Cities of Saviors

ZÉNÓ VERNYIK

2015 Zénó Vernyik
2015 Szeged, AMERICANA eBooks

General editors: Réka M. Cristian & Zoltán Dragon

Manuscript reviewed by Taimi Olsen and Petr Chalupský

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"Vernyik's analysis of city poems and the embodiment of the city in poems are well-written for the careful treatment and strong conclusions that Vernyik reaches. [...] The most notable position is his positioning in terms of EEC criticism. Indeed, critics are starting to move in new directions, yet American critics do so very carefully. [...] However, perspectives from international critics like Vernyik are an important step forward for Cummings criticism."

Taimi Olsen (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

"The whole work is very coherent and only rarely digresses from its main topic, its division into chapters clearly reflects the author's thought process and the structure of his line of reasoning. The work is written in very good language, in an erudite, but at the same time readable style. The wide range of secondary sources, including unpublished dissertations on related topics, also deserves appreciation." Petr Chalupský (Charles University, Prague)

Cities of Saviors

URBAN SPACE IN E. E. CUMMINGS’ COMPLETE POEMS, 1904–1962 AND PETER ACKROYD’S HAWKSMOOR

ZÉNÓ VERNYIK

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

1. The Sacred City with a Twist: An Introduction

2.1. E. E. Cummings and Urban Space: The Reception

2.2. The Nature of Urban Space in E. E. Cummings’ Poetry

2.2.1. The City as Savior vs the Zen Axiom

2.2.2. The City in Selected Poems of the Author’s Later Volumes

2.3. From a Bird’s Eye View towards the Temples: Specific Heterotopic Localities of E. E. Cummings’ New York City

2.4. Mapping the Space of the City: Cartographic and Sacred Fictional Space

2.5. Faces in the Crowd: The Space of the City’s Inhabitants

3.1. Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Reception

3.2. Hawksmoor: the London of the Architect

3.3. The Existing Critical Interpretation of Hawksmoor’s Urban Spaces

3.3.1. A Criticism of the City as Abject Female Body

3.4. The Cartographic Fictional Space of Hawksmoor

3.5. Sacred Heterotopias: An Alternative Reading of the Urban Sphere of Hawksmoor

4. The Urban Space of E. E. Cummings’ Poetry and Peter Ackroyd’s Fiction: A Comparison

5. Conclusion

Works Cited

Appendix 1: A List of Cummings’ Words Presumably Used in an Urban Context

Appendix 2: A Revised List of Cummings’ Words Used in an Urban Context

Appendix 3: A Preliminary List of Cummings’ Urban Poems

Appendix 4: Final List of Cummings’ New York Poems

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

An acknowledgement is probably like an acceptance speech at the annual ceremonies of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: long, and for the majority of those present, inevitably boring. But only for that majority, since there is another, small, but enthusiastic circle of people for whom this section means a lot: the author of any work and the people and organizations thanked. Unlike at the award ceremony, however, here the uninterested party can simply skip these few pages, and start reading the “real thing.” Those who are unable to survive a few pages of grateful praise are thus pardoned if they choose to do so. Yet, one does not write an acknowledgement section for himself or herself, nor simply for those who helped, but rather to show the rest of the world the immense amount of support, patience and assistance that was necessary for the project; to tell that even if his or her name is on the cover, it would be a bit more fair if a whole list of names stood there. Cover pages being limited in size, however, this is, unfortunately, not possible. This is why one writes an acknowledgement, and this is why I ask the reader to be patient, and read this section, as well.

The person who deserves mention above and before all others is my PhD supervisor, prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., MA. That this book, and the PhD dissertation that served as its first version, would have never been written without her assistance goes without saying. She devoted countless hours of her precious time, often weekends and nights, to read my thoughts, answered all my questions, and was available for discussions even at very short notice, if it was necessary. Her meticulous readings of my papers went beyond general guidance and often included even such aspects of my papers as language and style. Yet, her help as a supervisor is by far not the only reason she deserves my warmest gratitude. She helped me in numerous and decisive ways in my professional life, and she even helped me get through difficult and turbulent times. I would most certainly not be where I am now without her. Beyond being a supervisor, she is also a role model and a friend. Someone who has never given up hope in me, however much it looked like I would not make it.

It is also hard to properly express how great a share my colleagues at the English Department of the Technical University of Liberec have in this thesis, primarily my superiors PhDr. Marcela Malá, MA, PhD and PaedDr. Zuzana Šaffková, CSc., MA. Within the limits of the possibilities of a small and understaffed department, they have done all they could to provide me with the most ideal conditions for writing and research. Beyond this, they created a really unique and friendly working environment where the workers are not simply colleagues, but friends and possibly even more than that.

Writing this book would have been very different, if at all possible, without the two generous grants that allowed me to spend a month in the United States of America, and consult the manuscripts and notes of E. E. Cummings, held at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. While the very fact that these grants made it possible for me to gain access to secondary evidence supporting my thesis and to have a deeper insight into the creation of the analyzed poems in itself would have made their contribution priceless, the European Society for the Study of English (with their Type A Travel Bursary) and the Technical University of Liberec (with their grant number IGS FP 90/2009) helped me in other, less obvious ways, as well. The very thought that two institutions independent of each other deemed my research worthy of their support reinforced me in the feasibility and worth of the venture, and also provided a welcome boost of self-esteem at a time when I had more doubts than certainties. Likewise, spending a month in one of the world’s foremost centers of learning, Cambridge, and probably the most educated of all towns in the United States, Boston, broadened my horizons in more ways than one.

It is at this point I have to mention the kind, helpful and professional staff of the Houghton and Widener Libraries. They were always there when I needed something, with a friendly and reassuring smile, and always made sure that I got what I needed, in a fast and simple manner, even though my requests were not always the easiest or most commonplace. In fact, they even managed to hide the inevitable fear a coughing and sneezing foreign scholar must have caused at the peak of the bird flu hysteria (although the illness was a common cold caused by the iced drinks and the air-conditioning).

There are also many teachers at Masaryk University who helped me in various ways. For me, Prof. PhDr. Ivo Pospíšil, DrSc. will always be more than just a teacher and the head of the Comparative Literature program. I am grateful for his belief in me and my abilities from the very beginning of my studies, and his willingness to tailor his exams to the individual needs of the research projects of doctoral students. At the same time, his unparalleled knowledge of virtually all Judaeo-Christian literatures, including Hungarian, and his masterful skill to see all theoretical approaches in their historical, cultural and philosophical contexts not only broadened my horizons as a scholar and a teacher, but also provided me with an example I will always aim at, but probably never reach. Mgr. Kateřina Prajznerová, PhD, and her doctoral research seminars provided me with necessary guidance and meticulous feedback at the earlier stages of my research. Last but not least, Stephen Paul Hardy, PhD is probably the most important scholar of urban literature in Central Europe whose texts inspired me in writing my own, even if our personal discussions were only sporadical and not always satisfactory.

I could not miss mentioning three very influential colleagues who all worked at the English Department of the Technical University of Liberec at various points of their career. Their contributions are very different, but equally important. Dr.habil. Ferenc Zsélyi, CSc., PhD made me rethink not only my priorities, but the very foundations of my life. Doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. helped me put my research and career in a different context, taught me to relax in an efficient and meaningful way, and showed me the beauties of an active and healthy lifestyle. Without his example, I would have probably not been able to finish this book. And finally, in the order of chronology and not importance, Dr.phil. Michaela Christina Mudure read and commented on two chapters of the present work and inspired me with her unlimited reserves of energy and sometimes really unusual conference destinations.

I would have never reached this stage without the formative influence of many of the teachers at the University of Szeged, my alma mater. Most of what I know about research, theories of literature, culture, film and gender I acquired there, along with my understanding of Modernism and the Renaissance. Beyond doubt Réka M. Cristian, PhD is the person with the strongest influence, teaching me not only structuralist analysis, psychoanalytic criticism, and film theory (to mention but a few areas), but also who ended up being a true friend one can always rely on, and who has always been with me, defying distance and difficulties. Who knows what I would have done at the Houghton Library with all those manuscripts if György Novák, PhD had not taught me the necessary skills and techniques. Perhaps even more importantly he instilled in me a humble, careful and tentative approach to texts, based on the importance of realizing that whatever one knows, or believes that s/he knows, about a text or an author, there is always much more that is a mystery. In his lessons, I also learned to analyze and understand Modern poetry, allusions and intertextuality. If that was all I got from him, it would be enough to be grateful for a lifetime, yet one cannot ever forget that every single lesson of his meant knowing a bit more about life, and being one of the lucky few who could have received all that knowledge from the most honest person I have ever met, with a warm and loving heart. Dr.habil. György Endre Szőnyi, CSc., DSc. keeps inspiring me with his example and his life philosophy, and shows that one can have a lasting influence on his field even if he is from Central Europe. He also taught me most of what I know of semiotics and language philosophy, and made me fall in love with Renaissance and eighteenth century literature, as well as Paradise Lost. I will always think of him as one of the masters who showed me the mysteries of our trade, just as I will always be proud of having learnt about American culture from Bálint Rozsnyai, CSc., the founder of the first American Studies program in Central Europe. Kirsi Haavisto taught me all I know of reading, writing and understanding academic texts, and these are skills without which all my theoretical and factual knowledge would be worth nothing.

There are also numerous fellow students, friends and colleagues who have read parts of this paper, or discussed it either in a classroom, at a conference, or in a pub sipping some beer. These people, in an alphabetical order, are Emília Róza Barna, PhD, Mgr. Klára Bicanová, PhD, Gábor Braunitzer, PhD, Mgr. Jiří Flajšar, PhD, Mgr. Zuzana Fonioková, PhD, Doc. PhDr. Bohumil Fořt, PhD, Mgr. Filip Hanzelka, Mgr. Jaromír Haupt, Mgr. Jana Heczková, PhD, Mgr. Martina Horáková, PhD, Mgr. Tomáš Kačer, PhD, Mgr. Renata Kamenická, PhD, Doc. Michael M. Kaylor, PhD, Sándor Klapcsik, PhD, Prof. PhDr. Bohuslav Mánek, CSc., Mgr. Michaela Marková, MPhil, Dávid Levente Palatinus, PhD, Dr.habil. Nóra Séllei, PhD, Mgr. František Tůma, PhD, Mgr. Ladislav Vít, PhD, Mgr. Martina Vránová, PhD, and Ian Wienert, BA. Though they all contributed in a different way, they all should be praised for their unique perspectives, creative insights, personal and professional support.

My loved ones, be their friends, family or one’s partner, provided a completely different type of help and support, but their contribution is just as valuable. It is their patience, understanding, unconditional love and genuine belief in me and my abilities that make all this worth the time and the energy.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Attila Gyarmati, to whose memory this dissertation is dedicated. His charisma, personality, just as well as his amazing knowledge and professional, yet human approach to teaching made me choose this profession, and who taught me more about teaching by his personal example than all the lessons of methodology I have ever had. In a way, even though my field of research and my thinking is different from his, this book is also an attempt to make his memory live on.

While this is a long list of acknowledgements even for a book, and I have tried to make sure that all persons involved one way or another are mentioned, it may have happened that someone who would deserve being included was not listed. All such cases, however, was caused by my short and imperfect memory or some tragic oversight, and are in no way expressions of criticism or ingratitude.

In a similar way, although the support and help offered by the individuals listed above is deeply appreciated, they are in no way responsible for my potential mistakes, factual errors, cases of oversight or oversimplification. These lapses, shortcomings, and any other kinds of imperfections, are completely my own responsibility.

Finally, I have to mention that a short part of this dissertation was published in conference proceedings. I am grateful to the reviewers for helping me make my thoughts clearer and better organized, and the editors and copyright holders for allowing me to incorporate those texts into the present work. The individual publication in question is “Transformations of the City-Goddess: Towards a Model of E. E. Cummings’ City-Space” published in Silesian Studies in English 2009: Proceedings of the International Conference of English and American Studies, edited by Michaela Náhlíková and Marie Crhová.

The article, “Sacred-Evil New York. Urban Spatiality in Tulips & Chimneys” is a special case: as it is a slightly reworked version of my Master’s thesis defended in 2005, in order to avoid self-plagiarism, this text is handled as any third party secondary source would be. It is listed in the Works Cited section, and all references to it are properly cited and referenced.

1. The Sacred City with a Twist: An Introduction

The aim of this book is to point out that there is a deep commonality in the spatial structure of the urban poems of E. E. Cummings and those of the urban prose of Peter Ackroyd, as represented by the novel, Hawksmoor. This commonality, as it is shown below, can be seen in that both Cummings’ New York City and Ackroyd’s London have a sacred organization of space, appearing as a result of a creative reworking of Christian symbolism. These spaces then are organized around a limited set of heterotopic localities functioning as portals in time, space, space-time or the three zones of heaven, earth and underground, depending on the interpretive framework applied. Finally, the source of this kind of organization in both cases is a Christ-figure.

Beyond identifying the spatial structure of the two authors’ cities, however, this work also offers an explanation for those common features. Although E. E. Cummings and Peter Ackroyd are considered as examples of two different periods (and thus also styles), it is pointed out below that they can both be taken as representatives of modernism. This is a crucial fact since modernism was shown to have its very specific thinking about time and space. What is more, not only are they both arguably modernists, but a rather special kind at that: conservative, traditionalist modernists. This in turn leads to a specific subtype of modernist space: one aiming at reconstructing an otherwise lost sacred order. Finally, although this is not demonstrated, only mentioned, since both authors are rather obsessed with the literary tradition, and its influence on later writing, it is not impossible that one (or more), as yet unidentified, earlier text(s) may also have helped in creating strikingly similar spaces in the form of common readings or models.

These points are illustrated through separate analyses of the two oeuvres. In both cases, I first briefly summarize the critical reception of the works in question. After this, I ascertain the nature of their city space in general. Then, the individual chapters in both cases identify and describe those central localities that organize this space, as well as describe the city from a cartographic perspective, drawing maps representing all locations mentioned in the texts.

These common parts are supplemented by further chapters reflecting the individual needs of the analyses. In the case of E. E. Cummings, the discussion is a continuation of earlier research that led to an article published in Words into Pitures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders, thus there is a short summary and consequent extension and modification of the original findings. A Christian interpretation also goes considerably against the present critical consensus about the author’s religious views, so there is also a separate discussion of the validity and relevance of this approach. Finally, as not only the city and its spaces are ignored by most of the available literature, but also the individual inhabitants, a separate chapter is devoted to this.

As for Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, no such chapter appears, as this question is frequently discussed elsewhere. On the other hand, unlike in the case of the New York City of E. E. Cummings’ poetry, there is at least one detailed critical analysis of London’s spaces as they appear in the novel. Alex Link devoted a chapter of his dissertation to this issue, and since my interpretation is very different from his, a longer unit of my analysis is devoted to the criticism of his stance. The findings of the Cummings and Ackroyd parts are then accounted for and put in context by a chapter devoted to providing an explanation for the similarities of the two oeuvres’ spatial aspect.

The analysis of the urban space of E. E. Cummings’ poetry is based on the poems listed in Complete Poems 1904-1962 with the exclusion of all those works that do not deal with the city or some of its aspects, and also those that demonstrably deal with cities other than New York. The methodology used for this selection is explained below, while the results of the individual stages of the process, including the final one, are available in Appendices 1 to 4. Some of these poems are then analyzed using close reading, a comparison with the author’s manuscripts and notes, as well as Mircea Eliade’s theory of sacred space and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. The drawing of the maps of the city’s cartographic fictional space is based on Christopher Bollas’ thoughts on the subjective experience of space, while additional theoretical models, such as Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, or Stephen Paul Hardy’s model of the flâneur are also used wherever they seemed appropriate or revelatory. Most of the analyses also heavily rely on parallel readings of verses from the Bible, including apocrypha. Previous interpretations of the poems are also consulted or contested, not only those available as monographs or journal articles, but also many unpublished dissertations.

The methods and theoretical frameworks used for the analysis of Hawksmoor are mostly the same, although Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is not used here, while Julia Kristeva’s abject plays an important negative role in my reading: I point out that it is not applicable to the urban space of the novel, regardless of Alex Link’s claims to the contrary. In tackling the issues of various models of time in relation to space, my interpretation relies to a great extent on Hendia Baker’s summary of models of time and space used by quantum physics and their applicability to the writings of Peter Ackroyd.

The conceptual framework of the chapter comparing the results of the individual analyses and accounting for them is provided by Stephen Kern’s study of Modernist conceptions of time and space, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918. Spatial models featured in this work are juxtaposed to the findings of my readings of E. E. Cummings’ and Peter Ackroyd’s city space, the two authors’ theoretical works on art, and their statements in notes and interviews, as well as other scholars’ interpretations of their works.

The New York City that emerges from the poems of E. E. Cummings is made up of a limited set of inner-city sites, primarily in Manhattan, and most often in or around Greenwich Village. The central locations organizing the sacred vs profane dynamics of this city space are Dick Mid’s Brothel, McSorley’s Pub and Hassan’s Place. These act as temples and portals between the three zones of heaven, earth and underworld. The city itself, at the same time, appears as a female and eroticized savior, going through stages in the life of Jesus Christ, and sacrificing herself for the inhabitants of the city who at the same time constitute her body.

The London that appears in Hawksmoor is likewise one made up of a selected set of locations in the center of the city, almost exclusively on the North Bank of the River Thames. The central locations in this case are the seven churches built by Nicholas Dyer that at the same time also function as occult temples mirroring the arrangement of the seven stars in the Pleiades and providing portals in time, space or space-time, according to the model used. These portals are made functional by a series of human sacrifices carried out by the architect himself who intentionally leaves traces of his “crimes” in combination with semi-hidden symbols and messages for those willing (and able) to read them, interpret them, and follow his teachings. His aim in this is to escape from the chains of human existence forced on humankind by the inevitable pressure of time and show a select group of enlightened people the way to do the same. Thus, similarly to Cummings’ New York City, he appears as a savior-figure directly responsible for the arrangement of space through his activities as the builder of his seven churches.

As it is mentioned above, there is a visible commonality of features here. One finds the opposition of sacred and profane space to be the fundamental organizing principle of the urban sphere. While this space appears to include only a severely limited part of the cartographical city, it is further controlled by an even smaller number of heterotopic portals. Finally, in both cases, this specific spatial arrangement is linked to a heavily reworked version of a Christian-type savior-figure.

These findings significantly modify the image and critical understanding of both authors. E. E. Cummings is rarely if ever considered a city-poet, while this monograph points out that his poems devoted to New York City show a consistent and complex treatment of urban existence that is worth investigating. Likewise, it challenges the view that religion either does not play any role in the poet’s works, or at most, if anything appears, it is a transcendental, sublimated form of Zen-Buddhism. In contrast to this, my reading documents a consistent and complex use of Christian symbolism. In the case of Peter Ackroyd and his Hawksmoor, the dissertation contests Alex Link’s understanding of the novel’s London as a misogynistic, rational space based on the abjectification and repression of the female body, and instead offers a religious-sacred city space based partially on occult symbolism and partially on contemporary physical models of space-time. Furthermore, it situates the author as a late representative of modernism, rather than a postmodern writer, in harmony with Peter Ackroyd’s own claims and his theoretical writings, but against the tide of existing critical and scholarly reception.

2.1. E. E. Cummings and Urban Space: The Reception

Taking a look at the available analytical and critical writing on E. E. Cummings’ oeuvre, one can easily recognize that the poet’s use of space has been mostly ignored. And if it nevertheless appears, it mostly does so only as the spatiality of the printed page (Olsen 2007, 114). To mention but one striking example of the many, while Isabelle Alfandary makes the strong statement that “The Cummingsian poem makes space an object of experience without precedent”{1} (2002, 18; my translation), she herself also subsequently limits this to “how [Cummings] arranges his lines and ‘draws’ out the line lengths to form blocks of stanzas and various shapes” (Olsen 2007, 114).

However, if spatiality in general mostly plays the role of an overlooked issue in Cummings studies, one has to emphasize that the issue of urban space is even more an example of a puzzling neglect. Concentrating at first only on the quantity of such work available, one has to realize that no book-length study of Cummings’ city poems has been published, essays dealing with them can be counted on one hand, and those volumes that are devoted to the poet or his work in general usually marginalize the importance of these poems by rarely devoting more than a line or two to each. This is especially striking if one, again, stays with the numbers and notices that just in the poet’s first volume of poems, Tulips & Chimneys, alone, “out of the 152 poems, 48 deal with the topic of the American city. It is a bit more than 31.5%, almost one third of the poems” (Vernyik 2007, 129).

If one is to leave mere numbers behind, and approaches this question from the angle of the importance of the city-experience in the poet’s oeuvre, this neglecting attitude gets not a tiny bit more understandable: quite the opposite. As María Tereza González Mínguez notes, not only is it “well-known that [the] city appears constantly in his writings” (2006, 247), but in addition, it is quite warranted to claim that “Cummings used New York as a quarry: there was always a hidden rock somewhere from which to extract a diamond” (247).

One possible reason for such a treatment can be the fact that when Cummings “waxes sentimental about skyscrapers and gum chewing molls and sweat [...] just as other poets have been sentimental about pale ladies and panting bosoms,” as Joseph Auslander ([1927] 1981, 84) put it, he often concerns himself with “old bottles, loose lips, dirty hair and low women” (83) in a manner that puts a rather strong “emphasis upon the sexual in bawdy terms” (Haines [1951] 1972, 17). While there is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with this, such a focus on “an earthly reality” (17), part of which is a bodily sensuality that “blended the sexual with the repulsive” (Kidder 1979b, 58), and part is made up of unconscious drunks, and at first sight disgustingly or horrifyingly graphic scenes, simply does not fit into the image of the poet having a “lyric vision” of a “transcendent world which is one, and full of love” (Friedman 1960, 9). This idea of Cummings’ transcendentalist (and elitist) vision of a “world of awareness – the true world – which is outside of, above, and beyond the ordinary world of everyday perception” (Friedman 1969, 5) is clearly incompatible with such a lively focus on the dirty details of everyday life in a city.

To some extent this concept of a transcendentalist vision may be a side effect of Norman Friedman’s efforts in trying to establish Cummings as a major American poet. He has been conscientiously working on this since the second half of the 1950s through emphasizing the importance and complexity of the poet’s lyric vision. This venture he took on in defense against the critics who claimed that the poet’s art is shallow, derivative and rigid. However, while Friedman’s focus on proving the opposite is well-founded, thorough, justified and logical,

his first two books on Cummings, right because of their excessive focus on showing the vision and the improvement of E. E. Cummings’ art respectively, let the reader fall in the trap of oversimplification, and without being aware of it, channeled most of the later research into similar fields. (Vernyik 2007, 126)

Thus, for decades, with a few notable expressions, interpreters of his work have ignored Cummings’ use of space in general, and that of city space in particular. If space has appeared, it was meant only in the sense of the arrangement of words on the printed sheet. As Taimi Olsen (2007) notes, “[p]revious examinations of Cummings’ use of space involve” hardly more than “the space on the page” (114). In other words, their investigation of space is limited to “his place among visual poets,” or to “how he arranges his lines and ‘draws’ out the line lengths to form blocks of stanzas and various shapes” (114). This lack of attention to city space seems logical, if one bears in mind that the critical tradition has ignored not only the spatiality of said urban poetry, but those very poems themselves.

And this “negligence to deal with the question of the city” (Vernyik 2007, 126) gets even more puzzling once one realizes the already mentioned fact that “poems dealing with the American city comprise a major part of Cummings’ poetic śuvre – although their percentage is slowly decreasing towards the later volumes” (126). In order to identify poems dealing with cities I applied the following methodology: I used Katherine Winters McBride’s (1989) A Concordance to the Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings as a starting point. This volume contains a list of all words and word-fragments occurring in the author’s poetry (939-1006). I used this list to find those expressions that might appear in a context related to urban experience (Appendix 1). The most obvious ones, of course, were the names of towns and words referring to types of settlements, but there are also words referring to specific, named parts of towns or buildings, numbers that may refer to New York’s streets and avenues, words about public space and its components, the vocabulary of the world of transportation, that of surveillance, power and crime, as well as words of art and music, of restaurants, hostelry and nightlife, and even expressions of health, hygiene and smell. Similarly, there are items that are building materials, interior or exterior decoration, and also furniture and household appliances, along with parts of buildings. One is bound to remember also words denoting business and industry, abstract concepts used to talk about urban settlements, while types of buildings also occur. And, of course, no town can function without its people and their pets and education, or even religion for that matter. The list I compiled contains the vocabulary of these spheres and some words that I could not categorize, yet seem to be related to the urban experience.

Applying this set of words, it is possible to compile a more or less complete listing of Cummings’ poems dealing with urban life. Through Literature Online one can get access to the electronic version of the text of E. E. Cummings’ Complete Poems 1904-1962, edited by George James Firmage, and thus easily find the individual poems containing the above mentioned words, and check if those words are indeed appearing in poems dealing with the urban sphere, or not.  This is how I compiled a revised word list containing only those expressions that indeed appear in poems describing some aspect of urban existence (Appendix 2). This revised set of words was used then (as search phrases) to compile a preliminary list of the author’s urban poems (Appendix 3), one that contains all such texts, without paying any attention to whether or not they refer to New York City. The list contains 152 poems, in other words 15.69 percent of the 969 total collected poems of the author. Though admittedly a lower percentage than in his first volume, Tulips & Chimneys, it is nevertheless a significant set of texts, even if one has to stress that this number, indeed, includes all urban poems. After removing those with explicit markers to towns other than New York City, one is left with the 110 poems listed in Appendix 4 (11.35%).

In passing, I should also mention that New York City does not only appear in Cummings’ poetry, but also in his short prose and in his paintings. This is an important note to make, even if these texts are not actually analyzed in the present study, since the author’s output of essays devoted to the town is rather prolific.

“Coney Island,” “The Soul Story of Gladys Vanderdecker,” “An Ex-Multimillionaire’s Rules for Success in Life,” “How to Succeed as an Author,” and “Why I Like America,” all deal with the American City, some directly, some indirectly (Vernyik 2007, 127).

As for the paintings, as Lisa Nunn (1997) notes, Cummings “would celebrate the city (or satirize it) as Sloan did in his Sunday, Women Drying their Hair and as Marsh did in Broadway, St. Paul’s Church, both exhibited at the armory show” (80). However, yet again, due to the limitations in length and focus, a discussion of the author’s paintings does not comprise a part of this book.

In other words, urban poems both form a possibly important and interesting area of the author’s oeuvre, and also provide a significant portion of it. By analyzing them in this monograph, as a logical follow-up of my earlier research, I hope to contribute to a fuller and more versatile understanding of the author’s poetry, and fill a surprising void.

2.2. The Nature of Urban Space in E. E. Cummings’ Poetry

In my earlier essay, “Sacred-Evil New York: Urban Spatiality in Tulips & Chimneys,” I have illustrated that the author’s first volume of poems can be interrogated in search of a unified city concept. There, I pointed out that the volume’s “is a city full of life, showing a dualism of organic and mechanistic features” (Vernyik 2007, 127). In addition, through close textual analysis I argued that “the city of Tulips & Chimneys is anthropomorphic and gendered: the New York City portrayed in [the] volume is feminine” (127). Furthermore, it was proposed in the same essay that the dynamically changing city is undergoing a transformation from a mechanical to an organic existence through “a sacred act of self-sacrifice. In effect, […] the city becomes a modern day savior, saving both herself and those of her body – the citizens – through the said self-sacrifice and her (the city’s) repetitive, commemoratory act of Symbolic Feast or Holy Communion” (128), while at the same time, it also shows some features of “an ancient earth/mother goddess” (128).

I reached these conclusions through the analysis of four poems: “[in the rain-],” “[writhe and],” “[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-],” and “[i am going to utter a tree,Nobody].” Since the present monograph is the logical continuation of the thesis in question, I provide brief summaries of my treatments of those four texts, and in three out of four cases also extend them to better reflect my present stance. Yet, it is obviously neither possible nor necessary to reprint the individual close readings here, so the reader is advised to consult the original for further details and evidence.

The poem, “[in the rain-],” mostly either does not figure in available studies, or gets barely more than a dismissive or oversimplifying sentence or two, and never in connection with the urban symbolism it features. In contrast, I pointed out the strong urban imagery present, and the allusions to Jerusalem, the Holy City. In addition, I warned about the fact that this is by far not the only case of Christian symbolism in this text, and thus thinking of the city in terms of Mircea Eliade’s concept of religious space is probably warranted. At the same time, I also called attention to the heavily anthropomorphic representation, to a human city strongly opposing the mechanistic tradition of the expressionist city (129-31).

Yet, one should add at this point that the image of the city as a human being, moving as an organism, is not something that is limited to the author’s poetry. As Lisa Nunn (1997) notes, something similar happens when the narrator-protagonist of The Enormous Room, C, sees New York City for the first time after returning from his captivity in France:

The final passage of The Enormous Room depicts New York as C. reaches it; the style is quite similar to his painting New York, 1927. […] The city moves, again synaesthetically, into light that is hard or solid. Cummings mixes in music as well. The city leans through octaves. New York seems to be walking toward Cummings, instead of him approaching it. Cummings blends the cubist style with a synaesthetic style here; the edges of the buildings are parallel, but appear to be moving toward the viewer. (135)

There is obviously no mention of suffering, yet the image is strikingly close to that of “[in the rain-].”

In my treatment of “[writhe and],” I tried to establish to what extent that poem fits into the pattern identified above: an anthropomorphic city featuring religious symbolism and sacred space. My conclusion was that although at first sight it may seem an utter disappointment with its mechanical noises, with its pain and suffering, this picture gets a completely new light upon closer inspection. Towards the end of the poem, the mechanical features are pushed to the background by the human-like aspects; what is more, the city is the suffering victim, and not the perpetrator causing the pain. In addition, the human features get so emphatic that the town is even assigned a specific gender (that of a woman), and biblical allusions are likewise present, this time in fact the reference is to the scene of the Agony in the Garden. This, in turn, renders the city into a female savior, suffering for its citizens (Vernyik 2007, 131-3).

One could add to this original analysis that Rushworth M Kidder (1979a) was right in his claims for the strong visuality of the poem, when he explained that “the pattern of indentations from the left margin suggests […] the block-like appearance of city buildings” (283), and that in fact the visual arrangement of the words on the printed sheet also “recall[s] the Cubists’ device of reducing objects to their planes” (283), and thus parallels the author’s stylistic experiments as a painter in the period.

Yet, there is no reason to stop at this. This visual arrangement, this fragmentation, might not only be a stylistic or formal device. The image of a poem broken into pieces on a white sheet of paper might just as well stand for a fragmented and ruptured city space, in harmony with Mircea Eliade’s concept of sacred space, as well as with the findings of the analysis of “[in the rain-].”

In my interpretation of “[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-],” I pointed out that this one is yet another misleading poem. One that would, again, seemingly seamlessly fit into the anti-urban tradition, with its inhumane, evil and alienating city. Yet, however much there is a speaking voice likened to a morsel, a city with a huge devouring mouth, it is not a violent, but a peaceful, monumental and celebratory scene (Vernyik 2007, 133-6).

In other words, even though the poem may seem to depict “millions who will be devoured and swallowed by the city and their own uncompromising disaffection” (McBroom 1971, 72), and one might at first want to join Robert Louis McBroom in claiming that the text in question is about the “sense of alienation which presses upon the lonely soul even in crowds” (67), it is not necessarily so, although such a view is by no means alien to Cummings: he is well known for his “distaste for mobs, groups not made up of individuals thinking for themselves” (Nunn 1997, 47).

While the vantage point of the speaker gets lifted above the people, it is not an air of alienation, solitude or superiority one feels while reading the poem. Even though it is typical in such situations to write of “the solitude of a belfry-tower, […] an impression of domination at little cost” (Bachelard [1958] 1994, 173) or to claim that to peep down from a tower is “the dream of high solitude” (173), yet, this is not the case here. Those “[l]aughters jostle grins nudge smiles” (Cummings 1994, 111), and such an image simply cannot fit in this framework. It is not a scene where “[f]rom the top of his tower, a philosopher of domination sees the universe in miniature. Everything is small because he is so high. And since he is high, he is great, the height of his station is proof of his own greatness” (Bachelard [1958] 1994, 173). There is too much life, “ecstasy” (Cummings 1994, 111) and energy in the poem’s description for that, and even too much awe. After all, the lyrical voice calls what he sees the “mystery of mysteries” (111).

But I went further in my original analysis, as well, and recalled another Cummings poem, “[morsel miraculous and meaningless],” and primarily its Catholic reading by Valarie Meliotes Arms (1979). Just like there, here one faces a scene of the Holy Communion. In this case, however, it is the city who is carrying out the sacral feast, and she is eating not only symbolically, but factually the body of the savior, in the shape of her own inhabitants (Vernyik 2007, 135-6).

Finally, I juxtaposed this poem with the only other one featuring an enormous, devouring mouth in the volume I then focused on (Tulips & Chimneys), and found some interesting commonalities. Although “[i am going to utter a tree,Nobody]” is a rural poem, spatial and structural commonalities may warrant such a handling. I likewise found an anthropomorphic representation linked explicitly to femininity, yet here the symbolism is much more animistic and/or pagan than Christian, thus I modified my initial hypothesis to accommodate for such possible elements.

2.2.1. The City as Savior vs the Zen Axiom

As it was shown, I reached a conclusion that postulates the city of the poems of E. E. Cummings as at least partially based on Christian, and potentially Catholic imagery. While to some extent the analyses spoke for themselves, it is worth stopping here for a moment, since such a statement does not fit particularly seamlessly into the available understanding of the poet’s ideas of faith and religion. Although a statement that claims that the author’s urban imagery may be deeply rooted in Christian symbolism should not come as a surprise if one bears in mind that the poet’s father was an “ordained minister of the South Congregational Society, Unitarian, of Boston” (Norman 1972, 15), yet, an interpretation that claims central importance for Christianity goes notably against the tide in Cummings studies.

Norman Friedman, the first Cummings scholar proper, started a tradition which understands the work of the author in terms of a “lyric vision” of a “transcendent world” (1960, 9), and often goes as far as to consider him “something of a Zen master” (1996, 62), or even a “Zen monk” (173). Friedman, and through his influence most of present day Cummings scholarship, pursues, either consciously or unconsciously, a strategy that considers such a transcendentalist-Buddhist vision to be “the tradition which the best of Cummings […] follows” (62).

However, this may turn out to be a vision that may only partially be Cummings’. Iain Landles (2008), for example, remarks that “[t]his ‘timeless and transcendent world’ is one constructed by [Norman] Friedman” (2008, 97) himself. And him being the most prominent, and indeed ground-breaking Cummings scholar, in turn, other Cummings scholars “sought to ‘fit’ Cummings’ work into these categories, come what may” (6).

That Cummings was fascinated by the symbolism of Christ’s self-sacrifice, as well as that of the (related) Holy Communion, however, is also evidenced by his readings. And many of those passages that he decided to quote for himself run strikingly parallel with what happens in the poems. In one of his typed-out notes on books read, he quotes Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought as follows:

just as the Xian

who is not merely a spectator of the Mass,but participates in

what is enacted,sacrifices himself

“the sacrificer dies,& it is only upon this condition that he reach-

es heaven:at the same time,this is only a temporaryXXXXXXXXX death,&

the altar,identified with the sacrificer,is his substitute”

“the first Brahminical work of art was an altar in which the patron

,or in other words the sacrificer,was united with his deity”

“if the deity assumes a human form it is in order that the man for his

part may put on the likeness of divinity”--“Only by becoming God can

one worship him” (Coomaraswamy 1946 quoted in Cummings Papers, bMS Am 1823.7 (64), folder 3, page 56, color and emphasis his)

The concepts are, indeed, very close: “the Xian […] is not merely a spectator of the Mass,but […] sacrifices himself” claims Cummings’ version of Coomaraswamy (folder 3, page 56), similarly to my concept of the city sacrificing herself and at the same time remembering it by the act of the Holy Communion whereby she partakes of her own, both symbolic and actual, body. At the same time, my formulation that here, “the savior is the saved, the two are one” is, although noticeably slightly different from the idea that “if the deity assumes a human form it is in order that the man for his part may put on the likeness of divinity” and that only “by becoming God can one worship him,” the difference is by no means radical.

A related concept in my original analysis is that the poem entitled “[writhe and]” shows the city in the process of entering “a garden of agony that suits her,” which claim I base on the poem portraying the city-woman while transcending its original form of existence and on its allusion to the Christian theme of the Agony in the Garden (Matthew 26:36-39). In fact, Cummings’ notes offer support for this concept of a female savior, too. At a certain point he quotes Mary E. Lewis’ The Ethics of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung in which she discusses the concept of love both divine and human:

Love,be it human or divine,has

ever one characteristic—it gives. Its nature is to give & to give of its

own substance,& to it receiving is secondary.  The love that bargains &

makes conditions,that demands & receives only,is of one type;but the love

that gives all & ever,& that knows no sense of limitation,is of quite ano-

ther...It is the nobler of these two kinds of love that is peculiarly char

acteristic of woman.

In her love for man woman gives all,& having thus given all,there is a

further evolution in her nature in which to her offspring she gives ever

& always.  Woman in her love for her child is earth’s highest expression

of the divine & universal love that ever blesses its children. (Lewis 1906, 43 quoted in Cummings Papers, bMS Am 1823.7 (64), folder 11, page 204)

Visibly, the most perfect earthly embodiment of divine love in this conception is one that only a woman can experience and give. Since Jesus is the ultimate proof and expression of God’s love (cf. John 3:16) on Earth, applying the above mentioned thesis about a woman’s love to this, and thereby going a step further, coming up with the idea of a female savior seems a logical, if daring, step of Cummings’.

But the most direct support for the fact that Cummings was, indeed, planning to use Christian symbolism in his work are his plans for a play provisionally titled “U.S.A.” In his notes, he variously attributes the role of Christ to the US (Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, bMS Am 1892.7 (27), folder 1, page 1) or identifies America as “God’s goilfren” (Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, bMS Am 1892.7 (27), folder 2, page 15). What is more, he imagines the play to be based on the standard lifeline and vigil of Christ, including, amongst others, episodes about the “agony in garden” (Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, bMS Am 1892.7 (27), folder 1, page 1) and the “crucifixion” (folder 1, page 1). While the USA being Christ says nothing as to Christ being represented as a woman, and America considered as God’s girlfriend can easily be understood as referring to Virgin Mary, this evidence is nevertheless very important since it proves the poet’s fascination with the symbolism of the savior and also his willingness to imagine a country or a collection of humans playing this role. While this plan is evidently not exactly the same as the city-concept proposed in my previous study, it is visibly not too far from it, primarily if one combines it with the indirect evidence of Cummings’ notes offered above.

Of course, one might object as to the relevance of some notes about a play to the author’s poetry. This is a logical critical remark, however, not completely well-founded. First of all, it should not be too surprising if an author devoting his energies to planning a longer work sees his fascination with the material reflected in some of his shorter works too. But more importantly, there is evidence that he was about to write a longer work about transformation which was either to be embodied as a play, or alternatively as poetry. He noted that “perhaps my long-projected ‘play’ [is] actually a poem – a poem of a new form” (Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, bMS Am 1892.7 (113), folder 4, page 37), and whereas “U.S.A” was certainly not his only unfinished play, it was definitely one of them, and one with probably the highest amount of notes related to it, so it can be considered as a likely candidate for being identified as “my long-projected ‘play’.”

In other words, however much the poet’s Zen-Buddhist orientation and his alleged anti-Christian stance is taken for granted in most of the studies focusing on his oeuvre, there is ample evidence in manuscripts to validate an interpretation that sees primarily Christian symbolism in the poems’ version of New York City. And then one has not even yet mentioned such biographical facts that although early on he revolted against all that his father represented (including religion), yet after his death, having lost “his place in the avant garde—his second family—he gravitated back to his first one, not only resurrecting his father as hero […] but even adopting his father’s preacherly voice at times” (Cohen 2007, 81), or that “Cummings’ third wife was a Roman Catholic” (Meliotes Arms 1979, 293).

2.2.2. The City in Selected Poems of the Author’s Later Volumes

In this chapter I check the above reading of the urban sphere against other poems not included in my previous analysis. These samples come from various later volumes of the author’s oeuvre, and thus can support such an understanding that considers my original reading of the city in Tulips & Chimneys valid, with some modifications, to the rest of E. E. Cummings’ urban poetry, as well.

Although “[the hours rise up putting off stars and it is]” is yet another poem from Tulips & Chimneys, it is worth returning to it, as it may provide valuable extra information about the city, in its slightly different imagery. Yet, in doing so, one is again going against the tide of Cummings scholarship that pays only sporadic attention to this text. Richard S. Kennedy (1994) grants the poem only a cursory glance and deems it as one of the poet’s “renderings of the diurnal variations of light” (56) where, however, “death still intrudes” (56), and so does Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b), in his one-sentence analysis that simplifies the city to a poem-factory “where poems are made at twilight and unpoetic reality intrudes during the day” (27-8). Though considerably longer, Robert Louis McBroom’s (1971) treatment is not more detailed or specific. He mostly provides but a prose paraphrase with bits and pieces of actual interpretation here and there.

The only exception amongst Cummings’ commentators is Iain Landles (2008) who tackles the poem in great length and detail, devoting a meticulous and monumental, 23 pages long analysis to it. His main concern in discussing it, however, is the poem’s relation to the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the author’s strategies in struggling with the predecessor’s strong authorial voice, leading to “a poem that tackles far more profound and interesting subject matter than his original” (130) through the strategy of “reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough” (Bloom 1997, 14 quoted in Landles 2008, 131). In focusing on the issue of influence versus the creativity of the individual author, however, Landles mostly ignores the issue of the representation of the city. The only relevant comments he makes are that the poem’s first, unpublished, version “describe[s] a ‘walk’ through the city undertaken by the speaker” who then “walk[s] the streets, pass[es] by the docks/ferry, ‘saunter[s]’ past ‘business’, encounter[s] prostitutes, [is] affected by some religious experience, and meditate[s] upon death” (Landles 2008, 113). Yet, a glance at the final, published version suffices to show that traces of both the walk and the people met on his walk were erased without a trace. Turning to the final version, he points out, however, that

the city – metaphorically a person – dies having “death upon her mouth,” a death rattle or cry, since the phrase, “a song in her eyes,” could be interpreted as a death-bed transcendent vision of heaven. Alternatively, the phrase, “with a song upon her / mouth,” could be the cry of a new-born baby, whilst, “having death in her eyes,” could mean the same as Beckett’s “They give birth astride of a grave,” in that both point toward death being present all through our lives even when we are born (Beckett 1956, 89). In this interpretation, “dreams” now become the failed ambitions and bitter regrets of life, for the hustle and bustle of everyday life does indeed “murder dreams.” (Landles 2008, 123)

But be it as it may, in his opinion the poem is basically “depicting (through an editing process) a fleeting series of impressions subjectively” with “little objective, concrete detail” (130).

Yet, maybe one should not go as far as that. Even less so if one focuses not so much on the “message” of the poem, but on how the city appears, and what happens in the text. From this perspective, the following can be taken as an apt summary: “[w]ith dawn, light walks the ‘street of the sky,’ and sows poetry, while on earth man’s artificial light is extinguished and the city comes alive, ‘a song upon her mouth,’ yet death in the eyes of her inhabitants” (McBroom 1971, 66). One should, however, also recognize the commonality of this text with the other poems analyzed: the city again appears as a woman with individual actions and conscious behavior.

What is new is that in this case, there is a more sensual description: one hears of her eyes and mouth, and her waking up and going to sleep. While words are used sparingly, it is hard not to imagine a flesh and blood woman crawling out of bed in the morning and back at night with “a song upon her / mouth” (Cummings 1994, 67).

