The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  In contrast to the homely involutions of space in the Hall Lakes’ house, the spatial disposition of this house is distinctly unhomely. Ford deliberately draws on a Gothic register in order to represent it, as in the image of the mediaeval staircase, which seems to have been transposed from the Castle of Udolpho. It is a haunted house. Even the housemaids’ phrase for it, ‘A Murderer’, which refers colloquially to the murderous demands of the staircases they repeatedly had to climb in order to attend to their duties, assumes more sinister overtones – it is as if the house itself, with its violently angular features, takes on the anthropomorphic qualities of a psychopath.

  Ford blames the house for ‘the chain of disasters, suicides, bankruptcies and despairs that visited its successive tenants and owners’ (174). The house is accursed. This is perhaps an instance, then, of the phenomenon that Anthony Vidler has called ‘the architectural uncanny’.12 And Ford manifestly suffers what might be characterized as a spatial phobia, or topophobic anxiety, in relation to it. The metropolis itself at this time he described as ‘that London mausoleum of 1903’ (208).

  Ford was afflicted by a number of phobias in London. Of these, agoraphobia was by far the most prominent. ‘From 1903 to 1906 illness removed me from most activities,’ as he himself summarizes it in Return to Yesterday: ‘I suffered from what was diagnosed as agoraphobia and intense depression.’ While insisting that he ‘had nothing specific to be depressed about’, he admits nonetheless that these years, his ‘lost years’, represented ‘uninterrupted mental agony’ (202).

  Ford’s complaint, which in the autobiography he unconvincingly ascribes to intense fatigue, manifested itself in ‘a slight fluttering of the heart’ and a sudden faintness (204). ‘This will naturally sometimes happen in the street,’ he adds, and ‘the result therefore a little resembles agoraphobia’ (204). It happened in empty spaces other than the street, too, so his condition does more than simply resemble agoraphobia. It is a profoundly disabling ‘movement inhibition’, to use Paul Carter’s deliberately unspecific, but nonetheless useful, definition of agoraphobia.13

  In July 1904, to cite an incident that testifies directly to Ford’s agoraphobia, his friend Olive Garnett set off with him on a walk across Salisbury Plain, close to a house that he and Elsie had rented; and found that he was suddenly incapable of proceeding. Garnett later offered a revealing description of this incident in a memorandum:

  Ford had an attack of agoraphobia, & said if I didn’t take his arm he would fall down. I held on in all the blaze for miles, it seemed to me, but the town reached, he walked off briskly to get tobacco and a shave; and when I pointed this out to Elsie she said ‘nerves’. He can’t cross wide open spaces. She said he had already consulted a local doctor. We explored further & went to Stonehenge, but he got worse.14

  Garnett also described him, while they walked together, ‘sitting down on every seat & putting a lozenge into his mouth against agoraphobia’.15 Here, too, Ford’s susceptibility to superstition appears to shape, even as it proposes a solution to, his agoraphobic anxiety about ‘wide open spaces’.

  Ford spent five months in Germany that same year in an attempt to cure his condition, drifting unhappily from one medical institution to another like some melancholic exile from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924). ‘Everyone diagnosed my trouble as agoraphobia,’ he reports with comic bitterness in the autobiography; ‘sixteen or seventeen of them attributed it to sexual abnormalities and treated me for them’ (204). Attempting ‘a nerve cure on the Lake of Constance’, for example, where the treatment was principally hydropathic, he later admitted: ‘I was so weak that, even if the so-called agoraphobia had not interfered with my walking I should hardly have been able to get about’ (202).

  In the last of the sanatoria he attended, the Rhineland Kaltwasser-Heilanstalt, he was put on a diet of pork and ice cream and forced to take iced footbaths. ‘There’s such a lot of nervous breakdown in the land,’ he declared in a letter to Elsie, half in triumph, half in defeat. ‘They’ve a regular name for lack of walking power up here: Platz Angst.’16 In a letter to Garnett from Germany, Ford told her that he was ‘staggering along the streets’.17

  The German psychologist Carl Otto Westphal first assigned the name ‘agoraphobia’ to a fear of open or urban spaces in 1871. It had however been identified as a distinct neuropathic phenomenon since at least the late 1860s, at the outset of what David Trotter has called ‘phobia’s belle époque’.18 In his Die Agoraphobie (1872), Westphal observed that ‘for some years patients have repeatedly approached me with the peculiar complaint that it is not possible for them to walk across open spaces and through certain streets and that, due to the fear of such paths, they are troubled in their freedom of movement.’19

  One example he offered was that of a salesman suffering from this complaint:

  For two years now a feeling of fear walking through the streets alone has been accompanying him; in the beginning such walks were almost impossible for him, now he at least tries, but a nibbling feeling in the stomach area, a feeling of paralysis in his arms and legs, as if he could not move, as if he would fall to the ground[,] overcomes him.20

  The feeling of falling. Of collapsing. This is the classic experience of the agoraphobic. As examined by Moritz Benedikt, Emil Cordes and Henri Legrand du Saulle, in addition to Westphal himself, agoraphobia was variously associated with epileptic, melancholic and neurasthenic conditions, and with vertigo. The psychiatrist Legrand du Saulle referred to it as ‘la peur des espaces’.

  In Britain in the late 1890s, some five years before Ford’s acute crisis, a physician to the Leicester Infirmary and Fever House called J. Headley Neale insisted in the pages of the Lancet that ‘the “agoraphobic” is a much more common individual than you might be led to infer from the little which is said or written about him.’ In part so as to refute a ‘West-end physician’ who had claimed that ‘agoraphobia was all bosh and due to excess of wine and venery’, Neale offered his own experiences as forceful testimony to its significance. These began, he relates, when he was a medical student in Edinburgh:

  Walking briskly one evening down the slope [of Chalmers St] I have my first attack; and it is the suddenness and unexpectedness of the first attack that is so alarming – a feeling that something dreadful is going to happen, that the end of all my strivings and longings has come. I stop; the heart seems seized in an iron grip. I feel as though I were going down into the earth and the earth were coming up to meet me. There is no semblance of giddiness or faintness in these attacks, it is more a feeling of collapse as though one were being shut up like a crush hat or a Chinese lantern. I have a strong inclination to cry out and I feel that I must fall, so I lay hold of, and steady myself by, the palings. A deep heaving sigh, the breaking out of a cold sweat upon the forehead, and in less time than it takes to describe (a few seconds only) the attack has passed.

  Neale associated agoraphobia both with ‘fear of impending death’ and ‘the dread of an open space’ that is ‘called up by a sensation of vastness, infinity, and solitude’.21 In short, he concluded that it was an existential condition rather than a moral one.

  As the term’s etymological root in the notion of agora or marketplace implied, agoraphobia was consistently associated with cities. In France, for example, where cases of agoraphobia had been documented since the late 1860s, Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Gélineau, the discoverer of narcolepsy, refined the prevailing definition and insisted in 1890 on employing the term kénophobie, on the grounds that the condition ‘strikes only the inhabitant of cities …, developing under the influence of that debilitating atmosphere of the big towns that has been called malaria urbana’.22

  The empty spaces of the metropolis, especially large squares, appear to have been a particular problem for agoraphobics. ‘Nineteenth-century agoraphobics experienced the gigantic squares and boulevards introduced into their cities as hostile environments,’ Kathryn Milun has stated. ‘They perceived these monumental spaces as “empty
” and experienced intense anxiety that caused them to retreat to the curb, to their homes, and even to bed.’23 (I am reminded of Ford’s image of Zola marooned on that park bench in London, oppressed perhaps by the ‘immensity’ of a city whose ‘colossal character’ he had once admired.)

