DAY TRIPS WITH DAPHNE

 

One of my infinitely minor claims to fame is that I was once, in some sense, “portrayed” on radio by Bill Nighty.  He read my book first-person travel book Day Trips to the Desert on BBC Radio 4. Bill NIghy doesn’t sound remotely like me and yet I thought he got the tone of my “voice” and of the book, exactly right. 

 I met him very, very briefly in a studio in Broadcasting House and he was entirely the Bill Nighy you would want him to be.

 

Day Trips to the Desert isn’t exactly a walking book (whatever the heck that is) but there’s a reasonable amount of walking in it, walking that I did in Australia, the United States, Morocco and Egypt.

 

I can’t say how much of a walker Bill Nighy is but there are quite a few online pictures of him walking, such as this one in which he’s carrying a jar or Marmite, no I don't know why.

 And sometimes he’s seen, in a professional capacity, with Helena Bonham Carter:

 

Just last week the two of them were on the radio performing a play titled

Beside Myself, with Bonham Carter as Daphne du Maurier and Nighy as “man”.   To quote the publicity materials, the play allows the listener to “follow Du Maurier as she starts a conversation with a stranger while on an amble.”

Yes really, an amble!

“When a stranger approaches, Daphne … picks up her stiff stride, eager to get away. However, this one’s not to be deterred. As they walk along Daphne, to her own amazement, finds herself revealing much to the man about her life. Why is she compelled to divulge so much? Perhaps too much.”  Why indeed.  Perhaps it was the rambling.

 

This is Daphne du Maurier:

 

And this is Helena Bonham Carter, not walking.

 

She seems to be divulging quite a lot, but not too much, I’d say.

 

 

 

 

METHODICAL WALKING

If you find yourself at London’s Temple tube station there’s every reason to follow the signs and walk up a set of steps to the Artist’s Garden which is ‘an open-air public space for art by women artists.’  So maybe it should be 'Artists' Garden'?

    It’s actually on top of the station building itself; a roof terrace or I suppose roof garden.  It’s surprisingly big, 1400 square metres. I mean it’s not like walking around Versailles but it’s definitely a place you can wander.

 

The current exhibition is by Holly Hendry and titled Slackwater, a sprawling installation chiefly made of industrial ducting. The contrast of the curved shiny metal of the art with the solid straight masonry of the buildings behind it, is spectacular, and of course on the other side you have the Thames.  

 

There was also this by Annabel Tennyson-Davies who’s artist in residence at the garden.

I’ve been up there once or twice and it’s never been busy with people, although I did see one visitor who’d found it a great place to have a kip.

 

If you walk down the stairs when you’re finished you can then go into what you might call the non-artists' garden, or in fact the Victoria Embankment Garden, with a sign directing you to the Middle Temple Gardens, the end point of the City of Westminster Fitness Route, which is apparently a thing, though when you think about it, isn’t the whole world a fitness route if you want it to be?

 

In fact I was only in those parts because I was on the way to see a ‘site specific and participatory installation’ by Zheng Bo in the center of the Somerset House courtyard.

 

The artwork’s title was ‘Bamboo as Method’ which according to the online artspeak ‘pays homage to the Ming Dynasty thinker and scholar, Wang Yangming. Wang’s pursuit of enlightenment through the practice of gewu zhizhi (the acquisition of knowledge through the investigation of the nature of things) is encapsulated in Zheng Bo’s profound reference.’  There’s also a board up in the courtyard telling visitors that Zheng Bo is ‘eco-queer.’ 

 

But none of that was  obvious from seeing the work itself.  In fact it looked as though Mr. Bo had done a tour of quite a few garden centres, bought up all their bamboo and arranged it in planters to provide what was really a very interesting environment in which to walk.  

I like bamboo a lot ,without being any kind of expert, but I understand there are over 1,400 known species in 115 genera.  Zheng Bo had managed to round up 10 different types.

 

     The participation wasn’t the walking, or even the looking, but visitors were invited to draw the bamboo, or I suppose draw anything else they fancied, - pencils and paper were provided – and then drop the result in a box. 

 

        But one participant hadn’t made a drawing. He or she had made a paper plane and dropped it on the ground.  Of course I found myself thinking about Harry Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker anthropologist, and collector of ‘lost’ paper planes.

As discussed elsewhere in this blog Harry Smith used to walk the streets of Manhattan in the late 60s to early 80s, finding discarded paper planes wherever he went, picking them up, then annotating and cataloguing them to form a ‘proper’ anthropological collection.

 

But this was the first time I can ever recall seeing a paper airplane lying on the ground when I was walking.  Obviously I swooped on it. Do I feel an anthropological collection coming on? No, but the plane has gone straight into the archive of ‘things found while walking,’ which is a form of participation.

 

 

 

WALKING AS ART SUBJECT AND ART OBJECT

 

As a person walks through the world he or she inevitably sees other people walking through the world, and it seems that lots of people have decided this is a suitable subject for art.

