SAUNTERING E-Book

Various

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

SAUNTERING features sixty writers - classic and current - who travel Europe by foot. We join Henriette D'Angeville climbing Mont Blanc; Nellie Bly roaming the trenches of war-torn Poland; Werner Herzog on a personal pilgrimage across Germany; Hans Christian Andersen in quarantine; Joseph Conrad in Cracow; and Robert Macfarlane dropping deep into underground Paris.

Leseprobe

i

Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.

After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be lingered over and cherished.

Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind.

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SAUNTERING

Writers Walk Europe

–

Introduced and edited by

Duncan Minshull

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I am going for a walk outside the wall, having spent a long time sitting there since early morning, and on the advice of your friend and mine, I am taking my walk on the paths, for he says they are less fatiguing than here on the streets.

– Phaedrus

I have the European urge to use my feet …

– Vladimir Nabokov

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Contents

Title PageEpigraph– Introduction ––PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR – Europe Unfolds –JOHN HILLABY – A Feeling of Apprehension–ANON –Never Looked Up–ROBERT WALSER –An Enormous Theatre–PETRARCH –Gazing to the West–HARRIET BEECHER STOWE –Mysterious Flowers–MARIANA STARKE –Walking Sticks–HENRIETTE D’ANGEVILLE – Steps to the Summit–AMELIA B. EDWARDS –I Never Noticed It Before–FRANZ KAFKA –Mountains!–WILLIAM LITHGOW –Honny Spot of All Candy–EDITH WHARTON –Dense, Dripping, Febrile–ANN RADCLIFFE –Picturesque, Near Poppelsdorf–JOSEPH ROTH –Baedeker-ized Nature–FRIDTJOF NANSEN –Dreamwalk–JOANNA KAVENNA –Dream Landscape–CHEVALIER DE LA TOCKNAYE –Miracle on an Irish Road–JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU –Offering Thanks–JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE –Dung– RICHARD WRIGHT –Candles, Halos, Penitents–WERNER HERZOG –Pilgrim, Outsider–HEINRICH HEINE –The Philosopher Walks–LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN –Notes in the Vienna Woods–MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF –A Painter’s Eye, Nice–XAVIER DE MAISTRE –Looking Up–VERNON LEE –Quivering Red Life–EDWARD LEAR –‘Heavens’ said I, near Khimara–EDMONDO DE AMICIS –On Foot and Free–MARK TWAIN –La Passeggiata, a Male Gaze–KATHERINE MANSFIELD –Indiscreet at Bandol–D. H. LAWRENCE –Maskers–ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON –A Fever of the Feet–JOHANN GOTTFRIED SEUME –Emotional, Estonia–A. J. EVANS –On Foot?–ELIZABETH VON ARNIM –So I Drove–REV. A. N. COOPER –Borders–HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN –Wallachian Quarantine–NELLIE BLY –Trenches–ROBERT ANTELME –Sleepwalking through Halle–MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE –Generosity–THOMAS CORYAT –Kisses, Chapineys, Venice–WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY –Crimped Skate, Brussels–FRANCES TROLLOPE –Fosse, Glacis, Faubourg–THOMAS JEFFERSON –Without Bread–THOMAS CARLYLE –Eight Thousand Judiths–ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING –Southern Life–ANATOLE FRANCE –ShoppingPlayful Paris–ROBERT MACFARLANE –Catacombs–THÉOPHILE GAUTIER –The Cemetery at Pera–AMY LEVY –Away from the Pleasure-Place–JOSEPH CONRAD –Recollections of Cracow–REBECCA SOLNIT –The Voice of the Street–KATE HUMBLE –Randonnée Nocturne–NICHOLAS LUARD –A Caravan of UsBrevi Passi …– Acknowledgements –About the AuthorCopyright

xivDUNCAN MINSHULL

– Introduction –

Soon into Sauntering comes Mr Hackman, moving sketchily across a single page. Little is known of him, where he is heading for, or if he is open to foreign experiences circa the 1790s; and he makes only a sole utterance ‘I never look up’. At anything, it seems, for several years, whilst walking the length and breadth of Europe. But his words work in one way – they serve as a prompt, to select accounts of the ‘Continent’ being traversed by figures quite unlike this one. The pedestrian writers ahead do look up, and do look down, for on foot we connect with the world. The world comes our way. And our senses sharpen: the sights, the sounds, and the aromas; everything heightened, everything felt. So when Petrarch the poet climbs Mount Ventoux in Southern France (and pens the first pedestrian piece in 1350), it is the views that keep him going rather than any notions of glory or moral rectitude. He becomes elated by what’s close at hand and what’s seen from afar – ‘under our eyes flowed the Rhone’. Then Lyons is outlined … the bay of Marseilles … the shores of Aigues-Morte … Western Europe begins to unfold.

Isn’t this landmass embedded in all our minds? xvTo be climbed: the famous mountain ranges, like spines. To be trailed: the rivers, lakes and deltas, like arteries. Fields and forests shall be crossed. City pavements trod. And drawing closer, a multitude of buildings and boulevards, parks and people, get the steady gaze, giving rise to joy, curiosity, and bemusement – as if all the responses can be trotted out with ease!

