From Streetwalker to Street Walker: The Rise of the Flâneuse

Posted on 24/10/2012 by Bobby Seal

In fact and in fantasy, London had become a contested terrain: new commercial spaces and journalist practices, expanding networks of female philanthropy, and a range of public spectacles . . . enabled workingmen and women of many classes to challenge the traditional privileges of elite male spectators and to assert their presence in the public domain. In so doing they revised and reworked the dominant literary mappings of London to accommodate their own social practices and fantasies. The effect was a set of urban encounters far less polarised and far more interactive than those imagined by the great literary chroniclers of the metropolis.

(Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London)

Reading Mrs Dalloway again recently and writing the two Woolf-related pieces featured elsewhere on this blog set me thinking. At what point did the concept of the flâneuse emerge? And does the idea bear any relation to the reality that most women experience, or is it still just a literary device? In other words, to what degree, if any, do women today enjoy greater freedom to inhabit our urban spaces than that which was experienced by women a hundred years ago?

If we look at the early twentieth-century, we can see that women, in particular middle class women, incrementally gained a range of new freedoms; the freedom to walk alone in certain districts, at least during the hours of daylight, the freedom to work, within certain prescribed limits, and the freedom to shop – to wander through the commercial districts of major cities in order to look, to compare and to buy. Working-class women had always been free to wander the streets of the city, provided their perambulations were strictly related to their work or family responsibilities. Women who were out after dark, walking down the wrong street, or even walking at too leisurely a pace risked being subject to assumptions about their sexual availability. From Victorian times onwards, women’s participation in the life of the city gradually moved from the domestic to the public setting.

This increase in freedom of mobility for women, especially that of middle-class women, was in essence a metropolitan phenomenon – the new woman, the working girl, the female shopper; all became growing types of female presence in the modern city. Though clearly bounded by the demands of employers and commerce, this nonetheless represents a growth in freedom for women. Previously the streets had been the realm only of men, or of women escorted by men, and of women who had to resort to prostitution in order to survive. But the early twentieth-century saw an improvement to policing and street lighting in central London, the extension of the underground system and a greater prevalence of bicycles. This led to increased freedom of movement for middle class women. But even for middle class women, there were limits to how far they could push against the boundaries of entrenched attitudes.

This change, this increase in women’s freedom to wander through the city, is reflected in the fiction of the time: Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf all portray female characters who have ready access to the streets of the metropolis in a way unknown to previous generations of women. Female characters from starkly different backgrounds – Ada Moss, the struggling actress forced into occasional prostitution in Mansfield’s Pictures, Miriam Henderson, the respectable working girl and autodidact in Richardson’s Pilgrimage and the wealthy politician’s wife, Clarissa Dalloway, in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – are all depicted as being able to enjoy the freedom to walk through London alone.The question then is did these, albeit limited, freedoms that were allowed to women, and the writers who reflected their lives in their fiction, create the female equivalent of the male flâneur; in other words, did early modernism bring with it the creation of a recognisable flâneuse?

 

 

Shopping and the Commodification of Flânerie

Benjamin’s archetypal flâneur wandered the Parisian shopping arcades. London had its own arcades, modelled on those of Paris, but these did not become the haunt of the flâneuse. Although, in the early twentieth-century, women were increasingly able to shop without being accompanied by men, it was the new department stores rather than the arcades which they made their own. Department stores, women discovered, invite flânerie. The department store, like the arcade before it, constructed fantasy worlds for itinerant lookers. But unlike the arcade, it offered a protected site for the empowered gaze of the flâneuse. The existence of the flâneuse was only possible when a woman could wander the city on her own, a freedom linked to the privilege of shopping on her own.

Eatons Department Store

Department stores became central fixtures in most large cities by the early years of the century; and from the start they employed female sales assistants, allowing women to be both buyers and sellers and not just another commodity for the enjoyment of the male gaze. But with this freedom came another form of commodification, this time at the hands of the advertisers and marketing agents. Judith Walkowitz suggests that many male commentators of the time wrapped up misogyny in a cloak of moral objection to market culture by casting it as ‘sordid and feminized’.

Women enjoyed new freedoms from these changes to the city centre, but the driving force was the market and not ideology; retailers quickly learned to target window displays and advertising at the female eye. There was new mobility for some women, but it fell far short of that enjoyed by the male flâneur; the freedom of the department store flâneuse is, after all, regulated by the male department store manager.

 

 

Prostitution and the Tyranny of Public Space

Thus in the public arena, the streets of the city, women are prey to the harassment of male optical gratification. Women cannot simply walk, they do not stroll, they certainly do not loiter. They are in public with a function, such as is provided by markets and shops and meeting children.

