WALKING WITH WOLFE

Until a couple of days ago I had never read (call me a Philistine) a single word written by Thomas Wolfe, unless you include the titles of his books.  I mean everybody knows the phrases Look Homeward Angel, though that’s originally from Milton, and You Can’t Go Home Again. 

And actually that latter has always worried me.  Isn’t the “again” at best superfluous and at worst self-defeating?  I mean if you can’t go home, you can’t go home.  But if you can’t go home AGAIN that kind of implies that you’ve been home at least once before, in which case you CAN go home again, just not right now, or maybe not more than once.

In any case, my non-reading of Wolfe has, in the most minor way, now been corrected.  I have read his short story “Only The Dead Know Brooklyn” from 1935 or so and it’s wonderful.

It’s written in “Brooklynese” which isn’t quite as much of a strain as you think it’s going to be, but the great thing is it’s all about walking and mapping and urban exploration and (oh what the hell, I’m going to say it) psychogeography.  I had no idea.

The narrator writes like this:

So like I say, I’m waitin’ for my train t’ come when I sees dis big guy standin’ deh – dis is duh foist I eveh see of him. Well, he’s lookin’ wild, y’know, an’ I can see dat he’s had plenty, but still he’s holdin’ it; he talks good an’ is walkin’ straight enough. So den, dis big guy steps up to a little guy dat’s standin’ deh, an’ says, “How d’yuh get t’ Eighteent’ Avenoo an’ Sixty-sevent’ Street?” he says.

The “big guy” is going to Bensonhurst for no particular reason except that he likes the sound of the name, and we learn that he’s been all around Brooklyn in this haphazard way, walking, wandering, drinking in bars, and feeling he’ll never get lost because he has a map with him.  The narrator finds this completely incomprehensible.

“… I got a map dat tells me about all dese places. I take it wit me every time I come out heah,” he says.  


And Jesus! Wit dat, he pulls it out of his pocket, an’ so help me, but he’s got it - he’s tellin’ duh troot - a big map of duh whole goddam place with all duh different pahts mahked out. You know - Canarsie an’ East Noo Yawk an’ Flatbush, Bensonhoist, Sout’ Brooklyn, duh Heights, Bay Ridge, Greenpernt - duh whole goddam layout, he’s got it right deh on duh map.


“You been to any of dose places?” I says.


“Sure,” he says. “I been to most of ‘em. I was down in Red Hook just last night,” he says.


“Jesus! Red Hook!” I says. “Whatcha do down deh?”


“Oh,” he says, “nuttin’ much. I just walked aroun’. I went into a coupla places an’ had a drink,” he says, “but most of the time I just walked aroun’.”


“Just walked aroun’?” I says.
“Sure,” he says, “just lookin’ at t’ings, y’know.”


No, the narrator doesn’t know, and he finds the whole enterprise absurd as well as incomprehensible, and also in some obscure way threatening.  He considers himself a real Brooklynite and of course a real Brooklynite would never just wander around, and would certainly never use a map.  So maybe this means that a real Brooklynite never goes anywhere except the places he already knows.  And the narrator here consoles himself with the thought that it’s impossible to know the whole of Brooklyn anyway, so why bother to step outside your own orbit?  Needless to say, this doesn’t only apply to people from Brooklyn.

The story seems to have been at least partly autobiographical, and Wolfe probably saw himself as a version of the big guy wandering around Brooklyn.

In Thomas Wolfe: Memoir of a Friendship, Robert Raynold gives an account of walking with Wolfe.

“ …(Wolfe) had a good way of walking along the street. He swung his long legs easily and his arms no more than needful; he carried his shoulders well; his torso was erect and firm and his head straight with innate dignity … Wolfe walked along the street as if his business were right there; his business was to see, feel, hear, taste and touch and smell the life of the street: he was working as he walked. This gave his face an alert, lively expression, animal in its watchfulness, with his wary lower lip thrust out; then from time to time the gatherings of his senses coalesced in a spiritual perception, and the joy of spiritual apprehension lit up his face – ‘in apprehension how like a god.’

Which suggests that walking with Thomas Wolfe must have been quite a performance, unless (you think?) just possibly Robert Raynolds was laying it on a bit thick.

For what it’s worth, I lived in Brooklyn during my time in New York, though I’m sure I never became a Brooklynite.  And I certainly did plenty of walking, though I think my senses rarely coalesced in a spiritual perception.  However, while I was wandering around, I did take a few photographs that I’m still quite fond of.  This is one of them.

OF WALKING AND HITCHING

We went to Lone Pine to do some walking.  Lone Pine is a rustic little town, halfway into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with one stoplight, some motels and an Indian reservation.  

Chances are you’d go there if you were heading for Mount Whitney.  The big attraction is the Alabama Hills: some very fancy rock formations.  The hills were given the name during the Civil War by some Southern sympathizers, after the success of the CSS Alabama as a commerce raider (which is admittedly not so attractive).

Lone Pine also has a Film History Museum, and this is the big thing about the Alabama Hills: they make a great backdrop if you’re making a movie: pretty much any kind of movie.  Imdb lists 344 movies or TV shows with scenes shot there.

They can stand in for anywhere you like, so they appear in Gunga Din, Charge  of the Light Brigade, Bad Day at Black Rock, Tremors, and many, many cowboy movies Including Yellow Sky, with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter (below):

In recent years they’ve also appeared in Iron Man and Django Unchained.

