Every time I pick up Jeffrey Robinson’s book The Walk it makes me happy, and what more can one ask from a book? The Walk also makes me open up my computer almost immediately to see if the books it mentions are available. Yesterday I came across a reference to The Lore of the Wander: An Open-Air Anthology by George Goodchild (Amazon doesn’t have it, although I found it elsewhere), and E.V. Lucas’s collection of essays Turning Things Over, which contains an essay entitled “A Journey Round a Room” which Robinson praises highly, and which is inspired by Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around my Room (published by Hesperus), which I read and loved a few years ago. You see why this is fun?

This book isn’t perfect; I was disappointed by the third chapter, entitled “Throwing off the Burden: Walking and the Self,” which sounds so promising but didn’t quite deliver. Robinson seemed most interested in talking about walking and the self to make a point about Wordsworth, when I would have preferred him to talk about Wordsworth to make a point about walking and the self. This book is quite short — 140 pages — and I’m discovering that it makes no attempt to dive deeply into ideas, but instead covers a lot of ground (so to speak), and so is more suggestive than thorough. I’d like it to be more thorough, but I’m also coming to think that its suggestiveness is part of what makes me so happy; it leaves lots of room for me to read and think some more.

But even that disappointing chapter has this utterly charming pair of quotations to offer; first, this is Hazlitt from his wonderful walking essay “On Going a Journey”:

Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner — and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder rolling cloud, I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the sun-burnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his native shore. Then long-forgotten things, like ‘sunken wrack and sumless treasuries,’ burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again.

I think that’s wonderful, but I’m also sympathetic with Robert Louis Stevenson who has this to say about Hazlitt (from “Walking Tours”) — and those of you who are feeling overwhelmed by all that laughing, running, leaping, and singing might like it too:

I do not approve of that leaping and running. Both of these hurry the respiration, they both shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air confusion, and they both break the pace. Uneven walking is not so agreeable to the body and it distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas, when once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind.

Although I admire Hazlitt’s energy and joy in his walking, I’m more on the side of Stevenson; I prefer to let walking soothe and calm my mind, almost to put it to sleep, and to walk in a regular pattern that invites a kind of quiet meditation. I don’t need to walk to think; I need to walk to keep from thinking.

And a couple more quotations from the introductory chapter (I haven’t even touched on the chapter on the walking essay, which I’ll have to save for another post):

The walker observes things from a distance, and if the power of the object is in some way too compelling, he by definition detaches himself from it by walking on. Yet the walker is in experience, feels and thinks in his movement through time and space, and is reaching out (or can) to the world in time. To deny either side of the walk is to deny half of experience.

……

When I walk, my mind does not flow like a stream. More literary than that, it works in mixed genres: at times autobiography, polemic, natural description, dialogue, essay, even treatise, story. Sometimes it seems a genre that keep resisting genre. Sometimes internal pressures or laxities break the integrity of genre. Other times the break comes from the squirrel that will not get off the path, the sprinkler’s spray that I must circle around, the old man trudging past in a heavy great coat on this warm day, the vague green lines of algae on lake water.

Robinson constantly points to the ways writing and reading and walking are all similar; in fact, I don’t think you can write a book about walking without doing so to some degree. He slips back and forth between the experience of walking and the experience of reading as though they are the same thing: “walkers, who are almost always bona fide essayists, are urged from somewhere to ambulate on paper about ambulation.”

I’m wondering now why it has taken me so long to pick up this book, The Walk, by Jeffrey Robinson; I’ve had it on my shelves since December, and I’ve kept my eye on it as a possibility, but never quite got around to it. But when I picked it up yesterday on a whim, I realized very quickly that it is a book I’m going to enjoy a lot. First of all, and this isn’t even related to the book itself, I noticed that it’s published by Dalkey Archive Press, and it’s got a list of their books in the back, a list which looks quite wonderful, full of world literature titles, some of which I’ve heard of and many of which I haven’t. From what I can tell, they seem to be lesser-known works that tend toward the experimental and subversive. I’ve only recently begun to check out publishers’ websites and blogs, and now I’m wondering what took me so long with this too; I’ve enjoyed checking out the Hesperus Press blog and A Different Stripe, the New York Review of Books Classics blog.