(Chris Jenks (ed), Visual Culture)

In some ways, despite the limitations imposed by the prevailing culture, women have nonetheless always been able to take part in urban observation. But working-class women, who effectively had the greater freedom to roam, in daylight at least, were the least likely group to have their observations recorded. Therefore, it was with the development of modernist writing, particularly in the works of Woolf and Richardson, that women were able to chronicle these observations. Almost all of Benjamin’s city figures were male – the flâneur, the gambler, the rag-picker. The one exception is the prostitute, or streetwalker. As Judith Walkowitz puts it:

The prostitute was the quintessential female figure of the urban scene . . . for men as well as women, the prostitute was a central spectacle in a set of urban encounters and fantasies.

(Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London)

Prostitution was indeed the female version of flânerie, which serves only to emphasise the inequality of gender differences in this era. The male flâneur was simply a man who loitered on the streets; but women who loitered risked being seen as prostitutes, streetwalkers, or les grandes horizontalesas they were known in nineteenth-century Paris.

Streetwalker - Eugene Atget

The image of the prostitute, the most significant female image in The Arcades Project, is the embodiment of the prevailing male attitude to women at this time. Benjamin links together prostitution and gambling as the two sides of alienated sexual desire:

for in the bordello and gaming hall it is the same, most sinful delight: to insert fate within desire, and this, not desire itself, is to be condemned.

In a time when the city streets were the domain of men, any woman walking alone in a public place was viewed as a fallen woman. Whatever her position or motivation, she invariably functioned as a projection of the male loiterer’s alienation or as a symbol of a form of social ‘contamination’ that had to be purged. In either case she is objectified.

Prostitution reflects the economic relationship of women and men. But, argues Benjamin, wrapped up in that relationship are also elements of fantasy, desire, pleasure, anxiety, guilt, shame, regulation and exploitation. Of particular interest to Benjamin is the ‘gaze’ of the customer upon the prostitute; a subjectively masculine gaze which tells us it is acceptable for men to gaze at women, but not the reverse. But, counters Walkowitz, male sensibilities were threatened by the fact that the prostitute did gaze back: in a look that was ‘audacious, unflinching’.

Indeed, there may well be a link between flânerie and voyeurism: when the flâneur absorbs the city visually he does so on the basis of a sense of entitlement; he acts as if he owns the city; which, in terms of the power held by his gender at least, he does. The flâneuse, in literature and on our streets, joyfully subverts this norm.

 

Images

Eaton’s Department Store 1920s (out of copyright)

Streetwalker by Eugene Atget 1920s (out of copyright)

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Woolf at the Door 2: Mrs Dalloway’s Inner Flâneur

Posted on 19/10/2012 by Bobby Seal

 

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway Peter Walsh is the most obvious flâneur character; he is able to wander the streets of London with an abandon even the patrician Clarissa Dalloway cannot manage. In an encounter which in its imagery reminds one of Baudelaire’s idea of the passante, Peter Walsh notices an attractive young woman as he walks through Trafalgar Square:

But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.

But Woolf subverts the conventional norms and, in this encounter, transforms Baudelaire’s objectified passante into an assertive flâneuse. Although Peter Walsh is presented as being able to wander the streets of London with freedom and detachment, Woolf’s depiction of his attempts to pick up the young woman he encounters in Trafalgar Square in a way that subverts his confident desires with an eventual realisation that he will never possess her. He follows her, imagining himself as ‘a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties’. But, as she reaches her house and puts her key to the door, she quickly turns and snubs him with ‘one look in his direction, but not at him’. Elsewhere, we read of Clarissa’s daughter, Elizabeth, being described as a ‘pirate’ when she boards a bus on the Strand. This echoes Peter’s ‘buccaneer’ self-description, but is applied to Elizabeth without any irony.

Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway opens with Clarissa standing poised at the roadside in Victoria Street waiting to cross over towards Bond Street and finish the errands she needs to complete before her party. Both Victoria and Bond Streets are busy, modern city streets. But at the same time they simultaneously evoke and serve as symbols of wealth, power and tradition; qualities that embody the Empire they represent. Clarissa is able to wander freely; her freedom of movement intimately tied to her class position, rather than her gender. The sense of underlying power and privilege is symbolized by a passing car in which:

there could be no doubt greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state…

 

Clarissa’s immediate motivation for walking through the streets of central London in the opening pages of Mrs Dalloway is undoubtedly more to do with her need to prepare for that evening’s party than any wish to map out a spiritual or psychological journey. In that sense, it would be difficult to apply the epithet flâneuse to her. However, the very act of walking provides her with the opportunity and impetus to reminisce and to analyse the key relationships in her life. She thinks about her father, her husband and her daughter and, as she walks, her thoughts drift on into an existential reverie that belies her calm exterior:

Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? But that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived.

It is a fine June morning and Clarissa’s consciousness immediately conjures up reminiscences of such mornings at Bourton when she was young and of when, at eighteen, she chose to marry Richard and not Peter. Peter had called her ‘cold, heartless, a prude.’ She stills feels the indignation of that moment when she reminds herself:

She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or they were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on . . . she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, or I am that.

