Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  This last novel, in which she transforms what she witnessed of Dachau into the experience of a young Jewish-American soldier liberating the camps, is one of Gellhorn’s most successful attempts at putting her reportage in the service of her fiction. The point of no return, she writes in an afterword, forty years after it was first published, is the moment when a pilot has gone too far to turn back, ‘a specific time limit, stated in hours and minutes. When reached, the pilot must head the plane back or it would have insufficient fuel to stay airborne and land in England. Turn or die.’34 Dachau, Gellhorn wrote, was her own ‘point of no return’.35

  She was told about the camp in 1937. It was not the worst of the Nazi death camps, she said, but it was the first to be set up, in 1933. She spent the whole war waiting to see Dachau liberated: this was her own ‘private war aim’. ‘By bumming lifts across Germany, as the Allied troops advanced’, she got there a week after the first American soldiers discovered it (and a week after Lee Miller took her now famous, deeply disturbing photographs of the Death Train). Afterwards, Gellhorn saw ‘the human condition, the world we live in, changed’.36 In her novel, her hero, Jacob Levy, leaves Dachau, gets in his Jeep, and runs over three German civilians crossing a nearby road, because they had lived their lives not even a mile away from the camp as if nothing were happening. ‘They knew, they didn’t care, they laughed.’37 From Jacob’s enraged perspective, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. Through Jacob, Gellhorn implicates all Americans in the lynching she recounted, not least herself, driving peacefully through the South with her French lover.

  * * *

  While Point of No Return is important, and under-read, Liana, though not a great work of literature, seems to me to be a text where she was trying to figure something out, trying to understand something about why she couldn’t stay in one place, why she could not rest until she had seen all there was to see in the world, then seen it all again. Liana is about a lot of things: Empire, and the impact of war on people far away from any front. Race, and white domination, and the inheritance of slavery. Gender, and the inequalities of love between men and women, especially when complicated by race. It’s a novel that might not have been written if Gellhorn hadn’t been excluded from the European front because of her gender, and sent by Collier’s to the Caribbean in the spring of 1942 on a submarine-hunting mission (Gellhorn hopped to it, studying up on ‘military and naval tactics and strategy, artillery, insignia, and the geography of the islands’).38 But when I read Liana, I also see Gellhorn reflecting on the way people are so changed by what they live through that they can’t go back to where they started, or even, in some cases, go forward at all.

  The young mixed-race woman at the centre of the novel has been taken away from her family to be first mistress and then wife to Marc, the wealthiest man on the island of St Boniface, who tries to make a ‘proper white lady’ of her, renaming her ‘Julie’ and treating her like an animal without feelings or reason. Liana, understandably, is miserable in her new home, the future stretching ahead of her endlessly, meaninglessly. She is not allowed to have her family visit; when she goes to see them, her little sisters call her a princess, and the word itself is ‘lovely and strange, from a faraway place’.39 But she has become so used to luxury, and internalised, perhaps, the prejudices of her new milieu, that she can’t bear spending time with them, ‘the odour of their bodies and their beds, their food, the creeping smell that came in from the latrine which was too near to the house, and the sharp, rotten smell of the garbage dump […] the smell had seeped into the ground’.40

  In time, she belongs nowhere. ‘She wore her elegance like a varnish all over her,’ Gellhorn writes of Liana’s early transformation into Marc’s ideal wife, as if the ‘real’ Liana were there all the time, ready to be varnished white or varnished black.41 But who, exactly, sees her this way? Who is this narrative voice who observes Liana, with the ‘finicking voice to go with the neat and tidy French she now spoke’, whose table manners are better than Marc’s? Marc wouldn’t admit such a thing, and Liana – from what we learn of her – doesn’t have that level of self-awareness. It must be Gellhorn the social observer, involving her journalist’s perspective in the intimate lives of the people she invents.

