Passages: on the Rue des Thermopyles

“It was a beautiful street. The street of homeless cats, she often thought. She never came into it without seeing several of them, prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud. Sympathetic creatures, after all.” – Jean Rhys, Quartet

By Anna Evans:

In the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, starting from Metro Denfert-Rochereau. On the trail of passages and impasses, courtyards and gardens. With a scattering of notes and addresses to guide us through our route. Wide streets branch off in different directions from the centre, where the great lion looks out. We walk along the Avenue d’Orléans, renamed Avenue General Leclerc after the liberation of Paris. The old street name has been retained only crossed out. Strikethrough: a line drawn through, as though to keep the name still present. 

Along Rue Daguerre, past the pink house that was Agnes Varda’s, there are patterns of white cloud where the sun is starting to break through, to dazzle. The elegant white facades of the buildings appear lighter, so that the street seems to open to us, as we absorb the decorated iron balconies, shutters and flowers in window boxes, pavement cafés, and glimpses in shop windows. We like to spot the launderettes and tabacs, the neighbourhood shops and bakeries.

In Place Jacques Demy, in a square shaded by trees, we sit and drink coffee. In the park there are basketball courts and ping pong tables. An old merry go round and tables with chess squares painted over them, a few old books left there for the taking. The sun makes patterns through the trees.

In photographs taken along the way are glimpses in passing of buildings and streets. Compositions of a moment in time. Walking along the Rue des Plantes in search of an impasse. Impasses, the streets that come to a dead end, a cul-de-sac, that most evocative of Parisian place names: a passage with no way through. 

The Impasse du Moulin Vert. An enclosed passage, a cobbled street with the feel of a village. There are houses and buildings of different styles, statues and carvings, hidden entrances. Gates conceal gardens and terraces, trees growing tantalizingly across the walls. At the end of the passage, a courtyard with old style lamps and green shutters on the windows. There are pots of flowering plants, pink roses, geraniums, and begonias. An elegant pink and white building with iron balconies and ivy growing up its side. Shadows of trees make patterns on the walls.

The streets of this area, Pernety, have the feel of another time. Narrow streets and smaller houses, shutters and chimneys mingle with Haussmann-style facades. Enclosed gardens tucked away behind trees and railings, with enticing corners to sit and read among grass and sunlight, green and shaded. The village meets the city as people gather with friends or pause to eat their lunch, making use of the space, scattered sounds of music.

A mural with flowers and bold lettering along the wall, the words of Louise Michel, a revolutionary of the Paris Commune: La révolution sera la floraison de l’humanité comme l’amour est la floraison du coeur[1]. 

Turning the corner to find a passage, the Rue des Thermopyles, a narrow street paved with cobblestones that feels quiet and secluded. There are low-rise houses linked by leafy arches, blue shutters, and red flowering roses. Some of the buildings seem like artists’ studios, the sense of Montparnasse in another time. Climbing vines and wisteria grow across the passage and trail between the houses and branches cover windows. Window boxes and planters, pots of different shapes and sizes, imperfect, unexpected, like a story opening outwards.

On the corner is a yellow house with a black painted door, creepers grow across the building and pots of plants and flowers. We hear music, the sound of a piano through the open window and a voice singing, soaring like a moment in a film. Each day, a reel of moments. 

Looking back along the cobbled lane there is a sense of green everywhere, hushed voices from the shared garden. The shade of trees and dappled sunlight, rooftops, and blue sky. Each glimpse is like framing a different fall of shadow and sunlight and sometimes the street seems to lengthen depending on the angle I look, as figures emerge and fade into the space of the passage and around corners. I want to notice every detail, to know the story behind every door.

Cats emerge from behind windows, unobtrusively free, and stroll along the cobbled alleyway looking for a patch of sunlight to sprawl under. I think of the city as viewed by its cats, who prowl its spaces, its hidden courtyards, and enclosed places. For the cats there are escape routes in every dead end, and no forbidden entrances. 

We take our time, absorbing every angle, torn between the wish to linger here, and the draw of the blue sky ahead and what comes next; of what other hidden places we might find. The city becomes an endless series of movements, experienced in passing. A passage is made to be followed.

***

Notes: [1] The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Out of Place No.03: 'Missing Person' by Patrick Modiano

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘To make a few faded words visible again.’ Memory and oblivion in Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person

The last rays of the sun linger on the façade and the glass-fronted doors of the garage, over there, on the other side of Rue de Rome, by the railway track.

From the window of an apartment, a man looks out across the city at night contemplating the rooftops, the façades of the buildings with windows lit up, a maze of staircases and elevators. In the distance, the city stretches out to streets, gardens, squares, and métro stations. To the bridges crossing the river, and lines of cars. The city is imagined as a dreamlike labyrinth, a network of chance meetings and encounters, of paths that cross, and lives that leave few traces. 

Published in 1978 and steeped in the shadows of Paris during the occupation, Missing Person evokes a city of mystery and ambiguity. Patrick Modiano creates a haunting and melancholy atmosphere of dreamlike uncertainty, from the first line of the book: ‘I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop.’ 