Woolf surveys the human topography of London in Mrs Dalloway; she depicts landscapes that reinforce boundaries of class and gender; rich and poor, men and women, each of them lives in a different London. She also creates dichotomies of public and private, internal and external and past and present. The London through which Woolf’s characters move is dominated by the symbols of authority: Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral; and the life of each character is punctuated by the omnipresent sound of Big Ben. But Woolf also hints at a creeping Americanisation of British life; perhaps giving away something of her own position in a somewhat negative suggestion of tradition being usurped by vulgar commerce. She highlights shopkeepers ‘fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds’, arranging their displays of jewellery ‘to tempt Americans’, and the aeroplane writing advertising slogans in the sky as symbols of rampant commercialism.

The Strand

Clarissa Dalloway is ostensibly part of the established order Bond Street represents. As she perambulates through the streets of London, her thoughts wander between memories of her landed gentry upbringing and plans for her elaborate party that evening. She wanders the streets glowing with excitement:

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

And it is London that she loves: ‘I love walking in London’ and ‘really its better than walking in the country.’ Rachel Bowlby sees significance in the very surname that Woolf gives to her protagonist; Clarissa Dalloway is a woman who likes to dally along the way; in other words, she is a flâneuse. Power, wealth and history are all evoked in these opening pages. But this is a London still recovering from war, from the devastation and grief, and cracks in the edifice of kingdom and empire quickly percolate to the surface of Clarissa’s thoughts:

The war was over, except for Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed.

Mrs Dalloway owes much to James Joyce’s Ulysses, which Woolf was reading at the time she wrote her book. In the way she describes her characters, what they are doing while they think and the way she creates their inner life, one can see the influence of Joyce:

In her story, as in the opening episodes of Ulysses, a character leaves home in the morning and while she walks, thoughts prompted by the immediate scene are mixed with memories and reflections. In both works close attention is paid to place and time: the routes of the characters can be followed on a map and both Bloom and Clarissa hear the chimes of a clock.

(Susan Dick, Virginia Woolf)

Memory, in both, is mixed with anticipation: Clarissa must prepare for her party and Bloom plans to attend a funeral. Woolf also shares with Joyce the employment of fragmentary thoughts and memories and, like him, she is able to move from the consciousness of one character to that of another. Woolf’s aim is for the audible narrator, whom the reader ‘knows’ to be there, to disappear and for the story to be told by the consciousness of the characters. The two centres of consciousness in Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa and Septimus, each weighed down by memory, criss-cross London on that June day, but never meet. The exploration of consciousness is without doubt a unifying factor of Mrs Dalloway and Pilgrimage.

In one of her short stories, Street Haunting, Woolf suggests that the city streets provide the female flâneur with a cloak of anonymity; the opportunity to merge into the crowd:

Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering…

Indeed it is in this short story that Woolf most closely observes the pleasures of the flâneuse; as she walks, the narrator constantly creates stories about what she sees around her; the act of walking transmutes into the act of writing. A quest to buy a pencil takes the narrator through the streets of London; and in those streets, alone and silent, she absorbs and possesses all the tantalising sights that catch her eye:

Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one’s will …

Woolf’s protagonist in Street Hauntingremarks on the beauty of London’s streets ‘with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness’. The streets are washed with yellow lamplight from numerous offices and the narrator speculates on the work of lowly clerks in dingy chambers poring over documents with ‘wetted forefinger’. Her pencil bought, she returns home, leaving behind the tide of trade washed up on ‘the shores of Oxford Street’.

Similar themes are explored in another essay in the same collection, The Cinema. In both essays Woolf is particularly interested in the relationship between the eye, which glides effortlessly over the surface and ‘licks it all up instantly’ and the brain, which ‘resting, pausing, perhaps sleeps as the eye looks.’ Yet, when the eye ‘wants help’ and calls, ‘you are needed,’ the brain is ready: and the eye and the brain are those of the flâneuse. A Room of One’s Own suggests elements of flânerie too. Though its title indicates that its focus is set indoors, its form takes that of a ramble from Oxbridge, to London and the British Museum before the narrator sits down to write about her journey. The narrator speaks of ‘the fascination of the London street’ and urges her readers to ‘loiter at street corners’ in order to find the inspiration ‘to write all kinds of books.’

 

Image of The Strand courtesy of the George Reid Collection

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Woolf at the Door 1: The City and Modernism

Posted on 17/10/2012 by Bobby Seal

(Cities were) more than accidental meeting places and crossing points. They were generative environments of the new arts, focal points of intellectual community, indeed of intellectual conflict and tension.

(Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (ed), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890 – 1930)

Modernism is very much a phenomenon of the city. Writers from previous generations, Dickens, Gissing and Wells, had all written about London. However, as realist writers, they created narratives driven by plot and character. London was, thus, the backdrop against which these writers’ characters acted out their lives, rather than the city itself being an integral partof the story. Dickens and Gissing’s characters were clearly affected by their experience of urban life. However, early modernist writers, such as Woolf, Eliot, Joyce and Richardson, took this further by exploring, through their writing, the psychological impact that metropolitan life had upon their protagonists; the effect of what Walter Benjamin referred to as the ‘shock’ of life in a modern city.