  Eventually, love comes Liana’s way, in the form of Pierre, the recently arrived schoolmaster who has fled the war in France not out of cowardice but because, he says, if he saw a German he would certainly shoot him, and that would only be revisited on the French population. Marc hires Pierre to teach Liana to read, with predictable consequences. When Marc discovers their affair, he tells her to leave his house. Meanwhile Pierre can no longer bear being away from France in her hour of need, and can’t take Liana with him – not only would it be bringing her to a war, but, they agree without saying the words, he couldn’t bring a black girl back with him.

  Gellhorn threads through the novel a motif of irrevocability, the impossibility of ‘going back’ – both in terms of the various characters’ actions, which can’t be undone, and also to where they started from: France, for the men, and life with her family, for Liana.42 There is no direction she can take, no backwards, no forwards. No one can help her; no one can save her, and she can’t save herself. Into this trap Gellhorn introduces the notion of responsibility, in this case, the blame that Marc and Pierre must assume for taking Liana out of her world – Marc with money and Pierre with love – and making it impossible to return to it. Thanks to them, ‘she had no home and no people’.43 Hearing the men decision-making on her behalf, Liana feels robbed of any agency of her own, and, facing a future without Pierre in a cold house by herself, takes drastic action. First she burns all of her fancy things leaving her ‘as poor as when she started’.44 Then she opens up a vein and dies on the bathroom floor, her face ‘tired and grey against the white tile of the bathroom floor’.45

  The novel is critical of the inbuilt, unquestioned mistrust of whites for blacks Gellhorn witnessed in the US and abroad, and takes aim at those who rule without consent; in its study of the impact of war on a little Caribbean island so very far away from any of the fronts, there is an implicit critique of Empire, of powerful nations meddling and instituting Eurocentric hierarchies and value systems everywhere they can sail to. Yet Gellhorn makes some questionable pronouncements, and her representation of Liana’s family suggests Gellhorn was not entirely aware of her own biases. She herself writes Liana, to some extent, as an unknowable mystery. Even Liana’s suicide is pitiful, as she tries to staunch the flow of blood after she’s done it, trying to undo it. She immediately tries to take it back, and dies regretful. We are encouraged to see Liana as a victim, not only of the men in her life and her mother’s ambition and the colonialist world she is born into, but of herself. This final act of self-harm turns the violence of the culture she lives in on her own body, which is no longer neatly stuffed into white women’s clothes but spills messily all over her perfect bedroom and bathroom.

  In the end, as Pierre speeds off back to France, the sea-spray rising up against the side of the boat a sad echo of Liana’s vividly spurting blood in the previous chapter, Pierre repeats his idea of the homeland like a mantra, pledging his life in defence of France and all it stands for, the dignité et les droits de l’homme.46 Et la femme? Gellhorn implies. Et les noirs? And all those who are beat down by systems they have no say in, even in the name of France? This global consciousness is the book’s strong point, written at a time when ‘all the uprooted people were struggling to have a home and live in it, to be part of a human world, to have identity and place and safety’.47 But how the war would end, and who would have a say in how that world was built, was yet to be determined, as the novel went to print in 1944.

  * * *

  Gellhorn had finally left for Europe in September 1943, spending time in New York before catching a boat to Britain. She pleaded with Hemingway in this December 1943 letter, trying to help him to understand why she has to travel. ‘I believe in what I am doing too
and regret fiercely having missed seeing and understanding so much of it in these years, and I would be no use to you in the end if I came back before I was through … You wouldn’t really want me if I built a fine big stone wall around the finca and sat inside it … I’ll never see enough as long as I live.’48 It seems she was very persuasive: soon Hemingway, who had claimed to want to sit out the war in Cuba submarine-hunting, decided to get himself over to Europe to see the D-Day invasions. He went as Collier’s lead correspondent. She never forgave him. They split up in 1945, the year the war ended and Liana was published. For the rest of her days she would unceremoniously dismiss anyone careless or nosy enough to mention his name.

