MEAN STREETS, I SUPPOSE

I’ve been reading a rather good book titled A Spy’s London, by Roy Berkeley.  It’s a sort of travel book and walking guide, complete with maps, that allows you to wander around London and see where various spies lived, and where various acts of espionage were planned or committed.  Chelsea is full of them, it seems.

There’s 111, Old Church Street where the SIS trained refugees from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and turned them into secret agents. There’s the flat in Drayton Gardens where Kim Philby lived with his mother.  And there’s the home of Ian Fleming in Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk. 

Authors just love to pose as though they're reading their own books.

Berkeley, like many before him, is skeptical about the extent of Fleming’s work as a spy, and calls him an intelligence wannabe. Fleming moved into Carlyle Mansions in 1952, taking his gold typewriter with him, bought specially to finish Casino Royale. 

Fleming’s flat was some floors above TS Eliot who, as I understand it, was living there at the time, at number 19, in an austere room, its walls bare except for a crucifix, and Eliot himself was living immediately beneath a flat where Henry James had lived. 

If the internet is to be believed, number 19 was subsequently the place where the serial killer Patrick Mackay murdered an elderly widow named Isabella Griffiths in 1974. ("There will be time to murder and create")

A more optimistic confluence has it that in 1958 Raymond Chandler was living very close to Cheyne Walk, in Swan Walk.  He was in desperate straits, grieving for his late wife, drinking too much, and working on his last, unfinished, and doomed Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs.  It seems that Fleming lived in a considerably better building, but Chandler was only staying for one summer.

I think it’s unlikely that Chandler and Fleming ever walked to each other’s flat.  I did, of course, and then back again.  On the way I passed a door to The London Sketch Club,

and I walked by Clover Mews, “This is a PRIVATE Mews” 

Frankly, it didn’t feel much like Bond territory, and understandably it felt even less like Marlowe territory. 

But Chandler and Fleming did have at least one encounter, not in the street while walking, but in a broadcast they did together on BBC radio in 1958 – Chandler was 70, Fleming 50 - and Fleming adopts the position of the junior partner, very wise given than Chandler (who of course I love more than life itself) sounds in the broadcast to be a bit of cantankerous old know it all, and very possibly drunk.  Thus:

Fleming: I see they had another killing last week in New York. One of these men connected with that dock union man—what’s his name?

Chandler: Albert Anastasia?

Fleming: Anastasia, yes. How’s a killing like that arranged?

Chandler: Very simply. You want me to describe how it’s done?

Fleming: Yes, yes.

Chandler: ... So they go to where the man lives, and they get an apartment or a room across the street from him.  They study him for days and days and days until they know exactly when he goes out, and when he comes home, what he does.  And when they’re ready, they simply walk up to him and shoot him.

Walking, it’s not for wimps.

SOME WALKING GOSSIP

First: John Hayward (who was wheelchair-bound because of muscular dystrophy, and who was known, not always affectionately, as Tarantula) talking about TS Eliot, quoted by John Malcolm Brennan:

“On the day Time magazine came out with his face on the cover he walked for hours looking for wherever he might find it, shamelessly taking peeks at himself.”

       This is the Time cover, with portrait by Boris Michael Artzybasheff, and yes, that is a martini rising behind Eliot's right ear:

It’s remarkably hard to find a picture of T.S. Eliot walking, but there’s this one from the University of St Andrews, captioned “T. S. Eliot and others in North Street, St Andrews, 1953; photograph by George Cowie.”

Secondly: here’s Mark E Smith writing (or being ghostwritten) in Renegade his amazingly (and perhaps unexpectedly) good, not-quite memoir. It seems he was a walker of the suburbs at the time of making the album Perverted by Language.

“Walking the same places, skint, you see a lot of hidden sores when you’re having an off day.  Your eyes have changed and the simple actions of other people take on a significance that may not be truly there.  These are extreme moments …

“I’d be walking around wondering how I could finance everything and there’s be a fellow in an ill-fitting pair of slacks adding dabs of white paint to the white paint that was already there.”

        

It’s not too hard to find a picture of Mark E. Smith walking, this one’s by Natasha Bright:

It’s not even hard to find one of him in a wheelchair either:

Much harder to find one of John Hayward, but here is with Rose Macaulay and others.

WALKING IN THREESOMES

I just read Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs.  My agent recommended it to me.  She said it just kind of drifts along for 250 pages and then it kicks you in teeth in the last chapter.  (She may not have used exactly those words).  Well, my agent is right, although of course if somebody’s told you that you’re going get kicked in the teeth, it’s not quite the surprise it would be otherwise.

The book isn’t specifically about walking, but the all-American heroine and narrator Nora embarks on a long flirtation with a brooding Lebanese professor named Skandar, and walking together figures largely in the seduction process.  (Nora also has a passion for Skandar's wife, though they don't actually get it together physically). Nora and Skandar walk and talk. Skandar says,

“… In our lives, we span many worlds and many centuries, sometimes without taking a step.”

He said this while we were walking, and I laughed and gestured at the Cambridge streets around us and replied, “And sometimes you take many steps and stay in just one world.”

It’s the kind of book in which people say things like that.  However, when things go pear-shaped in the relationship, as we knew they would, she eventually goes alone on a tour of Europe, and in Naples, as she experiences a sudden burst of feeling she says to herself, “Who is he who walks always beside you?  No-fucking body thank you very much.  I walk alone,”  thereby invoking, and subverting, and very possibly insulting, TS Eliot, Ernest Shackleton, William Burroughs, and of course the Bible.  Quite an achievement.

I haven’t been able to find a picture of Claire Messud walking (neither alone nor with others) but here she is standing in her house with some books. We know she has many more elsewhere.