Modernist writers saw the city as a space to be conceptualised and understood; cities in all their complexity, where spaces overlap and coalesce and are defined variously by economic function, social class, history and topographical character.

Thus, modernist writing had a strong tendency to encapsulate the experience of life within the city, and to make the city-novel or the city-poem one of its main forms. In England, modernism took the form of a reaction by predominantly metropolitan writers against the strictures of Victorianism. London was important to the development of modernism for several key reasons; it was the world’s biggest city in the early part of twentieth-century, having expanded with extraordinary rapidity, and it was the locus of a burgeoning growth of technology and increased mobility. In the nineteenth-century, with writers like Dickens and Baudelaire, artists saw that the city informed the consciousness of its inhabitants. This tradition continued in the twentieth-century with, for example, Joyce’s Ulysses and Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.

But this was a tradition both embraced and transformed by women modernist writers, most notably Richardson and Woolf. Exploring female personality and the very nature of consciousness itself, they adopted Walter Benjamin’s maxim that ‘life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of variations thrives among the grey cobblestones.’ (Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism)

Virginia Woolf

In the time in which Woolf was writing, London established itself as the point of concentration for English national culture and established dominance over communication, journalism and the arts. From the 1890s onwards, the average age of marriage increased, women began to enter the universities and the workplace and became more evident on the streets of the commercial centres of major cities. The numbers of such women were not great, but their impact was major and the New Woman was a prominent social and cultural figure of this era. Initially, this new breed of educated, single working woman was represented only in the works of male writers such as HG Wells, with Anna Veronica in 1909 being his most notable example. Whilst there was some support for the New Woman from male writers, many of them had an almost voyeuristic fascination with her sexuality and agonised about her supposed loss of femininity and her reduced prospects of marriage.

However, the early years of the twentieth century saw an explosion in women’s autobiography and fiction that represented an increased sense of empowerment and self-actualisation by women. Alongside this came increased physical mobility for women; not just in terms of opportunities to travel independently outside the family home, but by other changes such as simply being able to wear less constricting clothing. The New Woman became adept at using train timetables and bicycles and a number of, mainly educated Edwardian women, took part in street marches in support of women’s suffrage. By the time of the Great War, women writers, such as Mansfield, Richardson and Woolf, began to write about the types of metropolitan women with whom they were familiar; to write about women from a woman’s perspective:

This simultaneous experience of difference from and yet identification with the walking male writer becomes the central feature of the self-reflexive modernism of Dorothy Richardson, who can be interpreted as progressing from merely borrowing or identifying with the masculinized tropes of attic room and street, to constructing them as the spaces of the woman in the city, the flâneuse.

(Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity)

Modernist writers stretched the boundaries of subject matter and form at a pace which reflected that of the fast-moving modern city; they embraced the task of depicting the rapid growth of metropolitan life and the impact that it had on their characters in the fiction that they produced.

Taking up this challenge, Virginia Woolf insisted that her main concern was with the way a story is told, and with the function of the story itself, rather than simply telling a tale. For Woolf, the need to tell a story should not get in the way of the writing. For this reason she abandoned the conventional linear story-telling conventions. Dorothy Richardson came to similar conclusions and explored her resulting ideas in her work Pilgrimage.

As well as a focus on the actual words, Virginia Woolf evolved a new approach to the use of rhythm in her writing too; the pace of life in a modern city was disorientating and intense; gone were the slower rhythms of the countryside, to be replaced by a panoply of sensual inputs. Woolf, and others, suggested that city life affected the rhythms of consciousness itself. This view is reflected in Woolf’s writing and informs her dissatisfaction with conventional realist narrative forms.

She set out to distinguish herself from realist fiction by the use of free indirect discourse, thereby avoiding the falsifying presence of an authorial narrator. In Mrs Dalloway she challenges the very concept of linear time and explores alternatives to traditional storytelling forms. For example, she portrays how the thoughts of people going about their separate business are temporarily bought together by each of them seeing a plane drawing an advert in the sky:

All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.

(Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway)

A similar effect is created when a stately car bearing a government crest passes by. Her portrayal of a number of parallel, sometimes overlapping, events is quite cinematic in its effect. Mrs Dalloway is structured around the passing hours of the day, as marked by Big Ben. But the standardisation of time is arbitrary, suggests Woolf. Not just arbitrary, feminist critics have argued, but controlled by men. The masculine Big Ben strikes eleven-thirty and Peter Walsh, worried that he is late for an appointment, is relieved to hear the feminine bell of Saint Margaret’s strike the half hour slightly later:

I am not late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. Yet, though she is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality.

(ibid.)

The Mall

A constant theme of modernist writing is that of generational difference; the conflict between of the Victorian generation and those of the twentieth-century, modern era. It is possible to perceive in Mrs Dallowaya generational difference between Clarissa Dalloway and her daughter, Elizabeth. The approach as to how each one travels the streets of London is very different. Clarissa, born in the Victorian era, walks up Bond Street with pleasure and impunity but does so only, she senses, by virtue of having become ‘invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now’ In other words, she is middle-aged, no more of child-bearing age and most likely no longer sexually active.