Guy Roland is a detective on a quest into his own past, hoping to uncover the identity he lost during the occupation of Paris. In the years following 1945 he found himself ‘struck by amnesia and was groping about in a fog’. Following a thread of fragments of evidence, of names, addresses, and photographs, the book maps a trail of clues and a series of encounters. He begins to submerge himself in the past, hoping to be recognized, for his own memory to surface. Amidst a tangle of revelations, of possible directions and stories, of unreliable evidence, are the memories even real or are they imagined: ‘Is it really my life I’m tracking down? Or someone else’s into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?’

Modiano’s work is preoccupied by the ways in which the past lives on and shapes the city of the present. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, which cited ‘the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation’. Since the publication of his first novel in 1968, Modiano has felt compelled to keep returning to this period of history, to begin to unravel its secrets, and to piece together in fragments what it felt like to live in those years, the gaps in memory and silences about wartime France and the occupation.

Modiano borrows the framework of a detective thriller, but this is a detective story in which no resolution is possible, because the evidence is fragmentary and dependent on chance and memory. Perhaps there are no answers, only dead ends. The search for a lost past creates a sense of dislocation and doubt that it’s enigmatic narrator can be anything other than a missing person with no verifiable name or history: I am nothing. 

Missing Person describes a series of phantomlike encounters with people whose lives briefly intersected. There are meetings with people who fail to recognize him, and muffled conversations. His identity is obscured, obliterated by the distance of time, by the fading of memory. ‘There, under the embankment trees, I had the unpleasant sensation that I was dreaming. I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of a Saturday evening. Why try to renew ties which had been broken and look for paths that had been blocked off long ago?’

It feels as if uncertainty is what defines Modiano’s writing, and his themes of loss and abandonment arise from the precarious circumstances of his upbringing which he has written about in his memoir Pedigree. Missing Person echoes some of these fragments, and there is a crossover of places and names. Modiano has written about his memories of walking the city from a young age, in areas of Paris such as Pigalle and Montmartre, and the influence of these first impressions on his subsequent writing: ‘It was there, on rue Fontaine, place Blanche, rue Frochot, that I first brushed against the mysteries of Paris and, without realizing it, began dreaming of a life for myself.’

Modiano’s cities are memoryscapes. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he spoke about the links between walking and exploring the city and imagination: ‘through the topography of a city, your whole life comes back in the form of successive layers, as if you could decipher the superimposed writings of a palimpsest.’ Modiano’s places tend to be spaces of transit, hotel rooms, cafes, rented apartments. He is drawn to explore the run down and haunting atmosphere of certain quarters of the city. They are ephemeral and intriguing locations that fill his books with an atmosphere of mystery and melancholy. In Missing Person, the narrative circles around the Rue de Rome in Batignolles and the train tracks, the site of a lost memory.

What is striking on reading Missing Person is the detailed geography of the city, and the number of references to street names and specific places. The city becomes a site of clues or signs to be followed like a trail. They provide something tangible. Signs that might point the way through the darkness of memory. ‘I use them to try to obtain reference points. Buildings bring back memories and the more precise the setting the better it suits my imagination.’

I couldn’t resist the urge to map this book, the specific locations contrast with the uncertainty and lack of solidity which are the overall effect of the book. For Modiano’s narrators, the city is a place of anonymity in which it is possible to merge with your surroundings. Mark Polizzotti describes how this effect of disorientation is created precisely by a ‘sense of tension arising from this almost hyperreal precision and the knowledge that, despite this, the places themselves keep eluding our grasp.’ 

In Missing Person, the reader is led along a trail of papers, lists and fragments - postcards, letters, files and memos, newspaper articles, and old photos. Tracing backwards into the distant past, these artefacts begin to feel like evidence – the only proof the past was not a dream, a denial that lives could disappear and leave no traces. In the office of the detective agency, there are dark wooden shelves lined with street-and-trade directories: ‘these directories and year-books constituted the most valuable and moving library you could imagine, as their pages listed people, things, vanished worlds, to which they alone bore witness.’ 

In his Nobel speech, Modiano describes writing his first books, and looking at old Parisian telephone directories, their names, addresses, phone numbers and imagining the lives of those inside: ‘I had the feeling as I turned the pages that I was looking at an X-ray of the city – a submerged city like Atlantis – and breathing in the scent of time.’

Modiano’s work is interested in the way memories can arrive unexpectedly, and their connection to place. In the book, the narrator begins to walk the streets, attempting to retrace his steps and to piece together flashes of memory, like the traces of a dream on waking up: ‘I was like a water-diviner watching for the slightest movement of his pendulum. At the top of each street I would stop, hoping that the trees, the buildings, would make me suddenly remember.’

In his writing, Modiano explores the idea that places hold traces of the lives of those who have passed through, and that certain areas of the city retain a mystery and strangeness. The novelist becomes a seismograph, ‘standing by to pick up barely perceptible movements.’ The city is a site of memory, a layered surface that merges with the present and retains traces of the past; a haunting that can be detected in vibrations or waves within the spaces of the city itself: ‘I believe that the entrance-halls of buildings still retain the echo of footsteps of those who used to cross them and who have since vanished.’ Certain streets create a particular affect, as though they are weighted with the past. There is a feeling of peril in certain locations, as if some areas of the map are charged with meaning or tension and shape the present city. 

