On our last day in Peru, we walked around Saqsaywaman, a ruined settlement above Cusco. The remaining boulders had proved too heavy for colonists to use for other purposes. Monumental, they formed the base of walls that jutted this way and that for hundreds of metres. Some said the zigzag represented lightning bolts, others that the walls were stylised puma’s teeth. I walked across a plain to the hill opposite to decide for myself. As I stood there, I tried not to think of the Andean condors we saw at an animal rescue centre earlier that day, nor the de-clawed pumas. Both Peruvian national symbols, they are now endangered. The walls, I decided, were lightning bolts, but it was hard to get a proper perspective.
As you move through history, history moves into you, more surely than if you read it. Writers mark the page, but walkers mark the earth, and the earth in turn marks us. In Incan constellations, animals are found in the negative space, the black between the stars. When the Incas first saw the Spanish, they believed they were part human and part animal because they arrived on horseback; man and horse were considered one creature. I carry these ideas with me: that there is meaning in the space between, that we and the creatures that carry us are one.
*
The writer Ray Bradbury lived in Los Angeles and walked its streets for sixty-eight years without driving a car, fantastically obstinate in a city that is a monument to the oil industry. But Los Angeles is not alone in its abandonment of human scale. It is New York that is the odd city out, New York that has invited people to walk its streets for hundreds of years. Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville not only walked New York’s streets, they also wrote about them, as many have done since – as I am trying to do. More recently, William B. Helmreich, a 68-year-old professor of sociology at CUNY, walked almost every street in New York City: 120,000 blocks, or about 6000 miles.5
In Teju Cole’s first novel, Open City, walking the streets of New York appears, at first, to be an expression of engagement and curiosity for Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist who wants to embrace his new home. Rousseau-like, Julius’s walks lead to a series of pronouncements and observations: on the flocking of birds, on failed relationships, on race, on class, and on history. But his digressions take on a bitter edge. Random observations and the rambling narrative structure that sustain them become attempts to erase the past, a past that includes a mistreatment of women. A meditation on gender is not where I intended to end up, but it is certainly one of the places Cole does. Sometimes there seems to be no way of escaping it even when all you want to do is walk, or read about walking. It was when doing the latter that I noticed this casual aside from The Art of Wandering, that the walker ‘remains, despite notable exceptions, predominantly male’.6
I compare this bald statement with Rebecca Solnit’s exploration in Wanderlust of the ways in which women are discouraged from walking, the oft-cited concerns for safety that are motivated by a desire for control. She goes on to posit that, ‘Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a criminal category when in public.’ As I read her, I have a memory of a midnight walk one hot summer night, pacing down the middle of Nicholson Street, arms flung wide for no reason other than joy at being alive, the freedom of walking without scrutiny.
Walking provides an excellent opportunity to argue with people in your head, so I argue with Merlin Coverley, the author of that aside. I imagine telling him about Australia’s Sorrel Wilby, who trekked through the Himalayas in 1991, wrote about that experience, and who has been walking ever since; of Lisa Dempster’s 1200-kilometre walk through Japan and her book, Neon Pilgrim (2009). I remind him of Robyn Davidson’s extraordinary 3000-kilometre pilgrimage through Australia’s deserts, enshrined in Tracks (1980), of Cheryl Strayed’s hike from Mexico to Canada, the subject of her bestseller, Wild (2012). Coverley, I say, do you not know of Charlotte Brontë and her creation Jane Eyre? ‘I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.’ Of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whose heroine Elizabeth Bennet walks everywhere, often unescorted, much to everyone’s consternation? ‘I do not wish to avoid the walk,’ she insists. ‘The distance is nothing when one has a motive; only three miles. I shall be back by dinner.’
