French radical Guy Debord, who coined the word psychogeography in the Fifties, described it as the “effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour.” He added that there was a “pleasing vagueness” about what the adjective psychogeographical might be applied to, and it has been stuck on everything from Stonehenge to Jack the Ripper. For the most part, Merlin Coverley uses it to mean city writing, and the central thread of this book is a guide through the history of writerly walking in London and Paris.
Coverley’s chosen starting points are Defoe and Blake, and he proceeds to give an overview of the now canonical links from De Quincey’s wanderings in the city, through Poe’s “man of the crowd” and Baudelaire’s “flâneur”, and on into the surrealists and the situationists. Arthur Machen and Robert Louis Stevenson are discussed as London writers and, opening up a new tack, we get a brief look at Alfred Watkins and ‘ley lines’, leading to Iain Sinclair’s paranoiac vision of a secret pattern behind Hawksmoor churches.
Coverley also explores a more idiosyncratic and original strand of his own, an extended riff on the name of Robinson. He follows it from Robinson Crusoe, the obscure French verb robinsonner (seemingly to daydream or perhaps even travel mentally, from Rimbaud’s poem ‘Roman’), characters named Robinson in the works of Céline, Weldon Kees, and Chris Petit, and ends with Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson In Space, making the book neatly circular.
Coverley is a clear writer and he makes a straightforward job of his subject, but he does it at the cost of lopping off whole dimensions and leaving others unexplored. Nothing in this book really explains why we can talk of the places you know and the city in your head (the pub where you met your partner, the routes and shortcuts you take, the site of the now vanished caff where you used to have the all-day breakfast) as your psychogeography.
Nor does it have very much – certainly nothing very sympathetic – about the idea of psychogeography as emotional ambience, or the way that Debord and the lettrists could say they admired the decor of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books as psychogeographical.
Coverley seems to have a virtual loathing of Debord and his lettrist and situationist comrades (their works are “uninspired”, “weakly humorous,” “adolescent” and “feeble”, and their journal Potlatch was “mercifully short-lived”). He’s much happier quoting Iain Sinclair on Blake, Bunyan and Defoe. The result is a slightly parochial and journalistic book, culminating in a recent clutch of over-publicised London writers: Sinclair, Stewart Home, Peter Ackroyd, JG Ballard and even Will Self.
Psychogeography is a more moveable feast than this London emphasis would suggest. British situationist Ralph Rumney attempted a psychogeographical survey of Venice, Luis Buñuel and his friends drifted across Toledo on walks of a recognisably psychogeographical nature in the Twenties, and HP Lovecraft’s “antiquarian explorations” of night-time Providence were psychogeographical in all but name. Similarly, British surrealist Anthony Earnshaw remembers that in the Forties he started to see Leeds “in a new light. Restless and not knowing what to do, I spent my Saturday evenings walking… seeking, I suppose, some avenue of astonishment… These walks were in fact elaborate games. From some arbitrary starting point, I would walk to the other side of town using, as far as possible, only backstreets and side-roads – secret passages…”
Part of what we’re talking about is explorations in the genius loci or spirit of place; any place. Promoted by the English neo-romantic movement in the Forties, the idea goes much further back, to Alexander Pope on landscape gardening and before him to the Romans. Following on from the lettrist–situationist idea of psychological decor, Rumney once gave me a list of early “psychogeographers” including the Renaissance architect Serlio, French garden designer Le Nôtre, and all builders of grottoes, follies and mazes. Reading this book, you’d have little idea of why he thought they were psychogeographical.
This is a good introduction; clear, sane, and enthusiastic about visionary London writing. It is also rather British and low-church in its commonsensical and vaguely anti-intellectual attitude, and it is a partial treatment, tending to steer the subject down a certain path and close it in. Given the all-embracing claim implicit in the title, it would be unfortunate if this book were taken to be a guide to the whole terrain.
MORE REVIEWS
Bookmark this post with: