by Lauren Elkin
In the essay material, Woolf is sometimes more sociologically explicit; young Edward Pargiter, for instance, had from a young age been allowed to walk around London on his own, and had picked up a certain kind of ‘knowledge’ on the streets, which was complemented by what he heard from the other boys at school.50 Analysing the different ways that men and women are allowed to use space was part of her feminist agenda. ‘Eleanor and Milly and Delia could not possibly go for a walk alone – save in the streets round about Abercorn Terrace, and then only between the hours of eight-thirty and sunset.’ Woolf says explicitly that ‘For any of them to walk in the West End even by day was out of the question. Bond Street was as impassable, save with their mother, as any swamp alive with crocodiles. The Burlington Arcade was nothing but a fever-stricken den as far as they were concerned.’51
And yet the Pargiter women love to walk in the city; the excitement of the Strand gives Eleanor the feeling of ‘expand[ing]’.52 Through Eleanor, we see that charity work is one of the only ways for a middle-class woman to get out of the house on her own, walking in the poorer districts of the city. Though it isn’t for enjoyment or distraction, but a Victorian gesture of care for those less fortunate, this does not lessen the sense of freedom women like Eleanor derived from it.
Then there is the youngest Pargiter sibling, Rose, who also wants to go out walking by herself. When she does, she cannot make sense of what she learns on the street; there is no school for her, where she could figure out, like her brother Edward, what’s what. One evening, she sneaks out to the toy store to buy ducks and swans for her bathtub. She tiptoes into the front garden, like a tiny cat out for his first prowl, and when she reaches the corner she straightens up and casts herself in a heroic guise, imagining she is on a secret mission to a ‘besieged garrison’. ‘“I am Pargiter of Pargiter’s House,” she said, flourishing her hand, “riding to the rescue!”’53 As she nears the shop, that is, the garrison, a terrifying man leers in her face. She holds up her fingers to form a gun: ‘“The enemy!” Rose cried to herself. “The enemy! Bang!” she cried, pulling the trigger of her pistol and looking him full in the face as she passed him. It was a horrid face; white, peeled, pock-marked.’ He thrusts out his arm and almost catches her. When she passes him again, on her way home, he begins to undress, and makes a ‘mewing’ noise.54 Lying in bed that night, Rose can’t sleep; her sisters can’t understand why, and neither can she make sense of the fear and guilt that keep her awake. She can only say she saw ‘a robber’. But what she has been robbed of is impossible to tell. She will grow up to be a suffragette, and refuse male domination in all its forms, whether it be over the public sphere of politics or the public space of the city.
The Years presses forward into Woolf’s present day, weaving and reweaving its cast of many, as the family proliferates in some places and dies off in others. But the streets don’t change. The car may have replaced the hansom, the Tube become a common means of transport rather than a novelty, we may cover them in and reroute them and build them elsewhere, but the streets can still be the site for a declaration of freedom, or, in Rose’s case, resistance to forces that would curb that freedom. Though the novel is the history of a family through one long generation, it also charts the changing of attitudes and mores in British culture in general.
Like ‘Street Haunting’, it imagines a freedom for women on the streets of the city to come and go as they please, on foot. In the novel’s final scene, the family comes together at a party given by Delia, who has long since left London with her Irish husband. They stay up into the wee hours of the morning talking, reuniting, and, Eleanor, now in her seventies, realises: ‘“all the tubes have stopped, and all the omnibuses,” she said, turning round. “How are we going to get home?”
‘“We can walk,” said Rose. “Walking won’t do us any harm.”’55
* * *
The city that gave Woolf so many novels, stories, poems, so much literary and personal freedom – I have been looking for it since that June day in Bloomsbury in 2004. Staying there for regular periods since 2012, I have gained a real affection for the city, exploring its nooks and corners on foot, especially the leafy north, where a kind editor put me up for a while in her house in Primrose Hill, and the leafy southeast, where a kind architect rented me a room in her house in Brockley. I have walked everywhere, and come to know Peckham High Street and Highgate, Bethnal Green and Green Park, Holland Park and Honor Oak, the Isle of Dogs and Dulwich, Clerkenwell and Camberwell, Greenwich and Gravesend. But my London is a twenty-first-century city, one Woolf probably wouldn’t recognise.
The London she loved: there are fewer and fewer people who remember it any more, leaving those of us who read her diaries and letters and books to reconstruct it for ourselves. We have to rebuild a world from the rustle of paper.
Or we could put on our shoes and go out the door.
walk northeast on rue du Départ, bear right around Place du 18 Juin 1940, cross the boulevard, north on rue de Rennes, past the Fnac, Naf Naf, H&M, right at St Placide and northeast on rue de Vaugirard, past the Institut Catholique where I taught once, keep an eye out for that lovely bookseller in an old butcher’s shop, past the Jardin de Luxembourg, follow the curve of it, then really you have your pick of smallish streets, just move northeast, north-east, till you emerge onto the Boulevard Saint-Michel and follow it till you hit the river
PARIS
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
For these roads are not straight, but have several revolutions.
– Josephus
Whenever I come across roadworks in Paris, I always stop to look at what they’ve dug up. I peer over the corrugated green and silver barriers down into the cross section of layers of street accumulated over the centuries. I look for the cobblestones further down, nestled under swathes of pavement laid after the upheaval of 1968. Traditionally, when there’s been an uprising, Parisians have dislodged the cobblestones and thrown them at the authorities – the Republican army, the riot police, whomever – so in certain neighbourhoods a protective layer of asphalt was smoothed over the stones. I get a thrill in seeing them revealed again, the kind you get from seeing something you shouldn’t, what’s usually covered up, or hidden away, like when I walk past a porte cochère I’ve never seen open, and catch sight of the expansive courtyard stretching back behind it, or the muddy expanse of a worksite where a building used to be, or even, on elevated métro lines like the 6 or the 2, glimpse someone in their flat who doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, that they’ve been seen.
In Paris, when the city workers dig into the streets, it’s as if they give passers-by access to long-finished, long-covered-over revolutions. How deep would they have to dig to reach the paving stones they replaced after 1848, after 1830? I wonder who walked those stones, planning the revolt to come. What drives a person to dig their fingers into the crust of Paris as if it were nothing but sand, prying loose the stone from its setting, perhaps with the aid of a chisel and a spade. Sous les pavés la plage (‘Under the paving stones, the beach’), they graffitied on the walls of the city, sometimes the very ones on which was already printed Défense d’afficher (‘It is forbidden to post’). Défense de ne pas afficher (‘It is forbidden not to post’), someone wrote on the wall at Sciences-Po in 1968.
What do we see of a revolution after it’s gone? A better world, perhaps. Some changes in the structure of society. But not always – sometimes there’s no change at all. ‘People must hope so much when they tear streets up and fight at barricades,’ muses the young woman at the centre of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1935 novel The House in Paris. ‘But, whoever wins, the streets are laid again and the trams start running again.’1 Karen longs for a total, irreversible upheaval, but the world into which she is born – upper class, Regent’s Park, Georgian-terraced London – resists all attempts at change. She is talking more about private revolutions, the overthrow of family and custom, the kind she attempts in the novel’s central transgression, and later pretends n
ever happened.
* * *
Looking over their city, Parisians tend to write more about what’s disappeared than what’s still visible. ‘Old Paris is no more (a city changes more quickly, alas, than the human heart),’ wrote Baudelaire.2 ‘Alas! Old Paris is disappearing with terrifying rapidity,’ sighed Balzac.3 Louis Aragon, the surrealist poet, composed an elegy to the Passage de l’Opéra, built in 1822 but scheduled to be demolished in 1925 to make room for the Boulevard Haussmann. Composed of the Thermometer Gallery, the Barometer Gallery and the Clock Gallery, all technologies for charting ambiance, it was the perfect surrealist territory. Guy Debord, in his autobiography Panegyric, lamented: ‘To see the banks of the Seine will see our grief: nothing is found there now save the bustling columns of an anthill of motorised slaves.’4 When Baudelaire sighs alas, the form of a city changes faster than the human heart, in a way he’s talking about a rate of change the human heart can’t measure, forces of change that go beyond individual capacity. Traces of the past city are, somehow, traces of the selves we might once have been.
Here and there we find them, and we fetishise them. A bit of faded, stencilled signage on the side of a building; the disused railroad track known as the Petite Ceinture, which can be glimpsed in places like the Parc Montsouris and Ménilmontant; a plaque on the ground near my old apartment informing anyone who notices it that the Bièvre flows under their feet, having been covered over for reasons of public sanitation in 1912. We peer at photographs by Atget and Marville, trying to imagine that those people we see in their aprons and flat caps leaning against doorposts in streets we don’t recognise aren’t characters from a Zola novel, but real people who lived and breathed, and stood still long enough to be captured on film. Unlike many of their fellow Parisians in these photographic cityscapes, who were moving too quickly for the slow-seeing lens to notice them.
Slow down: it’s the only way to guarantee your immortality.
* * *
I am always looking for ghosts on the boulevards. So many people have passed through Paris; did they leave any residue? Some parts of town seem still to be inhabited by older souls who won’t leave – up towards the Portes Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin I think I can feel them, crowds of people in bowler hats and long skirts, I can sense them pressing past me along with the people I recognise from my own time, bare-headed and in short skirts. Other places seem totally empty, tabula rasa, like the brand-new city-within-a-city near the library in the 13th, which looks a bit like Anytown, USA, with its wide sidewalks and pristine new buildings all in glass and steel. It’s hard to believe anything else was ever there, or anyone else, that it isn’t a bit of earth brought about by real-estate developers to be inhabited by render ghosts.
Most of the meaningful moments of my life have taken place here, since I moved here for good, on the cusp of adulthood. Bliss has unravelled, joy coalesced out of nothing; my life has pulsed in its streets alongside so many others. Key spots on my emotional map of Paris glow hot for a time, and then the heat and light subside; I can walk past that fountain near the Comédie Française, for example, and not remember that I once kissed someone there, or walk right by the flat I shared with an ex and not think about him. Which doesn’t mean those places have lost their charge; it takes something unexpected to strike a match and set the air on fire. An unexpected face. A song. Someone’s cologne.