  Agoraphobia is not exclusively an urban psychopathology, as the example of Ford’s collapse on Salisbury Plain itself demonstrates; but its emergence is arguably inseparable from a certain experience of the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘Once we recognise that the spaces which bring it on are not just topographically open, but public, a social as well as a physical expanse,’ Trotter insists, ‘we can surely agree that there is a great deal in them to disable.’24

  Ford seems to have been conscious of this public, urban dimension. In Return to Yesterday, he writes that ‘at the beginning of the [twentieth] century it would have taken you 247 years walking at four miles an hour to cover all the streets of London on foot’ (notice here that the digits comprising the number 247 add up to thirteen). ‘What it would take now goodness knows,’ he adds – ‘A thousand likely.’ From this terrifying agoraphobic image, which evokes an inexhaustibly labyrinthine city, Ford infers an existential lesson he claims should be the first that artists learn, namely ‘that you are merely an atom among vastnesses and shouldn’t take yourself very seriously’ (171).

  This vision of an atom among vastnesses shapes a number of Ford’s poems from the early 1900s, several of which have rural rather than urban settings. ‘On a Marsh Road’, for example, from The Face of the Night (1904), evokes ‘infinite, glimpsing distances’ and ‘eternal silences’; ‘infinite plains [which] know no wanderer’s foot’ and ‘infinite distances where alone is rest’.25 Ford’s sense of isolation and insignificance, however, does seem to stem in particular from an alienated, psychopathological relationship to the streets of the metropolis. ‘When you get out of the Paris train at Charing Cross,’ he comments in Return to Yesterday, ‘it feels as if you sink down like a plummet into dim depths and were at once lost to sight’ (230).

  He seems to have felt equally lost when arriving in Paris from London. In his Preface to Jean Rhys’s collection The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), he describes the Left Bank itself as ‘a vast, sandy desert, like the Sahara … but immense.’ He concedes that, geographically, it hasn’t altered since his childhood, but emphasizes that ‘the mental image’ has been dramatically altered by the passing of time. The Left Bank, which he boasts of knowing ‘better than any other portion of the surface of the globe’, is a place that nonetheless reminds him ‘how minutely little one can know even of one street thickly inhabited by human beings’.26 A densely populated place that is at the same time ‘immense’, like a ‘desert’, is a quintessentially agoraphobic one.

  It is no surprise, then, that Ford goes on to talk about the ways in which the populous plains of the Left Bank have impeded his movements as a pedestrian in Paris, especially in the early evenings, when taxicabs are ‘unprocurable’ and ‘it is impossible to get a place in a bus.’27 (As one correspondent to the Lancet advised in 1885, ‘should the symptom [of agoraphobia] be very aggravated, the patient should only (in London) walk in the open streets, where he can obtain a cab should he require one.’28)

  Ford is too delicate, of course, to refer to his agoraphobic condition in the context of this Preface. But he concludes nonetheless that ‘the impression of infinitely long walks with the legs feeling as if you dragged each step out of sands … remains.’29 Impressions, obviously enough, are everything to the Impressionist, so this is a graphic testament – all the more vivid because of that ellipsis – to the inhibitive force of this psychopathology on his ability to move freely about the city on foot.

  Certainly, the strikingly odd incident that seems in 1904 to have triggered Ford’s agoraphobia, an incident in which superstitious and phobic behaviour are indissociable, is irreducibly urban. This is the first and most significant of the examples of poor luck that he offers in Return to Yesterday.

  Ford explains that, after he had given Elsie an opal ring, for some reason they both became convinced that this precious stone was the cause of the series of disasters that befell them, including the most recent, his daughter’s distinctly Gothic domestic accident. In consequence, having tried and failed to dispose of it in several improvised rites, he finally decided to neutralize its supernatural force by disposing of the ring in running water, through which, so he claims, witchcraft ‘cannot operate’ (227).

  He therefore set out for the Thames at Hammersmith Bridge with the opal in his pocket: ‘At once an indescribable lassitude fell on me. I was almost unable to drag my legs along and quite incapable of getting to the Thames’ (227). He tells us that he thought of dropping the stone through a grating, but was unfortunate enough to meet a policeman every time he caught sight of one, and feared being accused of disposing of stolen property. The next day he decided to send the opal to a convent as a donation, having first apprised the Mother Superior of its malignant properties. But, in taking it to the post office, he found himself ‘almost completely unable to walk’: ‘I could hardly drag my feet along,’ he writes (227–8).