Missing Person is saturated with the oppressive atmosphere of the occupation. The darkness of the blackout and the silence of the curfews creates ‘a city which seemed to be absent from itself’. It is a place of transitory encounters, false papers, and random police checks, where on the surface life continued but in which ‘adults and children could disappear without a trace from one moment to the next.’ 

There is a sense of menace and fear to the city that pervades the novel, a feeling of suffocation, of the net closing around you. The city feels haunted and uncanny, as if it carries the weight of the past alongside it. ‘He remembered that tiny snowflakes – almost raindrops – were swirling outside the window. And this snow, the night outside, the bareness of the room, made him feel he was suffocating. Was it still possible to get away, even with money?’

The atmosphere feels shrouded in mystery and shadow, as though the encounters take place in a dream, half glimpsed and uncertain. It is as if the past city emerges through the fog, and Modiano uses imagery to create an atmosphere of fragility and a lack of solidity: ‘Everything about us was deserted, frozen. Even the Eiffel Tower, which I could make out on the other side of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower generally so reassuring, looked like a hulk of oxidized scrap-iron.’

In this city, Modiano places shadowy figures of uncertain identity, ‘the strange people who discussed their affairs in low voices’. His characters drift through an untethered existence, plagued by doubts or a sense of guilt and unease about the events of the past. They are stateless and exiled emigres of indeterminate nationality: ‘They spring out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.’

The act of vanishing is one of the central metaphors of the book, and Modiano’s work is full of characters who go missing. The occupation is portrayed as a time of disappearances, and the threat of obliteration feels present. Retracing his footsteps to Megève, the whiteness of the snow-covered landscape is like the amnesia that grips him. He finds himself surrounded by snow which seems to suggest invisibility: ‘All around me there was nothing but whiteness.’

In his Nobel speech, Modiano spoke of memory as engaged in ‘a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies.’ 

Modiano’s work has been guided by this prevailing interest in the silences and omissions of memory, an attempt ‘to shine a light into the darkness’ and to trace what is left of the disappeared, of those who left few traces. ‘Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.’

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Out of Place No.02: 'The Vagabond' by Colette

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Nothing keeps me here or elsewhere.’ Freedom and writing in Colette’s The Vagabond

It is true that departures sadden and exhilarate me, and whatever I pass through – new countries, skies pure or cloudy, seas under rain the colour of a grey pearl – something of myself catches on it and clings so passionately that I feel as though I were leaving behind me a thousand little phantoms in my image, rocked on the waves, cradled in the leaves, scattered among the clouds.

In the dressing room of the Empyrée-Clichy, a café-concert in Paris, Renée Néré is preparing for her act. She contemplates the mirror, from behind the mask of her stage make-up: ‘my painted mentor and I gravely take stock of each other like well-matched adversaries.’ It is a cold night, and the dressing rooms are unheated. She can feel the floor vibrate from the chorus and the dancers, listening to the creaking iron staircase and waiting to go on stage as the minutes crawl slowly by. This is ‘the dangerous, lucid hour,’ the time when thoughts and doubts creep in. A restless crowd has gathered in the dark and dusty, smoky auditorium. From the moment the first bars of music strike up, a mysterious discipline takes over and Renée has the sensation that all is well, that she no longer belongs to herself. On the stage she feels ‘protected from the whole world by a barrier of light.’ 

Published in 1910, La Vagabonde, which translates as ‘the wanderer’ was something of a turning point for Colette. This story of life in the music halls of Paris in the early twentieth century was drawn from her personal experience, travelling around France performing as a dancer and mime. As Renée reflects upon solitude and independence, the conflict between a sense of liberation and security, the book mirrors Colette’s own struggles to find artistic freedom. 

The encounter with the mirror image, a self-portrait in disguise, is something that recurs in Colette’s writing and suggests a way of framing her work. As she writes in her 1928 novel, Break of Day: ‘Are you imagining, as you read me, that I'm portraying myself? Have patience: this is merely my model.’

Written in a personal style, The Vagabond is a novel that breaks new ground suggesting that Colette was already beginning to explore the possibilities of a shifting style of writing, moving between fiction and memoir. In her work she mixes genres and different modes of writing in a way that feels distinctive and radical. Colette’s form of writing was based around her own life, but carefully crafted and shaped; constantly reinvented. From the start, we are in the company of a voice that feels fresh and immediate. The Vagabond is written in a first person, present tense that makes it feel ageless and undated. The tone is full of energy and sparkle. She is playful and inventive, witty and disparaging, yet also compassionate and sincere. 

Written in three parts, the novel mirrors aspects of Colette’s life and the events following the end of her first marriage to Willy. Married at the age of twenty, Colette’s life was transformed from the quiet solitude of her upbringing roaming the countryside, to a Parisian woman of society. Willy wrote popular novels, or more accurately employed a production line of young writers to produce the work which was unpublished under his own name. It was during these years that Colette began to write, later she would describe this as her ‘apprenticeship’, and became a ghost writer, publishing the Claudine series of novels under Willy’s name. The Claudine novels were incredibly successful, and the couple became well known within Parisian society. Not only did Willy keep the rights to the books, but he also sold them for an enormous sum of money in 1909. After their marriage and divorce, Colette began to publish under her own name.

