WALKING MEANLY

Do you ever have one of those moments when you think, “Oh my lord I just made the most amazing discovery”? And then two minutes later you think, “Wait, everybody but me probably knew this already.”  I just had this experience with Raymond Chandler.

“Everybody” knows his passage from “The Simple Art of Murder,” the one that runs “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything …” and so on.

Now (and stick with me on this) I happened to be reading Gore Vidal’s review of  Robert Calder’s  Willie: The Life of Somerset Maugham.  

Maugham trained as a doctor in London at the end of the 19^th century, and Vidal says this was “still Dickens’ great monstrous invention,” and then he quotes Maugham, “The messenger led you through the dark and silent streets of Lambeth, up stinking alleys and into sinister courts where the police hesitated to penetrate, but where your black bag protected you from harm."

Much of the world, and certainly much of the literary world, seems to have fallen out of love with Maugham (to be fair, Gore Vidal seems never to have been much enamored) but I think that’s rather a good sentence.  It’s from Liza of Lambeth, Maugham’s second-written, first-published novel, from 1897, when Maugham would have been 23 or so.

Vidal writes, “Maugham raised the banner of Maupassant and the French realists but the true influence on the book and its method was one Arthur Morrison.”

And if you wonder who this “one Arthur Morrison” was (that's him above), it turns out he was the author of a book published three years before Liza of Lambeth, titled (hold on to your hat) Tales of Mean Streets. Did Chandler read Morrison?  Well, it seems perfectly possible, doesn't it?

Morrison went on to write detective novels, his hero was named Martin Hewitt, but Tales of the Mean Streets is a series of short stories, sometimes described as "slum fiction" though there’s plenty of anthropological interest there.  His East End of London doesn’t sound much less daunting than Maugham’s, or indeed Chandler’s Los Angeles.  But I do wonder whether Morrison and Chandler would have had the same understanding of the word “mean.”  Morrison would surely have favored the sense of poor or paltry; Chandler would have favored cruel and nasty; but maybe both senses are there in both.

Well that’s pretty much the extent of my great “discovery” except to note that there’s a certain amount of walking in Morrison’s mean streets.  In a piece titled “A Street” he writes, “When love's light falls into some corner of the street, it falls at an early hour of this mean life, and is itself but a dusty ray. It falls early, because it is the sole bright thing which the street sees, and is watched for and counted on. Lads and lasses, awkwardly arm in arm, go pacing up and down this street, before the natural interest in marbles and doll's houses would have left them in a brighter place. They are 'keeping company'; the manner of which proceeding is indigenous—is a custom native to the place. The young people first 'walk out' in pairs. There is no exchange of promises, no troth-plight, no engagement, no love-talk. They patrol the street side by side, usually in silence, sometimes with fatuous chatter. There are no dances, no tennis, no water-parties, no picnics to bring them together: so they must walk out, or be unacquainted. If two of them grow dissatisfied with each other's company, nothing is easier than to separate and walk out with somebody else.”

It sounds to me as though he’s being unnecessarily mean to his characters.

HAUNTED WALKING

I wonder if you’re familiar with a book titled, Inferences From Haunted Houses and Haunted Men, (1901) by the Honorable John Harris.  It’s everything you would want it to be and a little bit more.  Walking, naturally, is one of the ways that men demonstrate their hauntedness.

Harris writes, “One of (Charles) Kingsley's neighbours at Eversley was the late Sir W. (William) Cope. The elder son of this gentleman, when Secretary of Legation at Stockholm, came to a tragic end. He suddenly, when out walking with a friend, although his health had been apparently perfect, began to shout and wave his umbrella. He was put under the care of attendants, as he was considered to be temporarily insane. He jumped out of a window and was killed. Voices insulting or threatening him, and with such scoundrels speech would be of something dreadful, would provoke or frighten the unhappy man.”

Well of course you to have sympathy for the haunted man here,  but I imagine that if I were to walk down the street and suddenly began to shout and wave an umbrella (not the least likely thing in the world) I wouldn’t immediately be put under the care of two assistants.  I suspect that wouldn’t make things any better at all.

Harris also writes, “About two years later a distinguished priest, well known in London, also suddenly waved an umbrella and behaved as if he were angry. But he showed hardly any sign of insanity, and on applying to the proper court for release from supervision, was declared sane by a jury. Strength of mind and religious feeling doubtless saved him from the fate of Mr. Cope. A brave man can resist such an attack under favourable  circumstances.”