Mr Hackman fails to look up, nor does he reveal his travelling credentials. Grand Tourer or itinerant ex-soldier? Lost explorer or ex-pat author? A few of the latter wander through Sauntering; usually British or American, they want to walk their versions of Abroad into existence, regale us with responses aesthetic and soulful – their lives of leisure and privilege prevail. Still, I like Edith Wharton’s recall of exotic Sicily (brushing against plant-life ‘dripping’ and ‘glaucus’) and her idea that stepping forward triggers a mental leap backwards, near Syracuse. And it’s fun following the Chevalier de Latocnaye in Ireland, a French dandy sporting an ‘umbrella stick’, who tells a story at every turn of the road. One of the best describes the lost palace of Dondorlas with its fantastical ‘flying dishes’.

Wharton and the Chevalier walk well, lots of leisure seekers do not. They over-praise the picturesque and often compare European life with their lives at home. Windy, knickerbockered men of Empire typify the trend, including William xvi Makepeace Thackeray, yet he features because he makes us laugh in Brussels and Antwerp. And Joseph Roth is out and about, cautioning against the picturesque, or as he puts it, our ‘Baedeker-ized nature’. He observes crowds in a local park, hearty Berliners, before tut-tutting the need for sticks and umbrellas and loden-jackets. Why the gear!

In 1974 a young man packs his own gear into a duffel bag and tramps the minor roads from Munich to Paris. It is November, and already freezing. What he sees forms a remarkable diary. Small objects enthrall him, wet cigarette packets like ‘corpses’ and cellophane wrappings ‘dimmed from dampness’; and bigger objects too – as when a low-flying aircraft enables the pilot’s face to be visible. Evening time, he breaks into empty properties and appoints himself ‘king of the house’ for a while. He is the director Werner Herzog, whose journey seems more outlandish than his famous films. For he is on a mission ‘to walk’ an ailing friend back to good health, taking a tough and wayward course to her bedside in the French capital. It is an act of will. Some kind of pilgrimage.

The real pilgrim trails of Europe are ancient and multitudinous networks, running rural and urban. If not pilgrims marching, you might find others similarly disposed. Johann Wolfgang Goethe prepares for a civic procession in Palermo and has to choose between ‘clean walking’ or hopping across ‘heaps xvii of dung’ during a recce of the city. Also on Italian ground is D. H. Lawrence, witnessing a Sardinian custom whereby the young men of a town dress up as women, then move off as women. ‘Unselfconsciously’ and as ‘maskers!’ he adds, rather excitedly. It’s a rackety custom, and I’m not sure we get to the nub of it.

‘I walked through the mountains today’, says Robert Walser, Swiss-born, Alps-besotted, and taking to the road to ‘see so much’. He encounters smoking trains, fellow hikers and highway children, and all becomes ‘an enormous theatre’ to him. A theatre of walking types is what struck me as I sorted these extracts, with Europe acting as the mis-en-scene. Ex-pat authors, pilgrims and paraders have passed so far. Who else shall show?

Questing types for certain. Walking to a place is often a quest, different to a pilgrimage. Up, up into the thinning air goes Henriette d’Angeville, the second woman to reach the top of Mont Blanc. She’s not against the men of the team, but she won’t be helped by them either, even as her strides turn to stumbles and the endeavour looks doomed. Nor would you call d’Angeville a poet of the peaks, yet her words affirming success at ‘twenty five past one’ on a September afternoon ring clear – bravo to that. And a more recent quester is Joanna Kavenna, setting off to find the mythical land of Thule. Approaching the glacial tongue of Skaftafellsjökull (Iceland), she xviii appreciates the walker’s tininess against an expanse of white. The ice doesn’t cause fear, it hints at ‘incongruity’. Small details are telling, as are her words to describe the writings of an earlier visitor – Richard Burton’s ‘holiday baroque’.

Words come easily en route. Physical movement frees the mind, stirs up thoughts and this leads to a brilliant insight or two. Immanuel Kant’s walking habit is just that – a habit – and he probably sensed little of the external world when pacing a lime-tree avenue in Konigsberg, northern Germany. He was so precise in his practice – exactly eight lengths daily – that his neighbours would set their watches by him. But unknown to them ‘what destroying, world-crushing thoughts and words’ were being hatched there, under the limes, according to Kant’s chronicler Henrich Heine.

Thoughts also come to Ludwig van Beethoven, in the Vienna Woods. And the more he walks, he says, the more likely these thoughts shall turn to ‘tones’, then to ‘notes’. It’s tempting to believe melodies for the Sixth Symphony (The Pastoral) were honed this way as he weaved amongst the trees, and set a rhythm. Likewise, evening strolls along the front at Nice provide artist Maria Bashkirtseff with images to use for a series of canvases, including an entry from her diary, almost fully realised – ‘the moon is shining on that interminable road on the sea, which looks like a fish with diamond scales’. xix

These walks around Europe encourage another imaginative act – that of reclaiming and reshaping the past. Yes, Edith Wharton steps forward to step back, being attuned to the ages of Sicily. One night her friend Joseph Conrad revisits Cracow with his eldest son in tow. Familiar buildings loom large to convey a pleasing ‘unchangeableness’ – and carry the father back too. But a jarring discovery is made at ‘Line A.B’, a place cherished by Conrad at an age the son is now. Unreliable memories are playing their tricks, and the two figures resume their way further into the gaslit gloom.