Renée too is a writer whose books have had ‘an unexpected and extravagant success.’ The name Renée connotes rebirth, it means to come back to life or re-emerge, to be reborn. In the mirror she sees the image of ‘a woman of letters who has turned out badly’ in the eyes of the world. The book is about finding an identity in writing. As Renée tells us: ‘And that is where my story ends – or begins.’

The Vagabond describes these years of marriage as painful and humiliating - the discovery of her husband as serially unfaithful – and as a time of self-effacement: ‘I was made to understand so well that, without him, I didn’t exist.’ These past experiences haunt Renée when she meets a new admirer and begins to confront the central dilemma of the novel. Torn between finding love and companionship and letting go of her solitary life, and the sense of empowerment and self-sufficiency she has worked so hard to find: ‘On my good days I joyfully say over and over again to myself that I earn my living.’ 

For Renée, the music hall provides a way of securing financial independence, a way for her to survive outside the constraints of marriage, which for Colette represents a form of entrapment for women: ‘He offers me marriage as if he were offering me a sunny enclosure, bounded by solid walls.’ The conflicting needs of independence, work, and love are themes of Colette’s writing, and Renée feels ‘an active passion, a real need to work, a mysterious and undefined need which I could satisfy equally well by dancing, writing, running, acting, or pulling a hand-cart.’ 

The Paris of The Vagabond is Montmartre and its surrounding areas. She writes about the street girls of the quarter: ‘slowly dying of misery and pride, beautiful in their stark poverty … they belong to a breed which never gives in, never admits to cold or hunger or love.’ With Colette as a guide, the Parisian dance halls and café-concerts come alive. The Empyrée-Clichy is a fictional theatre perhaps based on the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Rochechouart. She draws portraits of the music hall artistes. The star of the show is a singer from the streets, raw and untamed: ‘She sings like a sempstress or a street singer, and it never occurs to her that there is any other way of singing […] The public adores her just as she is.’

Behind the perception of the music hall as a place of dubious morality, Renée finds a comradeship among her fellow performers, while acknowledging the precarity of their lives: ‘my silent sympathy goes out to them without any preferences.’ They live an uncertain, wandering life, unrecognized, disparaged, little understood. In her eyes, there is a dignity to the insecurity, the sadness and pride of their lives away from the stage: ‘Who will condescend to wonder what you do […] when darkness has swallowed you up and you are hurrying, towards midnight, along the Boulevard Rochechouart, so thin you are almost transparent.’

Within this life, there is a truth about living. Renée has chosen a life of chance. She is aware that freedom comes also with loss: ‘I attract and keep the friendship of those melancholy, solitary persons who are pledged to loneliness or the wandering life, as I am.’ She tries not to look in the mirror too closely for there she sees the solitary life she has chosen and ‘the realisation that there is no one waiting for me on the road I follow, a road leading neither to glory nor riches nor love.’

On reading The Vagabond, I am struck by Colette’s great love of language and attentiveness in observing the world around her. She is a writer of the senses, concerned with feelings. Her writing is elegantly constructed, absorbing, written with exquisite timing and an extraordinary clarity of expression. The book describes the act of writing, ‘the patient struggling with a phrase until it becomes supple and finally settles down, curled up like a tamed animal, the motionless lying in wait for a word by which in the end one ensnares it.’ Colette’s descriptions are vivid, dreamily poetic, and intense. She writes in a way that seems to map feelings onto the world around her, blurring the boundaries between internal and external experience through memory and reflection.

Colette is a writer of place and landscape, and she has written often of her memories of the countryside where she grew up, Puisaye, an area of northern Burgundy. In The Vagabond, she talks about finding a refuge in the past through writing about memories and places: ‘Every time I touch the fringes of it, my own country casts a spell on me, filling me with sad, transitory rapture; but I would not dare to stop there. Perhaps it is only beautiful because I have lost it.’

Renée’s long self-examination and the central dilemma of the book concerns this sense of being torn between freedom and solitude: ‘I escape from myself, but I am not still free of you, I know it. A vagabond, and free, I shall sometimes long for the shade of your walls.’ These moments of reflection and melancholy contain a realisation that she holds the key to her own destiny, and that sometimes this means ‘the right to be sad’ and to exist in her interior mind, to become ‘neither darker nor lighter than the shadows.’ 

‘Call it obscurity, if you will: the obscurity of a room seen from without. I would rather call it dark, not obscure. Dark but made beautiful by an unwearying sadness: silvery and twilit like the white owl, the silky mouse, the wings of the clothes-moth.’

The Vagabond echoes its title in summoning a writing that is all about movement, and the conjuring power of words. Renée describes herself as an exile, a wanderer, a solitary. She feels a draw towards departures and a yearning for travel: ‘to move from one place to another, to forget who I am and the name of the town which sheltered me the day before, scarcely to think, to receive and retain no impressions but that of the beautiful landscape which unfolds and changes as the train runs past.’