Well I like to think I’m brave enough, and strong enough of mind, and that I show hardly any sign of insanity, but I’m not sure that would be enough to save me. “Religious feeling” I'm pretty sure has nothing much to do with it.

PABLO, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

And speaking of walking down the street looking at “girls,” I’ll bet you’re familiar with the Jonathan Richman, Modern Lovers song “Pablo Picasso.”  The lyrics run:

Well some people try to pick up girls

And get called assholes

This never happened to Pablo Picasso

He could walk down your street

And girls could not resist his stare and

So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole

I suspect there’s some truth lurking there amid the absurdity.  There probably was a time when Picasso could pick up girls while walking in any street.  On the other hand he does seem to get called an asshole pretty often these days, for one reason or another.

         Now, here’s a thing. Pablo Picasso certainly wrote some poetry, and if you go online you’ll find a poem of his “A Lonely Road is That I Walked,” a title which has surely lost something in the translation.  It runs as follows:

I walk a lonely road, the one and only one I’ve ever known.


I don’t know where it goes, but I keep walking on and on.


I walked the lonely and untrodden road for I was walking on the bridge


of the broken dreams.


I don’t know what the world is fighting for or why I am being instigated.


It’s for this that I walk this lonely road for I wish to be
 alone.


So I am breaking up, breaking up.


It is the lack of self control that I feared as there is something


Inside me that pulls the need to surface, consuming, confusing.


being called weird I walk this lonely road on the verge of broken dreams.


And so I walk this lonely road and so just keep walking still

Now, if you’re at all familiar with the band Green Day, you’ll see these words are dead ringers for the lyrics to their (really piss poor if you ask me) song “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”  Did they use Picasso’s lyrics?  Were they inspired by them?  They Internet is silent on the subject.  Or is it some Internet hoax pretending that Picasso wrote lyrics just like Green Day?  I have no idea, but I’d like to know.

Meanwhile I’m glad Picasso didn’t give up his day job.  Here’s a painting better than any of the great man’s words: it’s titled “Couple Walking” (Couple Voyant).

Incidentally, I believe Jonathan Richman wrote the greatest ever lyrics about the difference between walking and driving, in (some versions of) “Radio On,”  better than anything by Picasso, and certainly better than anything by Green Day.

I walked by the Stop n shop


Then I drove by the stop n shop


I liked that much better than walking by the Stop n shop


Cause I had the radio on

Below is Mr Picasso, walking but not picking up many girls.

UNDER THE BEACH, THE SUBWAY

I was meeting somebody outside the Hollywood and Western subway station - a fairly unHollywood thing to do.  That's the exterior above, and the interior below.  There have been times when that location has had a bad vibe about it – I’ve been known to refer to it as “disaffected shouty youth corner” since there often seem to be groups of disaffected shouty youth hanging out there. 

On this day things were quiet on the corner itself and although the area isn’t especially pedestrian-friendly there were a lot of people on foot crossing Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, and being the kind of person I am, while I waited I was people-watching, observing the various gaits, postures and walking styles.

And I saw a very tall, thin, elegant, black-haired woman walking across the street.  She was striking rather than pretty or glamorous, and obviously eye-catching since my eye was definitely caught.  She was wearing very high heels and when she got closer I saw that the tops of her feet were heavily tattooed.  I accept that there are evils lurking in the male gaze, but I am only flesh and blood, and I did find myself gazing.

She obviously noticed me looking, and she looked back, and it was a strange look, very encouraging in a way but somehow I wasn’t encouraged.  It just wasn’t the kind of look  that women use to look back at men, even at men they like.  And I thought, rightly or wrongly, oh no, she’s a professional, my male gaze has been attracted by the promise of commercial sex.  Perhaps not every man on Hollywood Boulevard would have averted his eyes, but I did. 

By now she was fairly close to where I was standing and I looked up again and suddenly saw, and I suppose I could have been wrong again, but I really don’t think I was, that this was actually a dude. 

My change of assessment from striking woman, to female prostitute to male prostitute had been amazingly swift.  And I couldn’t say that this kind of thing ONLY happens in Hollywood, but it did seem to be the kind of thing that people EXPECT to happen in Hollywood. 

Fans of walking and Hollywood movies may also be aware that in Spike Jonze’s Her Joaquin Phoenix (that’s his back, above) finds the Hollywood and Western subway stop very convenient for the beach, which in reality is some twenty odd miles away, and not currently served by the subway.  Ah, the magic of the movies.