Les Deux Magots dazzles. Courcelles entices. And at Debeauve & Gallais – le chocolat! More urban landmarks to head for as Anatole France, aged three, accompanies Maman in the final year of the reign of Louis Phillipe. Unlike Wharton and Conrad, however, France has no need to reclaim memories or later re-address them, for he is drawn to such spots beyond childhood, beyond adult life, into grand old age. They are constant beacons for him, beacons for all residents of the seventh arrondissement. Part of the tremendous topography of Paris.

In Sauntering I hope you find a favourite city – seen and sensed at pavement level. It might be London or Antwerp; Seville or Vienna; Prague or Florence. Each wonderfully walkable, yet the French capital shines for me, with its specific moods xx and allure, its compactness, and sheer variety of connecting thoroughfares. And Paris provides that ‘enormous theatre’ in the pages ahead. Watch out for the flaneurs, for an original ‘psycho-geographer’, and for one deemed unclassifiable – ‘Who is the peculiar man?’, asks Rainer Maria Rilke, as he trails him beyond Place St Michel, never expecting an answer to the question. Watch out too for some subterranean types (modern-day ‘cataphiles’), and why not join the revolutionary flow:

There is a universal ‘Press of Women’. Robust Dames of the Halle, slim Mantua makers, assiduous, risen with the dawn; ancient Virginity tripping to matins; the Housemaid, with early broom; all must go. Rouse ye, O women, the laggard men will not act. They say, we ourselves may act!

This is Thomas Carlyle reimagining the women’s march for bread, when thousands flowed from Paris to Versailles in 1789. Such walking is born of necessity, grievance, hardship, which lie at the heart of other excursions. Close to Orsova (Romania), Hans Christian Anderson clicks his heels, feels fine at the start of two weeks quarantine. But fine turns to ennui, turns to ‘desperation’, as he wanders around and sees what beckons beyond the barriers. Made of sterner stuff, Nellie Bly reports from the trenches of Przemyśl (Poland) during the Great War. Charred landscapes and Russian snipers unsettle, as do a xxi number of lesser concerns: how to keep up with Baron Mednyasnsky, how to keep Herr Hollitzer’s walking-cape clean, and how to keep steady without grip on the ‘shiny, smooth, mud’. It is a different theatre now.

In quarantine, in the trenches – and in Albania. The backdrop is beautiful as a hiker zig zags over the country’s uplands close to Strada Bianca, all sparkling and sheer. Greeted by a group from Khimara, he can only answer ‘Heavens!’ The women come first, struggling with capotes, chattels and children; the men next, empty-handed, carefree. The hiker asks why: is told there are no mules ready, that Khimariote women ‘are the next best to mules … better than horses’ – but being an outsider, he wouldn’t understand, would he? Therefore, he attempts to dignify the women’s efforts, writing in his journal how lovely they look, their original dress sense, the charm of ‘a woollen apron worn behind and not before.’ Soon the women and men wave goodbye, filing off to find work in the olive groves at Avlona.

The hiker is Edward Lear, known for his verse and drawings, who explored rural Albania and much of Greece. With a keen eye for human quirks and distinctive objects, he would have relished the Sardinian ‘maskers’ and Werner Herzog’s ‘king of the house’, and the Chevalier’s ‘umbrella stick’. But these aren’t the only examples of oddity and verve embarking on Europe’s spines and arteries. xxii

Patrick Leigh Fermor sets off first, taking forever to depart London for Istanbul (after a party, finding his gear, a last lunch) and humming a tune called ‘Hallelujah, I’m A Bum’. It’s amusing how Harriet Beecher Stowe loves the Alpine flowers (Canterbury Bells, Les Clochettes), tells herself not to pick any, but instructs a guide to do the honours instead. And upon arrival, a member of Frances Trollope’s party announces the capital of Austria really does emit ‘the smell of the Continent!’. No, surely not in clean, classical Vienna, with a renowned and elegant ‘ faubourg’ stretching out before them.

A thousand miles east of Vienna is Theophile Gautier, visiting Pera in singular style. It’s a more ‘uplifting’ burial site than any located in Christian Europe, where the poet will slow for a coffee and a smoke, and lean against a ‘joyous tomb’ of azure and gold. An editor’s licence here: but perhaps he will also think about the title of this book and accept an explanation. That in the middle ages people seeking charity said they were heading for the Holy Land, la Sainte Terre. Ducats were given to those duly named ‘Sainte-Terre-ers’, those going ‘saunterering’ … True or otherwise, a lovely word had entered the lexicon, and it’s for Gautier to use on his own excursions through western Turkey.