WALKING IN FOOTSTEPS

On Sunday I went on a guided walk led by my pal Jen Pedler, with Footprints of London, a walk based on Rose Macaulay’s book The World my Wilderness, following in the footsteps of the book’s heroine Barbary.  This is Jen keeping her anonymity:

 

The novel, published in 1950, is set in London shortly after the Second World War, mostly around the City of London where St Paul’s Cathedral remained intact after the Blitz even as much of the area around it was in ruins. Then the ruins became a wilderness, and in that wilderness a certain kind of life flourished.

 

Barbary is sent from France to London by her posh Bohemian mother Helen to study art at the Slade.  She paints and sells postcards of ruined London, and she meets various colourful and dodgy working class types. 

 

I’ve read critics who say that the name Barbary is supposed to raise questions about what is and isn’t barbarous, and I don’t doubt that’s true, but personally I thought of Barbary pirates, because there is something piratical and lawless about the characters in the novel, even if unlike the actual Barbary pirates they’re not slave traders.

 

At the centre of the novel is a bilingual pun.  In France during the war, Barbary and her stepbrother Raoul ran wild with members of the French Resistance – the Maquis.  But maquis also means scrubland or bush, therefore a kind of wilderness, leading mother Helen to think, as Jen pointed out, ‘The maquis is within us, we take our wilderness where we go.’

 

  And so we walked with our inner and outer wildernesses, seeing London ruins, some of which dated from long before the Second World War to at least Roman times, while all around them, and us, were new big shiny buildings including the sprawl of the Barbican estate. 

 

I’d have said that I knew the area at least somewhat but a lot of what we saw was new to me including the Physic Garden belonging to the Barber’s Company, which is on the site of the 13th bastion built by Emperor Hadrian in AD 122. In 1666 the garden acted as a kind of fire gap to stop the Great Fire spreading, and if I’m reading the Barber Surgeons’ website correctly, it was derelict from World War Two until 1987.

 

Rose Macaulay is best known in many quarters for the novel The Towers of Trebizond which I admit I haven’t read. I know her best for the book Pleasure of Ruins, a title I can never quite get right; I always think it should be Pleasures of Ruin, and I tend to put in a superfluous definite article or two. 

 

The version I like best is the edition with photographs by Canadian Roloff Beny.  He does have a few photographs of British ruins but none in London.

 

Our walk was a very fine walk, taking two hours or so, and of course serendipity always plays a part in these things.  I wasn’t entirely surprised to see a Nicholson, because they get everywhere

 

But I really wasn’t expecting Monkwell Square, a place I had in fact been to before, to be the scene of such hot, compelling obelisk action. OK, I accept that not everybody feels the same way about obelisks as I do.

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

THE UNKNOWN WALKER

A couple of days ago I picked up my old copy of Don DeLillo’s The Names which I read a long time ago, and had only vague (though positive) memories of.  I did know that it was set in Athens, and if I’d been forced to guess I’d have assumed the Acropolis featured in there somewhere since it’s pretty hard to write a novel set in Athens that doesn’t mention it.  I found this picture of DeLillo, sort of walking, though I'd guess some way from Athens:

In the years since I read The Names I’ve written a book titled Walking in Ruins, and how I wish I’d thought of the DeLillo novel while I was writing it.  It would surely have been worth a mention and a quote.  And now, as I open it again, I find this on the very first page:

“For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis.  It daunted me, that somber rock.  I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring.  The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one.  So much converges there. It's what we've rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order, proportion. There are obligations attached to such a visit.

            “Then there was the question of its renown.  I saw myself climbing the rough streets of the Plaka, past the discos, the handbag shops, the rows of bamboo chairs.  Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy, mingling in one unbroken line up to the monumental gateway.

            “What ambiguity there is in exalted things.  We despise them a little.”

Between my first and second years at university I went to Greece for a chunk of the summer.  I’m no longer really sure why.  I had some vaguely hippie acquaintances who were living on the island of Samos, and they said I should stop by and see them, but I think they were mortified when I actually showed up.  This was well over a decade before I read, or DeLillo wrote, The Names.