  Was it the institute of marriage that she found so imprisoning, or marriage to Hemingway? I’m inclined to think the latter. It wasn’t, in the end, about literary competition; she had enough bravado to stand up to him. Rather, it was about the right to roam. ‘Place names were the most powerful magic I knew,’ Gellhorn writes in her memoir Travels with Myself and Another. In her book-length essay Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), a response to George Orwell’s 1946 Why I Write, Deborah Levy writes of a moment of crisis in her life, when ‘life was hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to’, and so she took off for Majorca, where by the end of the narrative she has realised that ‘where she had to get to’ was simply a socket to plug in her portable typewriter. ‘Even more useful to a writer than a room of her own,’ Levy concludes, ‘is an extension lead and a variety of adaptors for Europe, Asia, and Africa.’49 How can any sort of long-term relationship, running over the same familiar territory, compete with the endlessly renewable frisson of encountering a new place? Gellhorn’s most sustaining relationship was with her work, but work undertaken away from home, where something might be about to happen. ‘I settle in temporary furnished quarters in foreign places where I know nobody and enter into a symbiotic relationship with a typewriter.’ This is a hard-won right.

  Gellhorn spent the last few decades of her life living in London; one has to imagine that after all those attempts at homemaking, it wasn’t that London was finally right, but, rather, it was finally enough. And it was an ideal place from which to take off again: all flight plans lead to Heathrow, or many do at any rate. She died in 1998, the year before I went to Paris for the first time. She was eighty-nine years old, but it wasn’t natural causes. Mostly blind, and very ill with several forms of cancer, she took her own life. She decided when and how she would ‘leave’. As if death were just another place to go.

  home

  NEW YORK

  RETURN

  But what good are roots if you can’t take them with you?

  – Gertrude Stein

  A young girl, in a hotel room, her first night in a new city – in the city, that is to say, in New York City – is wrapped in blankets in a room that is air-conditioned to the point of resembling a cave in a glacier. She has a bad cough and is running a fever, but she is too nervous to call the front desk and ask for someone to turn off the air. How much would she have to tip whomever they sent? Better to freeze than to stiff a bellhop, or worse, to overtip, and look naive. Recalling that first night in New York in an essay years later, Joan Didion asks, ‘Was anyone ever so young?’

  Eight years later, the girl has become a woman, and the bloom is off the Big Apple. She returns west to California, where she would no longer be hemmed in by the narrowing possibilities of disappearing youth. Her elegy to New York, ‘Goodbye to All That’, appeared in her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), at the end of a section called ‘Seven Places of the Mind’. By placing the essay after pieces on Sacramento, Hawaii and Newport, Didion suggests not only that New York, like most places, is of the mind, but also that it is a place most often looked at through the lens of other places.

  People move to New York from all over the world, drawn to what it stands for: work, success, freedom, acceptance, glamour: give me your tired, your poor, your ambitious, your determined. To approach the city from somewhere else amplifies its power. There are so many viewpoints on the city that ‘New York’ – the idea – is filtered in the imagination through millions of tiny windowpanes.

  And yet for me, it’s hard to come to terms with my relationship to New York, especially now that I’ve left. As hard as it is to see, to really see, your mother’s face. It is too familiar; you have never not known it, and you cannot be said to have looked at it in any objective way.

  * * *

  In Amor Towles’s novel Rules of Civility, the heroine, born and bred in Brighton Beach but trying to make her way in the upper echelons of Manhattan society, pretends not to know someone from her past when he recognises her at a news-stand. Observing their exchange, the newsvendor pronounces: ‘That’s the problem with being born in New York […] You’ve got no New York to run away to.’

  * * *

  Didion describes her early crush on the city, having moved there from northern California: standing on a street corner eating a peach, catching a whiff of expensive perfume, she recalls thinking that in New York ‘Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach’. That is not how it feels to a native New Yorker. Either you’ve got nothing left to reach for, or the reaching looks like a betrayal of where you started.

