WALKING WITH SMILEY

I’ve often wondered if I could have been a spy.  Not the James Bond type wrestling with supervillains in underground lairs, but more like George Smiley, teasing out inferences and confessions by the practice of “tradecraft.”  The kind of spy who goes for a walk in the local park and has a “chance meeting” with some disaffected underling from the Russian embassy.  Information and a slim envelope of money are exchanged, we both go on our way, but the course history has been changed, that sort of thing.

This has been on my mind because a little while ago I was staying in somebody’s spare room, and being unable to sleep I picked up John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and (as they say) couldn't put it down.  I tried to read le Carré a long time ago, and I found it all a bit slow and talky.  Now, of course its slowness and talkiness are what seem so totally wonderful about it.

There’s a certain amount of walking in the novel, and also in the BBC miniseries, though it's not a direct “opening out.”   Certain conversations that are static in the novel do take place while the characters in the series are walking.  But certain exchanges are, if anything, even more static.

There’s a scene in the book, a flashback, on the cliffs in Cornwall between Smiley and his faithless wife Ann.  We all kind of wish he’d push her off the cliff edge, but that would be unsporting, dishonorable, and above all out of character.  

Walking helps when Smiley’s trying to get information from his fellow spooks.  Like this:

Sensing Jim's antagonism, Smiley opened his door and let the cold air pour in.

'How about a stroll?' he said. 'No point in being cooped up when we can walk around.'

With movement, as Smiley anticipated, Jim found a new fluency of speech.

They were on the western rim of the plateau, with only a few trees standing and several lying felled. A frosted bench was offered, but they ignored it. There was no wind, the stars were very clear, and as Jim took up his story they went on walking side by side, Jim adjusting always to Smiley's pace, now away from the car, now back again. Occasionally they drew up, shoulder to shoulder, facing down the valley.

And walking itself may be part of tradecraft:

“In the stairwell, Smiley lightly touched his arm. 'Peter, I want you to watch my back. Will you do that for me? Give me a couple of minutes, then pick me up on the corner of Marloes Road, heading north. Stick to the west pavement.'

Guillam waited, then stepped into the street. A thin drizzle lay on the air, which had an eerie warmness like a thaw… He completed one round of the gardens then entered a pretty mews well south of the pick-up point. Reaching Marloes Road he crossed to the western pavement, bought an evening paper and began walking at a leisurely rate past villas set in deep gardens. He was counting off pedestrians, cyclists, cars, while out ahead of him, steadily plodding the far pavement, he picked out George Smiley, the very prototype of the homegoing Londoner. 'Is it a team?' Guillam had asked. Smiley could not be specific. 'Short of Abingdon Villas, I'll cross over,' he said. 'Look for a solo. But look!'

As Guillam watched, Smiley pulled up abruptly, as if he had just remembered something, stepped perilously into the road and scuttled between the angry traffic to disappear at once.

I do believe I could manage that kind of thing, though perhaps I wouldn’t have 

had Smiley’s chilly, patrician calm. 

At this point in literary history it’s impossible to read the name George Smiley without picturing Alec Guinness: I can’t imagine many people picture Gary Oldman in the movie remake, though I know it got decent reviews.

There are generally reckoned to be three real-world models for George Smiley, all of them walkers to some degree.  On was John Bingham, a spy for 20 odd years, also a novelist, less successful than John le Carré, but then who isn’t?   When his picture appears in print, it’s more often than not this one, showing him walking his dogs.

Another model was the Reverend Vivian Green, le Carré’s tutor at Oxford, and a keen walker, who wrote a book titled The Swiss Alps (1961).

And thirdly Maurice Oldfield, a career intelligence officer who rose through the ranks to become head of MI6 from 1973-8.  I haven’t been able to find any photographs of him walking, though the obituaries tell us he was a farmer’s son in Derbyshire who had to milk the cows each morning before he walked the two miles to school.  There's a great deal more to be said about Oldfield's public and private life, but I think this isn't the place.

Le Carré has said in recent times  “I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. I write and walk and swim and drink.”  In a piece in the New York Times Dwight Garner wrote, “John le Carré remains obsessed with this terrain. He’s more agile than men 20 years his junior mostly because, when his mornings spent writing fiction are complete, he sets out on arduous hikes. His wife only recently made him curtail these adventures. ‘I now walk the interior, instead of scampering along the cliffs, because she worries about me taking a fall,’ he said. ‘The cellphone reception is almost nonexistent here. If I didn’t die immediately, I’d be stuck for some time.’”

Elsewhere le Carré has said, “Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.”  I’m not sure that makes it VERY like walking in the street, but ultimately I think that any metaphor you care to use about writing is workable.