  Ford derives a rather curious moral from this incident – one that, suspiciously perhaps, occludes its specifically spatial aspects. He claims that, if a novelist is superstitious, he will be at one with the ordinary people he represents in his fiction: ‘A novelist had better share the superstitions of, than high-hat, humanity’ (228). ‘Superstitions, belief in luck, premonitions’, he emphasizes, ‘play such a great part in human motives that a novelist who does not to some extent enter into those feelings can hardly understand and will certainly be unable to render to perfection most human affairs’ (229).

  Ford’s covertly elitist claim, here, is that a superstitious cast of mind, to the precise extent that it is a common, if not universal mentality, provides an effective means of identifying with the masses. He repeats an odd anecdote in support of this asseveration:

  I remember once dreadfully shocking Mr Edward Garnett. It was at the time when Limpsfield was disturbed by my wearing a cloth cap. I said it was my ambition to pass unobserved in a crowd. Mr Garnett never forgot that. Years after he advanced it against me as a proof of my bourgeois nature.

  And indeed it is so. Yet the novelist must pass unobserved in the crowd if he himself is to observe. And the crowd is his clay, of his observations of it he will build his monuments to humanity. The social reformer may – and usually does – render himself conspicuous by singular garments that express his singular personality. It does not matter how humanity reacts towards him. He will make capital out of persecution.

  But the first thing the novelist has to learn is self-effacement – that first and that always. (228)

  The ‘cloth cap’ might unconsciously have functioned as a form of protection against Ford’s agoraphobia. Interestingly, Carter has proposed that a hat ‘introduce[s] a little distance between the walker and the street’; and moreover that, because ‘no hat comes without its hatpeg, it implie[s] an imminent homecoming’, and therefore acts as ‘a thread through the day’s labyrinth’.30 But, in so far as this cap is a social disguise, even a cap of invisibility, it also speaks to the Baudelairean tradition of the artist remaining unseen in the city, the better to see the city.

  The ambition to ‘pass unobserved in the crowd’ in order to observe the crowd is of course characteristic of that celebrated modernist archetype for the artist, the flâneur. Ford dreams, then, of being a flâneur of the kind described by Baudelaire; but, as an agoraphobic, he is congenitally, and almost comically, ill-equipped to perform the role. For the agoraphobic is in effect the antitype of the flâneur. In his famous commentary on the poetics of urban space in Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin states that ‘the street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls.’31 An agoraphobic could not be less at home in the street. The spaces of the m
etropolis are profoundly alien to an individual such as Ford whose movement is pathologically inhibited.

  ‘You are to remember’, Ford had reminded his reader in a previous chapter of the autobiography, ‘that my chief trouble was that I imagined that I could not walk’ (206). He there implies that being at one with the common people whom the contemporary novelist must represent is simply a matter of putting on a proletarian cap. He assumes that it is impossible to ‘high-hat’ humanity if one is inconspicuous. A cloth cap, he hopes, like that of Perseus in the Greek myth, makes its wearer magically disappear in the metropolis. Ford is, in fact, concealing the extent to which his spatial phobia shaped his Impressionist aesthetic.

  For, in representing the modern metropolis and its ‘human affairs’, Ford is forced into a compromise. He must attempt to grasp the dialectic of the fleeting and the infinite characteristic of modernity, as Baudelaire’s example demands, but he is in practice capable of doing so only from outside the urban crowd that embodies it. This is a painful paradox for the ambitious modernist artist to find himself trapped in. He cannot be at the very centre of the world and at the same time unseen of the world. And it is in part because he cannot inhabit ‘the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life’, as Baudelaire put it, that Ford’s perception, his peculiar consciousness, is of paramount importance to his aesthetic.32 His Impressionism, then, is among other things the product of his inability to participate in the life he is committed to representing. It is a half-vicarious means of experiencing the modernity that he is forced to observe from the margins of the city.

  According to the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a phobia acts as an ‘unconscious estrangement technique’ because it constitutes the phobic object as an alien phenomenon.33 Ford’s agoraphobia estranges him from the life of the city, it might be concluded, because he cannot spontaneously or unselfconsciously participate in it.