As a description of life in the city, one has to agree with Richard S. Kennedy’s remark about death intruding. Indeed, there are darker aspects and more dire elements. Not only death is there, however, at first in the city’s eyes and then on her mouth, but one also hears that “the world / goes forth to murder dreams,” there are “brutal faces,” some people are “hideous hopeless” (67). Yet, this is not the overall view: where “light walks scattering poems,” and so does the night, where the people are not only hideous and hopeless, but also “contented” and “happy” (67), one rather senses a delicate balance between these two aspects. The beauty and the poetry of the town spring exactly from this natural juxtaposition of opposites, the common presence of pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness.

Bearing the poem “[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-]” in mind, one can also not help but think of some of the expressions in “[the hours rise up putting off stars and it is]” in a slightly different light. After all, the city was partaking of herself or her citizens there, and in this poem one is told that there is death on the city’s mouth. Thus it seems like a possible allusion to that very act. The “frail man” (67) is also reminiscent of the lyrical voice of the former poem, in that case a mere morsel.

But one can go further by noticing that death moves from the city’s eyes to her mouth. Death on one’s mouth can, after all, not only refer to that person killing others by eating them, but also, alternatively, to herself being dead. The verb “sleep” thus gains a new meaning and so does “a candle is lighted” (67): they become euphemisms for death and a funeral. In this interpretation, the time frame is not necessarily a single day (although it can be), but the length of a life.

This would fit particularly well with the image of the constantly self-sacrificing “savior city,” and also with Cummings’ general preference for a circular conception of time, as evidenced in such poems as “[anyone lived in a pretty how town].” Such a view is also visible in the author’s notes. For example, in his copying out, from Webster’s Dictionary, the following entry on Heraclitus: “principle(ultimate nature)of all things = ethereal fire;nature represents the constant flux & flow of this principle or element which cause periodical creation & dissolution of the universe” (Cummings Papers, bMS Am 1823.7 (48), page 3, color his).

But if there was a hint of the bodily aspect in “[the hours rise up putting off stars and it is],” there certainly is much more than a mere suggestion in “[my eyes are fond of the east side],” a poem from &. Here, the poetic voice reacts to the experiences the town has to offer purely on the basis of the senses. As Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b) notes, this is one of those poems that “attempt to capture sights, sounds, smells, and conversations” (48). There is vision: “as i lie asleep my eyes go into Allen street the dark long cool tunnel / of raving colour” (Cummings 1994, 187), taste: “then my mouth will go out into the East side,my mouth goes to the peddlers, / to the peddlers of smooth,fruits of eager colours of the little,huddling / nuts and the bad candies my,mouth loves melons slitted with bright knives” (187), hearing: “is there anything my ears love it’s / to go into the east Side in a. dark street a hurDygurdY with thequeer / hopping ghosts of children.  my,ears know the fuZZy tune that’s played / by the Funny hand of the paralytic” (188) and finally touch, and in an erotic sense at that: “my stomach goes out into The / east side my sex sitting upright on the stomach like A billiken with / hisknees huggedtogether” (188).

And one does not deal with a controlled, calm, scientifically detached reflection on the sensual data, either. This is a fact that Kidder (1979b) also noted when he identified the text as one of the author’s “ventures into Joycean language” where Cummings “experimented […] with stream-of-consciousness prose” (48). And the parallel is just, enough to think of Leopold Bloom’s walks in Dublin, and the description of the various bodily sensations.

Yet, in my opinion, the poem is more like a cornucopia of pleasures, a hedonistic mixture of rapturous enjoyment than a simple exercise of stream-of-consciousness prose. After all, the lyrical voice’s mouth “stains itself,with currants and cherries” (Cummings 1994, 187), and rather than merely tasting, “it will,Gorge indistinct / palishflesh of laZilytas tingg OO seberries” (187). Likewise, there is too strong a sense of structure and conscious planning lurking behind the seemingly haphazard surface to allow for the stream-of-consciousness label. The poem is clearly, even visually, divided into five distinct parts: the first one is devoted to vision, the second to taste, the third to hearing, and the fourth to touch, while the fifth provides a sort of coda. This all makes it look much more like an inventory of pleasures than a stream-of-consciousness technique would allow. Not to mention that the breaks are provided by phrases that although at first sight might seem nonsense, make up a completely meaningful utterance if read together: “TUMTITUMTIDDLE […] THE BLACK CAT WITH […] THE YELLOW EYES AND […] THE […] VIOLIN” (188). An utterance that, as Marianne Moore ([1926] 1984) claimed, “advances metronomically through the rest of the poem” (49). One is almost tempted to see this as an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s (1939) Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, except that Cummings’ poem was published in the 1920s, and thus such a thought would be a clear case of anachronism.

Nevertheless, the poem’s strong structure of ordered, composed lists and its positively sexual imagery connected to touching, together with its almost explicit focus on the speaker’s selfish pleasure, may be related to a literary influence. In my opinion, however, it is more Walt Whitman than James Joyce. This should come as no surprise once one bears in mind Iain Landles (2008) already mentioned lengthy analysis of “[the hours rise up putting off stars and it is]” (109-31). In any case, there is also ample textual evidence. For example, Cummings’ list of sensual pleasures recalls the predecessor’s “fondness for enumeration, for ‘catalogues,’ as they have been called” (Allen 1958, xviii). Here are a few bits of Cummings’ list of sounds:

[…] my,ears know the fuZZy tune that’s played

by the Funny hand of the paralyticwhose dod d e rin g partner whEEl

shi min chb yi nch along the whirlingPeaceful furious street people

drop,coppers into,the littletin-cup His wrappedupbody Queerly Has,my,

ears,go into Hassan’s place the kanoonchir p ing the bigtwittering

zither-and the mealy,ladies dancing thicklyfoolish,with,the,tam,bou,

rine,s […]

The L’s roar tortures-pleasantly myears it is,like the,Jab:of a dark

tool.   With a cleverjeRk in itlike the motionofa Sharp Knife-sN ap-

pingof fadeadf ish’ shead Or,the whipping of a blacksnake cu tSudden ly

in 2 that,writhes (1994, 187)

And one can easily juxtapose a similar passage of Walt Whitman’s:

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

[…] The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,

The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,

(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

I hear the violoncello, (‘tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)

I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. ([1892] 1958, 70)

Comparable passages could be found for the other senses as well, and the reader is encouraged to find them herself, if she is interested in the Whitman-connection.

It is more interesting here, for identifying the nature of Cummings’ New York City, to notice another characteristic feature that the poem’s lyrical voice shares with that of “Song of Myself”: the sexually charged imagery based on rubbing and touching. Here is the Whitman poem’s voice ([1892] 1958): “I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy, / To touch my person to some one else’s” (71). In a similar vein, Cummings’ speaker’s stomach (along with his “sex sitting upright,” let us not forget) “goes out into the rapid hard women and / intotheslow hot women       my Stomach ruBSiTSElf kew-re-ous-ly a mong / Them(among their stomachs andtheir sexes      )” (1994, 188).

Such explicit sexuality is, of course, not rare or unheard of in E. E. Cummings’ poetry, it is enough to think of poems such as “[i like my body when it is with your],” “[may i feel said he],” or “[she being Brand].” But its autoerotic tint, again reminiscent of Whitman, and its focus on the experience of bodily contact with the unknown masses does make it special in the author’s oeuvre.

In fact, this autoerotic tint is noticeable enough to have led Iain Landles (2008) to make the comment that “a cascade of sexual words dominates ‘my eyes are fond of the east side’ […], as the speaker masturbates and the images gets [sic] more and more repugnant” (172). This statement, nevertheless, is probably somewhat jumping to easy conclusions: the speaker is more of a frotteur than an onanist, and while there are certainly repugnant images mixed with pleasant ones, there seems to be no reason to suppose that there is a clear development from positive to negative. In fact, the closing image of this section, for example, appears in an uncontroversially positive light: “i,like,best,the,stomachs,of the young (girls silky and lewd)like corn / s l e n derl y tottering in sun-light” (Cummings 1994, 188).

What is more, Landles handles the whole poem as the literary manifestation of a masturbatory act, whereas, it deals not only with touch, but also taste and hearing. It is most certainly dominated by an intention to know the world through bodily experiences, but these are in no way limited, or even dominated, by the sexual. And one can suppose that the mixing-in of unpleasant sounds, tastes and bodies has more to do with showing a fuller, if contradictory, image of reality in the manner of Whitman, than with any development towards repugnance. It is enough to remember the line “I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also” (Whitman [1892] 1958, 66) or the combination of “I hear all sounds running together” that includes “bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat” but also the “angry base of disjointed friendship” and “the faint tones of the sick” (70).

There is one important difference between this and the Whitman poem, however, and that is the text’s easily detectable rather heterosexual view. Whereas “[c]ritics […] who try to prove Whitman was fundamentally heterosexual have little to stand on” (Reynolds 1995, 490), in the Cummings poem, even if there are people in the anonymous mass of the crowd whose sex is unclearly defined, or not at all, the speaking voice’s stomach nevertheless “goes out into the rapid hard women and / intotheslow hot women” (Cummings 1994, 188) and finds it important to stress that he likes “best,the,stomachs,of the young (girls silky and lewd)like corn / s l e n derl y tottering in sun-light” (188). Not a surprising thing considering that some commentators go as far as saying that “Cummings was particularly homophobic” (Landles 2008, 114).

Be it as it may, unrelated to his alleged homophobic stance, this absence of signifiers other than female, and the heavily sexual and sensual imagery used, fits very well into the conception of the city as a woman. The difference is that here, in the form of its citizens, she appears as a flesh-and-blood woman, a real, tangible object of physical attraction, not a distant, mysterious lady far above and beyond human existence, impossible to approach, let alone touch. Bearing this in mind, one can easily see that all those references to the city as “she”, “her”, “lady”, and so on, are not merely due to the traditional English way of expressing emotional attachment to land and ships, but is rather a strong feature of the artist’s view.

At first sight, such a sexualized and bodily depiction clearly contradicts the idea of the city as savior. After all, Christ is often imagined as someone beyond the “temptations of the body.” Yet, one should not necessarily jump to this conclusion. While many interpretations indeed insist on such a view, the apocryphal Gospels of Mary and Philip, together with some passages in the Bible, are often interpreted as possible evidence for Jesus’ alleged intimate relationship with Mary Magdalene. To start with the canonical (and circumstantial) evidence, one can mention that after Jesus is resurrected, she is the first one to see him (John 20:11-18; Mark 16:9), she is there at the cross (Mark 15:40; Matthew 27:56; John 19:25) saying farewell to him like a wife or a member of the family would. The apocryphal texts add to this that she was special among women in Jesus’ eyes: “Peter said to Mary, Sister we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of woman” (Mary 5:5). This could still be interpreted as someone who is maybe equal to the disciples, but in no way closer to him than them. Yet, one also finds in the same gospel that “Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why He loved her more than us” (Mary 9:8-9) that both suggests a special relationship and a status above those of the disciples. The Gospel of Philip goes even further in identifying her as an equal only to the Virgin Mary and Jesus’ sister (another Mary) in his eyes, and someone who always walked with him, everywhere: “There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion” (Robinson 1977, 135-6). Note also the epithet “companion” used for her. While the word does not necessarily imply a sexual relationship, it certainly does stand for a close and intimate one. Yet, the text goes even further in claiming that he not only “loved her more than [all] the disciples,” but also “[used to] kiss her [often] on her [mouth]” (138; additions in brackets in the original). While again, one could claim that this may be for other reasons, this set of evidence seems strong enough to allow for the reading that sees Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ partner.

These apocryphal texts were discovered in 1945, in the author’s lifetime, although after the publication of the poems in question. But such views also appeared amongst the beliefs of the Cathars, in the 11th to 13th centuries, for example. They held, according to the medieval author Peter of Vaux de Cernay (and possibly also Ermengaud of Béziers), that “Mary Magdalene was the wife of Christ” (Wakefield and Evans 1991, 234). As he had a good command of Latin and Ancient Greek, and majored in the Classics, his familiarity with these medieval sources is not completely impossible. But whether or not there was any relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and whether or not this was accessible information at Cummings’ time, there is also some, although admittedly not too strong, Biblical evidence for Jesus having come across sexual temptation. After all, one can read that “we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are” (Hebrews 4:15; emphasis mine). In other words, not only in those three ways that appear in the Gospels, but in all other possible manners that then, by definition, includes sexuality.

In any case, there is manuscript evidence that such a view does not contradict the poet’s views. That he could imagine sexual metaphors to stand for sacred and even religious topics could be seen in the following comment:

erection penetration coitus orgasm…  Old

Testament

conception embryo child   New

(Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, bMS Am 1892.7 (113), folder 4, page 34)

Here, the Old and the New Testaments are basically identified with the sexual act and its result. Likewise, in his notes for a play about the United States, he noted that “North America = (Virgin)Mary” and “South America = (husband) Joseph,” while “England (Great Britain) = the penis of the Old World (GOD)” (Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, bMS Am 1892.7 (27), folder 2, page 22). While there is no direct reference here to Jesus, it is visible that for Cummings, mixing religious imagery with a strongly sexual one either did not count as blasphemy, or alternatively, he actually fancied indulging in it for the sake of shocking his audience.

At the same time, in the very same notes one finds remarks about Jesus Christ, although it is unclear whether he was to appear in addition to, or as an alternative of, Virgin Mary:

Christ suite

Seul’s speech   (arrest

S & Mary Magdalen

S’s prayer(garden:skyscrapers

Trial of S by Uncle Sam

carrying the cross

crucifixion—Statue of Liberty (Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, bMS Am 1892.7 (27), folder 2, page 18)

Here, the story is indeed completely built on that of Jesus’ life, with strong connections to New York (skyscrapers, Statue of Liberty), rather than America as such.

It is somewhat puzzling what the abbreviation “S” may stand for. It cannot be taken for Saul, as this would not fit into the story: he was neither on trial, nor did he have anything to do with Mary Magdalene. If one relies on the Bible, then it must be someone in the role of Jesus, since he had a trial, had many scenes with Mary Magdalene, said a prayer in the garden, and was crucified. Since in some of these notes Cummings refers to Santa from his (1946) play, Santa Claus: A Morality, it may be possible that at some point he imagined the same character playing the role of Jesus in his new play/set of poems. Though it could just as well stand for something else, even a character called She, in the tradition of Him and Me in his most important play, Him (1927), a possibility that would fit particularly well in the interpretation of the poet’s New York City put forward in this book.

One way or another, many elements identified in the analysis of other poems above appear in this very note. There is the Agony in the Garden, and so are the skyscrapers. In fact, even Mary Magdalene appears in shorthand that could be possibly, although not necessarily, taken to imply some romantic connection: “S & Mary Magdalen” (Cummings Additional Papers, 1870-1969, bMS Am 1892.7 (27), folder 2, page 18). That Cummings was indeed considering this “Christ suite” as an alternative for the USA as Virgin Mary plot introduced above is supported by his note about “USA (America) = Χριστός [Khrīstos]” (folder 1, page 1, transliteration mine). The United States being identified in the very same notes sometimes as Virgin Mary and sometimes as Jesus Christ might be taken for evidence of the poet hesitating between a male and a female protagonist. And together with his notes from the works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1946) and Mary E. Lewis (1906) already quoted above, it may lead one to consider a female savior as his possible solution to the problem.

That is to say, there is no need to consider “[my eyes are fond of the east side]” as a poem that would undermine the interpretation of New York City as a female savior with its heavily erotic symbolism. In fact, as I pointed out, bodily attraction, to some extent, may be (and have been by some) integrated into the picture of the savior. More importantly, however, as it is visible, the author’s notes document the use of sexual symbolism mixed with a religious one, and show evidence that this could be extended even to Jesus himself.

Another relevant poem, “[structure,miraculous challenge,devout am],” from the same volume, ViVa, also contains interesting features of the city. Yet, the only scholar who devoted some attention to the poem is Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b). Although it also appears in Norman Friedman’s (1969) E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer, he does not pay attention to it in an other way than as an illustration of the author’s “‘conceptual’ vocabulary” in the service of his alleged “transcendental vision” (79). Kidder (1979b), however, summarized the poem as follows:

The final sonnet of this sequence […] sets itself the task of describing attributes without naming its subject – and succeeds in spite of the fact that the reader is never exactly sure of the object of the poet’s apostrophe. Perhaps the poet has in mind the moon, or the sun, or the sky, or a cloud, or a landscape: a case can be made for each. Whatever the object of his praise, it has no traffic with the “noisy impotence of not and same,” of negation and conformity. Blending disparate elements – impressions of landscape with satire on humanity – the poem also sounds the note of transcendental worship absent from the first half of ViVa. (95)

A surprisingly long and detailed analysis compared to the sentence or two one is used to in case of the author’s urban poetry. Nevertheless, it does not say all that much about the text. In fact, it barely goes beyond reciting the usual Friedmanesque dogma of the contrast between “transcendental worship” and the routine of everyday “negation and conformity.”

Yet, there is more to this poem. Even if Kidder claims that the poem is not “naming its subject” and “the reader is never exactly sure of the object of the poet’s apostrophe” (95), I think such relativization is unwarranted. In fact, the apostrophe is specific enough: the lyrical voice addresses a “structure” (Cummings 1994, 352), in other words a building. This gets even more clear once one recognizes that it is “upward deep,” in other words tall, and at the same time it is “outtowering / this noisy impotence” (352). There is good reason to suppose that just like in “[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-],” the speaking voice puts forward some associations evoked by a very high building, most probably a skyscraper.

More importantly for the purposes of this study, one can again identify religious vocabulary in describing a genuinely urban phenomenon. That is to say, although I do not see any reason to talk of “transcendental worship” (Kidder 1979b, 95), it is indeed a sound hypothesis that the poem “sounds the note of […] worship” (95). After all, the speaker stresses at the very beginning that he is “devout,” and talks of the object of his devotion as a “miraculous challenge,” in front of which (or whom) other devotees “kneel” or “stoop”, and there is talk of “merciful forms” and “doom”, as well. (Cummings 1994, 352)

The skyscraper in question is personified, since it is addressed. And this is not a mere formal feature, as the speaker expects some interaction from the building: “answer” he calls. Yet, the gender is unclear. Although the phrase “her star” (352) appears in the text, it does not refer to the addressee, but to the morning. One could, of course, consider “stern sexual timelessness,outtowering / this noisy impotence” (352), along with the skyscraper’s shape as signifiers of phallicity, and thus masculinity, yet the situation is not that simple. One could equally think of “stern […] timelessness” and “who standest as thou hast stood and thou shalt stand” (352) as references more to the timeless{2} existence of religious icons and figures.

Whether masculine or feminine, however, one again sees a mixture of religious and erotic symbolism, already identified in the previous poem. One sees “stern sexual timelessness” and “ecstasy” equally applying to the central figure – the building – as the already mentioned signifiers of sacredness and ritual: “miraculous”, “devout”, “kneeling” and “stoops”. Thus, one can see that although this text does not deal with the city as such, only with a part of it (a skyscraper), it nevertheless fits rather harmoniously into the already existing interpretation of the city as a sexualized feminine savior.

The volume ViVa seems to be the last one that contains poems dealing with the city as a whole. The urban sphere, however, does not disappear. The only difference is that later volumes contain only glimpses of specific locations, situations and inhabitants. These poems and issues, however, are tackled below in chapters devoted to these specific aspects. In any case, although the remaining volumes do not add anything to the complex picture of the city as a whole, they certainly do not contradict the picture built on the previous poems.

Thus, one can conclude, on the basis of the poems analyzed above, that the addition of later poems devoted to New York City in general, as an entity, show the city as a woman, genuinely feminine, at times even strongly sensual or sexualized. Yet at all points, the vocabulary of sensuality is mixed with that of a distinctly religious awe and devotion, one due to a goddess (or a female savior). What is more, insisting on the mixing of a sexualized city image with that of the city as a female Jesus is not only something that remains feasible even after the inclusion of these later poems, but is also supported by the author’s manuscript notes. That is to say, the speaking voice’s Whitmanesque frotteuristic scenes, however incompatible it may look at first sight, are compatible with the original thesis set up on the basis of Tulips & Chimneys. The new elements of sensuality, hedonistic enjoyment and eroticism only modulate and supplement the picture but do not contradict or undermine it.

2.3. From a Bird’s Eye View towards the Temples: Specific Heterotopic Localities of E. E. Cummings’ New York City

In my previous study on the topic, analyzing Tulips & Chimneys, I identified two central heterotopic localities, McSorley’s Pub and Dick Mid’s Place, through the close reading of four particular poems: “[i was sitting in mcsorley’s.      outside it was New York and beauti-],” “[the young],” “[when you rang at Dick Mid’s Place]” and “[Dick Mid’s large bluish face without eyebrows].” In this chapter, I first briefly summarize my original conclusions, then provide some new insights and comments about these very places and poems, then extend the focus to the author’s other volumes of poems to see if other such localities emerge.

In my analysis of “[i was sitting in mcsorley’s.      outside it was New York and beauti-],” I identified a tripartite spatial division between that of the speaker’s mind, the inside of the pub, and the snowy street outside. I warned that whereas it may seem at first sight that one deals with a disgusting and unfriendly bar opposed to a calm and peaceful street, where the lyrical voice is longing for the latter, possibly the opposite is true. The visual arrangement of the words at the beginning of the poem suggests a place that functions as a double portal: one between the outside world and the pub, as well as between the innermost sphere of the speaker’s mind and the space of the bar. In this configuration, the homeliness, safety and warmth of McSorley’s Pub is second only to the speaker’s inner world, and is strongly attached to positive values, whereas the outside world appears as cold, dead and empty rather than calm and reassuring. In this reading, McSorley’s becomes a heterotopia of deviation, a special type of Eliade’s sacred space, providing a link between various periods in time (Vernyik 2007, 140-4).