 

More often than you might imagine, you see sculptures of people walking through the world.  This is Brancusi’s Walking Man:

 

You would have to say that Brancusi walked the walk as well as made the art.  In 1903 and 1904 he walked from Bucharest to Paris – Peter made a film about it, Walking To Paris.

 

Of course there are walking women too, though not as many as we might like, including this one by Giacometti, Walking Woman1:

 

You’re unlikely to be walking along and suddenly come upon a work by Brancusi or Giacometti – for that you probably need to be in an art gallery or sculpture park - but I realized that in my walking, without actively looking for them, I’ve come across quite a few sculptures of walkers.

 

Not so long ago, walking in Holland Park I came across this by Sean Henry, titled Walking Man. The statue is painted bronze but the path he’s walking on is genuine concrete:

 

And I was reminded of the Walking Manin Sheffield by George Fullard, which I know fairly well, being a deracinated Sheffielder.  It’s positioned outside what is now called the Winter Garden. I feel that most Sheffield walkers aren’t quite as lean as that statue – but let’s call it artistic license.

 

Naturally there are some interesting ironies in all this.  The viewer is walking but even though the statue shows somebody walking they’re perfectly still, frozen in a moment.  And sometimes of course the human walker stops to admire the stopped walking statue. As in this statue by George Segal, titled Walking Man which is at the (wait for it) Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

And then it clicked that Sean Henry, the artist who made the walking man in Holland Park was also responsible for this Walking Woman in Colchester, who’s a favourite of mine.  

 

Apparently there are different versions of Sean Henry’s woman, placed in different locations, often in snowy climes. Frankly she doesn’t really look quite dressed for it.­

 

And then there’s this fellow by Toni Matelli, titled Sleepwalker,who was in Regent’s Park for Frieze Sculpture 2023, who doesn’t seem to be dressed for anything at all.

 

 

THE SOLACE OF WALKING

I was in Faversham last Saturday for the Literary Festival, being an author, and I was on stage with Sonia Overall, author of Heavy Time: A Psychogeographer’s Pilgrimage.  

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Among the many things we discussed and agreed on, was that a large part of walking and drifting is about noticing.  You walk, you see things, you record them in some way, in memory or a notebook or a photograph. and later, somewhere along the line, they become something else – a book, an essay, even a blog post.

 

After the event, the inamorata and I stayed in Whitstable for a couple of nights with pals Jacqueline and Nick (thanks kids), and it seemed only natural that we should all go for a walk and a drift Sunday morning and do some noticing. So that’s what we did.

 

And what did we notice?  Well I noticed this sign:

 I’m not sure that we actually walked along the Crab and Winkle Way – we certainly didn’t get as far as Canterbury - but we may have covered some small section of it

 

And I can’t speak for anybody else but one of the things I noticed was the the intersection of what we might call nature with what we might call the built environment.

 

We saw gardens including this one decorated with a stone bearing the message ‘One Who Plants a Garden Plants Happiness.’ 

Now you could argue that one who plants a garden is just as likely to plant frustration, disappointment and thankless labour, but I don’t want to rain on anybody’s gardening parade.

 

There was nature creeping up the walls of houses:

We even saw a couple of Nicholsons:

We saw some interesting ruin:

 

And we saw this classic VW bus – every drift is better when it includes a VW bus:

There was also this very noticeable mural of Somerset Maugham:

 

Now, I didn’t know that Somerset Maugham was a Whistable lad: he was born in the British Embassy in Paris.  But after both his parents died he was sent to England to live with his uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, vicar of Whitstable.   

 

You know it’s a good while since I read any Somerset Maugham – I think the last book I read was Ashendenwhich I really enjoyed, so Maugham is definitely all right with me, but even so, from what I know of his life, I think perhaps he found some forms of solace even more supreme than writing.

YAY - I GOT A NOT BAD REVIEW

 Sands of an Hourglass: On Geoff Nicholson’s “Walking on Thin Air”

By Tom ZoellnerFebruary 6, 2024

 

Walking on Thin Air: A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps by Geoff Nicholson

 

MEMOIRS ABOUT the walking life are, by definition, all over the map. But they tend to fall into one of two general categories.

There’s the directed hunt, in which the author has pointed themselves at a specific target: the end of a long trail, a shrine, a lost geography, a bit of treasure—books like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks (2010), or any number of accounts of trekking the Santiago de Compostela.

Then there’s the musings of the ambler not going anywhere in particular but writing about the multiple joys of simply traveling around on foot, usually in cities, musing at the unfolding scenery—books like Alfred Kazin and David Finn’s Our New York (1989) or Thinking on My Feet: The Small Joy of Putting One Foot in Front of Another (2018).