But back to the book; after checking out the Dalkey Archive books, I looked through the “Bibliographic Essay” and the “Afterword,” both of which list books about walking. This sort of essay is a goldmine, isn’t it? Neither of them lists a whole lot of books, but the ones they do are intriguing. Here are a few of them:

• The Walker’s Literary Companion, eds. Roger Gilbert, Jeffrey Robinson, and Anne Wallace
• Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry, by Roger Gilbert
• Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust (I’ve raved about this one on this blog before)
• Joseph Amato’s On Foot: A History of Walking
• Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (I’ve read bits of this but never the whole thing)
• Edward Hoagland’s Walking the Dead Diamond River
• Gary Snyder’s book of poems The Back Country (I’ve never read Snyder, but think I will one day)
• Eric Newby, A Traveller’s Life
• Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
• Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist
• Authors who write about urban rather than rural walking, including Restif de la Bretonne, Baudelaire, Nerval, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Kafka, and Walter Benjamin. Also, Alfred Kazin (A Walker in the City), and poets Frank O’Hara and Charles Reznikoff.

And that’s not even all of it, and doesn’t include books mentioned in the main text itself. I’ve read the first two chapters of the main text, the first one an introductory chapter and the second on “The Foot and the Leg.” I love the idea of a chapter on the foot and the leg! I may post on quotations from the introductory chapter some other time, but for now, here are a couple of things from this second chapter:

People observe their feet or write about them with a unique detachment. The foot is not quite a part of the rest of the body, but not quite part of the mind and heart that direct actions and receive impressions. The foot is simply there, as the shoe that eventually may fit it is simply there.

Yet this does not mean that thoughts about the foot are simple or that people agree about its functions and, more provocatively, its character. Thoughts about the foot tend to exist in oppositions: the useful vs. the useless, the primitive or natural vs. the civilized, the animal vs. the spiritual, the physical vs. the mental, the heavy vs. the airy, the earthly vs. the spiritual, the ugly vs. the beautiful, the repulsive and disgusting vs. the sexually attractive and the adorable, the innocent vs. the seductive. The foot either responds to the body’s commands or works from an independent center. The foot is a thing or it is human.

And one more thing from later in the chapter:

Charles Lamb gushed over walking: “walked myself off my legs, dying walking!” This would be life as a pleasurable fulfillment, a leavening of the body into spirit, the rhythm of the legs dissolving the weight of the legs into energy. “To walk one’s legs off” does not indicate dismemberment. No violence hides beneath the swing of the legs. Along with the legs, one will have walked off self-consciousness, all heat. One may have arrived at what Rilke calls “The profound indifference of the heart.”

This is one of the reasons I love walking so much; I can walk off self-consciousness, and turn weight into energy.

I finished John Brewer’s A Sentimental Murder quite a while ago, but still want to write one last post on it (a previous post is here). It’s a wonderful book, in short. It tells the story of James Hackman’s murder of Martha Ray, mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, in 1779. But it does so much more than that — the first chapter tells what we know of the basic facts, and then subsequent chapters tell the story of how the story got told, how various versions developed, the “facts” changed, sympathies shifted.

There isn’t much we know of the facts, actually; Hackman had fallen in love with Martha Ray, but we don’t know for sure what her feelings were in return. On the night of the murder, he seemed more likely to commit suicide and leave Ray in safety, but something changed his mind, and he shot her just outside Covent Garden Theater. He tried to shoot himself, but failed.  He was tried for murder and hanged.

As the story gets shaped and retold through the end of the 18C and on into the 19C and 20C, the story focuses on different characters and different interpretations; at one point Hackman becomes a kind of sentimental hero — even though he is the murder — and at another, the focus is on Sandwich as an example of the corrupt aristocratic rake, and at another, on Martha, sometimes as an example of a fallen woman and sometimes as an exemplar of loyalty and devotion.

But the book does more than give varying interpretations of the story; it uses the story as a way to examine the culture surrounding it. Brewer includes a chapter on the 18C press, explaining how its openness and relatively amateur status meant that those in power could shape news stories as they saw fit (although those with competing versions of the story could do that too). He explains the late 18C culture of sensibility and how it fed into interpretations of the murder — this is a culture that valued emotional displays and loved to theorize about the political and social consequences of feeling. As he moves into the Victorian era, Brewer explains how writers took the murder as evidence of the decadence of late 18C life, compared, at least, to the moral uprightness of their own time.

One of my favorite parts of the book is the very end where Brewer backs up a bit to discuss theories of history and how his own story fits into them. He describes how, since the 1960s, the discipline of history has moved away from focusing solely on the public world of politics and economics and the big names — kings and presidents and prime ministers — and has moved toward telling the stories of everyday people. Writers of history also began to move away from using a detached and objective voice and wrote in a more subjective, personal, and engaged way. They began to look to new sources too — diaries and letters were sources of information, as well as the more traditional sources such as records of parliamentary debates.