To this, one could add that at the same time, the poem also does an excellent job at recreating an existing physical locality: a popular downtown bar in New York City. In fact, this is one of the author’s many poems where there is an extensive use of phonetic spelling, onomatopoeia, slang, and creative spacing and spelling to evoke the atmosphere of a particular location. As Robert Louis McBroom (1971) explains:

Cummings’ use of dialect finds its greatest force […] in his treatment of the typical “Brooklynese” found in his city, New York. His method breathes life into the “yankee” idiom by stringing together words composed from vernacular-sound alone. As such they sometimes appear as non-words and make sense only after careful study and continued vocal repetition. (139)

This is an important piece of information, since the technique is much more than idiosyncrasy or formal innovation. From the perspective of representing the city, for example, it allows Cummings “to approximate actual chants of the streets of New York” (Mullen 1971, 514), or to portray the atmosphere of a particular city location at a given, fleeting, yet poetically evocative and representative moment. Such an approach, in any case, is in no way unique to the urban poetry of the poet. Talking of Cummings’ essay on “The New Art,” Rushworth M. Kidder (1979a) emphasizes that he “makes clear his interest in ‘the moment’ as the appropriate focus for a work of art” (265), be it literary or visual.

Likewise, it may be worth revisiting the point where I turned the interpretation of McSorley’s around, and claimed that regardless of some controversial or seemingly negative adjectives, the place has an overwhelmingly positive value in the poem. While the original argumentation stands on its own footing, and is strongly based on textual evidence, one could, nevertheless, insist that the place, as described in the poem, has a distinctly filthy and disgusting character that does not seem to fit in neatly with the homeliness postulated. Yet, this contradiction may turn out to be more virtual than actual, since Cummings has a noted tendency to celebrate filth and bodily functions. Talking of The Enormous Room, Paul Wilkinson (2004) notes the following:

Dirt, excreta and odors practically come off the pages. But this almost exceedingly brute corporality is all simply part of “being” in Cummings’ world. The natural in all its facets is seldom shied away from, and nature itself is an essential element in the makeup of the individual. (22-3)

Rather than considered revoltingly disgusting, these scatological features belong to what constitutes being alive: they are at the very least taken as natural, or at most as aspects worth even celebrating. To put it differently, “[i]n the cityscape of ‘Portraits,’ the speaker is in fact confronted with positive, earthy and carnivalesque individuals who must coexist with those who have become less alive” (56).

In retrospect, I also feel that the issue of snow should also deserve more than to point out that it cannot only function as something connoting safety and calmness, but also as the symbol of death and cold. In fact, one could go much further than that, and claim that the only reason the snowy outside appears in the poem is to provide a necessary contrast: to appear as a cold, silent, and monotonous counterpoint to the warm, loud, and multivocal interior of the ale house. In fact, this juxtaposing of opposites amplifies both of them: “we feel warm because it is cold out-of-doors […] Behind dark curtains, snow seems to be whiter. Indeed, everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate” (Bachelard [1958] 1994, 39). This should not come as a huge surprise since, as Gaston Bachelard explains, feeling an increased liveliness, warmth and coziness in face of cold and snow is an almost instinctive reaction of human imagination: “Baudelaire declares that dreamers like a severe winter. ‘Every year they ask the sky to send down as much snow, hail and frost as it can contain’” (39). In such a case, the “ceiling-flatness” of the outside world, actually springs from the unifying and simplifying effect of the homogeneous snow cover: “snow, especially reduces the exterior world to nothing rather too easily. It gives a single color to the entire universe which, with the one word, snow, is both expressed and nullified for those who have found shelter” (40).

It may also be interesting to note that in working as a heterotopia of deviance, the pub gains a character similar to the male detention room portrayed in Cummings’ novel, The Enormous Room, whose function as the very same type of heterotopia was identified by Justus Nieland (2002, 114). This may seem shocking at first, since grouping a prison and an ale house together is not something one would routinely do, but there are enough reasons to do so. One should not forget, for example, that the narrator-protagonist of the novel, C, considers the room “the finest place [he has] ever been in [his] life” (Cummings [1922] 1978, 80); one that at his arrival left him “sitting in a state of complete wonderment, dead tired and very happy” (80). In fact, just like McSorley’s, the room of detention is a place with a collection of “selfless, giving, loving, and truly living beings” (Wilkinson 2004, 41) where “laughter and the body in tandem come to dominate experience” (41). What is more, taking into consideration that McSorley’s was a strictly male bar until the late seventies, it can also be considered as another possible “haven of fraternal Eros – of a vital and binding libidinal energy” (Nieland 2002, 119), just like the detention camp of Ferté-Macé.

This, to some extent, also refers one back to the issue of the various bodily functions and impolite noises mentioned above. Not only should they be understood in the context of Cummings’ use of such features as markers of aliveness and directness, but one should also be reminded that they may also be connected to the fraternal and intimate atmosphere of the place. After all, one usually behaves in a more natural and direct way, and allows himself or herself more freedom to disregard the societal decorum of proper behavior in an intimate context than otherwise. In fact, this very intimacy guarantees in a sense that those “impolite” sounds and acts are not in the text to disgust: as Bachelard ([1958] 1994) explains, “[t]here does not exist a real intimacy that is repellent. All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction” (12). The polarizing dichotomy of cold, snowy outside and warm, cozy inside only further amplifies this: “[t]he house derives reserves and refinements of intimacy from winter; […] The dreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because of the diminished entity of the outside world, experiences all the qualities of intimacy with increased intensity” (40-1).

Back then, in my previous analysis of E. E. Cummings’ New York City, I identified Dick Mid’s Place as the second central heterotopic locality, on the basis of those three poems in Tulips & Chimneys that deal with this location. While even the very fact that just in this volume alone there are multiple references to this place would in itself hint at its possibly special role, yet apparently I was one of the firsts to attribute importance of any kid to these texts:

Norman Friedman (1960) calls “[Dick Mid’s large bluish face without eyebrows]” a sonnet, “in which the speaker narrates the situation of a certain kind of man in a certain state of mind” (101), remaining euphemistically silent about what the two “certains” stand for. Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b) is much more specific and honest, although still extremely brief. He summarizes “[the young]” as “a conversation with Death at Dick Mid’s brothel” (28), and “[when you rang at Dick Mid’s Place]” as “a visit to Dick Mid’s brothel” (32). Richard S. Kennedy (1994), however, mentions this poem only to emphasize through the quotation “eet smeestaire steevensun” (Cummings 1994, 120) that “the speaking voice […] is an imagined one, […] Cummings never visited prostitutes in the United States” (Kennedy 1994, 63). (Vernyik 2007, 144)

Playing down the importance of these poems, or simply acknowledging their existence with a few words might, of course, be the result of either considering their topic as something below serious academic analyses, or an attempt at securing the reputation of the author. What is common in both strategies, however, is the fact that they oversimplify the poetic oeuvre of the poet and play down some very interesting questions. One should not forget, for example, that whether or not Cummings visited prostitutes in the US, he “led a bohemian lifestyle during the twenties, which included a studio in Greenwich Village and travel and sojourns in France” (Faust 2008, 55), which in itself could explain “the urbanity of his poetry, and his more European view of sexuality, which would not have shocked the French” (55). More importantly than that, however, it ignores that bodily experience, the underclassed and the socially marginalized, as well as women all have an important place in the author’s poetry. As Paul Wilkinson (2004) explains:

In exploring and valorizing the lower ends of the hierarchical ladder – the poor, the forgotten, the abused and otherwise socially marginalized groups – Cummings and Prévert privilege the notion that these individuals are in fact the most vibrantly alive. (17)

This focus on the body springs from an understanding that “the body itself, even in its most tattered and abused state, can become a force for renewal” (18), even if one has to remember that the human body, just like the city, leaves ample grounds for even the most striking levels of contrast: “it is sometimes wonderfully alive and carnivalesque and at other times terrifying and ominously lifeless” (24).

No wonder then that the body of prostitutes has an important role to play in some poems of Cummings: these are bodies, so they should be alive in the Cummingsian sense, and work as a source of energy. What is more, these are the bodies of some socially and otherwise disenfranchised people. Yet, even though “sex in itself is by no means always characterized in this volume as a corrupting force” (61), in many cases, and mostly so in connection with his poems on prostitutes and brothels, the people working there are, in Cummings’ poems, “guilty of aiding Death’s cause in one way or another through empty, loveless sexuality” (61).

Whether one way or another, however, as it is visible, the body of the prostitute constitutes an interesting problem in the paradigm of Cummings’ art’s relation to many of its own central concepts. Primarily since bodies create spaces, or in other words, they are “elements in the creation of individual, emotionally fulfilling and liberating spaces existing in opposition to the modern dehumanizing official world” (10). And if one took the point to its utmost that the bodies of prostitutes are always representatives of commercialized, empty, heartless sexuality, it would logically follow that “the void of empty sexuality permeating the space takes on almost allegorical status” (61), in fact so much so that the void gains bodily form and meeting it one realizes that “Death is the owner of the place” (61), and not Dick Mid himself.

But regardless of the ownership, the situation is considerably more complex, as the brothel, just like McSorley’s Bar, is a heterotopia. One has to undergo certain rites to gain entrance, it is a place that brings together several frames of time, and provides communication, and maybe even travel between them, as a portal, and Death is also present on the premises (cf. Vernyik 2007, 144-5).

A third recurring locality, Hassan’s, appears in four different poems: “[by god i want above fourteenth],” “[she sits dropping on a caret of clenched arms],” “[my eyes are fond of the east side],” and “[my humorous ghost precisely will].” As it usually is the case, not much is written about these texts in available studies of the author’s poetry. Yet, it is possible to find some references to most of them. I have already covered “[my eyes are fond of the east side]” and its reception in detail above, so I only reprint the treatment of the remaining three below.

Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b) categorizes “[by god i want above fourteenth]” as one of the author’s “protests of love for city streets” (37), allegedly in a style “the painters of the Ash Can School would want it to be” (43). A style that in his opinion is “realized by specific detail” and is “replete with quick sketches of unidentified humanity” (43). It is notable that he mentions the “Greek dive run by ‘Hassan’,” the very reason this poem appears in this book, even if only in passing. It is much more puzzling, however, that without further evidence or closer attention he passes negative judgment on this poem along with those next to it in the volume and claims that they “do not bear up under much questioning” (43) and “they have no profound answer for the reader” (44), although it is not even clear from his text what kind of question they are supposed to provide an answer for.

Martin Heusser (1997) notes about “[she sits dropping on a caret of clenched arms]” that it portrays a woman who has “expressionless, ‘frozen’ eyes,” and “having turned into an immense heap of female flesh,” she “has lost not only all feminine attraction but also all humanness” (152). He also refers to “[my humorous ghost precisely will]” in a footnote, as an example of the complex symbolism of the moon in the author’s work (144), but this is as far as he goes in his treatment of the poem.

While I could devote a few pages to the individual, detailed analysis of the poems in question, in order to show that it is probably a gross oversimplification to claim that they “do not bear up under much questioning” (Kidder 1979b, 43), and that they indeed provide a complex picture of yet another location, my focus here is Hassan’s place as a locus. That is to say, instead of treating the poems separately, I focus on them as a whole: texts contributing to the description of this particular locality. This, of course, also means that all other parts and aspects of the poems that are not directly relevant for this purpose are ignored below.

The poem, “[by god i want above fourteenth]” shows Hassan’s in the following scene:

give me the Square in spring,

the little barbarous Greenwich perfumed fake

And most,the futile fooling labyrinth

where noisy colours stroll.... and the Baboon

sniggering insipidities while. i sit,sipping

singular anisettes as.   One opaque

big girl jiggles thickly hips to the kanoon

but Hassan chuckles seeing the Greeks breathe) (Cummings 1994, 119)

If one was to paraphrase these lines of the poem, one could say that the place is in Greenwich Village, there is music and dancing, and there is a person nicknamed the Baboon, probably one of the regulars, as otherwise such a one-word reference without any description would not be sufficient to identify him, who giggles about banal, empty stories. There are smells, colors and sounds all around the place, and it is spring. The owner of the place, Hassan, also appears, chuckling at the behavior of his fellow Greek customers. There is no real interaction whatsoever between the speaker and the environment: he observes what happens around him, in particular a girl dancing to the music, while sipping on his shots one after the other, enjoying his own passivity and the active environment around him.

The woman in the next poem, “[she sits dropping on a caret of clenched arms],” may or may not be the same one as the one referred to in “[by god i want above fourteenth],” but there certainly are some common elements in their description. In one, the reader finds out that an “opaque / big girl jiggles thickly hips to the kanoon” (Cummings 1994, 119), while in the other the woman is also dancing to the sound of the same musical instrument: “to the kanoon she totters,slouches, / with giggling hips and frozen eyes” (128). In addition, the description “big girl” (119) could also apply here, as well: she has “a fattish leg [that] leaks / obscenely from the dress,” and her breasts lie on a belly described as “a flabby mattress of jelly” (128). But whether or not the identity of the dancers is the same, the speaking voice certainly does a similar activity: he sits at Hassan’s place and watches the performance of a dancer.

In addition to this, one finds out that the place is probably not a very posh and popular one, as it is not located centrally and visibly. Quite the opposite, “[i]t is necessary to find Hassan’s Place / by tiny streets shrugging with colour” (128). This may, in fact, also explain what the speaking voice meant in the other poem by talking of a “futile fooling labyrinth / where noisy colours stroll” (119): it is probably the neighborhood where the bar is located: tiny, illogical, confusing streets full of life and its sounds and colors. In other words, the place is probably located in an old, but multicultural neighborhood, possibly noisy in itself, but even if it was not, Hassan’s Place would contribute to the level of noise with its music and dances.

This picture is further elaborated on by the poem “[my humorous ghost precisely will],” as it shows one a slightly different face of the bar:

[…] gliding most

softly into Hassan’s will see

them all dancing together,a turk

and one girl and three greeks

with the cousin of the old Man In The Moon playing

the kanoon. (Cummings 1994, 969)

As is visible, the music and the dancing is common, however, the basic situation is completely different. One does not encounter the speaking voice watching a single, heavily-built girl in performance, but is present at a place where the majority of the guests are dancing. It is true, of course, that he himself still watches it from outside their circles and does not join in. Yet, the rest of them are dancing, and more importantly, dancing together: even though there is a very varied set of nationalities and backgrounds, they are all “dancing together,a turk / and one girl and three greeks,” while the musician providing the music seems so exotic that, figuratively speaking, he seems to be “the cousin of the old Man In The Moon” (969). Nor are they dancing only in well-formed, traditional pairs, or at least the phrasing suggests otherwise.

This could hint at the possibly heterotopic qualities of the bar. Michel Foucault (1998) talked of these locations as those that are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several places, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (241), and if one takes the word “place” in a wider sense, to possibly refer to cultures, as well, then this certainly applies to the situation described by the poem. After all, Greek and Turkish people dance together in perfect harmony, whereas the two nationalities and their countries are infamous for their set of conflicts that already existed at the time of the poem’s creation, and to some extent last to this very day. What is more, the volume, Complete Poems, 1904-1962, lists it as one of the “Poems from the Dial Papers 1919-1920,” so it comes exactly from the time of the Greco-Turkish War that lasted from 1919 to 1922. The nationality, or rather ethnicity, of the girl is not noted in the poem, so it may be unknown, unimportant, or alternatively, the lack of such a signifier might point to a member of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant middle-class. In any case, one surely sees a mixture of otherwise not necessarily compatible nationalities, dancing together and mingling in the open and welcoming atmosphere of the bar; a fact that is in complete harmony with my claim above that it may be the heart of an old, colorful, multicultural neighborhood.

Lastly, “[my eyes are fond of the east side]” paints a picture of the sounds of the place. One finds out that the speaker’s “ears,go into Hassan’s place the kanoonchir p ing the bigtwittering / zither-and the mealy,ladies dancing thicklyfoolish,with,the,tam,bou, / rine,s And the violin spitting squeakysongs into the cuspidor-col our- / edRoom” (187). There is the recurrently mentioned kanoon, a zither, a tambourine, and a violin. Onomatopoeic words further help in creating the illusion of music.

This, of course, hints at the fact that unrelated to whether it is a sufficient enough reason to call the place a heterotopia because it has an ability to bring together people of various nationalities, even those that normally have issues with each other, it most certainly qualifies for another reason: because of the fact that probably genuine Greek music is played there (at the very least the instruments listed could fit that description), and possibly Greek dances are danced to the melodies, not to mention the speaker’s drinks. In other words, the place creates a small, virtual slice of Greece in the very midst of New York’s Greenwich Village, and thus also brings together two otherwise incompatible places in one: Greece and the United States. If one, again, considers the Turkish presence at the place, something that would not be possible in the space of the Greek state during the war, then this point gets even stronger.

In other words, it is possible to conclude that the rest of the poems of the author do not contradict the understanding that McSorley’s and Dick Mid’s Place are heterotopic localities. Yet, they provide further details to the general picture by describing a third such locality: Hassan’s Place. As one can see, the three localities are highly specific in being two bars and a brothel. Considering that these are the places that are the central heterotopic localities of an otherwise sacred space, linking various slices of time and place, in some cases even working as portals, one can imagine them as temples (cf. Vernyik 2007, 145-7). And if this is the case, then however much the representation of the city space of E. E. Cummings’ poetry is rooted in Catholic symbolism, it at the same time deconstructs it by designating places that are usually considered disgusting, and the very opposite of sacred and respectable, as its holiest locations. This is only further amplified by the dark and dire aspect of Death walking around, the prostitutes selling their otherwise also already “dead” bodies, and the noise and chaos apparent in all three locations. In other words, although these heterotopic localities are focal points of the sacred space of the city, this sacrality is visibly twisted and subversive.

2.4. Mapping the Space of the City: Cartographic and Sacred Fictional Space

In my analysis of the city space as it appears in the volume Tulips & Chimneys, I introduced the term cartographic fictional space to stand for “the space comprising those areas, streets, buildings, institutions – and so on – represented by the text which are identifiable outside the lyric universe of the book and can be highlighted on an actual map of the city in question” (Vernyik 2007, 137). I based this term on Christopher Bollas’ (2000) contention that “if we know the name of an object it generates a greater network of personal meaning [than if we do not know it], as names distinguish objects and network rather intelligently with other names” (33).

Then, I used this idea and the direct geographical references available in the volume to sketch a map of the said space. The original drawing is reproduced here as Figure 1. I refrain from reproducing the list of individual poems that refer to the locations shown on the map in order to shorten the length of this study, and to avoid needless repetition. The reader is advised to consult the original paper for this information.

Figure 1: The cartographic fictional space of Tulips & Chimneys

Obviously, the scope of Figure 1 is rather limited, as it reflects only the cartographic fictional space of Tulips & Chimneys. That is why I revised the original drawing, and added all extra locations that are present in the remaining poems. In addition, whereas the original, hand-drawn map was disproportionate and significantly distorted at parts, the revised one is now more precise. The result can be seen as Figure 2.

In this new map, the streets and areas that were identified during the original analysis of Tulips & Chimneys are in black and grey, and the buildings found at the same time are in red. Sizes, shapes and distances are proportional, except for Coney Island. In order to take up less space on paper, it is put directly below Manhattan. This simplification is shown by the introduction of a broken line separating the two areas from each other.

Blue lines show those streets that appear in the author’s other volumes of poetry. These are West 4th Street, introduced by “[jack’s white horse(up]”; Allen Street and Christopher Street, referred to in “[my eyes are fond of the east side]”; and West 9th Street that appears in “[‘right here the other night something].” While this is a very limited set of loci, those places that were found in Tulips & Chimneys keep repeating in later volumes, as well.

That is to say, the conclusions drawn from the original map stand unchallenged by the new information, and one can still easily see that “the New York City of Cummings’ poems is different from an actual New York City even in a strictly cartographic sense, as it features only a limited set of its spaces” (Vernyik 2007, 138), as well as the fact that “the limits of the urban space of this volume are set by […] three nodes” (140). These nodes remain the Bronx, Manhattan and Coney Island.

Figure 2: The cartographic fictional space of E. E. Cummings’ urban poems

This, however, is not the only way one can map the structure of space in a given representation of the city. Another possibility is to look at the way individual locations function, and in what way they are related to each other. In my already quoted article I introduced the term sacred fictional space to describe this kind of spatiality:

This type of space is a non-homogeneous space that can be derived from the use, role and importance of localities in the given literary work of art. Sacred fictional space is having the heterotopic locus in its center that stand in for the church or the temple, and the rest of the localities that disrupt the homogeneity of abstract space. (Vernyik 2007, 146)

On the basis of this definition, a derivative of Mircea Eliade’s (1965) sacred space, I distinguished three possible types of space: that of the heterotopic center, the space of other named locations, and unnamed space. This allowed me to draw a diagram, reprinted here as Figure 3.

Figure 3: The Sacred Fictional Space of Tulips & Chimneys

Similarly to Figure 2, which is an updated, refreshed and extended version of Figure 1, Figure 4 provides a similar model, but adds all those locations that did not appear in Tulips & Chimneys. As it is visible, a third heterotopic location, Hassan’s Place, joins the original two, and there are some new places added to the space of other named locations. In all other respects, however, the new findings fit rather seamlessly into the original model.

Figure 4: The sacred fictional space of E. E. Cummings’ Urban Poetry

2.5. Faces in the Crowd: The Space of the City’s Inhabitants

Up to this point, I have mostly tried to come up with an integrative and synthesizing understanding, or in other words, a bird-eye view. In the following, I am offering an extension and specification of that image with a closer look at those who inhabit the New York City of E. E. Cummings.

Although it is true that I have argued above (and in my previous studies) that the fictional space of the city is fundamentally sacred, it would be a mistake to imagine Cummings’ city vision as elitist and exclusionary in the conventional sense of these two words. While the feeling of being special and better than the average middle-class person is clearly central to the Cummingsian persona, and his “tendency to dichotomize the world into ‘you and I’ versus ‘mostpeople’” (Cohen 2007, 82) is well-known, he does not draw the line on the basis of class, gender or religious beliefs, but on the basis of each person’s willingness and ability to behave as a unique individual, rather than a cogwheel in the monotonously running machinery of society.

