Literary Flaneurs: Jeffrey Condran

 

A guest series at PANK Blog, curated by Jeffrey Condran

 

In 2001 Bloomsbury inaugurated a series called The Writer and the City. In the first book, Edmund White wrote about Paris.  The title was The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris.  White provides a helpful definition of flaneur: “A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search for adventure, aesthetic or erotic.”  It is an idea that has always held for me an air of romance and mystery, and puts me immediately in mind of Henry Miller, who in his frequently impoverished state, wandered the Parisian streets in search of diversion and inspiration.   And so writers walking a place and gaining inspiration serves as the theme for the blog posts during the next two weeks at PANK.  Contributors Stewart O’Nan, Elise Levine, Andrew Ervin, Michelle Bailat-Jones, and William Lychack will join me in taking readers on an international tour of places where being a flaneur has had an impact on a particular writing project or on their careers as writers.  We will visit Prague, Paris, Toronto, an island in Scotland, a Japanese village, and Dracula’s castle.  Enjoy the ride! 

 

***

Prague is Silent

by Jeffrey Condran

The moment I emerged from the subway in Wenceslas Square, I understood that Prague was a city meant to be seen on foot.  Perhaps it was the human scale of the place—no breaking your neck looking up at skyscrapers as in New York—what Henry Miller called those “beautiful white prisons.”  No, Prague’s architecture is 500 or 1000 years old, mostly, miraculously, untouched by the 20^th century wars that destroyed so much of the rest of Central Europe.  It has a time capsule feeling about it, even now, despite the ravages of two decades of capitalism.  You feel it’s almost possible to take a good running leap and hover just a few stories—a handful at most—off the ground and see everything. 

The feeling might also have something to do with certain cobblestone streets, medieval in width, that no American car could ever drive down, and on which it is easy to imagine some StB (Czechoslovakian secret police) agent meeting his Russian handler in 1952.

More than these things, however, and the most compelling reason to be a flaneur in Prague is this: Prague is silent.  Not absolutely, of course, but when I first visited the city with friends in 2008 I immediately felt a hush that blanketed everything.  I can’t explain it.  The typical urban cacophony was still there, at least a little, but it was also, somehow, subdued.  Even the electric trams simply emitted a quiet “hiss” as they trundled by.  I kept waiting to stupidly step out in front of one and be squashed, so used am I to negotiating my way around urban spaces using my sense of hearing.  Not in Prague. It is as though the city cultivates a quiet decorum.  Prague knows its value.  There’s no need to falsely draw attention to itself.

This is what I responded to during my first days in the city and long before I understood that I’d ever write about Prague.  An aural infection that I didn’t quite know was happening.  My friends and I are all “Type A” personalities.  Normally we’d be vying with each other to decide how to read the street map or which pub looked the coolest or whether or not statues of Franz Kafka were sincere or simply tourist kitsch.  But not this time, not for me.  I left them to it.  I simply walked, struck silent myself, taking it all in: the particular blue of the June sky, the multicultural press of humanity that had discovered the city, the castle-the bridge-the Vltava meandering on its course.

In my novel, Prague Summer, the protagonist says to a visiting friend who can’t leave her problems behind in America: “Let’s be flaneurs.”  What he believes is that the beauty of the city itself can be a cure, as can the simple act of walking, no destination in mind.  There is potency to the easy serendipity of walking a city, especially one as breathtaking as Prague.  Suddenly, in this ambulatory way, it’s possible to re-see life in a new context and to know oneself again away from the claustrophobia of a home or an office or, even, a digital device.  The avatar of our overwrought consciousness can be wiped clean and redrawn with new images discovered on the street.

Of course, this is especially true in a place where you don’t know the language.  What a relief at first to be excluded from most conversations—not necessarily a cocoon of silence, but at least a blissful isolation. A total letting go of responsibility.  Maybe it goes without saying that all of this—the silence, the beauty, the fresh experience of the self— wind their way inside the unconscious work that a writer engages in.  I have just recently read that one of the things many successful writers have in common is that they walk, that they provide themselves with time outside of time to think and to daydream.  Anne Lamott writes about it in Bird by Bird.  Michael Chabon calls it the Midnight Disease in Wonder Boys.  This is the air of distraction that plagues the relationships of most writers I know.  Your friend is speaking to you, perhaps even urgently, when they realize that, in truth, you’re not there.  In your mind the fictional world has taken over.  Suddenly whole descriptions write themselves in your head, snippets of dialogue, the cutting line upon which to end a story and break your reader’s heart.

Prague gave me these opportunities as I had never experienced them in any place before or since.  It welcomes the flaneur, welcomes the daydreamer.  It feels like an “open city” I have written before and repeat now; it stretches out its arms to you like a lover if you’re ready to for it.  Alan Levy, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Prague Post, wrote that, “The miracle of my life is to awaken every morning in the 21st century – in Prague.”  What a miracle that would indeed be.  For now, I can only daydream the paving stones of its streets under my feet and wait, as patiently as I can, to wake up there again.

 

***

Jeffrey Condran is the author of the story collection, A Fingerprint Repeated.  His debut novel, Prague Summer, will be published by Counterpoint in August 2014.  His fiction has appeared in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and Epoch, and has been awarded the 2010 William Peden Prize and Pushcart Prize nominations.  He is an Assistant Professor of English at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the Co-founder of Braddock Avenue Books.