The streets of Paris “seemed saturated with presence, even if there was no one there but me.”CreditJosef Koudelka/Magnum Photos
As a student in Paris, Lauren Elkin loved to wander aimlessly in the streets, but she needed to adapt the existing word for a person doing that, flâneur — an idle stroller, killing time — to fit her own case: feminine. But the feminine form, flâneuse, implied sitting decorously on benches rather than anything more vigorous. One point Elkin makes in her absorbing new book is that although men had always enjoyed the practice of loafing through city streets with no particular object, just enjoying the scene, women had long been prevented, culturally and practically, from going out alone. Respectable women couldn’t make their way along the streets without being harassed, perhaps even assaulted or arrested. Young American travelers with Eurail passes will have discovered that this is still true in too many places. Try parts of Italy or Istanbul.
“The great writers of the city,” Elkin observes, “the great psychogeographers, the ones you read about in The Observer on weekends: They are all men, and at any given moment you’ll find them writing about each other’s work . . . . As if a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.” It was in the great cities — Paris, London, New York, Tokyo and Venice are her models — that women gradually asserted the privilege of walking around and, helped by the advent of department stores and tearooms, could begin to enjoy the pleasures of being flâneuses. Middle-class women, that is. Washerwomen and vegetable sellers had always had the freedom to go out to market their wares, and the same held true for prostitutes. They had a kind of invisibility, as if they were honorary men.
Nonetheless, once Elkin began to look for a sorority of flâneuses, she found them, among contemporaries and in history. She talks in detail about some distinguished sisters: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, the formidable George Sand. And because this is a memoir as well as a history, we follow Elkin herself as she explores several cities, beginning with New York, then moving on to Paris, London, Venice and Tokyo, a restless spirit in love with flânerie, finally coming to light in the city that gave her pastime its name.Photo
In a sense, Elkin’s book is itself a flânerie, a stroll where the reader may come across an unexpected person — say, the film directors Sophie Calle in Venice and Agnes Varda in Paris, looking for locations — or get some ideas about May 1968 or the Situationists. Or marvel over an intriguing bit of research: like the discovery that one of the inspirations for George Sand’s cross-dressing came from her own mother, who confided that in childhood Sand was outfitted in boy’s clothing by her father to cut down on the family’s expenses. “Sand’s trouser-wearing was in its way an act of revolution,” Elkin remarks. “At the very least, it was illegal. In the year 1800, a law had been passed forbidding women to wear them in public.”
Sometimes — often — the streets have a political function. Elkin talks about the short-lived Occupy movement in New York and revisits Mavis Gallant’s account of the riots in Paris in May 1968, still remembered by many of the French as the most fun they ever had: “And we look to 1968 for authenticity, just as they looked to the Communards. And to whom did the Communards look? To 1848.” Gallant’s great insight, Elkin realizes, was that the disturbances in Paris in 1968 were an early manifestation of the continuing immigration problems of today.
Martha Gellhorn, one of Elkin’s more redoubtable subjects, “contradicts the solitary, disassociated image we have of the flâneur, and redefines it as oriented toward some goal, some revelation, some way of recording and sharing what she had seen. . . . In her dedication to exposing misery, Gellhorn turned flânerie into testimony.”
If Elkin’s capsule biographies can occasionally seem a bit potted, they are never uninteresting. Elkin has an eye for the unexpected detail, as befits a flâneuse.And so she’s able to inform us that Jean Rhys, the English writer born in the West Indies and associated with novels set in Paris, where she was so famously down and out, didn’t do well in drama school in London because of her Caribbean accent. And she reminds us that Rhys had an abandoned daughter who survived a concentration camp.
Elkin writes such things down in “smallish spiral notebooks, about the size of a paperback book, filled with unlined pages of a nice stock, not too hefty, not too light.” She “carried one, then the other all over Paris with me whenever I had a spare moment. I still carry a notebook with me everywhere I go. I learned to do that from Hemingway.”
Following Elkin as she explores the city, we inch into memoir territory. Although she is a native of New York, she makes her first acquaintance with aimless urban walking in France. To her, the streets of Paris “seemed saturated with presence, even if there was no one there but me. These were places where something could happen, or had happened, or both, a feeling I could never have had at home in New York, where life is inflected with the future tense.”
Emboldened by her walking habits, she braves Tokyo with a fiancé. (They eventually break up, but not before she has conquered her initial depression and gotten to love Japan’s capital city.) She visits Venice and follows Virginia Woolf on her peregrinations around London. “To walk alone in London is the greatest rest,” Woolf wrote. “Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the city, and should still ask for more.” Later, during the Blitz, Woolf inspects the ruins of her bombed-out house: She could “just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties.” Elkin, looking for the spot, realizes it must be where the Tavistock Hotel now stands, an example of how the good flâneuse must bring to her peregrinations a mind furnished with history, literary and social, with a feeling for the people and places of the past.
To be as good a flâneuse as Elkin also requires strong legs, sturdy feet, erudition and, above all, imagination, a way of being in touch with the ghosts who linger in recently visited spots. It will be up to booksellers to figure out how to categorize her pastiche of travel writing, memoir, history and literary nonfiction. A reader, flaneusing along the bookshelves, will find in it some of the pleasures of each.