Indeed, the characters of Cummings’ New York are very varied. As María Tereza González Mínguez notes, “Cummings was fascinated […] by the size and variety of the population, the suffering of the poor, the excess of the rich, and the quarters and territories where so many races and nations of the Old World and the New coexisted” (2006, 247). And while

the dual locality of the temple of course remains a place that is available for entry only to those who submit themselves to the set rituals, nevertheless the priests are bartenders, waiters, pimps and madams. […] Women are not missing, either. Most of them are prostitutes, of course […] This is a world of women and men who “mingled openly in the demi-monde of bars and vaudeville houses” (Zukin 1998, 827), in spaces with “a reputation for promiscuity and vice” (827). Some of these places, however, are also quite democratic and fairly open to all nationalities. […] Even though existing localities and structures that were set up by the dominant culture […] are used by the actors of Tulips & Chimneys, they are not central. Also they are used for other purposes than intended. (Vernyik 2007, 147-8)

Yet, one should not imagine Cummings’ New York City as a romantically overidealized place where the lower classes and the disenfranchised secretly rule over the rest, and live in perfect harmony between genders, nationalities and racial boundaries. As it has been already mentioned, “Cummings paints a rather ambivalent picture of modern life: it is sometimes wonderfully alive and carnivalesque and at other times terrifying and ominously lifeless” (Wilkinson 2004, 24). In fact, there are a lot of somber and dire details to be found. Although his “poems about Paris and New York show a fondness for the activity and bustle of the city” (Nunn 1997, 179), they also feature a strong “awareness of its cruelties” (179).

Beyond the often violent resistance mentioned above, one can see people covered in “stiffened puke” (Cummings 1994, 257), at points “despair impersonates a street” (377), people may be “alone in the house,with somebody” (377), to mention but a few such images. As a specific example, one could think of the poem “[of this wilting wall the colour drub],” with its “faintly sweating air” (132), “putrid window” (132) and with the lady’s “still-born / smile” (132) in a window. Indeed, the “poem’s basic imagery is that of an urban tenement area, which focuses one’s attention on societal decay” (McBroom 1971, 102).

And yet, what looks at first sight somber, dark and depressive, may turn out to be of a different quality once it is inspected from up close. A case in point is “[there are 6 doors.],” a poem from ViVa. The text is only glanced at by Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b) when identified as a portrait “of neighbors in the city” (87), and Eve Triem (1969) does little more than paraphrase the poem’s structure in repeating who the individual inhabitants of the six flats behind the doors are. Yet, she at least finds it important to stress that in this poem, “Cummings tells what happens to some men who have been jettisoned by society,” and while reading it, the “reader is left to ponder several kinds of waste of human life” (35), and thus provides a much more specific treatment than Kidder does. Nevertheless, probably the most useful comments were made by Robert Louis McBroom (1971) in his unpublished dissertation where he identifies the text as yet “another example of non-communication, this time within the ranks of apartment dwellers” (77) which has lead to a “quality of life [that] is so vacuous that, from the narrator’s point of view, bedbugs seem as important as people. The despair which has soiled the other residents has come to bruise the narrator” (78).

What none of the commentators seem to have noticed (with the possible exception of Robert Louis McBroom), or at least refused to comment on, is that although there are six doors mentioned in the first line (and six stanzas), only five apartments are actually discussed. This, along with the fact that the lyrical voice measures everything in a relative distance from a particular door – i.e. “Next door(but / four)” or “next / Door but two” (Cummings 1994, 314) – may point to the fact that the possible inhabitant of the sixth, undescribed, door is the narrator himself. This could, of course, explain why the “despair which has soiled the other residents has come to bruise the narrator” (McBroom 1971, 78).

At the same time, both Eve Triem’s (1969) formulation focusing on a poet who “tells what happens to […] men […] jettisoned by society” (35) and McBroom’s (1971) interpretation of the poem as a criticism of a particularly shallow “quality of life [that] is so vacuous that […] bedbugs seem as important as people” (78) seem to imply a certain distance between the lyrical voice and the inhabitants and a severely critical stance towards them. Yet, a lyrical voice living amongst them does not seem to fit into the picture of a critical speaker judging those people. Nor does the fact of the very absence of such critical statements. The poetic persona with an “increasing tendency to dichotomize the world into ‘you and I’ versus ‘mostpeople’” (Cohen 2007, 82), the eager “satirist of his society’s values and the champion of his own” (68) here remains notably silent and does not add any commentary to the descriptions, either positive or negative.

Nor is the picture as overwhelmingly negative as claims by the three scholars suggest. After all, although the young couple “noisily / who kiss” and “throw silently things / Each at other” (Cummings 1994, 314) may not have a harmonious relationship, they certainly seem to live their lives in a highly emotional and instinctive way, a feature praised by the poet. Likewise, the narrator hears life and movement where others notice none: “But next door nobody / seems to live at present(l’on / parle de repapering;i / don’t think so.maybe:somebody?)or,bedbugs” (314).

And this closeness to the described experience, and this refusal to judge even people normally outcast from society ties in well with the point I argued in my thesis on the urban sphere in the author’s Tulips & Chimneys. There I claimed that although “the speaking voice of the poems […] seems close to what Zukin (1998) after Walter Benjamin calls the flâneur, ‘an independent but impecunious single man who strolled the city’s streets and frequented the consumption spaces of cafés, nightclubs and shops, on the lookout for the new, the exciting and the unfamiliar’ (828)” (Vernyik 2007, 149-50), it nevertheless significantly differs from it: a fact that is not so difficult to notice under closer scrutiny of the term and the behavior of the poems’ lyrical voice. I based this statement on Stephen Paul Hardy’s (1995) study of the flâneur, in which he emphasizes that this type of character is a “nostalgically aristocratic figure […] lost in contemplation of myriad Otherness” (127). The words “aristocratic” and “Otherness,” I pointed out, imply that the “flâneur is in a position outside the circles of those whom he surveys, and above them” (Vernyik 2007, 150). Yet, the speaking voice of the author’s urban poetry is mostly not a person surveying the town’s inhabitants with the condescension of a quasi-aristocratic outsider. For one, as María Teresa González Mínguez (2006) notes, “Cummings hardly ever sees the city from a distance […] Both the impressed young boy of the first books and the mature man of the last volumes are almost always downtown” (248). At that point I based my argument mostly on the poem “[at the head of this street a gasping organ is waving moth-eaten],” and the speaker’s sympathy for the musician’s monkey (Vernyik 2007, 150), as well as listed some further possible examples without actually analyzing them.

Yet, probably the most poignant example of the lyrical voice having sympathy for the unconscious, or semi-unconscious drunk is the poem “a)glazed mind layed in a” (Cummings 1994, 388). Barry A. Marks identifies the basic situation of the poem as “a drunk throwing up in the men’s room of a restaurant” (1964, 98). It is somewhat weird to find soon afterwards that he claims that the “drunk’s almost complete passivity is implicit in his standing before the urinal” (99), whereas the poem quite clearly states that the drunk is, in fact, lying in it:

a)glazed mind layed in a

urinal (Cummings 1994, 388)

It is even more so, if one takes into consideration that the restroom attendant’s “gedup” (388) would make absolutely no sense, if the person was, indeed, standing. It is hard not to interpret this conspicuous case of oversight as an evidence of some internal censor working in Marks, revolting against the obscenity of the scene portrayed.

It is visible that scorn, or negative criticism on part of the lyrical voice of the poem is completely missing. The description is factual, precise and graphic, but it is neither judgmental, nor disgusted. The only possibly negative feature is the drunk’s categorization as “dead,” which has a heavy weight in Cummings’ symbolism. However, it is crucial to note that he is “dead but not complete / -ly not” (388), which is even further contrasted with the others “who are turned to seem” (388). That is to say, the drunk may be close to being dead physically, yet, it is nevertheless preferable to those whose existence is only on the level of appearances, on the level of “seem.” As Marks himself rightly points out, Cummings is “essentially serious when he points to the vomiting man, and says, here is ‘a … i’” (1964, 99), that is, in Cummingsian terminology: a real individual.

This, however, is still a case where the lyrical voice might be strongly sympathetic and positive; nevertheless it still keeps a certain distance from the character portrayed, and from the action itself. Such a situation might make a friendly, understanding and emotionally involved flâneur out of the lyrical voice, but it would still essentially stay a flâneur.

The poem, “[a man who had fallen among thieves]” (Cummings 1994, 256) is much more convincing an example about real, active involvement. Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b) claims that the subjects of the poem are the “rationalizations of society in refusing to come to grips with its derelicts,” paraphrasing at the same time “Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan” (67). It is the lyrical voice who ends up being the Samaritan in this case:

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke

i put him all into my arms

and staggered banged with terror through

a million billion trillion stars (Cummings 1994, 338)

That is to say, he “gathers up the man and, one assumes, takes him home” (Landles 2008, 221) at the same time overcoming “his aversion in two ways: firstly, helping a man he scorns, secondly, in the physical aversion of the ‘puke’” (222). There is clear evidence, that is, that Cummings’ lyrical persona does not remain an untouched free-floating flâneur at this point, but rather a “new Samaritan” who “ignores the ‘frozen brook / of the pinkest vomit’ to save his victim” (Smith [1965] 1972, 127).

This, however, is not without ambiguity, internal fights and struggles. Although the lyrical voice ends up being the only person who helps, he does not do it with the elevated and pathetic attitude of complete self-sacrifice and egotistic self-praise. He fights doubts, disgust, and even his own opinion about the drunk as a person. Nor is it a challenge which he undertakes easily, one that would not lead to an effort near the limits of his own ability:

If we examine the poem closely, we notice that the amount of stars increases – “million billion trillion stars” – as if we are travelling through the universe. Whatever these “stars” represent, they are growing rapidly, and […] the speaker is staggering through them. […] When carrying a heavy object, each step becomes more demanding, more exhausting. The speaker […] is guilty of hyperbole […], so it could make sense to exaggerate the actual act – he carried him through the length of the universe. This may also help explain the “terror” or quite simply, the fear of dropping him, or of collapsing himself. (Landles 2008, 222-3)

Yet overcoming physical hardships and disgust to help a fellow citizen are not the only possible way in the poet’s city for real human contact, for going beyond the flâneur registering the city from afar. There are two poignant examples of meetings that leave a lasting impression in the observer: one in “[no time ago],” a poem that appeared in the volume Xaipe, and one in “[‘right there the other night something],” one that comes from 73 Poems, the author’s last volume. Neither of these are loud, mass scenes, but similarly to the one above, poems involving a meeting of the solitary speaking voice with another person in the street. As usual, there is mostly not much devoted to these two poems in existent analyses, the few exceptions I could find are briefly summarized here before the actual discussions of the poems.

Robert E. Wegner (1965), in his treatment of Cummings’ topics talks of “[no time ago],” in terms of “an infinite loneliness” that “individuals suffer […], as do poets, as did Christ” (75). Much more attention is paid to it by Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b), who paraphrases it the following way: it is a poem that shows “the narrator ‘walking in the dark’ and meeting ‘christ / jesus’” (14). Yet he takes this darkness not as a physical quality, but as a metaphor of “worldly confusion” (188), and considers the meeting as “one of stunned passivity” similar to “seeing a celebrity pass in the street” (189). In obvious contradiction to this, he emphasizes the narrator’s observations on the peculiar situation of Jesus, being close to that of his own. He talks of the speaking voice’s recognition that “[m]ade of no material substance […], Jesus was able, according to the Gospels, to walk on water and appear or disappear as he needed” (189), and that “Jesus, isolated from common understanding by his redemptive trade, resembles the poet who, in the likeness of organ-grinder, tinker, and street-vendor, is isolated by his” (189).

In fact, if the meeting had indeed no meaning beyond “seeing a celebrity pass” in “stunned passivity” (189), the speaking voice would not have an opportunity to deduce these observations. There had to be some closer contact: if not verbal or physical, then at least spiritual for that. Though they indeed pass each other by, something changes in the speaker, since only through such an experience could he have this epiphany about the parallel situations of Jesus and himself.{3}

The only other treatment I know of, by Norman Friedman (1960), agrees with this in emphasizing that the poem “narrates an emotional experience” where “the whole effect is of an intensely serious, yet naively personal and humble, reaction to a vision of God’s presence on earth” (84). What is more, the poem directly addresses the emotional intensity of the meeting: “my heart / flopped over / and lay still” (Cummings 1994, 648). In other words, the experience was so much overpowering and intense that the narrator’s heart seemed to skip a beat. And rather than of “stunned passivity” (Kidder 1979b, 189), the poem talks of an intimate closeness: “close as i’m to you / yes closer” (Cummings 1994, 648).

The speaker, walking alone one night in the dark, meets Jesus Christ. And this experience is so deep and powerful that, although no word is uttered, or exactly because of that, he loses the comfortably detached position of the flâneur, and has an epiphanic moment about the situation of himself as a poet being parallel to that of the savior. This poem is thus another beautiful example of the speaking voice of Cummings’ urban poetry encountering situations where he gets in direct contact and interaction with his environment, and thus should not be categorized as a flâneur. At the same time, with Jesus appearing to a citizen, it fits rather easily into the religious, and in fact, Christian symbolism postulated above.

Much less is available about the other poem in question, “[‘right here the other night something].” The only treatment I could find is by Rushworth M. Kidder (1979b) who categorizes it as one of those “city poems that focus on reactions to the unconventional.” In this case, the multitude of contradictory impressions, “a well-dressed man begging, a beggar asking for only three cents […], a beggar who so effusely shows his gratitude – that he cannot construct from them a portrait of anything recognizable.” Or to put it differently, “[h]e cannot […] reduce this character to a label” that is why in the end, “he flees” (228).

It is a very special text amongst the author’s urban poems, as the basic situation is not the usual one where the speaking voice talks about his own experiences and impressions. On the contrary, there is a dialog with a character called Charlie who notifies him about what happened to him “the other night” at the crossing of “west ninth” and “sixth avenue”. While discussing this, they are standing at the very same location, as Charlie’s utterance of “right here” assures one (Cummings 1994, 800). This very act of an active conversation, even with the fact that the focalizing “I” is just listening to Charlie’s narration, in itself proves that one cannot speak of a passive, distant and aristocratic flâneur. If at other points he sympathized or helped, or got deeply touched by a mysterious encounter with Jesus Christ, this time he even engages in conversation with someone.

It is visible that this conversational partner himself talks about a puzzling and emotionally taxing experience of his, in fact so much so that he rather decides to flee than to endure it any longer. At the same time, however, this very experience is rooted in a situation in which the said Charlie is approached by a fellow citizen in need, and whom he helps without hesitation. In other words, not only is the speaking voice of Cummings’ urban poems often in situations where he engages in some form of active contact based on sympathy and the wish to help, but he is even surrounded by similar people with whom he discusses some of the most turbulent cases of such character.

At the same time, the poem goes against traditional portrayals of the beggar, as well. Instead of showing a torn, dirty, sorry-looking person, the one in question appears as someone who is “tall strong young / finelooking fellow” who is even “dressed / well but not over.” Yet, even if he is not overdressed, he is possibly the one with the better outfit of the two characters. At the very least one finds out that, at the time of the strange meeting, Charlie wore “muchtheworseforwear shoes” (800) which is a striking contrast to the beggar’s well-dressed appearance. The appearance of such an out-of-the-ordinary character, again, through a matter of fact, precise description without any hint of judgment might support my claim that the attitude of these poems is mostly either sympathetic, or at least factual.

To sum up, one can say that as far as the individual citizens inhabiting E. E. Cummings’ New York City are considered, one finds a very varied and colorful set of people. At the same time, however, they are mostly underdogs, outsiders and people with questionable status. This includes drunks, criminals, ethnic minorities, as well as prostitutes and beggars. Yet, the lyrical voice’s relationship to these elements is not that of a detached, aristocratic flâneur, reveling in the fascination of otherness. Quite the opposite: the range of reaction and attitudes shown by him reaches from active help and involvement through sympathetic feelings to factual though uninvolved description. Even less is the attitude that of the narrow, stubborn and bitter satire the author is often blamed for and that his poems may show elsewhere.

3.1. Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Reception

Whereas I claimed that E. E. Cummings’ urban poetry, although significant, is routinely ignored and/or marginalized in its reception, and thus he is rarely considered a poet of the city, Peter Ackroyd’s reputation is the exact opposite. Critics and scholars alike discuss “Ackroyd’s Dickensian fascination with the city of London” (Rosenstock 2007, 142), or his “imaginative revisioning of London” (Taylor 2006, 114); they emphasize that he forms a pair with Iain Sinclair, since they “share an obsession with the city” (Murray 2007, 5) and what is more, the two of them are, in fact, more “associated with London” than “any other contemporary British writers” (5). Basically, there is an apparent critical consensus as to the “central role Ackroyd gives […] to London as the visionary city built on the accumulated wisdom of numberless generations of Londoners whose roots go back to the dawn of English civilization” (Onega [1999] 2005, 43).

It is thus apparent that while my reading of the poetry of E. E. Cummings goes against the mainstream of the available scholarship, and is aiming at a radical resituating and reassessment of his oeuvre, my analysis of Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd fits harmonically into the picture that already exists of the author as an urban novelist, what is more, a/the writer of London, or the “London chronicler” (Chalupský 2008, 104). Based on this, the whole venture of analyzing the representation of city spaces in works of the British author might seem, at first sight, to have a rather limited contribution to the field of Ackroyd studies. This is, no doubt, partially true, as my findings, due to their already mentioned compatibility with the existing image of the writer as an urban visionary, will not radically change the present understanding of the author’s work and focus.

Yet, one has to emphasize that while the idea of Ackroyd as an urban writer is, indeed, the standard and accepted image, the actual amount of existing research into this aspect is, nevertheless, severely limited. Listing academic work dealing explicitly and primarily with the question of the city in writing by Peter Ackroyd seems neither an impossible, nor an exhausting venture at the time of the writing of this book, even if one accounts for the inevitable fact that some texts might have stayed unknown to me (primarily if they take the shape of unpublished dissertations). To my knowledge, there has not yet appeared any monograph on Ackroyd’s representation of London, even if Alex Murray’s (2007) Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair has a misleading enough title to make one believe otherwise. In reality, however, this work deals with the representation and reinterpretation of history and historiography in these works, and not with the urban environment.

The closest any book-length study comes to a discussion of the urban space of Ackroyd’s novels is Berkem Güremci Sağlam’s (2007) doctoral dissertation, entitled “‘The Mystical City Universal’: Representations of London in Peter Ackroyd’s Fiction,” later republished as Representations of London in Peter Ackroyd’s Fiction: “The Mystical City Universal” (2012). Yet, similarly to Alex Murray’s book, this one also has a title that makes one expect more than the text offers. Rather than being a treatment of London, the city, it mostly focuses on issues of historicity, time and the relationship of past, present and future. Nevertheless, it occasionally includes insights into the workings of the city as a spatial entity, as well, even if those often take the form of ex-catedra statements without the support of detailed analyses of those urban aspects, or are mere paraphrases of Jeremy Gibson’s and Julian Wolfreys’ (2000), and Susana Onega’s (1991, [1999] 2005, 2002) works. In fact, even its central claim is a paraphrase of Gibson and Wolfreys (2000): “although the past can only be known from textual data, and is thus not wholly reliable, it is always present in, and in fact is indispensible from, the present” (Sağlam 2007, 1), and this in turns leads to a situation where “London itself emerges as a text […] that is highly subjective and open to interpretation for the protagonists” (1).

In terms of shorter analyses, the situation is somewhat better. The most thorough and detailed study accessible is by Alex Link, who discussed London’s spatiality in his 2004 essay “‘The Capitol of Darknesse’: Gothic Spatialities in the London of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor,” published in Contemporary Literature, which paper itself is a reworking of a longer chapter he devoted to the same issue in his PhD dissertation (Link 2003). While the relevance and contribution of Link’s essay to the question is evident, it has the drawback of being limited to a single novel, Hawksmoor, a feature shared by a significant portion of studies available on Ackroyd’s work, whether or not they deal with the urban sphere.

Another, shorter and more general article about the same topic was published by Petr Chalupský (2008), entitled “London Re-experienced: Peter Ackroyd’s Historiographic Revisioning of the City,” which has the advantage of discussing also Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, Chatterton, The Clerkenwell Tales, The Lambs of London and London: The Biography, not only Hawksmoor. This, however, is also its disadvantage, as covering so many books in just fifteen pages does not really allow for a detailed commentary, or any closer analysis.

Sebastian Groes also devotes a chapter of his book, The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature (2012) to Ackroyd’s London fiction. Rather than tackling novels individually, however, he rather overviews earlier critical reception of the topic, similarly to what is attempted here and below, and then uses one of the author’s more recent novels, The Plato Papers (1999), as an interpretive filter for the rest of the oeuvre. He shares the contention of Jeremy Gibson, Julian Wolfreys, and Berkem Güremci Sağlam that Ackroyd’s city is of a textual nature, but disagrees with them at crucial points. That is to say, he does not consider the city-as-text as a case of postmodernist play without further significance and signification beyond itself. Instead,  he sees it as an engaged text, in which various spoken and written voices are in active dialog with each other, representing various social, historical and occupational groups.  Thus he substitutes Gibson and Wolfreys’ (2000) apolitical London with Alex Murray’s (2007) politicized version, and adds Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism. In addition, he considers the author’s vision of London as a fundamentally modernist, rather than postmodern one, but denies Susana Onega’s claim about the city being informed by esoteric or occult philosophies.

The Joycean echoes of Ackroyd’s city, again limited only to Hawksmoor, are discussed by Morton P. Levitt (2002), in his article “James Joyce in London: Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor.” Likewise, Sophie Cartier (2005a, 2005b) authored two articles on the topic of Ackroyd’s city, one in French and another in English, while Julian Wolfreys’ (2004) Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality devotes a chapter to the issue. These seven articles are apparently the only ones available that deal explicitly and primarily with the topic of the urban sphere in the work of Peter Ackroyd.{4}

Such a limited amount of studies is rather surprising about an author whose novels are generally considered to be urban novels, and mostly London novels at that. But while the amount of studies specifically devoted to the Ackroydian urban sphere is low, the topic nevertheless figures in other works, dealing with different issues in the form of brief digressions, remarks and short explanatory sections. While listing all such works here would be both impossible and probably rather futile, Susana Onega’s ([1999] 2005) Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd deserves mention as a study often remarking on issues of the city, as well as Alex Murray’s (2007) already mentioned monograph.

