I’ve been reading Paul Theroux’s excellent travel memoir about Britain: “The Kingdom by the Sea” which is a walker’s paradise of emerging images. Tired of London’s ingrown self-satisfactions and smug urbanity the writer takes off with his knapsack for a stroll along England’s coast. The writer is slightly irascible. (A Theroux trademark–ever just enough but not overblown; never cheaply ironic or decadent)and in this way he is akin to Melville’s Ishmael who must get to sea or knock the hats off the heads of strangers.
There is more of course. Much more. Mr. Theroux rides the rural branch lines of the rail system and provides preter-nostalgic views of provincial culture and its affection for 19th century travel. But despite the endangered charm of local rail lines (where the Brits get to dress up as Victorian porters) the British coast is a late Bictorian hell of cheap amusements, fried foods, bad pubs, dirty hotels, crumbling architectures, toxic landfills, rainy weather, roving skinheads and sad families “on the dole”.
As a walking writer by necessity I love the slow image. What is that ahead of me? Is that a man or an elephant’s ear? I see only provisionally so I’m trapped in phantasmagoria and that’s the way it will always be until some neurologist figures out how to plug a donated eye into a functioning brain without a manual. I adore the slow image. Mr. Theroux walks us into assemblies of modernist legacies with a rolling gate:
“I was happy, going to places I had never been, that had only been names to me, or descriptions in books that had falsely fixed the place in my imagination. In Rural Rides, William Cobbett had said, “Deal is a most villainous place. It is full of filthy-looking people. Great desolation of abomination has been going on here … Everything seems upon the perish …” And I had assumed it was like that, the judgment was so strongly expressed. But it was a small mild town, without a seawall or much of a beach, and few trees, and open to the breezes from France. It was raggedly respectable. The boats on shore looked practical — slow, clumsy, and made for one purpose; they had numbers but no names; rusty ironwork: fishing boats. Men still went out every day from this old trampled coast and its crowded houses, and they made a living at the hard work of catching fish.”
“They were winching up the fishing boats when I set out from Deal that day in bright sunshine. Winches on shore always meant there was serious fishing being done in a small way; and more than the usual number of public houses also suggested a fishing population; and timbers and rope hanks and a kind of tar-smeared and indestructible litter on the foreshore meant fishermen, too. Another thing about fishermen was that they never looked as though they could swim.”
These images are better than slow: they’re insistent and methodical like the tread of feet, like the sound of a parade to a blind man. The country is everywhere slowly in decline. People ever so slowly are repairing their shoes. Margaret Thatcher is slowly playing at Victorian war in the Falklands. The exhausted locals play at exhausted jingoism. Nothing has any glory”
“I walked a half a mile south and found Walmer altogether different. The newsstands seemed especially gruesome that day, with the headlines gloating over the sinking of the Argentine battleship and all the deaths. I crossed the grassy patch from Deal into Walmer, beside the low shore (“generally believed to have been the first landing place of Julius Caesar in Britain”). Walmer had the smack of a London suburb — flower gardens and elderly shoppers and a whiff of the sickroom and the sight of people dressed a little too warmly. In some coastal places people were living, and in others they were dying. Deal and Walmer, side by side, illustrated each type. There was further proof in Walmer. After a certain age, English people did not buy new shoes, but just went on cleaning and buffing the cracks in their old ones, and making them look decent. They looked at them and thought: These will see me out.”
“The beach here was level, a continuation of the Sandwich Flats, but ahead were the white cliffs of Coney Point and Bockhill Farm, beyond the village of Kingsdown. As I approached the cliffs I saw a sign indicating that a Ministry of Defence Rifle Range lay under the cliff: do not touch anything — it may kill you . Another sign warned walkers to “ascertain high water to prevent being cut off by the tide.” Most beach paths were subjected to tides, so a walker might find himself unable to go forward or back. The term for such a predicament was embayed: to be trapped and immobilized by the rising tide. “Walkers should be careful to consult a tide-table so as to avoid the risk of being embayed.””
We live in the age of fast image. Minimalism. Fragments. Irony cast as literary allusion. Accordingly much of contemporary nonfiction writing is imitatively addicted to the cut and forced speed of televised pictures. A walking writer is however just lost enough and just sufficiently satisfied by the business of discovery that immanence and facts are sweetly equal. I remember once upon a time teaching T.S. Eliot to a group of undergraduates. A boy said: “Eliot likes being exhausted.” “Yes,” I said. “He doesn’t have a choice.” This is the province of the slow image. People making do. Travelers waking up in unfamiliar locales. And for both groups nothing is as it should be. One keeps moving.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 