And while I was in Greece, and particularly in Athens, I did do a lot of walking, and I certainly saw a lot of ruins, and I can’t say I found them utterly gripping at the time.  But unlike De Lillo’s hero I did happily walk up to the Acropolis. I think I walked up there more than once: I wasn’t sure what else to do in Athens.  The description of handbag shops and discos seems accurate enough, though I definitely didn’t wear striped sneakers.

And on one occasion while I was there at the Acropolis a man came up to me with a fairly serious-looking movie camera, which was not a common thing at the time, and he put it in my hand and asked me, in very broken English, if I would film him walking among the ruins, walking towards the camera.

I said sure.  I was thrilled.  Unlikely as it now seems, I had some ambitions back then to make movies, though this was the first time I’d actually held a movie camera, and the man showed me the basics of how to operate it, and I asked him if he wanted to me to do anything fancy, panning or zooming or tracking or whatever.  And he said, “No.  You hold still.  I come, I go.”  So I did, and he did, and if this were a novel there's be some exciting second act involving ruins and doctored movie film and international men of mystery.  But in real life we went on our way without any further contact.

Inspired by rereading Delillo I dug out some old slides taken on that trip (seen above and below), and what do you know, it seems I took a photograph of the man before or after I’d filmed him.  I’m left wishing I’d mentioned this in Walking in Ruins, too.

SCENIC WALKING

If you go to the website caughtbytheriver.net (and why wouldn’t you?) you’ll find and extract/sampler/cut up from the opening of Walking in Ruins.  It starts like this:

Some Scenes From The Life Of A Ruin Walker

24 February 2014 // Books

By Geoff Nicholson

ONE:
  If, like me, you happen to have written a book titled The Lost Art of Walking, people tend to ask you, “What’s your favourite walk?” I always find this a really difficult question. I want to answer honestly, and I definitely don’t want to be evasive or pretentious, but the answer always escapes me.

More and more I find that if I’m in walking in an area of unspoiled natural beauty, or in a city of great vistas and magnificent architecture, I’ll be impressed, I’ll be appreciative, but the truth is, I’m often slightly bored in these places. Only a fool would bad-mouth the Champs-Élysées or the Lake District, but I just don’t get very excited about walking there. Whereas if I’m walking along a beach and discover some ruined bungalows, or if I’m at the edge of a city and find a wrecked and abandoned warehouse or barn, then I’m fascinated, I’m moved. And that’s why I’ve written a new book titled Walking in Ruins.

You can read the full piece (and much more besides) on the website here:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/02/some-scenes-from-the-life-of-a-ruin-walker/

THE MAHARAJAH OF MELANCHOLY - INDEED!!!

So there's this, the first review of Walking in Ruins, in the new issue of the Spectator

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Walking in Ruins, by Geoff Nicholson - review

Mark Mason 5 October 2013

Geoff Nicholson is the Maharajah of Melancholy. The quality was there in his novels, it was there in his non-fiction book The Lost Art of Walking, and it’s there in the latter’s successor, Walking in Ruins (Harbour Books, £12.50). He savours the comfort to be gained from accepting decay as an inevitable part of life.

Ruins are his muse. So he spends the book doing exactly what its title suggests. Locations include an abandoned Los Angeles zoo, now inhabited by two homeless men, a Sheffield housing estate whose road layout survives even though its houses don’t, and a desert town that’s been, er, deserted. Nicholson keeps finding shoes there, though never a matching pair.

If you share his mindset, you’ll love the philosophical ruminations that result. Can you, for instance, ruin a ruin? John Ruskin preferred dilapidation to the ‘lie’ that is restoration. It’s only when a graveyard falls into disrepair, argues Nicholson, that it ‘really comes alive’.

We also learn that there’s a town in America called Zzyzx, and that Albert Speer thought buildings should be designed with one eye on how they’d look when falling down. He even did Hitler a drawing of a Nuremberg grandstand with its ‘masonry crumbling, its fallen columns covered in ivy’.

At one point Nicholson finds the left-hand half of a ‘Spontaneous Combustion’ sign. ‘Sponta Combu’, he notes, would be a great name for an Indian fusion dish.

Click here to link to the Spectator website