The Walker by Matthew Beaumont

Author:Matthew Beaumont
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

Ford makes no further comment, but the reader is obviously intended to infer that, thanks to this cathartic treatment, he successfully cured himself.

Ford’s condition unquestionably improved. From roughly 1906 to 1914, as he proudly reports in the final part of Return to Yesterday, ‘The Last of London’, he even became something of a flâneur – as if he continued to feel the need to demonstrate, in the most performative terms possible, that he was not an agoraphobic. ‘You are to think of me then as rather a dandy,’ he tells the reader. He describes himself issuing from the door of his London apartment wearing ‘a very long morning-coat, a perfectly immaculate high hat, lavender trousers, a near-Gladstone collar and a black satin frock’, and carrying ‘a malacca cane with a gold knob’ (270). Note that the cloth cap, mark of his former determination not to ‘high-hat’ humanity, has silently been replaced by a … high hat.

‘As often as not,’ Ford adds, ‘I should be followed by a Great Dane’ (270). This dog – like the lobsters or turtles that, according to the legend loved by Benjamin, accompanied the most fashionable Parisian flâneurs in 1840 – was obviously intended as a dandiacal accessory.40 I suspect, though, that it also acted as one of those props that agoraphobics habitually employ to help them negotiate the fearsome open spaces of the metropolis.

In his intervention about agoraphobia in the Lancet at the turn of the century, Neale observed that the agoraphobic is recognizable, not only because of ‘his sudden pausing to lay hold of a paling or to place his hand upon a wall’, but because ‘he will hardly ever be without a stick or umbrella, which you will notice he will plant at each step at some distance from him, in order to increase his base line of support’.41 Freud, among later psychologists, confirmed that agoraphobics ‘feel protected if they are accompanied by an acquaintance or followed by a vehicle, and so on’.42 A dog offers an analogous means of increasing one’s ‘base line of support’ when negotiating the city on foot. Ford had finally found a performance that, as Trotter puts it in his discussion of Tietjens’s agoraphobic incident, ‘enable[d] him to out-manoeuvre his anxiety’.43

Ford nonetheless remained haunted by his agoraphobic experiences. The Coda to Return to Yesterday, in which he describes Britain in 1914, revisits Piccadilly Circus, the scene of his therapeutic triumph a decade before. In this setting, Ford consciously or unconsciously uses an autobiographical image that is manifestly agoraphobic in order to explore a sense of imminent social cataclysm. Standing ‘on the edge of the kerb’ on 28 June, the date on which Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, he confronts a Circus that is ‘blocked and blocked and blocked again with vehicles’ (311).

‘I did not know it but I was taking my last look at the city – as a Londoner’, Ford writes. ‘And yet perhaps I did know it’ (311). The kerb on which he stands symbolizes clearly enough the brink of war.

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