But these signals come in on my own personal frequency; they wouldn’t mean much to anyone else. We all have our own signals we’re listening for, or trying not to hear.
* * *
‘Places remember events,’ James Joyce noted in the margins of Ulysses.5 I want to see the evidence. Some inscription of what’s gone before, beyond what I can read in a book. I want to read the city like a book. War embedded in the surfaces of building facades. Bullet marks. Plaques telling us who died where. Sacré-Coeur perches like a neo-Byzantine wedding cake atop the Mont des Martyrs, an architectural apology to God for the bloodshed of the Commune. I learned about the Commune when I was a university student in Paris, and couldn’t believe it. Ten thousand people dead in the streets of Paris only 130 years before? It seemed shockingly barbaric. Why had I never heard of it? Why did no one talk about it? Plaques mark the spots from the schools from which Jewish children were deported or where résistants were gunned down in the forties, sometimes accented by a metal vase containing some long-wilted carnations. At least once a week I walk past the pavement plaque in the rue Monsieur-le-Prince dedicated to Malik Oussedine, the student who was beaten to death by the police during a student protest in 1986. He wasn’t even one of the protesters. The Seine swallowed a hundred Algerians in 1961; they were heaved in by police commanded by the Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon for demonstrating in favour of the National Liberation Front, which was carrying out bombings in France in the name of Algerian independence; that was his excuse. In 1961 someone graffitied onto the walls of the bridge Ici on noie des Algeriens (‘Here we drown Algerians’). Today, there’s a memorial on the Pont Saint-Michel. But the water bears no trace of them.
* * *
Paris has always had a ‘taste for tumult’, as Théophile Lavallée noted in 1845, with its ‘hurried, seething, tumultuous’ population, but today it presents a serene face to the world, in spite of all this revolting and murdering.6 To take a stroll through the lower levels of the Gare du Nord, or to watch the cop show Spiral, is to quickly locate the discord simmering in today’s city.
And yet on some streets you could forget all that, places so beautiful it’s as if no conflict has ever touched them.
Was this spot on the earth beautiful always? Did the Romans notice the light?
Yet the beauty of Paris is very much man-made, crafted out of speculation and conflict. In the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV asked his chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert to decide what would be the best stone to build with. They were looking for a new quarry, as the one they had been using directly under the city was having the predictable structural consequences. (Those quarries were shored up by Charles-Axel Guillaumot and became a useful spot for depositing all the bones from the Cimetière des Innocents when it was destroyed in the late eighteenth century.)7 Colbert reported back that a commission had found a quarry in the Oise region, conveniently accessible by boat, which produced stones to match those used to build Notre-Dame. The bricks for Parisian builds have come from the Saint-Maximin limestone quarries ever since.8 Did they know they were building houses that would absorb and reflect the light? And who drew the rooftops, with their sloping slate and their chimney pots, their slices of masonry standing up from the curve of the rooftops like the finish of a ballerina’s port de bras, the lilt and lift of their fingers Surrealist vessels for exhaling smoke?
Some of these buildings came into being through Haussmann’s determined plan to modernise Paris, tearing down entire neighbourhoods and displacing thousands of residents in order to make way for the boulevards we recognise today as so quintessentially Parisian.9 They represent at the same time a stunning feat of urban planning and a breathtaking disregard for the lives of everyday people. I’m in awe of the great beauty of the boulevards but wary of their size, devised as they were to facilitate the movement of troops and goods through the city to more easily quash any rebellions that might spring up (vivid was the memory of 1848, with its perfection of barricade warfare) while also increasing the amount of merchandise that could be sold through the newly built grands magasins, like the Bon Marché, fictionalised by Zola in his 1883 novel The Ladies’ Paradise. An American friend who lives in London begrudges Paris its loveliness, preserved, she argues only somewhat facetiously, at the expense of collaborating with the Nazis. Give me the honest ugliness of post-war London any day, she says, and she’s not wrong.
Then, too, London, like Paris, filled its coffers and built its wonders off the ravages of Empire.
Today, the policy of façadisme in Paris means the uniformity of the Haussmannian (and pre-Haussmannian) buildings is preserve
d even if the building behind it is not, a controversial practice that gives way to what I think is an interesting compromise, creating a hybridity of structure and use within a traditional Parisian aesthetic, but I understand the anti-façadistes, who hold that this reduces buildings to little more than adorable stage sets. I’m not sure retaining the facade works in every city, in every instance, and even in Paris it can be done badly, but in principle I don’t mind it. An entire culture is distilled in that top layer, and without it Paris wouldn’t be Paris. In the 4th arrondissement the policy has been applied to such an extreme that there is a delightful free-standing doorway on the rue Beautrellis, all that remains of a seventeenth-century hôtel particulier. Behind it, unconnected to the old doorway, stands a cement building from the 1960s. ‘That’s France for you,’ an ex groused once, as we walked past it. ‘A doorway to nowhere.’