Part three of the novel is the tour itself, written partly in letter form, full of glimpses, details, and images of the places they visit along the way. Colette writes beautifully about the passing landscape, the feel of travel, and of letting go, of seeing the changing scenery unfold. There is real life and feeling to this writing: ‘Half asleep, like the sea, and yielding to the swaying of the train, I thought I was skimming the waves, so close at hand, with a swallow’s cutting flight.’

There is a sense that this freedom is also about writing, and that the book mirrors Colette’s own path towards finding an identity through writing: ‘What are you giving me? Another myself? There is no other myself.’ For Colette, writing The Vagabond could be seen as a turning point, of belief in herself as a writer, and her quest to express what matters most to her in the world. Within the perfect moments of travel, and glimpses from the window of the changing landscape, comes a realisation: ‘as if the one dominating anxiety in my life were to seek for words […] In that same hour an insidious spirit whispered to me: And if indeed that were the only urgent thing? […] If everything, save that, were merely ashes?’

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Out of Place No.01: ‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

It is better to have nothing': Transience in Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.

Housekeeping, the first novel by Marilynne Robinson, published in 1980, is a book that is strongly resonant of place. It is a book with themes of transience and ideas about the meaning of home, even if that home is found elsewhere. Rooted in nature, it is also deeply human. It is a striking and singular book, full of beautiful imagery, written with a philosophical lyricism. When I first read it, I felt that it existed on its own plane, somehow. 

In the book, Sylvie, described as a transient and drifter, returns to her childhood town to look after her orphaned nieces. It is partly a coming-of-age story, about separation, memory, and loss. It begins with a train derailment, and the haunting image of a train disappearing into the lake. The train lies lost and submerged, hidden in its depths, becoming a legend in the town of Fingerbone, a story which also foreshadows the lives of its characters.

Housekeeping was highly acclaimed on publication, to the surprise of its author. In an interview with Thomas Schaub, Robinson remarks that when writing the book, she felt its style went against the tide of contemporary literature, and of what might be considered publishable: ‘part of what I was doing was trying to write a book that I would want to read, just to see what one would look like.’

It is a book that has language at its centre, and that uses language and metaphor to take us elsewhere. In the Schaub interview, Robinson talks about her interest in the idea that lived experience is something that transcends spoken, everyday language, and that people are more than what they say. In the book, Robinson uses metaphor to explore ideas through the thoughts of her narrator, Ruthie. She says that what interested her in writing was ‘in trying to be beyond my own grasp or outside my own expectations.’ 

The idea behind this series is partly to consider what it is about literature that seems particularly displacing, and what novels can tell us about being in the world. As Robinson puts it: ‘Art in a sense is recurring at the frontier of understanding because it integrates the problems of experience and the ordering of experience.’

In the book, dreams appear as real as memories, and the line between them is blurred: ‘I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.’ 

The fictional town of Fingerbone is based on Sandpoint in northern Idaho, which is situated on a vast lake, Lake Pend Oreille, between three mountain ranges and surrounded by National Forests. A long railroad bridge crosses the lake, as in the book, ‘from any distance its length and the vastness of the lake made it seem fragile and attenuated.’ The Northern Pacific Railroad built a depot at Sandpoint in 1882 opening a trade route for timber and freight trains, and the railroads played an important role in the arrival of settlers into this remote part of North Idaho. Amtrak’s long distance Empire Builder train route, which travels between Chicago and Portland or Seattle, stops at Sandpoint. 

Landscape plays a central role in the story, and is based on the place Robinson grew up, a part of the country where her family had lived for a long time. She describes the early parts of the book as ‘either memories from my childhood in some oblique form or stories from my family.’ Robinson’s all-female cast of characters are significant. When writing the book, she was aware of an imaginative lack and misrepresentations in stories and accounts of the American west, including the absence of women from these portrayals.  

Throughout, the book enacts a tension between transience and settlement, and between movement and stasis. Sylvie likes to watch the passing trains, and all the stories she tells are about boxcars and train or bus stations. She retains her transient habits, preferring food that can be eaten on the move, and the only place she will shop is the five and dime store.  She keeps her clothes in a cardboard box under the bed, and sleeps on top of the covers, fully clothed and with her shoes on. The book plays with the figure of the hobo, and with depictions of female drifters and migrant workers. For Sylvie, the trains represent a home that is always on the move, and through which pass the lives of many people, the invisible transient souls who claim a space within its wagons.

Sylvie’s drifting seems to arise partly as a response to Fingerbone’s isolation and instability. It is dominated by the lake that surrounds and threatens to overwhelm the physical spaces of the town. In Fingerbone, even the wind is watery. Each year the lake freezes over, and then thaws dramatically. Its houses seem like insecure and fragile dwellings, and there is recurring imagery of fallen houses, lost to the weight of snow and ice, and of houses adrift or unmoored: ‘a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel.’ 

Water imagery and metaphors of flooding and drifting recur throughout its pages. This connects to the idea of transience: ‘our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water.’ The word ‘transient’ comes from the Latin transiens which means ‘to cross’, and this crossing of boundaries, the seeping and infiltration of water, is everywhere in the book. The lake is a constant presence reaching deep into their imaginations, infringing the boundaries between land and water.  