Having said that there is a critical consensus about the centrality of London in Ackroyd’s writing and that this widespread opinion nevertheless has not yet led to too many essays actually dealing with this issue, it nevertheless seems logical, as a first step, to take a look at what little is available and see what various authors have to say about Ackroyd’s London. That is to say, in the coming few pages I provide a brief overview of the general statements about how London is represented in the author’s works, and not the individual treatment of various novels. The issue of Hawksmoor will be tackled in the chapters devoted to the volume itself.

As seen by his interpreters and critics, Ackroyd’s London is “a vast place of light and dark, good and evil” (Grubisic 2001, 141), a city of sharp contrasts, a “nexus for overlapping and not infrequently oppositional cultures – for criminality as well as comedy, for philosophy that produces emancipatory political tracts and murderous acts” (103). A place where one finds homeless vagrants and members of the Royal Society, dark murders and lectures about natural science, or likewise, smelly pubs and mighty churches, to mention but a few of the conflicting aspects.

Yet, even if these people occur next to each other, their interaction is severely limited. Characters are uncannily lonely and isolated, severely lacking in human contact and their reaction to each other is frequently that of paranoid distrust or disgust. In other words, “the Ackroydian mise en scčne does not feature a progressive interaction between person and environment. […] [P]rotagonists at no time embrace the society in which they actually reside, and society does not benefit from the protagonists’ input nor offer them a comfortable place at its expansive table” (232). The London society of Ackroyd’s novels is a society of isolated loners.{5}

Nor do their actions and wishes seem to be of any interest or impact, as they have to follow the pattern dictated by the city itself, at least as far as the average character is considered. His is “a London awash in uncanny echoes and repetitions, which threaten to overwhelm and negate all possibility of meaningful historical change” (Link 2003, 84), but even personal change for that matter. Not only is London “doomed to a repetition of ancient and bloody historical conflicts against a background of existentially inflected banality and futility” (84), but also, and even more, so is the individual living in the city. In many of his novels, “nothing progresses in time, […] the same events repeat themselves endlessly, and […] the same people live and die only in order to be born and to live the same events again and again, eternally caught in what appears to be the ever-revolving wheel of life and death” (Onega 1991, 31). There is a virtually inescapable determinedness of fate, a total mind control by the town itself: “London is posited as affecting not only the conscious development of its inhabitants, but also their unconscious gestures. The inhabitants of the city become, as it were, trapped, determined by the mythical forces of the city” (Murray 2007, 76). One can easily see a similarity to the circular repetitiveness of the Cummingsian city in this aspect. Yet, the basic difference between a peaceful, Zen-like, motherly cycle and this rather evil and fate-like pattern is also striking. Later chapters return to this issue, both to test these claims in the light of the analysis of the novel, as well as to provide a more detailed comparison of this aspect of the two authors’ cities.

Another often stressed aspect of Ackroyd’s London is that of its occult, sacred or mythical character. Berkem Gürenci Sağlam (2007) claims that “the city of London unites its dead and living inhabitants in a spiritual realm” (79). Ackroyd’s  “interpenetration of times and traditions repeatedly moves towards a mystical vision” (Taylor 2006, 100), which, in turn, leads to “mystic spaces” (8). As Adriana Neagu (2006) puts it, “[i]n the dramatization of sacred and profane mysteries, sacramental rites, apocryphal traditions, the cabbalistic and the esoteric, Ackroyd subscribes to a numinous order of sacred space and time” (225-6). This, however, allegedly reaches such an extent that not only is the topic and/or the environment mystical and sacred, but through Ackroyd’s “devout, priestly attitude to language” (225), his “constant recapitulation of rite and myth” (226), as well as his “re-enactments of scenes, forms, voices and vocabularies of old, his painstaking attempt at the consecration of space” (226), his whole form of expression becomes religious in nature, and thus, in his urban novels, the “space of the urban is written in the vocabulary of hagiography” (232), a feature partially shared with Cummings, as it has been shown.

However, unlike in the case of the New York City of E. E. Cummings, it is not a safe, controlled and light religiousness one encounters in these London novels, but one of an uncannily depressive and haunting manifestation of the sacred. What one encounters is a “London whose history […] is resolutely Gothic. It is alternately steeped in the blood of criminal violence, occulted in a suggestive and menacing obscurity, and replete with the persistence of traces of a past that will not stay securely past” (Link 2003, 83). In fact, as his “multitude of crazy vagrants, incidents of random violence, and avenues of ruined architecture and creeping disintegration attest, […] entropy and chaos remain the salient aspects in Ackroyd’s representation of […] [the] city” (232). This is true to such an extent that the “city is thus figured through a sensibility of disorientation, excess, laughter, and, not infrequently, violence and darkness, which no reading can domesticate or rationalize” (Wolfreys 2004, 128).

Yet, alongside or maybe beneath the apparent chaos, there is another layer, the layer of occult sites organizing space. Although Susana Onega ([1999] 2005) was discussing Hawksmoor when she claimed that the novel’s is a “vision of London as an intricate net of emblematic buildings accumulating through time the occult power of its millenarian inhabitants” (44), such a statement could also be taken to describe Ackroyd’s city in general. At the very least it agrees exceptionally well with Alex Murray’s (2007) claim that, for Ackroyd, “London is a city of sites that illuminate certain historical periods and personages. It is physical spaces that retain a tangible sense of the past and expose those architectures of history that can place us in contact with the ghosts of history” (5). What is more, these places are arranged in particular, specific locations:

For Ackroyd, London is to be found in a range of inner-city sites: Clerkenwell, Spitalfields, Limehouse, Holborn. Yet above and beyond these spaces London’s history is to be found in sites of memory. In Chatterton the focus is on the attic room in Brooke Street, Holborn, where Thomas Chatterton apparently killed himself; in Hawksmoor it is Christ Church, Spitalfields; in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem it is the Jewish Quarter of Limehouse and the London music halls; in The House of Doctor Dee it is the Clerkenwell House that once belonged to the sixteenth-century alchemist; in The Great Fire of London it is the area around the old Marshalsea prison. (5)

This specificity of locations is further discussed at the chapter dealing with the analysis of Hawksmoor’s cartographic fictional space, but already at this point, one can see that the organization of space, heavily reliant on specific sites and their special characteristics, is in fact a shared characteristic feature of the two authors’ spatial models.

One last, commonly emphasized aspect of Ackroyd’s city deserves attention before the actual analysis: the characters populating this literary version of London. Obviously, the treatment of this issue also appears in the discussion of Hawksmoor below, yet it seems logical, to once again summarize what available interpretation claims about the author’s London characters. For one thing, it is often emphasized that his characters are more often than not rather archetypes than flesh and blood people (7). The archetype most interesting for the purposes of the analysis of the urban sphere is that “of the troubled, yet visionary artist, such as Chatterton, Charles Wychwood, George Meredith and Henry Wallis in Chatterton, Nicholas Dyer in Hawksmoor, Matthew Palmer in The House of Doctor Dee, and Spencer Spender in The Great Fire of London” (7). Besides the troubled artist, the somewhat similar, yet distinct “figure that Ackroyd has described as ‘the London visionary’” (7) deserves a special attention. “For Ackroyd this figure is embodied in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural figures, namely Dan Leno, Turner, Blake and Dickens” (7) These two types are the characters who often focalize and embody a specific London vision, thus in “this formulation London is experienced and expressed by the privileged few” (7). That is to say, these characters, usually one per novel, provide a unified and elitist vision of the chosen one, the mystic. As Julian Wolfreys (2004) puts it:

The arrivals invariably take place through privileged subjects of the city, whether fictional or real, whether famous or, today at least, relatively obscure. Such subjects provide a singular, momentary provisional identity to the city, which cannot be generalized. Such Londoners make possible a certain glimpse of London via a narrative gesture akin to prosopopoeia. The force of revenance transforms the present irrevocably, and it does so precisely through the Londoner who gives face to the phantasms of the past, and so bears witness in mediumistic acts of poiesis. (127)

There is, however, another important archetypal character, which appears throughout the London novels. These are various, more or less nameless, downtrodden or outsider figures of the city: vagrants, children, people of the crowd, victims of murders, and so on. Though they could seem unimportant at first sight, the opposite is true: they play a crucial role in both the stories and in the town itself:

As we will see in both The House of Doctor Dee and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, anonymous London voices arrive to affirm aspects of the city’s otherness, while also speaking as otherwise forgotten, occluded Londoners, the ‘poor and the desperate’ for example, from whose shadow ‘the city is most recognisable’, or the vagrants and children in Hawksmoor, who are sacrificed, literally, to the rebuilding of the city’s churches. (128)

As Alex Link (2003) notes, they may have an important role in alienating various parts and aspects of the city: “Like the churches, their placelessness or status as excess in London’s capital machine makes them readily and exclusively legible as ‘objects of suspicion and sometimes even of fear’ (70). […] [They] are thus readily available […] for the play of othering in urban space” (101).

One could at this point imagine Ackroyd’s vision of London to be a particularly socially sensitive one, where underprivileged, poor outcasts are portrayed in a sympathetic and subversive manner. And, in fact, the special role they play has led some to comment on the author’s “sympathy for London’s many downtrodden citizens” (Grubisic 2001, 131) in the novels. Yet, one should not jump to such a conclusion too easily. It is enough to remember the statements above about the city being a combination of individuals separated both from each other and from the city as a whole, or the hopelessly binding, almost evil circularity of history and events that London apparently forces its citizens into, to realize that this is probably not the case, at least as far as one can rely on the existing critical readings. This contention is, in fact, shared by some readers, notably by Alex Link (2003), who emphasizes that the “homeless have no place in London’s abstract spaces, shaped by flows of capital, except as surplus labour. In the context of abstract space, the Limehouse vagrants are only understandable as items in a catalogue of London’s ‘unwanted objects’ who ‘stumble’ around a fire rather than intimate any sense of the ecstatic” (101). And the very same is stressed even more emphatically by Alex Murray (2007), who points out that this ever returning cycle of events, this eternality of the “London condition” that has already been mentioned above leaves no space to change and thus it conserves inequality and suffering. In fact, although “Ackroyd notes the inequality that is at the heart of the city, […] any critique is problematized by the notion that it is destined to repeat itself […] By aligning poverty with the cyclical narratives of the novel, Ackroyd creates a view of the necessity of systemic suffering that accords with economic rationalist theories of social mobility over social equality” (44).

That is to say, if one is to summarize what is there to learn about Peter Ackroyd’s representation of London from the available readings, one finds out that the texts portray the city in a dark and negative way. People have no contact and cooperation with each other, nor do they desire any. Situations, acts, crimes and even people recur over the endless cycle of history that controls and binds individuals and does not leave any room for either improvement or change. At the same time, the town is full of violence, murder, dirt and poverty in a frightening and depressive mixture of the gothic and the occult. As Petr Chalupský (2008) puts it, this London is “a swollen giant monster who kills and devours more than he could ever breed” (105). Beyond and below this chaotic rumble, however, there is a deeper structure of special sites usually in the form of buildings that organize space and exert a special force on its citizens, in some sort of cooperation with the layer of the town’s outcasts.

3.2. Hawksmoor: the London of the Architect

The novel, Hawksmoor, has a special place in the oeuvre of Peter Ackroyd. Since the author “won international repute after the publication” of this very novel (Onega 1996, 208), and it is also a work awarded with numerous prizes, including “the Whitbread Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize,” what is more, was even “shortlisted for the Booker Prize” (208), while it is also immensely successful with readers, it is of no wonder that the book has drawn “significant popular and critical attention,” and “spawned numerous articles and appears frequently in studies of postmodern historiographic metafiction and of the gothic” (Link 2003, 517). As it was suggested above, the novel may very easily be Peter Ackroyd’s most widely discussed work to date. As such, it leads to a special situation in terms of the treatment of urban space, as well. This is probably the reason for the fact that whereas in case of other novels there are only shorter comments and remarks about the issue, spread in a number of unrelated articles and theses, there are two texts, or rather two consecutive versions of one analysis, dealing directly and primarily with this issue in Hawksmoor: a chapter of Alex Link’s (2003) doctoral dissertation entitled “Postmodern Spatialities in the Contemporary Urban Gothic Novel,” and its subsequent reworking as the (2004) article “‘The Capitol of Darknesse’: Gothic Spatialities in the London of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor.” Therefore, I first briefly summarize the main points of this available reading, and then build my own in a critical dialog with it.

Before doing so, however, I provide a brief description of the novel’s structure and plot, in order to make the forthcoming discussions more transparent and digestible. This is particularly necessary because of the triple reference the word “Hawksmoor” may have at different points: character, historical person and novel. Throughout this analysis, following academic conventions, the title of the novel is italicized, and any other use of the name, unless specified otherwise, refers to the character in the book.

The novel’s two main characters are Nicholas Dyer, who is a fictionalized version of the English baroque architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and the other one is the twentieth century detective working for Scotland Yard, called Nicholas Hawksmoor. Besides them, other notable figures of secondary importance are their assistants, Walter Pyne (Dyer’s) and Walter Payne (Hawksmoor’s), as well as Sir Christopher Wren, and Dyer’s home servant: Nat Eliot. In addition to them, there are various murder victims, homeless people and vagrants, as well as other historical figures, to mention but the most evident of the rest of the characters.

The novel then is structured along the lines of Ackroyd’s oft-used “double-narrative tactics” (Vránová 2010, 88), where the even and odd number chapters deal with two parallel stories which then get entangled or overlap in various ways. This very same strategy is used, for example, in Chatterton, English Music¸ and The House of Doctor Dee. In the present case, the even chapters “take place over a period of eight months, in a present time loosely describable as belonging to the twentieth century. These chapters are narrated by a third person, extra-heterodiegetic narrator […] and are devoted to the story of Nicholas Hawksmoor” (Onega 1991, 32), whereas the odd ones, “situated in the eighteenth century, cover the span of Nicholas Dyer’s life: 1654-1715, which he recreates in a first person narration he supposedly writes between 1711-15” (32). In Dyer’s chapter he gives a retrospective account of his life, trying to thereby account for and explain his decisions and deeds while planning and building his seven churches, and most eminently, his seven sacrificial murders. Detective Hawksmoor, on the other hand, in his chapter, is trying to solve the case of a mass murderer, killing seven people, one after the other, near Dyer’s seven churches. Not only are the locations of the homicides shared, however, but so are the circumstances of the killings, and the names of the victims. A comprehensive table of the places and the names of the victims was compiled by Susana Onega (1991, 34), which is reproduced here, as Figure 5, since it will make it significantly easier to follow the argumentation of Link’s, and its subsequent commentary and criticism.

Figure 5: Names of murder victims and their locations

The seventh murder at Little St Hugh’s,{6} Detective Hawksmoor either does not encounter before the story ends, or in an alternative reading, he is the victim of that murder himself (more on this in the actual analysis).

The two narrative lines, that of the 18th century and that of the 20th century, which seem separate at first, are then connected by these murders, but not only by them. In fact, “Hawksmoor is filled with a tissue of echoes, repetition and coincidence that serves to affiliate 1711 with the late twentieth century. […] For example, the phrases concluding one chapter coincide with ones that begin the next chapter” (Grubisic 2001, 202).{7} Another such linking repetitive effect is created by “the recitation of popular songs and nursery rhymes” (Murray 2007, 44) in both eras. Likewise, the very churches and those specific and named neighborhoods that “seem naturally predisposed to violence” (Link 2003, 102) in fact attract the same type of crime in both of the two storylines, and thus suggest that nothing has changed, and what was true in Dyer’s time is true in Hawksmoor’s (and ours), as well.  The vagrants that appear in the 18th century of Nicholas Dyer and reappear in the 20th century of Nicholas Hawksmoor also participate in creating this very same feature of blurring the boundary of originally distinct timeframes, just as the parallel locations of Bedlam and the modern retirement home do.

These and many other similar devices, the consecutively more and more numerous and strong similarities and déjŕ vu-like reoccurrences, the “shocking reduplications of names, events, actions, and even identical sentences uttered by characters who live two centuries apart” (Onega [1999] 2005, 47) lead one to the understanding that in Hawksmoor “nothing progresses in time, that the same events repeat themselves endlessly, and that the same people live and die only in order to be born and to live the same events again and again, eternally caught in what appears to be the ever-revolving wheel of life and death” (47).

This build-up leads to the last unit of the book, which no longer fits the pattern, and does not belong either to the 18th century, 1st person narrated, subjective account, nor to the, at least seemingly, objective 3rd person narration of the 20th century detective story. Instead, it is “a concluding paragraph, a kind of epilogue, separated from the main body of text” (Gunnarsdóttir Champion 2008, 29). Yet, although it looks like an epilogue with its outsider’s, step-aside perspective, what it really proves to be is a “conjunction of passages, [where] we are told that all the previous ‘figures […] spoke with one voice,’” (Ackroyd 1985, 217 qtd. in Gunnarsdóttir Champion 2008, 29).

Summarily, therefore, one can say about the plot that in this novel, there is an architect, Nicholas Dyer, creating Christian churches for the authorities according to an occult plan of his own devising, hiding a sort of virtually Satanist, but at the very least pagan symbolism behind the façade of the officially required one. While doing this, he “consecrates” each of these according to ancient pagan tradition by human sacrifice, and thus each new church means a new case of murder, as well. Parallel with this, we see a twentieth century detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor, investigating a series of murders, happening at the same churches to similarly named people in the same way as Dyer’s sacrifices, but without any trace of physical contact or of an actually existing murderer. At the same time, there are more and more echoes and repetitions of the 18th century events in the 20th century world outside the murders themselves, in the end leading to the feeling of the dissolution of time, or that of its progress, and/or the unification of the two time frames. In a way, the reader gets the feeling that what Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating, are the 18th century murders.

3.3. The Existing Critical Interpretation of Hawksmoor’s Urban Spaces

In this chapter, I provide a brief summary of how the urban sphere and its representation are interpreted by Alex Link (2003, 2004), the major critic dealing explicitly with this topic. I do not provide a critical or polemic treatment of his reading at this point, as my own analysis of the novel is itself heavily built on such a critical debate and thus it makes such an assessment unnecessary. His main claims, however, are put in the context of other available analyses of the novel, to see how his reading fits into the critical consensus.

In Alex Link’s (2004) view, the novel’s architect, Nicholas Dyer, and his work superior and former teacher, Christopher Wren work “in complicity” and both of them, in fact, aim to “repress, in processes of abjection, excess in the form of the feminine, the popular, the poor, the body, and the corpse” (519). In this view, Dyer and Wren share the same (or at least very similar and deeply compatible) agenda, and they work together to impose this on the city. In fact, rather than occult celebrations of London’s dark and uncanny locations, in Link’s view, Dyer’s “architectural projects are […] expressly masculinist repressions responding to an abject city space characteristically conflated with the feminine, and especially maternal, body as excess” (523).

That is to say, while he certainly postulates a difference between the stance of Christopher Wren and Nicholas Dyer, it is more of a difference in modulation than kind. The two people in Link’s (2003) reading share a “coherent organised response to fear, with foundations in what amount to articles of faith” (92) and in fact, both of their strategies as such are but “strategies of fear-management in the face of free-floating anxiety” (92). In fact, they seem more like the two sides of the same coin in this particular understanding, where it is not possible to separate “Dyer, who holds to a systematic irrationalism, from Wren, whose rationalism is inconsistent” (94). They are both reliant on each other’s existence and in their “battle for an institutional supremacy” they open “the city to other voices only as a by-product of the seams opened by their contradictions” (94).

By doing this, he effectively reinterprets the prevailing understanding of the novel which sees these two characters as representing opposite (and antagonistic) poles. In this tradition, as Paul Smethurst (2000) points out, although “Wren oversees Dyer’s work in the novel, [he] does not seem to realise just how subversive Dyer’s churches are becoming” (186). While Dyer “incorporates references to older faiths […] by encoding patterns to evoke ancient mythical characters, and he sacrifices boys and young men and buries them under the foundations” (186), and is a character interested in dark, hidden layers, occult and mysterious spiritual phenomena, Wren is only “interested in the phenomenal world, in the surfaces of things, and with appearance” (186). That is to say, while Dyer is a figure of depth, Wren is that of the surface. This antagonism is the direct result of “the debate between Enlightenment reason, here placed in the mouth of Christopher Wren, and the critics of its abuses, arrogance, and discursive authoritarianism, here represented by Nicholas Dyer” (Link 2003, 89). That is to say, the prevailing view not only identifies the Dyer-Wren pair with the above mentioned deep/surface binary opposition, but also with those of dark/light, as well as reason/superstition. This tradition of Dyer’s practice as rebellious and counter-hegemonic, then, is what Link’s (2004) essay contests in its claim that Dyer is an accomplice of Wren’s in his plans to control, neutralize and systematize the chaos (519).

However, while Link’s reading declines interpreting Dyer’s behavior and his spatial and architectural practices as a form of resistance against the prevailing order of the architect’s time, this understanding does not completely deny the existence of subversion and revolt in an architectural or urban form as such. Quite the contrary, Link claims that “Dyer’s churches become sites of potential opposition” (519), however, not in his lifetime, and completely unrelated to his intentions, as they only start functioning as such special sites once they “become repressed sites in the cityscape and, unhinged from any coherent system of order, come to function in twentieth-century London as uncanny Lefebvrean absolute spaces” (519). That is to say, in the novel, the same spatial locations change functions and acquire a new way of functioning over time, as it distinguishes the “eighteenth-century churches, which are instruments of a systematic disorder, from the same churches in the twentieth century, where they emerge as a return of the repressed that ruptures the urban fabric” (Link 2003, 78).

