`I'm Going for a Walk' Part 2

Among its other disadvantages, the automobile seriously compromises visual acuity. Even a driver not listening to the radio, talking on a cell phone, berating the kids, looking for the dry cleaner’s or painting her nails is likely to miss the conceptual sweep of a cityscape, not to mention all the interesting details. Convenience and speed trump connection and understanding every time we get behind the wheel, and it’s a compromise most of us make, grudgingly or enthusiastically. The obvious solution, of course, is to walk. I envy my younger self: I lived within effortless walking distance of my first two newspaper jobs, and didn’t know how good I had it. I could visit the police and fire stations, town hall and diner on a casual, chew-the-fat circuit and still get the job done.

I have never read the prolific fiction of Georges Simenon. I vaguely admire the idea of doing so but mysteries as a genre, with few exceptions, hold little attraction. Instead, I enjoy reading about Simenon and the loyalty he inspires in readers. Guy Davenport was a devoted consumer of the Maigret series and Simenon’s other novels. So, too, was Richard Cobb, the English-born historian of the French Revolution. Last year, Brian Sholis urged me to read Paris and Elsewhere, published by New York Review Books in 2004, and I‘m pleased he did. Cobb’s essays are studded with aphorisms and nuggets of interesting information, sometimes having little to do with France or French history. For instance, in a 1976 piece titled “Maigret’s Paris,” Cobb writes:

“Simenon, too, is constantly and attractively reminding one that history should be walked, seen, smelt, eavesdropped, as well as read; he seems to say that the historian must go into the streets, into the crowded restaurant, to the central criminal courts, to the correctionnelles (the French equivalent of magistrates’ courts), to the market, to the café beside the canal Saint-Martin, a favourite hunting ground, to the jumble of marshalling yards beyond the Batignolles, to the back-yards of the semi-derelict workshops of the rue Saint-Charles, to the river ports of Bercy and Charenton, as well as to the library.”

As you see, Cobb conducts a sentence like a maestro. His prose, apart from the sheer volume of data it conveys, is vigorous, graceful and precise, free of self-preening. For “historian,” substitute “driver,” “reader” or “writer.” What Cobb describes should not be confused with the anti-intellectual cult of experience. Please note his final phrase. Cobb’s trademark as a historian was mining primary sources ignored by other historians. He was a single-minded mole and his devotion was always to the individual, not the collective tide. In his preface to Paris and Elsewhere, Julian Barnes describes Cobb’s work as “archival, anecdotal, discursive, button-holing, undogmatic, imaginatively sympathetic, incomplete, droll; sometimes chaotic, often manic, always pungently detailed” (sound familiar?).

Somewhere, A.J. Liebling said the best journalists report with their feet. I’m not certain Liebling, the most Manhattan-centric character imaginable, knew how to drive. I’m speculating about a link between walking and heightened attentiveness (consider the heroic walkers of English literature: Boswell and Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge). The best walking is cloud-like, drifting but purposeful, not a Volksmarch.

On a walk around downtown Bellevue on Wednesday with the boys, I talked with a Chinese-American librarian I had met several days earlier who described a mnemonic device for remembering the order of streets in downtown Seattle: "Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest." A look online uncovered several variants: “Jesus Christ Made Seattle Ugly On Purpose” (or “Under Pressure”) and “John Coltrane Made Saxophone Universally Prominent.” All (except the last) are part of the well-known American tradition of anti-boosterism, of subverting one’s home turf in favor of some shimmering mirage.