Flâneur
Something of the faded dandy
hangs about God’s moth-eaten evening coat,
his worn-out cloth-uppers.
He seems to be cruising lost time
in search of fellow flâneurs
who might remember him
from the good old days
before he dyed his hair. He holds out
a threadbare mauve suede glove
as if begging forgiveness
from the crowds of memories
pushing past him in the street.
Thinking I’ve seen him before somewhere
and feeling vaguely ashamed
of the white silk handkerchief
overflowing the pocket of my suit,
I slip him a few quid
to buy himself a coffee and a bed for the night.
A sudden violent shudder
passes through God’s frail form
as he turns himself into
a flowering magnolia tree,
its creamy white petals bending low
in seasonal farewell.
One of many poems I enjoyed in Hugo Williams’s new collection, Fast Music, Flâneur also set me a challenge. Should its representation of God be taken with a wry smile but a pinch of theological salt?
I tried reading it without God, substituting a down-at-heel street-wanderer I named Fred. I soon missed God, and humbly reinstated him. A being supposed by some to exist outside time, and by others to already be dead, he becomes almost more God-like by transfiguration into the not-unrelated persona of an aged, “faded dandy”. In Baudelaire’s description, “a passionate spectator”, the flâneur, after all, can be seen as a potential creator. In other words, smile as we may, theology shouldn’t be parted from the poem.
A mendicant friar and a flâneur may share in different forms a preference for the visionary above the comfortable. God’s vision is of his past: in a line with a Proustian echo he “seems to be cruising lost time”. The dream is not to revive the glory days of the Creation but to meet “fellow flâneurs” – past selves included, perhaps? God reimagined in the image of an old man wearing his youth nearly literally “on his sleeve” is a social animal; he has, or once had, comrades, although, in the narrator’s evocatively urban image, they may only be “crowds of memories” (perhaps not even his own).
Flâneur compares interestingly with the preceding poem, Leaving Faces, in which the narrator observes that those who once set off in the glow of youth and were clearly going somewhere have never arrived; their faces are “now blasted and frail”, “strangely genial” but “glazed in other-worldliness”. In both poems, people are stranded in time. The adjective “frail” occurs in both. The figures retain their autonomy, though, and are untouched by self-pity. They are almost enviable.
In the city where he’s unnoticed and homeless, God “holds out / a threadbare mauve suede glove / as if begging forgiveness / from the crowds of memories / pushing past him in the street.” The idle, aestheticised gesture of extending his glove is highlighted by a line-break (“He holds out /…”) so, for a moment, the gesture enables him psychologically to “hold out”. “Begging forgiveness” from those who are only memories is familiar human self-torture, and God might have more reason than anyone of lesser ability to ask to be forgiven – something the poem wisely doesn’t pursue (it’s not as theological as all that!) But the narrative is often conjectural, and God looks only “as if” he were begging forgiveness. He may be begging for, and offering, companionship: or just begging.
In an interview once, Hugo Williams said that “one of the hardest things in poetry is to get the poem correctly proportioned according to its muscle so that it doesn’t outgrow its own strength.” A certain expansion, “correctly proportioned”, beyond the short poem has been a successful long-term project for Williams. There are poems in Fast Music happily filling a page or more, as well as the long and engaging sequence of “love sonnets”: the storyteller and “passionate spectator” exert the necessary quiet, weight-bearing energy – as they do in Flâneur.
A developing existential crisis keeps us reading: God’s flânerie, to remain credible, has to reveal some kind of purpose beyond pathos. The second verse cues in another character, the narrator himself. Better dressed than God and “vaguely ashamed” of the luxuriant overspill of his “white silk handkerchief” he’s moved to give away a little of his wealth to the beggar (“a few quid / to buy himself a coffee and a bed for the night”). I don’t think the narrator at this point recognises God, nor is he motivated by the theological imperative to be charitable to the poor and earn salvation. He simply does a kindness to one of his kind.
Charity, of course, has to be rewarded and God makes the effort, puts on a dazzling show. He becomes a magnolia tree, “its creamy white petals bending low / in seasonal farewell”. The burning bush, who needs it? The magnolia, always somehow sudden and fully achieved in its early-spring appearance, seems just the right transfiguration for this no-testament, beauty-loving, dandyish God.
Forgetting God for a moment, I was reminded of Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro and the “petals on a wet black bough”. This would be a very literary version of the miracle, but I can’t help believing it’s one of the images we’re being shown, and that the petals, perhaps about to fall, are human faces from the memory of the flâneur.
The magnolia tree is a species at least as ancient as the mythology of gods’ transformation into trees, and something like immortality seems to glow in the dusk of age and lost time the poem has evoked. God the flâneur simply, tactfully disappears “in seasonal farewell” but, at the same moment, this is a revelation, indelibly visualised on the page.
For more about the flâneur in literature, see this commentary, which includes a stroll around Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.