Brewer explains how these changes in the discpline of history shaped his book:

The recent attempt to rethink the practice of historians, in other words, is a challenge not a threat. And it is in this spirit that I have written this book, partly as a certain kind of new history but also as an experiment, to see if it will work. I deliberately foreswore an approach that set out to recover the truth about events between 1775 and 1779, though I, as much as anyone, wonder about what lay behind the miasma of news, rumour, and information that circulated after Martha Ray’s death … I did not want to treat all subsequent accounts of the affair merely as sources of facts or evidence … I took what I considered a less invasive alternative. I tried to treat these accounts as stories or narratives with their own histories — not as databases of facts. The significance of each individual account — whether novel, anecdote, or essay — lay not in what it told us about James Hackman, Martha Ray, and the Earl of Sandwich, but in what it told us about the relationship between itself and the events of 1779, the connection between the past it was describing and its present.

If this book is an experiment in new forms of historical writing, I think it succeeds very well; he talks about history written from the bottom up, and this strikes me as a wonderful example — he gives us a picture of the late 18C century (and Victorian and 20C views of the late 18C) by focusing on one small story and following its development and implications. The story includes an aristocrat, but it’s a love story, not a political one — it’s a very personal story, and yet it tells us so much about the culture of the time. And the point is not so much what actually happened between Martha Ray and James Hackman — so much is unclear — but what the various versions of their story meant, what they reveal about the people telling the stories.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Litlove’s and Stefanie’s posts on Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer, and, if you haven’t read them yet, suggest that you go and read them first, and then return here.

I’ve now finished this book, and agree with Stefanie’s comment that the later chapters are better than the earlier ones. These later chapters cover things like character, dialogue, gesture, and detail, and perhaps these things are more complex and therefore more interesting than the topics of the earlier chapters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. At any rate, although my enjoyment of the book increased as I went on, I still have reservations about its quality.

To be fair, though, I’m not sure how I would have written such a book differently. Litlove confesses that she can be a quotation skipper at times, something I do as well, and much of this book is quotation (sometimes they go on for pages and pages). I got a little tired of quotation after quotation and felt that Prose’s analysis was sometimes a bit short and perfunctory. But how would one write this without the quotations? It’s good that the book was short or I would have found it tiresome; as it is, every time boredom threatened, I found I was near the end of a chapter and so contentedly moved on to another topic.

I’m also grateful the book was short (that sounds mean, although I don’t intend it to be) because what I found most valuable about it was the way it inspired me to pay more attention to the technical aspects of fiction, and that can be accomplished without reading something long. I loved Litlove’s point in her post that Prose is reading in a way that would make authors happy — she is pointing out their brilliance, calling attention to how they have carefully crafted their language — which is only one way of reading; another, perhaps deeper, way of reading is to read against the grain — to pay attention to the things an author may not have been so conscious of, to read subversively, as Litlove says. I’m trained to read in this latter way, and yet I’m intrigued by the former, by Prose’s attention to technical details. All this is to say that I’m grateful for Prose’s reminder of the pleasure to be found in enjoying a well-crafted sentence or bit of dialogue or a masterfully-chosen detail. Also I’m thinking about the technical aspects of writing more and more as I read my friend’s novel and talk with her about it and as I talk with Hobgoblin about his own writing process. All these things have added up to a fun glimpse into a writer’s life.

One more thing — my favorite chapter in Prose’s book is one near the end called “Learning from Chekhov”; here, Prose describes teaching a fiction writing class where her students notice the way she gives them advice about writing but then qualifies it and cites exceptions and backtracks, so much so that this turns into a class joke. She gives example after example of “rules” she has offered her students and then describes the almost eerie way she reads a Chekhov story after class that invariably breaks the rule. She tells a student that he needs to distinguish his two main characters more, and then reads a Chekhov story that has two main characters with the same name, for example, or she’ll tell a student to clarify a story’s point of view and then read a Chekhov story where the point of view similarly shifts.

I like this way of making a point that Prose has been developing throughout: that there really are no rules to fiction writing. It’s not that people sometimes break the rules; it’s that there are no rules. If I were a writer, I might find this idea a little bit terrifying (Prose’s students wanted some guidance, and I can understand why); as a reader, I find it completely freeing — I’m free to enjoy the infinite number of ways a story can be told.