As a student in Paris, Lauren Elkin loved to wander aimlessly in the streets, but she needed to adapt the existing word for a person doing that, flâneur — an idle stroller, killing time — to fit her own case: feminine. But the feminine form, flâneuse, implied sitting decorously on benches rather than anything more vigorous. One point Elkin makes in her absorbing new book is that although men had always enjoyed the practice of loafing through city streets with no particular object, just enjoying the scene, women had long been prevented, culturally and practically, from going out alone. Respectable women couldn’t make their way along the streets without being harassed, perhaps even assaulted or arrested. Young American travelers with Eurail passes will have discovered that this is still true in too many places. Try parts of Italy or Istanbul.
“The great writers of the city,” Elkin observes, “the great psychogeographers, the ones you read about in The Observer on weekends: They are all men, and at any given moment you’ll find them writing about each other’s work . . . . As if a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.” It was in the great cities — Paris, London, New York, Tokyo and Venice are her models — that women gradually asserted the privilege of walking around and, helped by the advent of department stores and tearooms, could begin to enjoy the pleasures of being flâneuses. Middle-class women, that is. Washerwomen and vegetable sellers had always had the freedom to go out to market their wares, and the same held true for prostitutes. They had a kind of invisibility, as if they were honorary men.
Nonetheless, once Elkin began to look for a sorority of flâneuses, she found them, among contemporaries and in history. She talks in detail about some distinguished sisters: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, the formidable George Sand. And because this is a memoir as well as a history, we follow Elkin herself as she explores several cities, beginning with New York, then moving on to Paris, London, Venice and Tokyo, a restless spirit in love with flânerie, finally coming to light in the city that gave her pastime its name.Photo
In a sense, Elkin’s book is itself a flânerie, a stroll where the reader may come across an unexpected person — say, the film directors Sophie Calle in Venice and Agnes Varda in Paris, looking for locations — or get some ideas about May 1968 or the Situationists. Or marvel over an intriguing bit of research: like the discovery that one of the inspirations for George Sand’s cross-dressing came from her own mother, who confided that in childhood Sand was outfitted in boy’s clothing by her father to cut down on the family’s expenses. “Sand’s trouser-wearing was in its way an act of revolution,” Elkin remarks. “At the very least, it was illegal. In the year 1800, a law had been passed forbidding women to wear them in public.”
Sometimes — often — the streets have a political function. Elkin talks about the short-lived Occupy movement in New York and revisits Mavis Gallant’s account of the riots in Paris in May 1968, still remembered by many of the French as the most fun they ever had: “And we look to 1968 for authenticity, just as they looked to the Communards. And to whom did the Communards look? To 1848.” Gallant’s great insight, Elkin realizes, was that the disturbances in Paris in 1968 were an early manifestation of the continuing immigration problems of today.
Martha Gellhorn, one of Elkin’s more redoubtable subjects, “contradicts the solitary, disassociated image we have of the flâneur, and redefines it as oriented toward some goal, some revelation, some way of recording and sharing what she had seen. . . . In her dedication to exposing misery, Gellhorn turned flânerie into testimony.”
If Elkin’s capsule biographies can occasionally seem a bit potted, they are never uninteresting. Elkin has an eye for the unexpected detail, as befits a flâneuse.And so she’s able to inform us that Jean Rhys, the English writer born in the West Indies and associated with novels set in Paris, where she was so famously down and out, didn’t do well in drama school in London because of her Caribbean accent. And she reminds us that Rhys had an abandoned daughter who survived a concentration camp.
Elkin writes such things down in “smallish spiral notebooks, about the size of a paperback book, filled with unlined pages of a nice stock, not too hefty, not too light.” She “carried one, then the other all over Paris with me whenever I had a spare moment. I still carry a notebook with me everywhere I go. I learned to do that from Hemingway.”
Following Elkin as she explores the city, we inch into memoir territory. Although she is a native of New York, she makes her first acquaintance with aimless urban walking in France. To her, the streets of Paris “seemed saturated with presence, even if there was no one there but me. These were places where something could happen, or had happened, or both, a feeling I could never have had at home in New York, where life is inflected with the future tense.”
Emboldened by her walking habits, she braves Tokyo with a fiancé. (They eventually break up, but not before she has conquered her initial depression and gotten to love Japan’s capital city.) She visits Venice and follows Virginia Woolf on her peregrinations around London. “To walk alone in London is the greatest rest,” Woolf wrote. “Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the city, and should still ask for more.” Later, during the Blitz, Woolf inspects the ruins of her bombed-out house: She could “just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties.” Elkin, looking for the spot, realizes it must be where the Tavistock Hotel now stands, an example of how the good flâneuse must bring to her peregrinations a mind furnished with history, literary and social, with a feeling for the people and places of the past.
To be as good a flâneuse as Elkin also requires strong legs, sturdy feet, erudition and, above all, imagination, a way of being in touch with the ghosts who linger in recently visited spots. It will be up to booksellers to figure out how to categorize her pastiche of travel writing, memoir, history and literary nonfiction. A reader, flaneusing along the bookshelves, will find in it some of the pleasures of each.
No comments:
Post a Comment