Geoff Nicholson’s new book Walking on Thin Air: A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps is firmly in the second group, a well-established genre that lends itself to episodic structure and ample philosophizing. Nicholson’s unenviable twist, though, is that he’s walking on the sands of an hourglass. He has a diagnosis of a rare bone marrow cancer—“not rare enough, obviously.” But this writer from the industrial English Midlands has been walking all his life and intends to “continue as long as [he] can.”

Nicholson is a marvelously direct writer of indirect subjects who doesn’t have a lot of truck with pretense or a sense of misgiving about his subjects. He treads where he likes and doesn’t seem to care about commercialism when describing his enthusiasms. His 1996 novel, Footsucker, was an apologia for shoe fetishism wrapped in a murder mystery. And his further tributes to the parts of us that meet the ground include two previous works on the ambulatory life: Walking in Ruins (2013) and The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism (2008).

The artistry embedded in this basic act can be reduced to a simple apothegm. “I go to places,” writes Nicholson, a contributing editor of this publication. “I walk when I’m there, I look around, I write about what I see and feel. It’s not the only thing I do with my life, but it’s probably the best part.”

Turns out that Southern California is one of Nicholson’s prime turfs: “When people used to ask me why I’d moved to Los Angeles I always said, ‘Oh, I came for the walking.’ That was met with varying degrees of hilarity.” But he gets the last laugh. His favorite hiking desert is the Mojave, where the myriad dangers led him to embrace the traveler’s counsel of “creative cowardice” favored by Reyner Banham, another Englishman in California. It was also the place where an unnatural fatigue one hot day prompted him to make a doctor’s appointment, which led to his cancer discovery. (He did not blame the desert.)

Nicholson also crafts an ode to Franklin Avenue, “one of the less glamorous and less celebrated streets of Los Angeles” with none of the name recognition of its neighbors, and which locals think of primarily as a glorified on-ramp to the 101. Through some detective work, he locates the house where Joan Didion reported on the moral chaos of the 1960s and posed in front of a Corvette. It’s now a spiritual retreat called Shumei America Hollywood Center.
But this is a rare example of chasing an image, or its afterimage. Nicholson does not go for oft-trodden paths that project a certain civic or cultural iconography. What would be the point of that? “You can’t really walk in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or on the banks of Thomas Cole’s Hudson River—though I’ve tried to do both—because essentially these places are inventions, artistic creations,” he writes. “They exist sure enough, but they exist on the page or on canvas and, of course, in the mind and imagination of the reader or viewer.”

As long walks can take meandering patterns, Nicholson bounces among subjects in numbered sections, not always connected. The reader quickly becomes aware that Nicholson is less concerned with subject than motion. As he puts it: “Admittedly I would in general prefer to walk in the Peak District than through the nearby industrial estate, but I’m not averse to walking through industrial estates, and true enlightenment might not even recognise the difference.”

In the days before GPS could be slid into a pants pocket, Nicholson often shunned the conspicuous and deliberate act of carrying a paper map, especially in London, where “a general sense of direction, a sense of how neighborhoods related to each other,” was often good enough.

Do the “neighborhoods” of this book relate to one another? Not always. Part of the appeal of discursive narratives sorted into number-headed chapters is the thematic puzzle of how things that shouldn’t fit into other things somehow do, or are made to, through the sleight of the writing. That assemblage isn’t always apparent here—the neighborhood is a jumble of architecture, and the promise of the subtitle, “a life’s journey,” resembles more of a stroll through a bric-a-brac emporium.

Then there’s the “thin air,” which provides the dominant key of the book. Nicholson keeps finding ways to drift away from seriously contemplating his cancer diagnosis. Perhaps, it could be credibly argued, this is a mimetic device. Such medical knowledge may indeed foster a constant desire to think about other things—to find alternative paths. Who can live their life for very long in constant dread? Come look at this discarded magazine on the sidewalk. And this colorful rock.

Herein lies a matter that some readers may consider a deficiency. Nicholson spends no time on the spiritual aspects of living and dying, not even to dismiss them. Does he think there’s a survival of the soul—a hidden path soon to become visible? We don’t get to know. The mysteries of dying are perfectly replicated by his authorial silence on this point.

Instead, when contemplating his own mortality, Nicholson turns to some of the imagery he likes best: “If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then every journey, of whatever length, must also end with a single step. I wonder exactly where and when that step will be in my own case. I can’t say I’m ready for it, but I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

Nicholson’s writing career has been varied, admirable, and courageous. He stops to notice uncommercial and even bizarre subjects, shunning well-traveled roads. He goes where he likes. He gets out often. Nobody can imitate him.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Tom Zoellner is an editor-at-large at LARB and a professor of English at Chapman University. He is the author of eight nonfiction books, including The Heartless Stone, Uranium, The National Road, Rim to River, and Island on Fire, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize in history.

 

Sands of an Hourglass: On Geoff Nicholson’s “Walking on Thin Air” | Los Angeles Review of Books (lareviewofbooks.org)