Elizabeth, born after the turn of the century, rides up Whitehall on a bus, boarding it ‘most competently’ and feeling ‘delighted to be free.’ But if Clarissa’s public consciousness is determined by her sexuality, or by her sexuality as it is construed by others, so too is the daughter’s:

And already, even as she stood there [waiting for the omnibus], in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning…. People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her…. For it was beginning. Her mother could see that the compliments were beginning.

(ibid.)

Since its first use by Baudelaire in the nineteenth-century, the flâneur has proved to be a useful device for writers to employ in their explorations of the modern city. Walter Benjamin conducted a systematic review of the world that Baudelaire had created and set it within a framework of literary, sociological and historical theory. His flâneur was an idle stroller with an inquisitive mind and an aesthetic eye; a solitary figure, he avoided serious political and personal relationships, preferring to enjoy the aesthetics of city life; its material artefacts and human archetypes. The flâneur reads the city and finds beauty in liminal spaces and discarded objects.

The city, though, has traditionally been a male place, with women in a subservient role, or at best at the margins, and this gender bias was reflected in the writing of that period. Benjamin’s work too was notable for the absence of women’s experiences. The writings of Virginia Woolf, and in particular Mrs Dalloway, have done much to redress this imbalance.

 

Image of Virginia Woolf : Creative Commons

Image of The Mall, 1920s: Courtesy of English Heritage

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One Moonlit Night – Book of the Month – October 2012

Posted on 10/10/2012 by Bobby Seal

 

Several years ago I had a friend, Henk, whom I would meet up with from time to time to ‘drink beer and talk bollocks’, as he put it. For a period of several months he would invariably turn the conversation round to a book he was reading called One Moonlit Night. It was a tale, according to Henk, of myth and madness and was set in a small Welsh slate-mining town around the time of the Great War. He spent a long time reading that book; he had the Penguin dual-language version with the English text on the right-hand page and the original Welsh on the left. Henk, despite his being at least partly of Welsh ancestry, wasn’t a Cymraeg speaker, but he loved the sound of the language and would read the Welsh text out loud just to enjoy the music of the unfamiliar words.

One Moonlit Night

Eventually he gave me his copy of the book and urged me to read it. I still have that copy and have read it several times, though only in English. So far.

Bethesda Slate Quarry  Bethesda

One Moonlit Night is a powerful evocation of loss, grief and madness set in a small community. A community that clings to a landscape that is scarred by the workings of the slate industry and a people many of whom are equally damaged. The book is Gothic in its tone and the atmosphere that Prichard evokes. Like that other great example of Gothic expressionism, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, One Moonlit Night is peopled by a number of grotesque characters with strange names: Will Starch Collar, Bob Milk Cart, Owen the Coal and Humphrey Top House. But underlying all the various human dramas of his book, Prichard depicts something bigger, something much older. The very landscape upon which the village is precariously lodged is always there; it waits and watches.

To think there was a time I didn’t know where Post Lane went after it passed the end of Black Lake. Emyr, Little Owen the Coal’s Big Brother was the first person I remember walking as far as the end of Black Lake, but he didn’t carry on any further cos they found him there on his knees, with his shoes off and his feet all blistered, crying and shouting for his Mam. Huw and me couldn’t understand what was wrong with him, and Moi was only pretending to understand, that’s for sure, or else he would have told us.

The unnamed narrator is a boy who lives with his Mam in a tight-knit community. Their relationship is touchingly warm and loving, and is apparently based on Prichard’s memories of his own mother. The boy has two close friends, Huw and Moi. Together the boys come to learn about sex, death and madness. The tone is bleak, but not without humour. The narrator, despite the hardships he experiences, is uncomplaining and accepting. Indeed, the overall effect of the story of his childhood is life-affirming; Prichard shows us through his protagonist that he loves life because it is so precarious.

But one character, deep and brooding, remains in my memory longer than all of the others. Black Lake, just outside the village and as ancient as the hills in which it nestles seems to act as a repository of all the joys and sorrows, generation upon generation, that have been enacted upon the local landscape. And, at the conclusion of Prichard’s beguiling tale, the lake’s black waters act as a mirror to reflect the cruel light of the moon.