It is interesting to note that by distinguishing between the spatial organization and the functioning of the churches in the 18th and the 20th centuries, Alex Link’s reading is again challenging the critical consensus, since such a change of status in the churches’ relationship with their environment and the society conditioned by the different historical context of the two centuries in question presupposes the existence of historical change and a linear view of time. Most commentators, however, read the novel as a text that collapses the boundaries between the two originally separate time frames, and makes historical change and progress meaningless terms by instituting either a circular time, or an existence outside time. Susana Onega ([1999] 2005) notes, for example, that “in the novel, nothing progresses in time, […] the same events repeat themselves endlessly, and […] the same people live and die only in order to be born and to live the same events again and again, eternally caught in what appears to be the ever-revolving wheel of life and death” (47), and thereby the text is effectively “disrupting traditional notions of chronological linearity in favor of a circular, or mythical conception of time” (47). Likewise, Paul Smethurst (2000) stresses that in Hawksmoor “architecture and writing – the church and the text – are both attempts to produce spatial constructs outside time, to escape time or to merge with an enduring or cosmological form of time” (182). And this tendency is also shared by many of those commentators who published their writing after the appearance of Link’s (2004) article. Paul Newland (2008), for example, also insists that “one aspect of the novel appears to remain fixed, however: the seemingly timeless and eternal form of the churches” (174), the exact opposite of Link’s claim of a significant and, in fact, decisive change in the status and functioning of those very churches. Alex Murray (2007) likewise talks of Peter Ackroyd’s fiction as such where “the past is condemned to repeat itself ad infinitum, with history bequeathing a pattern of influence from which the city and its inhabitants can never escape” (21). While in Sağlam’s (2007) vision Peter Ackroyd “rewrites London in his work […] to emphasise the circularity of the nature of time in the city” (15).

3.3.1. A Criticism of the City as Abject Female Body

One of the central claims of Alex Link about the activity of Nicholas Dyer, the architect, as it has already been pointed out above, is that his “churches are built on burial pits” (2004, 523), on pagan temples and in “violent neighbourhoods” (2003, 102), and the first of them “literally upon that of Dyer’s parents” (2004, 523), and in particular on the resting place of the body of his mother, and therefore, they are “expressly masculinist repressions responding to an abject city space characteristically conflated with the feminine, and especially maternal, body as excess” (523).

The first part of the statement is well-founded in textual evidence: Dyer does build his churches on graves, pagan temples and the like. Walter Pyne, Dyer’s apprentice notes, in a remark about Christ Church, Spitalfields, that “We have built near a Pitte and there are so vast a Number of Corses that the Pews will allwaies be Rotten and Damp” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 7). Likewise, Dyer remarks that near St. Anne, Limehouse “there had antiently been a great Fen or Morass which had been a burying-place of Saxon times, with Graves lined with chalk-stones and beneath them earlier Tombs” (62). And while St. George-in-the-East, Wapping is not built on any place of burial, it is most certainly located in a rather problematic area:

above the filthy passages of Wapping […] my third Church rises. Here all corrupcion and infection has its Centre: in Rope Walk lived Mary Crompton, the bloody Midwife who had six Sceletons of children of several Ages in her Cellar […] It was next to this place, in Crab Court, where Abraham Thornton carryed out his Murthers and Tortures […] The Black-Boy Tavern in Red-Maide Lane is also very unfortunate for Homicides, and has seldom been Tenanted. […]

Here in Angell Rents next the Ratcliffe High-way was Mr Barwick barbarously killed […] The Murtherer was afterwards hang’d in Chains near the place of his Crime – thus it is call’d Red Cliff, or Ratcliffe, the hanging Dock opposite my Church where the Bodies of the Damned are washed by the Water until they fall to Bits from the effects of Time. (92-3)

The fourth church, St. Mary Woolnoth is placed on what the vicar, Priddon, calls “Heathen Rubbidge” (133), or in Nicholas Dyer’s more precise description “an antient Chappell […] a primitive Church” (133), serving “the god Magon, or Idol of the Sunne” (133). What is more, though he is not completely sure, he considers it likely that it was “a Patch where Nocturnal sacrifices were once perform’d” (134). There is no information in the book about whether or not St. George, Bloomsbury and St. Alfege, Greenwich are built on any burial ground, ancient temple or site of murders. The last church planned, however, and the only one that has no real-life equivalent outside the fictional universe, the Church of Little St. Hugh in Black Step Lane, although built in a part of the town that Walter Pyne characterizes as “[t]hat stinking Alley close by the Moor-Fields” (10), is located where it is, not because of its “stinkiness”, but since the cult Dyer belonged to and later led had its meetings there, and was a location that, according to Dyer, is where “Druides held their yearly Sessions in London” (22).

At the same time, however, there are some reasons to suspect that the second part of Link’s statement, namely that Dyer builds at these sites to control and suppress them, is much more dubious. Granted, the architect has a very negative attitude to the city, and his most typical reactions to his fellow citizens are disgust, suspicion and hatred. He talks about “the Chaos of the Streets” (45), calls London a “Nest of Death and Contagion” (45), a “Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds” (47) with its “lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud” (48). He speaks of “the Barbarities of Mankind” (9), and along with other members of his faith he claims that “all men are Damned” (21), and human life is nothing but “an inveterate Mortal Contagion” (21) of “Tricking and Bartering, Buying and Selling, Borrowing and Lending, Paying and Receiving” (48). He likewise describes people as an “unchangeable Evil” (21) serving a god that is nothing but “shineing Dirt” (48) who “confesse to their Contagion only when they are like to Die of it, even tho’ they carry their Death with them every where” (50). They are corrupted by the body, which is a “Web of Ignorance, the foundation of all Mischief, the bond of Corrupcion, the dark Coverture, the living Death, the Sepulture carried about with us” (21). As for society, he identifies it with “a sensible Carcasse” (48). Yet, it would be jumping to conclusions to claim that if Dyer criticizes the people and the city, and he builds his churches in the most problematic locations of all, it automatically means that his aim is to beautify, control and contain it, much less repress it.

The argument of Alex Link (2003, 2004) for Dyer being an architect who tries to control and repress a city full of “sites of abject fear-desire” (2004, 523), is built on the following logic:

As Michel de Certeau reminds us, “the child’s desire to control the mother plays out as a desire to control space: that is, to render space visible, transparent and readable” (Pile 1996, 228). Dyer’s churches, at least at first, are an abject response to the feminised “Nest of Death and Contagion” (47) Dyer sees in London’s streets. […] Like Postmodernism’s critical edifices, the churches are phallic structures set deliberately to rise “above the Mire and Stink of this City” (203), away from the earth and its pits and graves, to govern it, just as he imagines erecting a pyramid over the labyrinthine “stinking Streets of London” (61). (Link 2003, 109).

That the first church happens to be built where Dyer’s mother was buried only seems to make Link even more convinced of the truthfulness of his argument. If the first of all his architectural projects is located at this very locality, then his “architectural projects are therefore expressly masculinist responses to an abject city space characteristically conflated with the feminine, and especially maternal, body as excess” (109).

While such a view seems highly convincing in its clear-cut simplicity of phallic symbols vs the abject feminine, there are many reasons to doubt that an understanding built upon such a central binary opposition really describes the behavior and the policies of Nicholas Dyer. This understanding, for example, ignores the fact that Dyer does not build to erase, control or repress fearful, disgusting or dangerous sites, but quite the opposite: to strengthen them and give them even freer reign. Likewise, Link takes a single site (the place where Dyer’s mother was buried), and a single event (the autopsy of a dead woman’s body by Christopher Wren) and after claiming that the church, as well as the efforts of both Dyer and Wren are attempts at repressing the abject feminine/motherly body (a claim not necessarily well-founded, as it will be pointed out), considers all the projects of the architect to work in the same way, without actually analyzing them, or providing any proof for such a commonality. Finally, this reading reduces Dyer’s motives to a single one (or at least attributes an almost exclusive centrality to it) and does not account for the architect’s strong occult-religious ideological positioning in any way.

Starting with the issue of Dyer’s motivation to build his churches, as well as his relation to the original sites, one finds a picture strikingly different from the one painted by Link (2003). If one is to re-examine the evidence about the case of the first church and the grave of Dyer’s parents, one encounters Dyer’s description of himself witnessing the interment of his parents’ bodies at the time of the plague:

But then they came out into the Spittle-Fields and, as I was running besides them now in my Wonder or Delirium (I know not what), of a sudden I saw a vast Pitte almost at my very Feet; I stopp’d short, star’d withinne it, and then as I totter’d upon the Brink had a sudden Desire to cast myself down. But at this moment the Cart came to the edge of the Pitte, it was turned round with much Merriment, and the Bodies were discharg’d into the Darknesse. I cou’d not Weep then but I can Build now, and in that place of Memory will I fashion a Labyrinth where the Dead can once more give Voice. (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 16)

The first thing one can notice here is that the scene shows the burial of both parents – a fact that Link (2003) briefly mentions (108), yet fails to attribute any importance to –, what is more, in a pit along with many other bodies. That is to say, there is no particular reason to identify the locality with the feminine, much less the motherly. In addition to this, Dyer mentions that he considers it a “place of Memory” (16), and although he “cou’d not Weep then” (16), he was surely emotionally moved at his parents’ death, since he “had a sudden Desire to cast [him]self down” (16). Therefore, there does not seem to be a reason to consider his building of the church at this location as an act of repression and silencing, as Link claims, but rather as a memorial. In fact, Dyer himself states that the aim of building there is so that “the Dead can once more give Voice” (16). Not an act of silencing or repressing, but of empowering and providing an outlet: connecting the sphere of the dead with that of the living.

And not only does this apply to this specific location, but all of his churches in general. While Link (2003) charges Dyer with constructing his churches as “phallic structures set deliberately to rise ‘above the Mire and Stink of this City’ (203), away from the earth and its pits and graves, to govern it” (109), and with the intention to “repress […] excess in the form of the feminine, the popular, the poor, the body, and the corpse” (Link 2004, 516), Dyer’s intention with the churches is the exact opposite. The architect’s credo, for example, is the following: “I build in the Day to bring News of the Night and of Sorrowe” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 6). Whereas Link talks of abjection and repression, Dyer talks of the very opposite:

It is a vast Mound of Death and Nastinesse, and my Church will take great Profit from it: this Mirabilis once describ’d to me, viz a Corn when it dies and rots in the Ground, it springs again and lives, so, said he, when there are many Persons dead, only being buryed and laid in the Earth, there is an Assembling of Powers. If I put my Ear to the Ground I hear them lie promiscuously one with another, and their small Voices echo in my Church: they are my Pillars and my Foundation. (23-4)

He talks of the dead not as disgusting and abject, not as something to control and repress, but something whose powers he intends to amplify and use, to “take great Profit from” (23). As he explains, “the ancient Dead emit a certain Material Vertue that will come to inhere in the Fabrick of this new Edifice” (62). It is not out of fear that he builds the churches either, as Link claims, but “in trust to the dark Powers” (92) whose speech Dyer even hears and listens to (88), unlike the overwhelming majority of the people who “walk as it were above the Precipeece with no Conception of the vast Gulph and frightful Abyss of Darknesse beneath them” (14).

The claim that Dyer, along with Wren, have a reaction of “abject fear-desire” (Link 2004, 523) to the feminine body, and that they project this onto their architectural project is mostly based on Link’s interpretation of the autopsy scenes in the novel. He claims that “Hawksmoor’s two autopsies illustrate the complicity of ‘God’ and ‘science’ [i.e. Dyer and Wren] in placing the abject” (2003, 106). Yet, only one autopsy features these two characters, as the other one takes place in the 20th century. Thus, I exclude the second scene from my analysis of the relation of these two iconic characters to the abject.

In case of the 18th century event, what one encounters is the corpse of a woman undergoing autopsy under the hands of Christopher Wren, while Dyer is acting as a spectator and occasional commentator. As Dyer explains, “the Coroner took us into a small Chamber where the naked Body of the Woman was to be seen” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 96). While cutting up the body, Sir Christopher comments upon the fact that “She must have been a fine woman when she was dressed” (97) and then goes on to itemize and inventorize the various parts of the body with cool scientific detachment: “You see here, Nick, (shewing me the Inside of the Corse as he spoke), you see the Valve at the entrance of the gut Colon, and here the Milkie Veins and the Lymphatick Vessels” (97). What he sees is but an object of scientific study and analysis, a puzzle to solve. In fact, his approach is much the same as that of a present day coroner performing a criminal autopsy:

It was not self-murther, he replied, and I am induced to believe that she was knocked down with a Blow on her left Ear, from the large Settlement of Blood there (and he pointed to the Head with his little Hammer): after she was fell’d to the Ground by the Blow it is probable, with the Gripe of a strong Hand, that she was throttled, and this to be understood from the Stagnation on both sides of her Neck under her Ears; and from the Settlement of Blood on her Breast, he went on, I am inclined to believe that the person who throttled her rested his Arm on her Breast to gripe the stronger. She is not long Dead, he continu’d, for although she was found floating upon the Thames, I find no Water in the Stomach, Intestines, Abdomens, Lungs, or cavity of the Thorax.

She did not drown her self for Shame neither, since her Uterus is perfectly free and empty. (97)

Link (2003) claims that through his behavior Wren “facilitates the abjection of the corpse by both eroticising it and placing it at a rational distance” (106). Yet, as Kristeva ([1980] 1982) notes, “abjection is a composite of judgment and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives” (9-10). That is to say, in order to talk of abjection, yearning and distancing are not enough, there must also be condemnation, and even more, “[d]iscomfort, unease, dizziness” (10). This part, however, is completely missing from Wren’s behavior. Link (2003) talks about “erotic desire veiled beneath a veneer of rational distance” (107) and claims that this is “abjection at work” (107), yet in the presence of “rational distance” one cannot speak of the abject. The abject does not allow for cool scientific detachment, it is “one of those violent, dark revolts of being, […] ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Kristeva [1980] 1982, 1; my emphasis), nor can it be named and catalogued as Wren does: the “abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine” (1), and not in the least would it “allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous” (1). Link (2003) himself quotes (106) Kristeva ([1980] 1982) claiming that a “corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection” (4), yet does not realize that Wren does not see the corpse “outside of science.”

What the other character present at the scene, Dyer, sees, however, is something completely different. The cutting up of the victim’s body reminds him of “a lady […] who seeing Hoggs and other Creatures cut up and their Bowels taken out, tormented her self with the Thought that she also carried about with her in her own Body such stinking Filth” (97). And the reaction of the said lady was that she “conceeved a sudden Abhorrence, and hated her own Body so that she did not know what Course to take to free her self from Uncleanness” (97). If anything, then this reminds one of abjection. The story about the lady closely mirrors the analysis of Kristeva ([1980] 1982): “The corpse […] is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance” (3), just as it happened with the unnamed lady. And no wonder for her reaction since “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live […] There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. […] [T]he corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything” (3).

What Link (2003) has to say about this is that, here, “Dyer tells a story, which Wren fails utterly to understand, about the female body as a site of abjection” (106). This, again, is a surprising case of a slip. Granted, Dyer does tell a story of abjection and Wren indeed fails to understand it, and his reaction shows this very clearly: “Meer Phrensy, Sir Chris, replied. See here, the Body is still fresh and what is this Corrupcion you mention but the Union and Dissolution of little Bodies or Particles: have you no Sense, Nick?” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 97). Yet, the story is in no way about “the female body,” but about corpses: the lady experiences her abject feeling not while encountering the feminine, but while seeing “Hoggs and other Creatures cut up and their Bowels taken out” (97). That the story is attributed to a woman, or that is told at the autopsy of a woman, bears no relevance, since it is made as a general comment about dead bodies, and as it was shown above, it could be taken for a reformulation of Kristeva’s own analysis of one’s feelings while encountering a cadaver.

Link (2003) further fails to distinguish between the position and opinion of the unnamed lady whose story about hogs and the filth inside her body is told, and those of Dyer himself. That is to say, those lines though uttered by Dyer, appear as an anecdote, rather than a direct expression of his own thoughts, thus identifying them with the position of Dyer without any further analysis seems somewhat debatable. Primarily once one realizes the significant difference between the way the lady reacted to an “autopsy” and Dyer does to the one in front of him. Granted, Dyer is a character who often expresses disgust with people and disapproves of their tendency to follow their bodily urges and to stay unaware of questions of faith and morality. Given that he is also prone to have a dark and negative world view, there indeed is a certain parallelism between the position of the lady and his perspective: there is the common element of disgust and a negative view of the body in general.

Yet, there is a key difference between their reactions, and this is exactly in terms of the abject. For one thing, it is not at all that clear that what Dyer finds disgusting is the body of the dead woman, and not its cutting up. After all, he talks of “the private Kingdom of Veins and Arteries” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 95) when describing the bodies that Wren opens up, which reflects rather an attitude of respect and awe than disgust. This is even further supported by comments on Wren’s passion for autopsies, where Dyer uses the adjective “filthy” not in connection with the corpses, but with Wren’s passion for opening them. He talks of “his filthy Curiosity to pore in Humane Corses and so to besmear himself” (95), and not of filthy bodies. This seems even more to be the case once one takes a look at his two strongly disapproving comments about Wren. The first one about his lack of cleanliness while doing the autopsies: “Sir Chris, his Hands steeped in Blood up to the Wrist-bones, and then scratching his head until his Wigg was tainted with it” (95); and the second one about his total lack of a spiritual attitude towards the human body: “The meerest Rake-hell has a finer Philosophie” (97). And such an interpretation of Dyer’s position gains even stronger support in Dyer’s connecting of Wren’s behavior with that of a self-flagellating traveler: “I remark on it in this Place, after the history of the Gentleman Traveller, so that you may anatomise the Mind of him who looks into that Blood and Corrupcion and not only of him who Whips it from himself and spills it upon a Bed” (95). But the strongest proof against the abject nature of Dyer’s reaction to the dead body undergoing autopsy is provided by this very reaction itself. That is to say, his own thoughts and not those of the unnamed lady he borrows. Listening to Wren’s scientific interpretation of the evidence and looking at the body Dyer remarks as follows:

I survey’d the woman’s Face, flinching as if my own Body had felt the Blows she endured, and then I saw what she had seen: Well Madam, says her Murtherer, I was walking here as I generally do, will you not walk with me a little? And I saw the first Blow and suffer’d the first Agonie of her Pain. He has taken a white Cloath from his Breeches, looks at it, then throws it upon the Ground and his Hand goes around my Throat: You need not be afraid, he whispers, for you will be sure to get what you Want. And now I feel the Torrents of my own Blood surging in my Head. (97-98)

He not only feels sympathy for the victim, but even identifies with her. In fact, this identification is so complete that he sees what happened to her and feels her pain. Identification, however, is not possible in case of the abject. As Kristeva ([1980] 1982) explains, “I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me.’ Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be” (10).

That is to say, contrary to what Link (2003) claims, neither of the two characters present at the autopsy have an abject experience. What is more, even if they had had one, it would not have been caused by the abject female body, as he claims, but by a corpse, which happens to be feminine only coincidentally, since it is not the femininity of the body, but its status as a corpse that brought up the possibility of an abject experience. Furthermore, it is visible that their reactions are at opposite ends of the scale in terms of intensity and emotionality: Wren is detached, cool-headed and scientific, while Dyer is affective and sympathetic to the point of identification. Thus the two figures’ alleged complicity through the common strategy of abjection (Link 2003, 105-7) as epitomized by the “the coroner’s dissecting table” (106) is unfounded since in case of neither of the two characters can we talk of an abject experience, and not even are their reactions the same, or even similar otherwise: they are rather exclusive opposites of each other.

Nevertheless, it is also worth taking a look at the grounds on which Link’s (2003) study claims that this alleged, and unfounded, common feature of an abject reaction to the dead body of a woman undergoing autopsy is applicable in a general sense to the behavior of these two men and extendable to their work in general. He mostly bases this on the following claim: “Wren’s autopsy, as Dyer explains it, is actually quite similar to the erection of Dyer’s churches because it seeks to erect an edifice of knowledge upon ‘a solid groundwork […] but the ground is filled with Corses’ (94)” (106). The first problem with this statement is that it is ambiguous: it is not clear whether it is Dyer’s explanation of Wren’s autopsy that is similar to Dyer’s way of building churches (in Link’s opinion), or alternatively, it is Dyer who explains that his way of building churches is similar to Wren’s autopsy. In other words, it is not clear, whether the idea of the similarity of the two practices is supposed to come from Dyer or Link himself. Considering that Dyer does not deal with this issue on the page referenced by Link, and elsewhere he always severely criticizes the alleged naďvety and mistakenness of Wren’s rationalist approach, one can safely suppose that though the formulation might be unfortunate, the idea of the parallelism is Link’s, and not Dyer’s. Furthermore, the quotation itself, reproduced by Link without its original context, is also misleading. It appears in Link’s sentence as if it referred to Dyer’s credo of building churches, but this is not the case. Dyer’s original statement goes as follows:

And so when the Cartesians and the New Philosophers speak of their Experiments, saying that they are serviceable to the Quiet and Peace of Man’s life, it is a great Lie: there has been no Quiet and there will be no Peace. The streets they walk in are ones in which Children die daily or are hang’d for stealing Sixpence; they wish to lay a solid Groundwork (or so they call it) for their vast Pile of Experiments, but the Ground is filled with Corses, rotten and rotting others. (94)

As it is visible, Dyer’s claim about the futile attempts of trying to build a solid groundwork on rotten corpses is in no way made as a remark describing Dyer’s policies, much less his actual practice as an architect. Quite the contrary, he attributes this to the “Cartesians and the New Philosophers” (94), like Wren, and only to them. Thus while Link’s identification of this statement with the autopsy carried out by Sir Christopher, and his projects in general is sound, Dyer would most certainly not welcome an allegation of doing the same. Rightly so, as although it is true that he is building his churches on graves and dead bodies, but not in the way that he considers ignorant and agnostic, but intentionally and calculating with the effects it may bring. Rather than expecting objects built upon rotten grounds to nevertheless turn out safe and healthy, to have a “solid Groundwork” (94), he claims that he has “built near a Pitte and there are so vast a Number of Corses that the Pews will allwaies be Rotten and Damp” (7). In fact, Dyer is not calculating with any solidity whatsoever: rather than talking of stones, he identifies “the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes” (5), and claims that the “dead, only being buryed and laid in the Earth […] are [his] Pillars and [his] Foundation” (23-4).  Thus, there is no real reason to make make the equation between Dyer’s and Wren’s policies as Link (2003, 106) does.