There’s a book by Dave Holland, titled On Location in Lone Pine, which would definitely help you find where specific movies were shot, though I only found and bought a copy in the Film Museum gift shop after we’d done our after we’d done our walking around.  As it was, we drove up Movie Road, got out of the car and consulted a sketchy map, but let’s face it I’m the kind of man who likes a sketchy map.

But one movie not mentioned in On Location in Lone Pine is Ida Lupino’s 1953 noir extravaganza, The Hitch-Hiker.  I’d seen it before but since there was a DVD for sale in the shop, I bought it and decided to watch it again, which I’ve just done.

The movie is heavy on the noir and frankly a bit light on the plausible motivation, but it’s supremely watchable, not least for the shots of the Alabama Hills, but more for the performances, by Edmond O’Brien as the good guy who picks up the hitchhiker (hitchhiking, after all, being a specialized form of walking), played by William Talman, a man so bad that he has a frozen eyelid and sleeps with one eye open.

Inevitably the guys are mostly in car, supposedly making a 500 drive mile through Mexico (using a sketchy map), but in fact the Alabama Hills really aren’t all that extensive, so you know they must have just driven around and around the scenic parts, never straying very far from town.

But in the end if the car breaks down and they have to walk the last stage of the journey.  Edmond O’Brien has twisted his ankle by this time and is frankly behaving like a bit of a girl.

In fact it’s easy to read a proto-feminist message into the movie – that none of these men is really all that manly, and the bad guy is no man at all without his gun.

Later in the weekend we went in search of a ghost town named Saltdale, and more or less found it.  There really isn’t much that looks like a town anymore but there’s plenty of salt.  It’s a good place to walk, and I think it’d be a great place to shoot a movie.

SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE PARADING UNIVERSE

“There is man in his entirety, blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.”  
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

And thinking of walking in other people’s shoes, Steve Martin was famously in a production of Waiting for Godot, a play with much boot imagery from Estragon who struggles every day with boots that are too tight and hurt his feet.  The beauty of this thought is slightly spoiled by the fact that Martin actually played Vladimir, and it was Robin Williams who played Estragon.  Still …

At this point in literary history anyone who cares about these things probably knows the story of Beckett’s shoes.  It pops up again in the latest New York Review of Books in Fintan O’Toole’s review of Beckett's Echo's Bones.

         O’Toole writes, “Georges Pelorson, who was a close friend of Samuel Beckett’s, recalled a walk they took together in Phoenix Park in Dublin in 1929 or 1930, when Beckett was twenty-three or twenty-four:

“‘After a few hundred yards I noticed Sam was walking almost like a duck. I said to him “What’s the matter with you, are your feet hurting?” and he said “Yes.” “Why, are you tired?” and he answered “No it’s my shoes. They’re too tight.” “Well, why don’t you change them?” I got no answer or rather I got it years later.’

“The answer came when Pelorson met Beckett in Paris with James Joyce. Joyce was wearing ‘extraordinary shoes of a blistering canary yellow.’ Pelorson had his answer to the mystery of Beckett’s sore feet: 

“’Sam was sitting nearby and as I was looking at him all of a sudden I realized that his shoes were exactly the same size as Joyce’s, though evidently his feet were not…’

“In the early 1930s, the young Beckett was trying, with sometimes painful results, to walk in Joyce’s shoes.”

Well this is very odd.  Beckett was a youngish man in the early 1930s, but not that young.   Be that as it may, I have been searching for pictures of both Joyce and Beckett which show them wearing, and preferably walking in, a pair of “blistering canary yellow shoes.”

This isn’t easy, not least because the photographs from that period are likely to be in black and white, and frankly none of them is exactly focused on the footwear.  Still …

Here’s Joyce walking with Nora Barnacle in London on their wedding day in 1931: Joyce’s shoes are very dark and very shiny, as I suppose befits a wedding.

His shoes are similarly dark and shiny in this photographed taken in Zurich in 1938 by James Stephens.

And here he is in Paris in a wonderful but undated photograph walking with that very James Stephens (who’s looking a lot like Buster Keaton, if you ask me) and John Sullivan.  Again the shoes are clearly not yellow.

The best bet, I think, are the photographs of Joyce and Sylvia Beach taken at Shakespeare and Company – its date seems uncertain, sources give as somewhere between 1921 and 1925.  Beckett moved to Paris in 1926, which is promising, though obviously not the “early 1930s” spoken of above.  Joyce’s shoes are certainly pale, but who could swear they were yellow, much less blistering canary?  Joycean scholarship being what it is, I’m sure somebody knows and may even tell me.

As for Beckett, well, here the photographic evidence seems to be a complete a non-starter.  I haven’t found any picture of him wearing any shoes that could possibly be yellow, but then pictures of him as a young man are pretty thin on the ground and certainly don’t show his shoes, although the facial expressions are in keeping with a man experiencing some kind of pain, whether from the feet or elsewhere.

There is this photograph taken by Liam Costello (I confess I don’t know who that is).  Beckett looks youngish, but the photograph is undated, and in any case the shoes are dark and shiny.

         And here’s a picture right from 1934 with Thomas McGreevy, which would again be the right period according to Pelorson, but those aren’t yellow shoes though he does appear to be wearing “skinny jeans.”  And could that coat really be black leather?

In any case, eventually, sanely, Beckett gave up on the whole “tiny shoe” thing.  In this picture he’s wearing what I’ve been told by people who know about these things, are Clarks Wallabees. 

They, or at least one version of them, do in fact come in yellow, though not the blistering canary kind.

YOU KNEW THIS ALREADY, I'M SURE

Werner Herzog "inspirational"posters.

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