My preoccupations collide in unexpected ways when I return from such a walk, and listen to a podcast on philosophy and extinction. In it the Australian environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren quotes a line from the feminist theorist Donna Haraway: ‘We need to “stay with the trouble”.’7
Walkers stay with the trouble. The Situationists called their walks dérives to distinguish between the unconscious act of strolling and their more politically charged way of moving through Parisian streets. Women march to reclaim the night. Between 1863 and 1881, William Barak, an elder of the Wurundjeri clan of the Woiwurrung people, walked the 60 kilometres from the Coranderrk Estate to the steps of Parliament House some three times: to call for his people be paid for their labour; to seek the right for his people to have their own community; to insist on their freedom to keep their children within that community. A hundred years later, during the civil rights marches, African Americans attempted the 54-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery on three occasions, despite the brutality of the beatings that battered down upon them. Here in New York, fifty years on, people are walking the streets, crossing the bridges, outraged by the fact policeman Daniel Pantaleo was not to stand trial for the choking of African American Eric Garner. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Garner had gasped. ‘I can’t breathe.’
There is so much trouble to stay with. Breathing becomes harder and harder. Can we stay with the trouble? Will the distance mean nothing if we have a motive? Can we, like Thoreau, make every walk a ‘crusade’, a reclamation of our cities, our lives, our land, our planet?
I think of the Horseshoe Crabs once more and come to realise that my attachment to them isn’t entirely random. In their plight I recognise our own. It is not just the crabs being left to float aimlessly in ruined seas. It is not just the dogs we live with, walk with, experiment upon, left to whine, to take the jolt. The knowledge of our undoing flickers, as if in the periphery of our vision, and such a flicker comes to me unbidden. I am in Kakadu National Park, in the Northern Territory, driving (not walking, it’s too hot) back to the campsite at South Alligator after dark. There is no moon. Dingoes race along the road’s embankment and keep pace, momentarily, with the car. They are powerful and pale. Wild. Endangered. Their paws move steadily over the red earth. Small fires lick all around us – it is burn-off time – and the flames light the dingoes’ way through this darkest of nights.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Weil, ‘The Woman Who Walked 10,000 Miles (No Exaggeration) in Three Years’, New York Times, 25 September 2014.
2. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Penguin Books, 2001.
3. ‘Extinction: A Matter of Life and Death?’, The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC Radio, 21 November 2014.
4. Meeri Kim, ‘Why Are Some Depressed, Others Resilient? Scientists Home in One Part of the Brain’, Washington Post, 5 June 2014.
5. William B. Helmreich, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City, Princeton University Press, 2013.
6. Merlin Coverley, The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker, Old Castle Books, 2012.
7. ‘Extinction: A Matter of Life and Death?’, The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC Radio, 21 November 2014.
Australian Book Review
Re-reading the Famous Five and Biggles
Jeff Sparrow
After he suffered a heart attack in Darlinghurst, doctors thought Robert Dessaix would die. Instead, he emerged from hospital with a book, What Days Are For, a bittersweet rumination about how one assesses a life as it draws to a close.
Always a writerly writer, Dessaix contemplates his mortality via his wide and eclectic reading: the great religious traditions (which he generally assesses aesthetically), Gogol, Larkin, Turgenev and Dr Johnson. And then comes this: ‘Enid Blyton �
�� shaped me in a way no other writer or book ever did.’
Sorry? Blyton? That Enid Blyton? The Famous Five? The Magic Faraway Tree? Noddy?
Enid Mary Blyton sold perhaps 600 million copies of her stories for children, mostly in the days before blockbuster movie tie-ins. Plenty of people have read her. But few would announce, as Dessaix does, that that ‘Enid Blyton … moulded my day-to-day imagination in a more profound way than either Shakespeare or Gogol’.
As it happened, Dessaix’s reflection on Blyton resonated with me because, just before reading What Days Are For, I’d been browsing a junk shop and found a job lot of books by Captain W.E. Johns, whose Biggles series I’d devoured as a child.