Robinson writes: ‘Below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains.’ We are used to hearing about the movement of people as streams, flows, and floods. In the book, the lake becomes a container for the lost: ‘all those who were never found and never missed, who were uncommemorated’.  

Fingerbone is described as insignificant and negligible, melting into the darkness, as if glimpsed from the window of a moving train. The town’s residents feel unsettled by the presence of the transients who arrive with the railroad, or from the mountains, who are found by the shores of the lake, and in the forests. They are described as ghosts, wandering through Fingerbone, ‘like people in old photographs’, ‘the nameless’ and ‘the dispossessed’. Their presence threatens the stability of the town, its claim to be a tenable and rooted place, and implies a recognition, of something too close for comfort. Robinson writes that, ‘a diaspora threatened always,’ and the book creates a space for the displaced and unknown who haunt its edges. 

Throughout the book, there is a tension between domestic life and drifting. Sylvie struggles with the feeling of being contained within a house, and her housekeeping begins to overlap the boundaries between inside and outside: ‘Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude.’ She opens the windows and turns out the lights, and every evening they have dinner in darkness, with the sounds of the night outside. Leaves begin to gather in the corners of the room. Crickets and squirrels begin to reside in the house, sparrows and swallows begin to nest in the attic. 

The book traces the narrator Ruthie’s thought process as she tries to come to terms with what makes her feel different from others. She describes feeling invisible, like a ghost: ‘It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.’ She experiences the absence of her mother, her sense of loss, as a constant waiting and expectation, so that ‘the ordinary demanded unblinking attention.’ The book’s characters feel an intense quiet awareness and stillness: When we did not move or speak, there was no proof we were there at all.’

Ruthie begins to find a greater awareness of fragility, of instability and impermanence. To stay still in the book, is to be caught up in the ordered time of the domestic. It can be a way to hold the past at a distance and keep out the ghosts of those who are absent or lost. For Ruthie and Sylvie, these fragments of memory threaten to overwhelm the present, and a life of drifting become a way of comprehending the ghosts of the past, of keeping them alive through movement. 

Becoming transient is to reach an awareness of the unsheltered, the nameless, the lonely; those who drift outside the lighted windows of the houses. Ruthie begins to feel that she is ‘breaking the tethers of need, one by one’, moving further from the comforts of the settled world, in which the sense of security, of permanence is an illusion: ‘It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.’

In Housekeeping, the idea recurs that families should not be broken: ‘That’s how it is with family, Sylvie said. You feel them the most when they’re gone.’ As I write this, I have been thinking about the separation of families in a more recent context, about migration and detention; about children caught up in war and conflict. Long journeys across impossible spaces; the events that cause people to become separated, to become lost. 

I’ve been thinking about the Sylvie who exists in me, my own restlessness and tendency to drift. And about the problems with a romanticized impression of life on the road or rails. But the invocation of this book, that families cannot be broken, brings back the idea of displacement. The book makes its transients central, rather than leaving them on the edges of things. 

Housekeeping portrays a longing for movement that is also a deep awareness, that registers the presence of those who have vanished; the unrecorded lives of those who left few traces behind. Perhaps a troubled line runs between these kinds of longing, and the small gratitude of having safety and security, somewhere to hide away, when needed, and to sleep in peace. 

Housekeeping depicts a different way of living in the world and evokes a belonging that can exist outside ideas of home as being rooted in one place. The book questions the notion of a stable past, a version of home that is not available to everyone. It is about the insecurity at the heart of living, of finding meaning and a place to be, within movement.

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Canal walk, reflections

By Anna Evans:

The canal is a great mirror. The stillness of the water reflecting the landscape, with barely a ripple or movement. The trees and the hills are echoed in the water. The clouds are a floating canopy, creating another dimension, a sense of the infinite, a continuous merging of land and sky. 

It is an idyllic day in early summer as we embark on a walk along the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. The sky is a carefree blue, the clouds dance through it. Along the towpath, dappled light and shade falling from the trees, stretching onwards and ahead in measured distances, marked for walking. Looking back towards Marsden village, to the backdrop of the moors, wanting to absorb, not to miss a single view. The houses and hillsides framed serenely, with wildflowers and thickets, patches of heather on the moors. The colour of the stone always feels like coming home. 

The telegraph wires suspended across the sky in lines. Ferns overhang the water, their elegant fronds distinctive, along with the branches, the dark shadows of trees. A tree spills its branches across the surface of the water, its reflection blurring impressionistically, ending there in the clarity of white clouds. The textures of the landscape layered in brushstrokes, like stepping through a painting. A picture framed in a pool of water below, dark hills above, a scattering of leaves and of light, propelled in a drift, into layers of colours. The pretty tree admires its image in the water.

A few narrowboats are moored, their coloured reflections surrounded by the trees; gypsy caravans on the water, landlocked but ready to move again. Here there are meadows and flowering trees, the scenic pause of a lock, painted black and white. A beautifully restored stone bridge, a cobbled lane leading away. I like these crossings, these intersections preserved in time. Each lock is numbered, and each bridge across. The sunken towpath passes underneath. It is damp under there and we bend our heads and lean towards the water.