Jees, the old lake looks good too. It’s strange that they call it Black Lake cos I can see the sky in it. Blue Lake would be a better name for it, cos it looks as though it’s full of blue eyes. Blue eyes laughing at me. Blue eyes laughing at me. Blue eyes laughing

Caradog Prichard: A Brief Biography

Caradog Prichard was born in 1904 in the Welsh slate-quarrying town of Bethesda. He worked on a number of Welsh local newspapers before moving to London where he became a sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph’s foreign desk. His published works include three collections of poetry and a semi-fictional autobiography. One Moonlit Night is his only published novel and, though first published in Welsh, it has since been translated into English and seven other languages. Caradog Prichard died in 1980.
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October 2012

Posted on 04/10/2012 by Bobby Seal

This past month Psychogeographic Review has been reading:

Maurice E.M Forster   ‘Maurice’ – E.M. Forster

The Best of Dorothy Parker’   ‘The Best of Dorothy Parker’ – erm, Dorothy Parker

Explorers of the New Century Magnus Miles   ‘Explorers of the New Century’ – Magnus Mills

The Awakening Kate Chopin   ‘The Awakening’ – Kate Chopin

Journey Through Britain John Hillaby   ‘Journey Through Britain’ – John Hillaby

Kingfishers Catch Fire Rumer Godden   ‘Kingfishers Catch Fire’ – Rumer Godden

The Goldilocks Enigma Paul Davies   ‘The Goldilocks Enigma’ – Paul Davies

Tooth & Nail Ian Rankin   ‘Tooth & Nail’ – Ian Rankin

 

Meanwhile, we were listening to:

Dry the River Shallow Bed   ‘Shallow Bed’ – Dry the River

Current 93 Black Ships Ate the Sky   ‘Black Ships Ate the Sky’ – Current 93

Joni Mitchell The Hissing of Summer Lawns   ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’ – Joni Mitchell

Traffic When the Eagle Flies   ‘When the Eagle Flies’ – Traffic

Miles Davis Bitches Brew   ‘Bitches Brew’ – Miles Davis

Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison   ‘Live at Folsom Prison’ – Johnny Cash

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Walking Alone

Posted on 24/09/2012 by Bobby Seal

 

Imagine you were a child with undiagnosed asthma and older brothers who always raced ahead when you were out walking. Supposing too that you were so completely urban in your upbringing that you always experienced a feeling of spatial illiteracy when asked to read a rural landscape…

This poem, on the other hand, is a meditation on a grown up recognition of the freedom of solitude. By Liz Lefroy.

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Walking Alone

 

This wind: it blows wild,

makes my hair shadows dance

on the pelleted grass.

 

I walk between plant pads

which ask nothing, not a name,

nor even a remark on their likeness

 

or difference from that time

which was another season

or in another place.

 

My pace, my breath

and its increase are my own:

the summit offers herself

 

as a permanence which

does not have to be climbed.

Behind me, and high

 

a kestrel hangs, though

I do not turn round to look,

and no one cries, Too late, too late!

 

And some footage of one of Liz’s readings can be found here.

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Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke

Posted on 12/09/2012 by Bobby Seal

I don’t normally publish notices at Psychogeographic Review but, since this event has been organised by this blog’s favourite poet, Liz Lefroy, and because it promises to be such a fantastic evening of wordsmithing, here goes…

On Thursday 11th October 2012 at 7.30pm Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke will read from their work at Glyndŵr University in Wrexham. The readings will take place in the William Aston Hall, Glyndŵr University, Wrexham.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate in 2009.  She has won many prizes, including the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Forward Poetry Prize, the TS Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award.  Her collections include Mean Time, The World’s Wife, Rapture and The Bees and she is editor of Jubilee Lines, 60 Poets for 60 Years:  a specially commissioned anthology marking the Queen’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee.

 

Gillian Clarke has been the National Poet of Wales since 2008.  In 2010 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Her Collected Poems was published in 1997 and collections published since have included Five Fields andA Recipe for Water.  Ice is due out in October 2012.  At the Source, A Writer’s Year, gives a lyrical insight into Gillian’s life as a writer set in the rich landscape of Ceredigion.

 

Tickets: £10 (£8 concessions) available from Glyndŵr Box Office or www.glyndwr.ticketsolve.com or phone 01978 293293

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Not On Safari in Harlesden – Website of the Month, August 2012

Posted on 16/08/2012 by Bobby Seal

I first heard from Rose Rouse when she asked me if I knew of any women involved in psychogeography.  The fact that there are, indeed, so few prominent female psychogeographers is a subject ripe for investigation, but that’s for another time and possibly in another forum. Serendipity, however, was at work and speaking to Rose led me to her wondrous website Not on Safari in Harlesden.

Not on Safari in Harlesden is, as the name suggests, about Harlesden, an area within the Borough of Brent in north-west London.  Harlesden is a vibrant, multi-cultural area that is not without its problems but, through Rose Rouse’s eyes, one comes to see that an air of optimism, creativity and tolerance seems to pervade the place.

Rose set up her website to record her explorations of Harlesden and, through the words of the people she walks and speaks with, uses the site to allow Harlesden to speak to the world.  I asked Rose why she felt Harlesden made such a good subject for her project.

“To me, Harlesden was a great subject because I felt that I lived here but I didn’t really know it.  And at some level, I felt afraid of it.  That it was so diverse – incomers have arrived from mostly Jamaica and Ireland in the 50s, then Pakistan and India in the 60s, after that Afghanistan, Brazil, Portugal, Columbia, Somalia and more.  I wasn’t sure a white middle-aged, middle-class woman would be welcomed.  That was my personal challenge.  I wanted to feel that Harlesden was my community.”