While writing this piece I did a bit of research on Alec Guinness and discovered that he was born at 155 Lauderdale Mansions South, Lauderdale Road, Maida Vale, London W9.  For 15 years or so I lived in Maida Vale, less than half a mile from there, and must have walked past his birth place scores if not hundred of times.  I had no idea.  And I don’t know what difference it would have made, and of course he wasn’t there and hadn’t been there for many decades, but somehow I wish I’d known.

LOOKING AT THE STARZ

Another day, another walk in Hollywood, and a day of faces, some looking down, some looking up from the sidewalk.  Some (as it were human) some less so.

A minimalist Lou Reed from his Transformer era.  I mean, I’m pretty sure it’s Lou Reed, but it does look a bit like Michael Bolton:

A comparatively detailed face signed by Klassy:

And then what at first I thought was best of all, a stencil of our soon to be Fearless Leader:

“Pendejo,” as I understand it, means a fool or an idiot, though it also (and simultaneously) means a single pubic hair.  Good knockabout, activist stuff you might think, but it turns out that “Ilegal Mescal” is just a brand of liquor which rather spoils the “guerilla” effect.

And meanwhile high above it all on Hollywood Boulevard, in Thai Town, not so much looking down as looking beyond, four golden statues of Apsoni, a mythical half-woman, half-lion, which appear thoroughly unimpressed by what’s going on below.  We’re all in the gutter, right?

TWO GUYS, TWO DOLLS

So, having done a blog post about Damon Runyon and walking, I thought I should read a biography of the man himself, and I went for Jimmy Breslin’s version, designated Damon Runyon on the title page, Damon Runyon A Life on the jacket.  Hey, I used to be a cataloguer – we cared about these things.  That's Breslin above.

The book was published in 1991, when the term “creative nonfiction” wasn’t used much, if at all, and there are certainly times when I wished Breslin’s writing was just a little less “creative.”  And there is one oddity in the early pages, Breslin describes Runyon as “a thin man who walked on tiny feet, which took a 5½B shoe.”  I think Breslin is trying to tell us something and I think we all know what it is.  I’m not saying he’s wrong, and he did meet the man, but in the photographs I’ve seen of Runyon, his feet don’t look especially small, as here:

On a somehow related note there was a review in the Independent newspaper by my pal and former editor Karen Wright, of an exhibition of paintings by the late Zaha Hadid, best known of course as an architect.

Karen Wright doesn’t think much of the paintings though she’s basically pro-Hadid.  Still, she writes, “I close this review recalling my reaction after visiting Maxxi, her sadly not fully completed building in Rome. When I visited it pre-opening, I noticed the floors designed to let light in with an open grid and realised that Italian women who love their stilettos would be stuck in the holes with their high heels. When I saw her at Soho House I questioned her on this. She drew herself up and looked at me as if I was mad. ‘I do not wear high heels.’ At the opening many women were hopping around clutching their escorts, their heels trapped. Since then the floors have been capped and the idea of allowing light through, which was brilliant in some ways, is gone.”

The Maxxi (above) still looks like a fun place to go walking however, that's it above.  

 Zaha Hadid did design shoes (3D printing was involved in many of them), and it’s true that they don’t have high heels in the usual sense of the word, though it’s hard to imagine anybody actually walking very far in them.

I have not been able to find many pictures of Zaha Hadid walking, though there is this one – she’s apparently on her way to the Sistine chapel:

I also managed to find a picture of her in what, to me, look very much like heels, and I can’t imagine her walking very far in these either.

Does she contradict herself?  Sure, and why not?  No doubt she contained multitudes.

THE HOLLYWOOD RAMBLER

If you write a blog titled The Hollywood Walker, then there’s some pressure on you to do a fair bit of walking in Hollywood.  And I give in to that pressure, honestly I do; I walk in Hollywood all the time.  But the thing is, and it’s a thing that I’m sure worries a lot of writers and bloggers, and certainly diarists, you get to the stage of thinking, “Is there any point doing if you can’t write about it?”

The answer of course is yes: If a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing for its own sake.  However obsessive a writer you are, not every thought and deed needs to be set down or described in words.  That’s because not every thought and deed is necessarily of interest to others. (I know some writers feel differently about this.) 

There is, in any case, a dual aspect to walking, at least the kind I do.  Partly you do it for its own sake, and partly you do it because you’re inquisitive, and you like observing and exploring, which is all part of the writerly function, though you don’t have to be any kind of writer in order to be inquisitive, and enjoy observing and exploring.

And this being a digital age, if you have a camera with you when you walk, then you tend to photograph what you see.  Again, this can be a problem: are you going for a walk or are you going on a photographic expedition?  And more than that, does taking photographs get in the way of a good walk?  Simple answer: sometimes yes, sometimes no.