An almost exact contemporary of Blyton, Johns has suffered as she has. Like Blyton, he was remarkably prolific, pumping out some 160 books; like her, he sold by the trailer-load. Yet despite that popularity, in recent years he’s become reduced – perhaps even more than Blyton – to little more than a punchline, with Biggles remembered merely as an aggregation of preposterous verbal tics (‘By Jove, Bertie!’).
Dessaix acknowledges the obvious black marks against the Famous Five: the repetition, the clunky writing, the undertones of racial and class prejudice. But he continues: ‘I forgive them their peccadilloes. I refuse to watch the cruel spoofs on their adventures, too – what are they called? Five Go Mad in Dorset, Five Go Mad on Mescalin and so on. The Famous Five were my friends.’
I think I bought the (surprisingly expensive) Johns titles for the same reason. When I saw the books in the shop, the lurid dust jackets were instantly familiar. I recalled how much time I’d spent with Biggles as a kid; I wanted to meet him again.
Suffice to say that some acquaintances are best not renewed. Johns – how to say this kindly? – is not a great writer.
He can’t do dialogue (and let’s move quickly past Biggles’ tendency to the terse ejaculation). Nor can he do character. The gaggle of chums who support Biggles through his various exploits are allocated extravagant marks of differentiation – Bertie’s a toff; Ginger’s a naïve teen and so on – but these ostentatious distinctions only accentuate their essential interchangeability. The Biggles mysteries are never particularly mysterious; the later books, in particular, manifest all the racism you’d expect from an Empire loyalist writing in the sour era of British decline.
Moreover, reading as an adult, I realised that as a kid I’d entirely missed the most impressive aspects of the books: the genuinely frightening depiction of Great War aerial combat. Johns himself had been a fighter pilot in an era in which the average life expectancy of a new aviator was a matter of weeks. The recruits were usually in their teens. Many had never driven a car before and were in the air with only the briefest training; often they died without seeing the plane that shot them down.
In the early stories, we’re told of Biggles’ high-strung nervous laugh: he doesn’t, he says, expect to live long. At one point, his commanding officer notes Biggles drinking heavily and comments that he’ll probably be killed soon. Of course, back then I didn’t recognise Biggles as traumatised. No, what I liked was the adventures, precisely the aspects of the books that now seem unreadably formulaic.
In his study Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature, David Rudd identifies a similar phenomenon in respect of Blyton. It is, he says, common for children to lose themselves in Blyton’s books – and then just as suddenly abandon them. If they re-read the stories later, the experience is not only disappointing but positively mystifying.
Of his own return back to the Famous Five books he’d once loved, Rudd writes: ‘I found the magic lacking, while the simple vocabulary and the old-fashioned and often embarrassing attitudes obtruded woefully … We adults are left with empty words, whereas our children, like millions of others, are transported.’
Rudd makes a simple but persuasive argument – namely, that children read in a quite different way to adults.
Blyton’s power comes from the creation of a world foreign to our own, a place in which different rules apply. The anachronisms that repel adults – especially Blyton’s peculiar and much parodied vocabulary (‘lashings of ginger beer’) – help create that estrangement, inducting readers into a realm in which they can safely explore identities and experiences that would otherwise be threatening. The condemnations of Blyton for not providing a realistic representation of English life entirely miss the point.
‘Those that read and enjoy the fantasy,’ says Rudd, ‘… are doing so in a way that is, by definition, not realistic: the enjoyment depends on readers engaging in the play of the text, thus making it their own.’
Johns’ stories operate in the same way. Like most protagonists in books for young people, Biggles and his pals are neither quite adults nor quite children. They’re boy-men, who adventure like grown-ups while lacking all the usual signifiers (homes, families, interior lives, etc.) of adulthood. Biggles books often come with a glossary of terms, a list of aviation lingo that the reader must learn, much like a traveller preparing to venture into strange lands.
No child reads Biggles as realism: on the contrary, the dated language, the peculiar settings and attitude are accepted as a necessary estrangement, like the magic in Harry Potter.