“Harlesden has a wayward character”, Rose explains.  “It’s unrestrainable, loud, and ballsy.  I loved the way when I arrived everyone double-parked as the norm. There’s a Wild West feeling here and an exuberance. So far it has resisted gentrification…”

Rose Rouse has been a journalist for over 20 years.  Not one to avoid controversy, she recalls being pelted with bread rolls by Frankie Goes to Hollywood in the green room of The Tube after she gave their album a poor review.  More recently she has done work for The Observer, GQ and (say it quietly) the Daily Mail.  Books Rose has published so far include Missing (2008) and Last Letters to Loved Ones (2009).

Rose doesn’t profess to be a psychogeographer, though much of her methodology is familiar to those of us who find that tag useful; she walks, she observes, she soaks up impressions, she gives as much credence to the landscapes of the imagination as she does to those of the official guidebook.  Most of all she speaks to people, and allows them to speak through her writing.

Maybe it’s a thing with male writers, or maybe it’s just me, but when I compare my own blog with Not on Safari I feel quite socially inept!  Like many male writers, I have a tendency to concentrate on ideas and things rather than people, hence my writing doesn’t have the life and vibrancy that leaps out at you when you read Rose’s website.  She describes her philosophy behind Not on Safari in Harlesden.

“I say it’s a mixture of urban anthropology, memoir and happenings.  I bring my life to Harlesden as well as Harlesden bringing its life to me.  Sometimes, I treat Harlesden as a stage. I sat underneath a sign saying Talk To Me in an attempt to embrace strangers.  And I embraced quite a few. I made a short film with eight friends dressed in red where we danced the walkways of our railway station Willesden Junction, and we seemed to have an infectious effect on the other passers-by.  That was like a nomadic journey to see if we could conceive of the industrial bleakness as beautiful.”

“And I like to think that the people I walk with – say different things to a static interview because we are walking in this landscape.  They are moving interviews.”

Rose has managed to persuade quite a varied collection of people to walk with her, as you can read about on her website.  Does she find they need much persuading to take part?

“Louis Theroux, a neighbour, politely declined for a while, but I persisted.  Tenacity has always been one of my ‘qualities’ and I need it for this.  And eventually, he gracefully surrendered.  Alexei Sayle took a little while.  Don Letts and I had a lot of banter for a year before we finally walked together.  I’m still waiting for Tamsin Greig to relent, she lives nearby but I always take the formal route via agents.  I used to interview people in the world of rock n’ roll so am used to the rough n’ tumble of it.”

I asked about the Talk To Me happening.  This was where she sat under the Jubilee Clock in the middle of Harlesden with a sign saying ‘Talk To Me’ and waited to see if anyone would.  I find it quite one of the most moving posts on her blog.  Was she tempted to bottle out of doing it at any point?

“Yes, I had the idea then I didn’t act for a long time. Then one of my friends fortuitously mentioned that she thought I was muddling along. That galvanised me into action. My son – who was initially very embarrassed – came along and took photographs. I appreciated that he was nearby.”

Finally, I ask Rose what other projects she is working on at the moment.

“I’m doing another short film called Dance Harlesden but this time with an original soundtrack. We’re having a workshop in September to co-create the music with a talented musician friend.  I’ve also suggested a documentary to Radio 4 on Harlesden, and am involved with a film-maker who is doing a documentary for TV.

I’ve had some initial interest from a publishing company re making this project into a book, so have been working on a proposal this summer.  Time Out are running a piece in the magazine about my five secret Harlesden places.”

Oh yeah, one more thing.  Why is the website called Not on Safari in Harlesden?

“Because I saw this message posted on the White Pride World Wide Forum, and it was titled Mine and GF’s (girlfriend’s) Safari In Harlesden: “So I think if any of you need to convince brainwashed whites about the very real dangers of multicultural society up close and personal, then take them to Harlesden.”

I was ‘disgusted of Harlesden’ and this is my riposte…”

 

Images courtesy of Rose Rouse

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Psychogeography: Taking Back the City

Posted on 08/08/2012 by Bobby Seal

 

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – all this seems to be neglected.

Guy Debord: Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (1955)

 

When I was a child I began to construct a map of the small town in which I lived.  It wasn’t a physical map, but one that I began to trace in my mind.  And it was an experiential map: as I grew and became more familiar with my neighbourhood, as I expanded my horizons, so the map grew.

As a small child my map consisted of the houses nearby where the children with whom I played lived and the waste ground across the road where we acted out our games.  Just around the corner was the sweet shop and chippie which both featured prominently on my map and, once I was allowed to walk to school with my mates and without my mum, around the age of five or six I seem to recall, my map expanded hugely to include the recreation ground, the park and other, less familiar streets.

As I grew older my personal map steadily expanded and I even began to grasp some notion of how my sleepy market town fitted into the wider world.  But I never actually saw a real printed map of my town, at least not until I started secondary school.