  Once New York had been the very definition of a city to me, offering freedom to roam, create, become, befriend, fuck, but in adulthood it made me anxious, claustrophobic. The long, long avenues, the tall buildings leaning in, like supervising giants; how can you wander on a grid? The avenues go up and down and the streets go left and right. Once you know it, you know it. My middle-class New York life was just as neatly mapped out: college, career, marriage, house, baby. Repeat cycle with next generation. My live-in boyfriend, a real-estate developer, bought a car. That was the beginning of the end for us. He wanted to speed into the future at 60 m.p.h.; I wanted to walk there.

  Has anyone ever been so young? Didion wonders at her twenty-three-year-old self, unable to call and ask for the air conditioning to be turned down. I was twenty-five, and I thought, with the moral resolution (or perhaps the affected maturity) of the very young, that because we lived together I had to stay. My choices narrowed to the width of the passenger seat in his car, and finally I couldn’t take it any more. I moved to Paris like I was letting myself out, out into the night air.

  * * *

  Nearly a decade after I moved to Paris, I had absolutely no idea where I would be the next year, or the year after, or in five years. A number of events coincided to make me wonder whether I had a future in France. I had seen my request for citizenship turned down; my engagement had collapsed; my right to work was revoked at the end of my student visa, so my employer couldn’t keep me on, and I’d learned this too late to apply for another teaching job. I made an appointment at the French Consulate in New York, and hoped they would be able to help me sort something out.

  Travelling to Paris from London two weeks before my appointment, I was stopped by a French customs agent in St Pancras.

  ‘Why do you want to come to our country?’ he demanded.

  ‘I live there,’ I answered. ‘Your country is my country. Sort of.’

  ‘Where’s your visa?’

  ‘It expired two weeks ago. I have an appointment to re—’

  ‘You can’t come in if you don’t have a visa.’

  ‘I guess I’m coming in on a tourist visa.’

  ‘But if you live in France you’re not a tourist.’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘So you live in France illegally.’

  ‘No. I have never lived in France illegally.’

  ‘Come with me please.’

  He ushered me into a back office where he went through my luggage and looked through the files on my computer. Fearing – what? that he’d refuse to let me into France? what was the worst that could happen? – I showed him my last visa, my airplane ticket to New York, the email confirming my appointment to renew my visa at
the consulate. (These are the papers the wanderer has to have on her at all times. Look, I am moving within legal limits. Look, I am doing nothing wrong.) I said I had a French doctorate and had taught in the French universities. I told him how my naturalisation request had been turned down because I didn’t make enough money, although I had done well in my citizenship interview. (Most people we get in here don’t even speak French, the woman had confided, with a look that I could tell was meant to reassure me I was the ‘good’ kind of immigrant.) Eventually someone on the phone told him to let me get on the train, and he indicated I could pack up my suitcase. Fighting tears, I asked him why he had put me through all that.

  He shrugged. ‘Well, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s hard for us to come to your country too.’

  After that, New York seemed like a haven. I wanted to be around my family, around old friends, I wanted to be in a place where instead of being growled at, interrogated and humiliated, I would be welcomed. Maybe this was it, I thought. Maybe it was time to move back home.

  * * *

  A few months later, exhausted, doubtful and jobless, I went to New York for six weeks to take stock of the situation only to find that my own city had become unrecognisable to me. Manhattan was crawling with bankers and their toddlers; Brooklyn was overrun with yuppies and their toddlers, and the twentysomethings you see on the HBO series Girls. It was as if there were two speeds of life in New York: married or very, very young. I didn’t know where to insert myself. Watching Girls, I didn’t know how to understand its aesthetic, its values, its uptalk; is it earnest, is it ironic? A little of both? How can it be both? In my day – and Girls is the kind of show that prompts you to say things like in my day – we didn’t have dinner parties for our friends (as dysfunctional as Hannah’s seem to be); like Carrie Bradshaw we kept our shoes in our ovens and met our friends in public. It felt as if the New York I had known had disappeared, like at the end of the film The NeverEnding Story, in which Fantasia has been consumed by The Nothing (or in this case, by real-estate developers), reduced to a grain of sand (or in this case, to Brooklyn).