So, after that throat-clearing, scattered above and below are some of things I saw, noted and photographed on recent Hollywood walks, and which I think might be of some interest to other people.

I have been known to complain about the essential monotony of Los Angeles skies, but it’s been raining here lately and there have been some spectacular opportunities for cloud spotters, so no complaints from me at the moment.

Under those less than sheltering skies most of us continue to be troubled, one way or another, about the election results.  A few pro-Hillary signs remain, though I wonder if these signs are a bit like Christmas decorations – how long should they stay before you take them down?  If you leave them up too long don’t they bring bad luck?

The fauna, of course, doesn’t even know we have a new president-elect, and the deer in particular are thriving:

Some of the flora is doing less well.  Is this the world’s saddest cycad?

Elsewhere in the ‘hood, they’re continuing to install new water pipes and that includes replacing fire hydrants, which gives rise to certain small-scale, Christo-esque effects:

The boys' activities still gives rise to inscrutable markings on the ground:

And this has recently appeared, which I think has nothing to do with the water company,and is far cleverer and more ambitious than most things you see painted on the sidewalk:

Meanwhile, the L.A. version of autumn gives us an inadvertent touch of Andy Goldsworthy:

In other places the sidewalks do battle with tree roots – the roots are winning - which definitely doesn’t make it any easier to walk:

But you see, some people love our sidewalks so much they feel right at home sleeping on them, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in front of a pedestrian crossing, right by a board directing you to an open house for what is most likely a million dollar property (feel the irony!):

There are no doubt places in the world where citizens would either accidentally or, more likely, deliberately walk on a person lying on the sidewalk in front of a pedestrian crossing.  Not here, though. There was also perhaps a slight feeling that maybe somebody was actually making a movie, and filming the guy with hidden cameras.  This is Hollywood after all.

ONE WISE GUY

I’ve been reading some short stories by Damon Runyon.  I’d read some of his work before, but not much, and I think Runyon is one of those authors who suffers because people think they know all about him even if they’ve never read a word: blame Guys and Dolls.

Anyway, as I continue to read my Runyon, I find that he often talks about people “walking up and down.”  And sometimes he obviously means this in a perfectly literal way, and sometimes he seems to mean it in some specialized or metaphoric way that I don’t always understand.

Sometimes it seems to mean going about your business, or it can mean stepping out with a woman.  Sometimes it seems to mean being free – as in you’re walking up and down as opposed to being in jail.  But then there are times when I just don’t know what it means.  See this, from the story “The Brain Goes Home:”

“He is maybe forty years old, give or take a couple of years, and he is commencing to get a little bunchy about the middle, what with sitting down at card-tables so much and never taking any exercise outside of walking guys such as me up and down in front of Mindy's for a few hours every night.”  What exactly does it mean to walk up and down in those circumstances?

Elsewhere in Runyon, walking may be a poetic and melancholy activity.  This is from “The Lily of St Pierre:”

“When a guy has a battle with his doll, such as his sweetheart, or even his ever-loving wife, he certainly feels burnt up inside himself, and can scarcely think of anything much. In fact, I know guys who are carrying the torch to walk ten miles and never know they go an inch. It is surprising how much ground a guy can cover just walking around and about, wondering if his doll is out with some other guy.”

       And of course Runyon, and his narrator, are interested in the way the “dolls” walk as well.  This is from “The Brakeman's Daughter:”

“Well, besides black hair, this doll has a complexion like I do not know what, and little feet and ankles, and a way of walking that is very pleasant to behold. Personally, I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her, because the way I look at it, the feet and ankles are the big tell in the matter of class.”

       Most of Runyon’s characters do most of their walking in New York, although there are plenty of exceptions.  Runyon himself seems to have been more of a sitter than a walker, planting himself at Lindy’s Deli and keeping his eyes and ears open. “I am the sedentary champion of the city,” he wrote. “In order to learn anything of importance, I must remain seated. Why I am the best is that I can last an entire day without causing a chair to squeak.”

Finally Runyon the man became very much like a Runyon character.  He has a wife out in the suburbs, but he fell for “a down-on-her-luck Spanish countess from Madrid named Patrice, who was, of course, actually an up-on-her-heels Mexican dancer from Tampico. She was twenty-six years younger than he was, and seems to have led him quite a life.”  That’s Adam Gopnik writing about Runyon in the New Yorker, where he also quotes Jimmy Breslin on the matter.  Patrice “sat with him about as long as the form chart for these things indicated that she would.”  Her full name was Patrice Amati del Grande, and she left him in the final year of his life when he was dying from throat cancer.  Maybe it would have been better if they’d done a little more uncomplicated walking up and down together.