WALKING MADLY

‘It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky.” 

Those are the opening lines of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of linked short stories posing as a novel. I can’t say I’d forgotten the lines because I’ve never actually read the book from beginning to end, though I have read at least one of the stories it contains – ‘The Veldt.’   

But I have seen the movie and I have never forgotten the sight of Rod Steiger, all naked and tatted up. The book describes him as “a walking treasure gallery.”

Gotta say I didn’t know that people went to Wisconsin on walking tours, but it seems they very definitely do.  The state seems to be dense with walkers and walking trails.

         When I first lived in Los Angeles, Ray Bradbury was alive and well and doing a lot of public appearances around town, many of them in Glendale.  I don’t know how much of a walker he was but sometimes apparently he walked while wearing a suit, like this:

And I think he must have been rather proud of his legs, perhaps honed and toned by walking, because he was always showing them off in shorts; like this:

Tangentially I have been reading Museum Without Walls,some collected essays by another writer who also walks while wearing a suit, at least when the cameras are on him; Jonathan Meades, a man I can’t quite imagine in shorts.

In a piece on Ian Nairn, Meades writes of “the ever-increasing battalions of soi-disant psychogeographers - who are distinguished from plain geographers by neglecting to take their Largactil before they release themselves into the edgelands of Sharpness or the boondocks of Sheppey.”  

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Largactil, as some of you will know, and some may not, is one of the trade names for Chloropromazine, an anti-psychotic.  Looks like good stuff:

WALKING THE GEORGE AND RAY WAY

Well here’s a sort of interesting thing.  I opened George Orwell’s 1984, more or less at random and found this curious reference to walking.  Winston Smith “had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.”

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that this reads like a direct inspiration for Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” written just a few years after Orwell’s novel, but I’d never been so consciously aware of it till now.  Perhaps everybody else already was.

Orwell continues, “On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.”  

Bradbury’s pedestrian is often assumed to be walking in Los Angeles, though the text doesn't actually specify.  "Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows."

I haven't been able to find a photograph of Orwell walking, though I imagine he was part of the generation of Englishmen who did a lot of walking.  I once met a very, very old man in Suffolk who had gone beagling with Orwell, a rather specialized form of walking, admittedly. 

But Orwell did write this, in The Observer in April 1945: “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the way from Brussels to Stalingrad.”

I haven't been able to find a photograph of Ray Bradbury walking either, and I know he did use a wheelchair toward the end of his life, but walkers in LA can visit both Ray Bradbury Square in downtown, and see his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  To experience Orwell's vision you only need walk down any street with a security camera.