The canal opens out wide, almost circular, before narrowing again into a lock entrance, towards which the water funnels. In this basin, the water reflects the clouds, the trees, the gates of the lock. The water level plunges so that it is like peering down into the depths of a dark well walled by stone. It is almost a surprise to see the water flowing, its force and light and movement. These locks of wood and iron turning cogs, using the measured weight of the water, to propel, to lift, to move. 

The path bends under trees, casting their shadows, leaning across and straying into the territory of the canal, as if swaying, bending, walking towards the water. The water has another quality to it, dark ripples shroud the reflections of the trees in mystery. They trail their leaves and branches through the mirror pool mingling with what is unsettled in the water, with a certain unexplained murkiness fragmented and immersed, stilled and agitated. 

Like much of the canal this stretch is wooded and the walls are mossy. A stream runs alongside. There are fallen leaves and hidden paths, the ground saturated by the recent rainfall. The trees bend gently obscuring the light and making it feel damper, the kind of mud that never dries out fully, dark with disintegrating leaves. Reeds and rushes grow thickly, and reflections of the trees make it almost impossible to see what’s below the surface. 

The water is densely covered to saturation with flying particles, seeds dispersed by the wind, blown across in sparkles of light and dark; a silver coated pathway travels onwards. A bright patch of light leading out into the dark canal, like a forest shaded in dark patterns of trees and light. The clouds darken again, shift their shapes in silhouetted, weighted light, outlined by the bright lines of sunlight emerging, changing the view. 

We emerge into the outskirts of Slaithwaite, a thriving Pennine village where people sit outside in cafés and bars near the waterside. The canal is a snapshot, like the cobbled streets and preserved architecture, a remnant of another time. Everywhere there are adaptations, an old mill building converted into modern apartments. Passing through the village, the towpath continues. The day has shifted and become more changeable as we cross into a part of the canal with a more industrial feel. The parts I remember most, that are indented on my memory. 

*

It is a walk I have been wanting to take for some time, to connect with my memories, with the impressions I carried with me. The canals were stilled space where once there was movement. A turbulent history mapped across the hillsides. A landscape reined in and tamed, saddened by overwork; lying forlorn and forgotten, waiting for a time when it might heal its scars. The spinning mills that were emptied and slowly given new life. Standing at the canal’s edge they overhang and overshadow; large windows in rows, reflecting the light.

I always wondered at the empty buildings left there, abandoned, derelict. The windows covered over, places of loss, places to avoid. I grew up around these buildings with their patched over windows and doorways. They followed me like shadows. Across these valleys they were everywhere. Desolate ruins blocking out the light and casting a reminder. When I close my eyes, what I picture are the shells of dark stone lying forlorn and forgotten, empty buildings and broken windows reflected in the dank still water. The shadow always remaining, the ghosts of what has gone before. 

The canal was always there in my memory. Sometimes a lonely desolate place, sometimes the sunny light feeling of walking along by the water. You could walk for miles of changing landscape, along its edges and lost waterways, crossing countryside and the hidden parts of the town. From the windows of a train travelling across the valley to Manchester. From the window of my school bus, as it wound its way through the outskirts of the town. Where the chimneys remain, when the clouds hang across the Colne Valley, the canal looks back at me.

*

The day has shifted, and the quietness is palpable. Each corner, each bend, each stretch of the canal seems to bring a new feeling, a difference to the walk. The canal becomes narrower here and the trees start to feel like they’re concealing something. There are high walls, moss-covered, ferns grow along the banks, and the trees bend closer over the water looking down on their reflections. I turn my camera towards the water and the sky lengthens out into a narrow passage of light, pulling towards the edges of the frame, a tunnel of soft, white light. 

The water feels closer, it is eerily quiet in some places. A sense of neglect, broken windows, barbed wire, and corrugated iron. The bank of clouds darker, overhanging. An abandoned building by the water’s edge, the dark symmetry of the windows reflected, slightly distorted by the water, deep and unbending, unmoving. The texture mimics a solidity the water cannot have, so that I start to wonder what it is about that part of the water that sets it apart?

The trees start to ascend the side of the building, its solid walls refuse to yield. Inside, its empty frame, the windows bricked over to conceal what lies discarded within. Through a web of tree branches, another empty structure, broken windows, semi-hidden. The trees beginning to cover the frame in shadow. Its empty soul lies reflected in the water. 

The canal feels like an intruder into the landscape, that many years later is starting to be claimed back. Over time to reflect and to blend with its surroundings, its edges to soften and become less clear cut, less distinct or separate. Blurring its lines, the hard edges cut from the land are overrun with ferns, with dandelions and grasses. Where the seeds, the falling leaves, and trailing branches corrupt the surface of the water.

Yet I think it always resisted, always retained its other quality. The one that is given away by that tendency of the water: to stand still, to resist the inevitable movement of wind and currents. There is something vacant and still, another quality to this water, as if it had a presence. In some places it looks like another surface, no longer water, lying still and undisturbed. 