‘Much children’s reading,’ argues Rudd, ‘… falls outside the way that many adults conceive it; neither slavish identification, passive consumption nor ideological servitude. Basically, children are out to maximise their pleasure, by personalising it, revisiting favourite moments.’
That’s precisely what Dessaix says, too. He came, he says, to the Famous Five at the right age; he seems never to have gone back. What did he learn from them?
[I]t was more a question of the subtext: the idea of loyalty to your close friends no matter what, the sharing of secrets with them (an important part of growing up) and also the unusual gendering (although I wouldn’t have known as a child what to call it): I was always rather taken with Julian, such a willowy yet manly youth, fair-haired and tall (like Peter, who is still quite willowy), good natured and firm (as Peter is), with marvelously determined eyes and a strong chin … and his cousin George such a bossy girl, the real boy of the group (‘a son to be proud of’, somebody says of her).
He notes their neighbour on Kirrin Island, ‘the sulky loner Martin, who has no parents, is artistic and apt to sob, just like me, really, which is, we’re told, a feeble thing for a man to do. Men, as we know, are meant to enjoy doing things, not appreciating things of beauty for their own sake … Martin’s a boy, but isn’t like that at all. Martin made quite an impression on me.’
That’s scarcely the canonical reading of Blyton, generally upheld (by supporters and detractors alike) as the zenith of a twee Englishness. But it neatly illustrates Rudd’s point about the freedom children can find in reading.
None of this concedes anything to the tedious Little Englanders (or their even more ghastly antipodean equivalents) who hail Blyton’s gollywogs as emblematic of Britain’s vanished greatness. Of course teachers and parents and librarians should use passages about ‘gypsies’ for discussions about prejudice and bigotry. Of course they should! What’s the point of a book if you don’t talk about it?
Nor should we fret particularly about editions rewritten to remove the more offensive passages. Rudd notes that Blyton herself, a writer who banged out 10,000 words daily, regularly recycled her stories, reshaping them to suit the changing mores. Johns did the same – Sopwith Camels became Spitfires, while later versions of the Great War stories replaced the whisky with which Biggles and his friends sedated themselves with more wholesome lemonade.
Yet Dessaix’s example might serve to assuage the perennial anxiety about what kids read or watch or (increasingly) play. He attributes his love of travel to ‘the Famous Five, the first explorers I ever knew’. Blyton’s Kirrin Island is, he says, the prototype of the places and tongues he has subsequently investigated, both in life and in fiction. ‘In the end, what we’re all doing, we inventors of
lands and languages, is refusing to accept the world as we’ve found it. We are utopians.’
The Famous Five as a gateway to Utopia? Why not? People have got there from stranger places.
The Guardian
The Northern Wilds: How to Build History into a Coastline
Nicolas Rothwell
It all began with the glamorously piratical, hyper-literary William Dampier, who reached the far northwest coastline of the Kimberley at Cape Leveque in January 1688 and penned a bestselling narrative of his journey: the sights, the animals and plants, the people too. ‘The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the world,’ he wrote. ‘They are tall, strait-bodied, and thin, with small, long limbs.’
Dampier was not only a fluent tale-teller and the unacknowledged father-figure of modern travel writing: odd links bind him to the English literary tradition. He was born in East Coker, where T.S. Eliot is buried; he rescued Alexander Selkirk, the real-life original of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World initiated a Western fascination for the north Kimberley shore that continues to our day, a fascination born of fear and wonder, as much as love or thirst for knowledge.
The coast provides the drama: it is a sequence of crescendos, curving northwest from Wyndham in a vast, jagged arc as far as Broome: cliffs, bays, reefs, cascades and promontories for 1000 kilometres. It is an articulate margin; its placenames trace the story of its contested discovery by Western eyes.
French and British mariners brought their distinctive ways of seeing with them as they probed its depths and shallows in the first decades of the nineteenth century; they left clues to their respective national temperaments on the maps they made. Those charts and their punctilious atmospheric observations are still of value.
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 16