I don’t think my experience is unique; all children map out their surroundings, pushing at the boundaries and conducting explorations.  It’s a process engaged in at an individual level, but also a collective one; as children on our council estate we had our own names for many of the topographical features around us, names which were not familiar to most of the adults around us.  We had our own folklore and mythology concerning certain locations; dire warnings about certain houses, lanes or woods.

In fact, researchers from the National Library of Australia have shown that there is a form of folklore which belongs exclusively to children.  Child’s lore is different to folklore in that it is passed from one child to another, whereas folklore is transmitted by adults to children.

I have a lifelong love of maps.  I find them useful for what they can do; a street map can help me find my way around somewhere unfamiliar and, as a regular hill-walker, I rely heavily on OS maps.  But I also love maps as works of art, gorgeous colourful maps with exotic names and suggestions of strange landscapes.  Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, for instance, is a masterpiece of lovingly created, hand-drawn maps.

Maps have never been so readily available, not just the traditional Ordnance Survey and A to Z variety, but maps on your computer, on your phone and in your car.  Maps are everywhere.  But what is a map?  What does it tell us and who drew it?  Do we have to accept the officially sanctioned version or, taking the lesson that childhood offers us, do we make a conscious decision to construct our own living maps?

The Situationist International was a disparate group of French intellectuals and dissidents who, in the 1950s, created a loosely-drawn school of thought that we now refer to as psychogeography.  For me, psychogeography is an invaluable and radically different tool that we can engage to help us understand the social and geographical environment in which we live.

The city is a human-created environment as, indeed, are suburban and rural zones.  The way in which we experience and react to these environments, however, is not neutral but it is conditioned and controlled by the prevailing drivers of our society.  The legacy of Guy Debord and other pioneers of psychogeography is to suggest to us that there are ways in which we can expose and subvert this environmental manipulation and, in doing so, begin to exert some control over the way that we experience our streets.

Our experience of the city is increasingly characterised by prescription: zones for retail, business and housing are assigned at the planning stage and the routes that we walk, cycle or drive through the city are labelled and any deviation is discouraged.  Even our mental image of the city is manipulated and boxed into a kind of restrictive functionality.   Harry Beck’s iconic London Tube map, for instance, though a beautiful visual creation in itself, sacrifices the human and the whimsical in favour of the functional.  For many of us this map is London, but it is a London where any form of wandering, exploring or even simply hanging around is discouraged in order to push us towards taking the quickest route from A to B.

Psychogeography’s most powerful tool for experiencing the city in an altogether different way is the dérive, or drift.  A dérive involves the participants wandering through the city with no particular purpose or destination.  But it is not an aimless walk; on a dérive our minds remains consciously engaged.  And as we walk we remain open to the resonances that certain streets or buildings produce within our emotions and we note not just what we see, but the sounds and smells we encounter and the texture of the ground beneath our feet.

…the Situationists developed an armoury of confusing weapons intended constantly to provoke critical notice of the totality of lived experience and reverse the stultifying passivity of the spectacle. ‘Life can never be too disorientating,’ wrote Debord and Wolman, in support of which they described a friend’s experience wandering ‘through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London

Sadie Plant: The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (1992)

This is not so much a case of wandering without a map but, to return to our original theme, it is wandering in order to construct our own map.  And, rather like the tale of the emperor’s new clothes, once we make a conscious effort to see through and beyond that which we are told we should see, we begin to develop a cognition that is, to a limited degree at least, free of societal orthodoxy.  We develop a way of experiencing the city that is not defined by consumerism or the commodification of our relationships.  To use the language of psychogeography, this is our détournment; the turning around of our consciousness.

But, in case this is all beginning to sound a little too earnest, remember that Debord characterised psychogeography as ‘playful reconstructive behaviour’ and that the whole process is about asserting the freedom to enjoy exploring our streets.

                                     

                                         Image courtesy of Red & Black, Detroit

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St. Giles Churchyard

Posted on 30/07/2012 by Bobby Seal

 

Pictures taken in St Giles churchyard, Wrexham and a poem written at the grave of Elihu Yale, founder of Yale University.

 

 

 

At the grave of Elihu Yale.

 

Born in America, in Europe bred.

 

Summer rain, warm

Fragrance of mown grass.

Droplets cling

To hand and lens.

Weathered stones upon this hill,

Sightless eyes gazing out,

The bustling town below.

Within this place, peace.

Eternal sleep.  Raindrops

On ancient slabs and

Glowering yew trees.

 

In Africa travelled, and

In Asia wed.

 

A New World, fortune reaped and

A league of ivy sown.

Returning at last to

An old world to die.

Soot black leaves, the

Shade of everlasting slumber.

 

Where long he lived and

Thrived in London

Dead.

 

Here he reclines

With Elsie Booth and

Emmanuel Purdey.

Pillars of the community,

Supporting now a

Verdant swathe.

 

Entrance to Mr. Lewis’s vault.

 

No need for first names in

Life following death.

 

Smell sweet and

Blossom in the silent dust.

 

A haven from the

Morning rush.

Manmade heaven in

Masonic stone.

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