We are approaching the outskirts of the town and the towpath seems endless. There is something concealed and desolate about these parts of the canal that intrigued me, that I remember. I am trying to work out where we are, where we will emerge when we leave the canal. The water churned and disconsolate from this angle. Empty buildings reflected in the water. Dark bridges and hidden pathways. In the windows, reflections of other ruins. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blogThe Street Walks In.

Winter Spell: A walk through Heptonstall

By Anna Evans:

These grasses of light
Which think they are alone in the world
These stones of darkness
Which have a world to themselves
– Ted Hughes

In my hand a shard of ice. I trace the shape of its perimeter. A prism hastily frozen and troubled by wind and rain, trapping air and all the falling elements of the earth below. It has a solidity, a texture that hints at the colours of the land beyond its edges, of green and brown, opaque, and patterned. The mesmerizing quality of looking through where the rain froze into earth in crystals of reflected light. On its surface bright scatters of light like carvings, as though initialed or drawn in delicate lines of white silver.

It is cold when we walk here. The spell of winter freezes over ponds and parts of rivers. The ground is held silent, the saddened grass still, nothing moves. In the winter when the light is always fading. The icy cold brings respite from the valleys running down with rain, from eroded riverbanks, the wind that batters fragile skeleton trees. Each frozen puddle lies in trails from rising rivers. The muddy ground is packed in tightly, ready to move again.

From this ground to the dark stone of houses. A steep hill leading upwards to the village perched on a hill, notable for the preservation of its narrow lanes and cobbled streets, windswept and shaken by the elements. Walking through the lanes past stone cottages with slate roofs and chimneys, stable doors of different colours. In the centre of a little square of cobblestones and paving stands a tree with lights and decorations. The village inns are lantern-lit, inviting.

In these quiet times there are words and pictures to bring it closer. Instead of going there, I am picturing the journey to Heptonstall along the road that travels from Mytholmroyd to Todmorden. The familiar stone of the houses and winter trees, the shadows of the hills, seem to blend one into the other.

The poet found in this landscape a mythology of stone and water; the words to write about a time already vanishing, the remains of Elmet. The haze that hangs across the valleys, the mist of rain. In the smoke from the mills and chimneys of factories, the ceaseless damp that made its way into the stone, to turn it black. In the weavers cottages are the histories of the lives that passed through; the blackened walls that absorbed their voices. We walk along to the old church its ancient frames laid open, exposed against the sky, underfoot uneven tombstones. You wrote of the ruined frame of the old church as the ancient bones of a giant bird that landed.

In the graveyard, we find the headstone marking barely thirty years in letters plain and black. Contested little stone that makes its claim to the land, far from home or fanfare. On a hilltop resting place exposed, with its pantheon of wind and rain and harsh elements, among stones you walked. In the poet’s eye only stone remains, moving outwards, ever outwards from the stone of a grave. A singular line to the empty moors and dark skies, forlorn, firm, and resolute. Marking a life turned inwards. You picture dark swans, wings beating, take flight across the valley; not one but many now, their wings spread wide in shelter, over hills and beyond to the crest of an ocean. 

High crags and lines of trees look down to the emptiness of hills, bleak and featureless. The grass seems hardened and scrubbed, it waves and ripples in the wind, unyielding, made to survive the elements. Sometimes you perceive the landscape as nothingness, where everything feels unfixed and even the land is temporary, drowned out by wind.

Drawn in lines the brooding sky, the hanging cloud, the dark constant of the horizon. The moorland furrowed dark and light with grass and rock. Then the line of the crag, a crater curves through and cuts into the landscape precipitous. The dry-stone wall piled up as if taken from the side of the valley and abandoned here. 

In the shelter of the moors, in the winter spell, the light is always fading. Narrow roads lead upwards, disappearing suddenly up impossible ascents, to the villages and farmhouse on the hills; the drear sweep of cloud, or mist: of still. The cycle of rain to river to clouds to hills. Weavers cottages stand tall at the side of the valley and low dark terraces in rows. In the still of winter it is almost possible to sense the residual smoke hanging across the valleys from abandoned chimneys and textile mills. A place caught in time and held by its lines of canals, the stone that trickles down from hill into valley. 

Even a fragment of ice has an accidental quality. As I hold it in my hand attempting to give it a significance, it has begun to melt very slowly. Tiny amounts of water receding from its edges; the shape it has become already changing. I lay it down once more on the cold and frozen soil, already less than whole, so it can continue its existence with every other part of earth and water that lies along the ground I walk. From its edges, moving outwards. 

The landscape leaves its marks, draws its way through my veins, like the road running through tree-lined stretches, where trees tunnel over us. This is how I remember it, etched in, and layered with buildings. The dark river, which is high at this time of year, winds through Hebden Bridge. The town is lit by lights, winter blue. In my hand a shard of ice. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In. 

Watch: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

In a discussion based a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year, Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year. Thanks so much to everyone who attended and took time out to spend a Monday evening with us. This was the first ever Elsewhere online event, and hopefully it won’t be the last… but equally, we hope to see some of you in person in 2021 too!

The essays:

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton