestead’.8 She could not stop making homes; nor could she stop leaving them, even when they contained Ernest Hemingway, her first husband, or Sandy. The term we use for marrying and having children is the opposite of wandering: we say we’re ‘settling down’, as if, meeting with a natural course of resistance, we eventually slow and become still. Is there a happy medium between being a vagabond and a wife, between solitude and ‘settling down’? For Gellhorn there wasn’t, as she pinged between extremes. The testimony she produced was born of her unwillingness to compromise.

  * * *

  Over a lifetime of work as a war correspondent, Gellhorn put herself where the blood was spilling and the filth and despair were proliferating. If there was a story somewhere, she had to get it, and she got it in (as she later recalled) ‘Spain; Finland; China; World War II in England, Italy, France, and Germany; Java; Israel; Vietnam’.9 When she couldn’t get accredited by the US Army to report on the D-Day invasions, becau
se women journalists were banned from embedding, she disguised herself as a nurse and stowed away on a ship. (She was eventually caught, arrested, reprimanded by the army, and barred from France.) Hemingway loved how fearless Gellhorn was, but he resented the competition and missed having her around the house. He sent her a telegram at the Italian front in 1944: ‘ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED?’

  It was a golden age for women daring to journey out, and travelogues from Rebecca West, Emily Hahn, Olivia Manning, Gertrude Bell, Jane Bowles, Freya Stark, Dorothy Carrington and Alexandra David-Neel were piling up in the bookstores, their stories something more and something else than what gets called ‘travel writing’. Gellhorn was one of these travelling, wilding, writing women, driven by a desire to see ‘more of the world and what’s in it’. Many of the others were travelling with or in the wake of their husbands, who had been posted abroad for some official reason. Whereas Gellhorn was often more daring even than her husband: when she wanted to go to China, she had to drag Hemingway along. She wanted to see the Sino-Japanese conflict for herself. He was happy in Cuba. He had good reasons, he protested, for not wanting to go to China; for example, his uncle had been a medical missionary there and was forced on one occasion to remove his own appendix on horseback. An adolescence spent reading Somerset Maugham and Fu Manchu and being forced to contribute dimes to the cause of converting the heathen of China had given Hemingway – usually up for any sort of adventure – a strong aversion to the place. And yet, in early February 1941, off they went, by way of Hawaii, calling it their honeymoon. By then a seasoned war correspondent, Gellhorn wanted to get a sense of Chinese life from the ground up: ‘Opium dens, brothels, dance halls, mah-jong parlours, markets, factories, the Criminal Courts: it was my usual way of looking at a society.’ Months later, when her hands were covered in ‘Chinese rot’ and she had to slather them in evil-smelling pomade and wear oversized white motorman’s gloves, Hemingway was unmoved: ‘who wanted to go to China?’ In an essay about this trip, written many years later, she dubs him ‘Unwilling Companion’, or ‘U.C.’ It’s the only time she wrote about him, after their divorce.