And who can speak of Arianna Huffington, as I was a few posts back,
without thinking of Bernard Levin. They
used to date, back in the day, and Arianna has been known to describe the
relationship as a “liberal education.”
Good enough!
These days Levin feels like a sixties character – (though he didn’t die
till 2004) and not the groovy sort. He was a David Frost alumnus, and a sort of
public intellectual (remember them?) but one who had the knack of sounding fairly
right wing even while expressing fairly left wing views.
He created various books and TV programs that involved walking. One was Hannibal's Footsteps (1985)
in which Levin walked the rout Hannibal supposedly took when he invaded Italy in 218 BC.
Another was A Walk Up Fifth Avenue (self-explanatory) from 1989.
Levin also wrote a book titled Enthusiasms (1983), and one of his enthusiasms was walking. He writes about doing a “serpentine” walk
along the Thames, crossing the river each time he comes to a bridge. (The question of how many Thames crossings
there are, and how many of them are in “London” is incredibly vexed – just
Google it.) Levin crossed the river 16 times
– this was before the Millennium Bridge was built. His walk covered 14 miles and required him to
make 30,000 steps.
He writes, “We who walk for pleasure
alone must never allow ourselves to think teleologically; our pleasure is in
the walking, and in that alone, and we have no need to seek outside the walking
for any justification for it.”
Well I agree of course, I am no
teleologist, and I don’t think walking needs any justification, but I do like
to look at things while walking (Levin says that he never looks at anything at
all) and I think that walking is also an act of exploration and observation,
being part of the environment not a thing apart from it.
In A
Walk Up Fifth Avenue he also writes of being at the Tiffany Ball (whatever
that may be) and afterwards he decided to walk from 59th Street
where the event took place at the Plaza Hotel to his own hotel on 76th. His fellow guests were horrified. (This must have been an old story from pre-1989,
surely. Things wre getting much better
by then). Still, Levin writes, “Their
belief in my insanity was based on an unshakeable belief that what I was
proposing to do was unacceptably dangerous. And I was inexcusably irresponsive,
even if not suicidal.” It’s not clear in
the book whether he did the walk or not, but either way he lived to tell the
tale, which is as much as most walkers hope for.
Teleology aside, Levin was famous for
writing heroically long and convoluted sentences. Harold Evans, who was briefly Levin's editor at The Times, said that his
sentences were like walking along the corridors of a Venetian palace: "You
know there is something good at the end, but occasionally your feet ache
getting there."