Yet, however full of slips, misleading formulations, and quotes taken out of context Link’s argument has been up to this point, the most striking case is yet to come. Having made his otherwise dubious claims, he reaches the following point:

What we have, then, is a battle between two positions, each laying claim to Logos, which at the same time conspire to elide the abject as it is manifest in the feminine and/or feminised body. In order to help us understand, Dyer asks his reader to consider the autopsy in relation to his visit to a prostitute for flogging (95). It is here that the prostitute, a stand-in for Wren in her declaration that “‘things like Shame are meer Bugbears for Children’” (151), facilitates Dyer’s abjection while claiming to hold it at a rational distance herself. (Link 2003, 106-7)

I have already pointed out above that the scene analyzed by Link does not support his interpretation that any of those two characters would try to elide the abject, nor is the scene about the female/feminised body as abject, but about a corpse. Whether or not they are both “laying claim to Logos” (106) is something that is discussed later in this book, and in any case, it is just an interjected remark in this statement. Much more interesting is Link’s statement that “Dyer asks his reader to consider the autopsy in relation to his visit to a prostitute for flogging” (106). The first hint that there might be something wrong with this claim is the fact that there are exactly 56 pages between page 95 (Dyer’s alleged visit that is linked to the autopsy) and page 151 (the time the prostitute utters the sentence Link refers to). Of course, as it has already been pointed out, the novel is built on alternating chapters, one of them always taking place in the 18th century, while the other one in the 20th. That is to say, one could try explaining those 56 pages by another chapter interrupting the flow of events. The problem with this that although chapter 6 indeed starts on page 109, it ends on 127, and thus only takes up 18 pages, so it still leaves 38 pages between those two things that Link cites. Thus, there are only three possible explanations remaining:

1. Dyer’s visit to the prostitute is explained in otherwise unprecedented detail and depth in the novel. This, however, is not the case not only because this would beyond doubt turn the book into S/M porn, but simply because there happen to be various things, completely unrelated to prostitutes, tackled in the meanwhile. To mention but a few: the autopsy itself (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 95-8), a visit to Bedlam (98-100), Dyer’s visit home (102-104), and so on.

2. The story is not narrated chronologically, but in analepses and prolepses, and Dyer’s narrative voice simply returns to the same event almost 40 pages later. This is obviously a much more credible-looking theory, yet this also fails. It is by all means true that Dyer’s narration operates with flashbacks and flash forwards, even more so since he regularly relates how he often loses touch with reality while delving on his chronicle of the past. Yet, this is not the case with the two references to flogging. The first reference is closely linked to the autopsy which Dyer narrates as one of those anecdotes of things that happened to him and Wren in the distant past, in order to reflect on his personality and his beliefs (95). The second one, however, although also narrated in the past, belongs to a much closer past, or almost present: one of those days when Dyer is writing his story (151).

3. Link (2003) misrepresents the situation or at least confuses or mixes up various events. This is exactly what is happening with those references. Although according to Link “Dyer asks his reader to consider the autopsy in relation to his visit to a prostitute for flogging” (106), he does not do that at all. Instead he relates “the story of the Gentleman Traveller” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 95), another unnamed, anecdotal character in the vein of the unnamed lady’s story about hogs. What is more, this unnamed gentleman was found “upon his Knees on his Bed, in the act of Scourging himself with the most unrelenting Severity, his Body streaming with Blood” (95). That is to say, not only is the flogging scene that Dyer mentions in connection with the autopsy about someone else than himself, but there is also no prostitute whatsoever involved in it.

Thus, Link’s (2003) claim that “Dyer asks his reader to consider the autopsy in relation to his visit to a prostitute for flogging” (106) is absolutely untenable. Dyer indeed compares Wren’s passion for autopsies to the bloody practices of a self-flagellator, yet there is no woman at all present in the scene he refers to, and thus there are no grounds for linking this episode to “the abject as it is manifest in the feminine and/or feminised body” (106). Nor, at the same time, is it true that “[i]t is here that the prostitute […] facilitates Dyer’s abjection while claiming to hold it at a rational distance herself” (106). That is a different, later flogging, and Dyer does not link it to Christopher Wren or his beliefs at all.

Besides the autopsy scene, however, there is another piece of evidence that Link (2003) lists in support of Dyer’s alleged abjectification of the female body, and that is his relationship with his mother. Yet, the argument that Dyer abjectifies his mother stands on particularly weak, if at all existent footing. The only part of the novel that shows Dyer’s mother in a situation that involves the abject is at the death of the architect’s parents during the plague. At this incident, Dyer mentions his mother’s progression from having “small knobs of flesh as broad as a little silver Peny” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 14) and “Swellings upon her Body” (14) to a state where she “stank mightily and was delirious in her sick Dress” (14). At this point, indeed, he stops referring to her as his mother, and calls her rather as an “Object of Loathing” (14), and refers to her as “it” and “the Thing” (14). Here, the mother’s body can really be called abject, without exaggeration. This, however, is a special and unique case: the dying and later on dead body of his mother. That is to say, one would need to find specific evidence about Dyer’s later identification of her mother with this state and or reasons to support a generic abjectification, to be able to claim something along the lines of what Link advocates.

A closer look at the novel, however, provides evidence for the exact opposite. Dyer has no other negative memories about his mother, nor sees her in a negative light. He mentions of his mother that she “was of honest Parents” (11) who was almost “about to leave this World […], having endur’d many painful Hours during [his] Birth” (11), but then “recover’d very soon, and raised [him] as a sprightly Infant who could turn as nimbly as a dry leaf in a whirle-wind” (12). True, being raised as a “sprightly Infant” (12) might not sound as an unequivocally positive thing, yet there are a few things worth noting here: Dyer finds it important to comment positively on her mother’s origins, stresses that she almost died because of him, and mentions only his mother in connection with raising him up, which could hint at strong emotional ties between the two of them. Likewise, he seems to have had a premonition of his mother’s death, since as a child “[w]here now in the Spittle-Fields [his] Church rises, there would [he] weep for no reason [he] could name” (12) in his mother’s lifetime. And, of course, the locations of the church and of the pit where she is later to be interred are the same. That their feelings are mutual is supported by the fact that Dyer’s mother calls for him on her deathbed (14), and the reason he does not go there is not due to his disgust or heartlessness, but because his “Father would not let [him] go to her” (14), in a quite striking contrast to his behavior towards his father: as Dyer himself puts it, “tho’ he called out to me, I would not go to him” (14). And most importantly, when Dyer joins the cult of Mirabilis, and is asked whom he would like to see, he answers that he wants to see “no one so much as [his] Mother before she Stank” (19). That is to say, it seems logical to suppose that the episode at his mother’s deathbed has not ruined the mother-son relation, nor has it abjectified her in general: that abject state is connected only with death and the mother’s carcass, not her memory or person. Even less if one recalls Dyer’s intention to build a “place of Memory” (16) at the site of his mother’s and father’s place of final rest.

Thus, it is quite visible that although Dyer’s mother and the dead woman undergoing autopsy are the two pillars of Link’s (2003) claim that Dyer’s relation to women and female bodies is essentially abject, both of these textual loci were found wanting as support of such a claim. Likewise, Link’s extension of this claim to Dyer’s building strategies and thus his relation to the city in general was shown to be based on an unwarranted bringing together and equation of two unrelated scenes. That is to say, having shown that Link’s proofs are spurious, his position could be considered as refuted.

Yet, it may be interesting to take a look at the most important 18th century women characters in the novel to see if any grounds could be found for his claims elsewhere. It is true that female characters do not abound in the novel, as is the case in many, but by no means all, other novels of Peter Ackroyd.{8} In fact, the author himself acknowledges that he is not particularly strong at creating full and believable women in his books: “in my fiction, when I create books, I find it very difficult to create symphatic or real, old female characters” (Onega 1996, 216). Yet, there are at least three that play a significant enough role to warrant some attention. These three are Dyer’s aunt, his landlady and the “prostitute” he has a sexual encounter with. I take a brief look at these three below.

Although Dyer does not have too many positive things to say about his Aunt, there is no need to think of the label “abject” in connection with her. She is mostly described in light of her stupidity: “Her Head was just like a squirrel’s Cage, and her Mind was the Squirrel that whirled it round” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 50); and absolute and utter inability to decide anything: “she was a perfect bundle of Contradictions and would no sooner hit upon a Course than tack herself round and choose another” (50). Yet, her appraisal is not even completely negative: he finds it important to mention that “she carried fair weather in her Countenance” (50) and that in fact, had it not been for her “enquiries about me in the neighbourhood of Spittle-Fields” (49-50) and her decision to take him “into her House in Coleman-Street” (49) he would have remained “the very Figure of a Beggar boy, despicable and miserable to the last degree” (49).

Mrs. Best, the housekeeper is also definitely portrayed in a less than alluring light, and is thus described as a “clownish woman, a Relict daubed thicker with Paint than her Sceleton is with Flesh so that she appears very much like a Mossoleum” (46), a “dry leaf in a wind” (46), or at one point even a “damn’d confounded pocky Whore” (128). No doubt, her attempts through “Sisars and Toothpicks, Tweezers, Essences, Pomatum, Paints, Paists and Washes” (46) are useless to fight against her looks, as it rather achieves the opposite effect, and makes her look even worse and more ridiculous. In Dyer’s biting words, “she has so many Patches upon her Face that she may soon be Pressed to Death like the inhabitants of Newgate” (46). Nor is she particularly talented or educated, since although she tries to write poetry, the results are rather weak. As Dyer sarcastically answers her “poetry” in his thought: “Twas not the Muse but her strong beer that stung / Her mouth being stopt, the Words came through the Bung” (47). And that reference to beer is not a coincidence either, as it is explicitly mentioned at another point that Dyer “smelt the Liquor upon her Breath” (128). But with all her bad health, weakness, age, ridiculous looks and alcoholism, she is by no means abject. As Kristeva ([1980] 1982) explains, “It is […] not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” (5). And although her health is frail, she can in no way be imagined to disturb order or identity. Likewise, abjection is a “composite of judgment and affect, of condemnation and yearning” (10), and in connection with Dyer’s relation to Mrs. Best, one can only talk about judgment and condemnation, but no yearning whatsoever. What is more, their relationship is not all that negative, either. He readily acknowledges that “in the wide World who was there to trust besides” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 128) her.

The person that Link (2003) unequivocally identifies as a female prostitute (106) may turn out to be somewhat more complex a character than that. The appearance of the person in question is introduced as follows: “I knew not what Time it was when a Mask came to my Table and brightened upon me at a strange Rate: Captain, says she, my dearest Captain, will you take a Turn with me? And then she fluttered me in the Face with her Fan and languish’d upon me, taking my own Glass to her Lips” (151). It is quite interesting to see the word “Mask”, and even more so once someone takes into consideration that this all takes place at no other location but in “Drury Lane, where [Dyer] took [him]self next into an Ale-house” (151). Granted, the place was known in the 18th century to be “under particular districts or ladyships, after the manner of lordships in other parts, over which matrons of known abilities preside, and have, for the support of their age and infirmities, certain taxes paid out of the rewards for the amorous labours of the young” (Steele [1709] 1899, 373), and thus associating the place with a prostitute is logical. Yet, Drury Lane is not only known for its brothels. Besides being the place of the Theatre Royal, as Judith Milhous (2003) explains, a “typical evening at Drury Lane or Covent Garden consisted of various kinds of entertainment, often including several dances” (481). Most importantly, however, bals masqués, or masquerades were organized in the area (Castle 1995, 92), which is in accordance with Dyer’s claim that a “Mask” came to his table. As Terry Castle explains, the public masquerade “drew on all social ranks equally, and permitted high and low to mingle in a single ‘promiscuous’ round” (85). That is to say, while the closeness of the locality and the generally permissive and anonymous nature of the environment indeed attracted prostitutes (92), it was not only them who participated, but ordinary women as well, who enjoyed a much more significant amount of freedom than otherwise:

[T]he masquerade indeed provided eighteenth-century women with an unusual sense of erotic freedom. Disguise obviated a host of cultural proscriptions and taboos. A woman in masquerade might approach strangers, initiate conversation, touch and embrace those whom she did not know, speak coarsely—in short, violate all the cherished imperatives of ordinary feminine sexual decorum. (93)

And this is exactly what the woman does at Dyer’s table, even mistaking him for another participant of the masquerade: “Captain, says she, my dearest Captain, will you take a Turn with me?” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 151). At least to me, the most logical explanation for addressing him as a “captain” is this: Dyer was wearing unusual clothes, thus it was logical to suppose that he is participating in the entertainment, and they reminded her of the outfit of a captain. The point here, however, is that the kind of behavior that the reader sees from her at Dyer’s table is something that not only prostitutes would have shown at a masquerade, but ordinary women, too, since they could keep their identity in secret.

Nor the fact that they went from the table to a nearby inn, and their meeting ended in a sado-masochistic encounter. It was talked all over town in the 18th century that “those who ‘dressed up’ for the masquerade would undoubtedly bare themselves later – when they retired to brothels or bagnios to consummate their secret liaisons” (Castle 1995, 89). And while the hearsay might be somewhat exaggerated in claiming that this would “undoubtedly” happen, nevertheless, the “occasion was indisputably a catalyst for certain kinds of behavior, and functioned throughout the century […] as an acknowledged public setting in which illicit sexual contacts might be made” (91). What is more, even the fact that she “took [him] with her to the Dog Tavern where she kept her Room” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 151) fits into this interpretation, as it was pointed out, those men and women who were trying to get some sexual freedom through the institution of the masquerade used the services even of brothels, not only taverns or inns.

Of course, one could argue against this suggestion with Dyer’s repeated reference to her using a word that is quite frequently used in the meaning of “prostitute”: he calls her a “Harlot” (151, 169, 173). Yet, even this is questionable to some extent. The word, after all, could also mean simply a promiscuous woman, primarily if one takes into consideration that the general consensus of the age was that “any woman who attended a masquerade did so, like the harlot, in order to seek unlawful sexual pleasure” (Castle 1995, 92). In other words, an oversimplifying equation between a woman participant and a prostitute. That Dyer might simply follow this way of thinking is only further supported by the fact that when he accidentally meets her later, it is yet again at a masquerade, the woman “walking up close to [him] and talking to some black Devil in a Mask” (173).

Whether or not she is a prostitute is only of secondary importance, however, since in any case, there is no real reason to suppose that he has an abject experience with her. Other than calling her a harlot, Dyer does not use any words that would make one think of disgust and repulsion. The furthest he goes is to say that “[w]ith her Cloaths off, she smelt as dizzily as an old Goat” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 151), but this is too little to claim that she was abject. Even more so since Dyer even decides to mention her relative cleanliness: he finds it important to recall that the woman asked him to wait “while [she] clean[s] [her]self” (151) and then “washed her Bubbies and sweetened her Arm-pits” (151).

And finally, putting this scene into any connection with Dyer’s relation to the female body is dubious as such, considering that her body did not really take part in his sexual experience, if it was of a sexual nature at all. Dyer asked her before they left his table at the pub if she had “any Rods” (151) and then “turned [his] Face to the Wall and did not so much as move a Finger as she went to work on [him]” (151). Dyer is lying or kneeling with his back to the woman, while she is beating him up a tergo. Whether this is a proper case of masochism, or rather just asking for punishment for the murders he committed is a question in itself. But that the female body as such has no role in it, is clear. Therefore, one has to conclude that the last significant woman character in the novel that has remained could also not be used to argue for Dyer’s abject relation to women and the feminine body.

That is to say, I find it completely unwarranted to speak of Dyer’s (and Wren’s) common project to “elide the abject as it is manifest in the feminine and/or feminised body” (Link 2003, 106) and in turn to talk of their shared “architectural projects” that “are therefore expressly masculinist responses to an abject city space characteristically conflated with the feminine, and especially maternal, body as excess” (109). Having thus shown that Alex Link’s position is unfounded in textual evidence, and it also twists the theory it builds on, in the remaining part of this chapter I focus on a possible alternative way to conceive of the urban space of the city.

3.4. The Cartographic Fictional Space of Hawksmoor

Just as I did in case of the New York City of E. E. Cummings’ poetry, here I provide a list of the actual London locations that are mentioned in the book, and then compile a map that represents them. The general use of such a venture and the theoretical presuppositions it is based on has already been described in detail, so it is not repeated here again. However, in case of Hawksmoor, it serves yet another purpose, namely to verify the statement by Iain Sinclair (1994) that “Ackroyd doesn’t burden his narrative with the tedium of a convincing topography” (21). True, he made this remark in connection with Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, but it may be of use to test it on other novels of the author, as well.

A comprehensive list of locations in the novel is much longer and specific even at first sight than in the case of the poetry of E. E. Cummings. I listed all those places that survived to the present day under the same name, and also those whose equivalents or close equivalents I could find or at least I was able to locate their whereabouts with some certainty. These places go, in no particular order, as follows: Scotland Yard (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 9, 10, 88, 169, 214), New Scotland Yard (109), Whitehall (10, 48, 57, 88, 96, 104, 130, 167, 203), Leadenhall Street (11, 51, 84, 208), Fenchurch Street (19, 208, 215), Billiter Lane (11), Gracechurch Street (11, 134, 151, 165, 215), Lime Street (11, 208, 215), Moorfields (10, 11, 14, 49, 90, 208, 214, 216), Brick Lane (11, 13, 28, 31, 41, 117, 196), Mermaid Alley (13, 31), Corbets Court (15), Redcross Street (18), Commercial Road (26, 28, 38, 39, 77, 79, 82, 85, 116, 191, 196), Chancery Lane (44), Bear Lane{9} (46), Queen Street (47, 185), Thames Street (47), Coleman Street (50, 51), Bread Street (51), Bishopsgate (51, 208, 215), Crutched Friars (51, 88), Ave Maria Lane (51, 84), Ludgate Hill (51, 58), Fleet Street (44, 48, 58), Paternoster Row (56), Cornhill (57, 58, 84), the Standard (57), Cheapside (47, 58, 84, 134, 152, 157, 165, 172, 173), St Paul’s Church Yard (58, 149), the Strand (48, 58, 130, 167), Haymarket (58, 91), Piccadilly (58), Knightsbridge (58), Kensington Road (58), Hammersmith (58), Turnham Green (58), Ropemaker’s Fields (63, 66, 69, 85), Narrow Street (69), Whitechapel High Street (79, 117), Swedenborg Court{10} (79, 116), Wapping Wall (81), Shoulder of Mutton Alley (81, 115), Artillery Lane (82), London Wall (83, 208, 215, 216), Poultry (84, 152, 155, 172), Spitalfields Market (13), Leicester Square{11} (46, 103, 208), Riverside (66, 68), Isle of Dogs (65, 77), Monmouth Street{12} (11, 15, 36, 38, 196), Black Eagle Street{13} (11, 14, 15, 48) and Eagle Street{14} (31, 32, 37, 38, 41, 42, 124, 196), Mermaid Alley (13, 31), Tabernacle Alley{15} (13, 31), Balls Alley{16} (13, 31), Angel Passage{17} (13), Browns Lane (15), Phoenix Street (47), Hogg Lane (47, 206, 208), Charing Cross (48, 89), Mews Yard (89), Dirty Lane (89), Castle Street (89){18}, Golden Square (89), James Street{19} (89), Seven Dials (90, 118, 130), Rope Walk{20} (92, 114), Wapping Lane{21} (93, 115, 125), Clothier Street{22} (93, 114), St Bride’s Church (93), Ratcliffe Highway (93, 94, 110, 116), Betts Street (93), Southwark Reach (96), Butcher Row (115), Grape Street (118, 122, 123, 168, 190, 199, 202, 211, 214), St Giles High  Street (47, 120, 130, 131), Lombard Street (132, 133, 150, 151, 153, 156, 159, 165, 170, 171, 214), Clement’s Lane (135), Crane Court (137, 142), Bridge Street (148), Drury Lane (149, 151), Catherine Street (149, 167), Great Eastcheap{23} (151), Cripplegate{24} (88, 151), High Holborn (152), Holborn Viaduct (152), Newgate Street (152), Angel Street (152), St Martin’s Le Grand (152), King William Street (153, 154, 160, 161), Pope’s Head Alley (162, 172), Long Acre (167), New Inn Passage (173), Russell Court (173), Queen Square (182), St Michael’s Alley{25} (183), Russell Street (185, 189), Little Russell Street (189), New Oxford Street (189), Cranbourn Street (208), St Mary Axe (208, 215), Wormwood Street (215), St Katherine’s by the Tower (12, 29), St Bride’s Church (93), Westminster Hall (48), St Paul’s Cathedral (22, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 84, 134, 214), Montagu House (182), Bedlam{26} (98, 99, 146, 208), Westminster Abbey (22, 88). This list is extended by the seven churches: Christ Church, Spitalfields; St Anne, Limehouse; St. George-in-the East; St Mary Woolnoth; St George, Bloomsbury; St Alfege, Greenwich; and the completely fictional Little St Hugh in Black Step Lane. These are continuously referred to throughout the book, thus I omit listing the exact pages where they appear. A special situation is presented by the various 18th century pubs, inns and taverns that appear in the book. Since they have not survived to the present, and their locations are mostly already represented by the streets and squares they are located at, they are not taken into further consideration for the purposes of this study’s analysis of the novel’s cartographic fictional space.

Figure 6: A map of the cartographic fictional space of Hawksmoor

Figure 6 shows a reconstruction of the novel’s cartographic fictional space, based on the locations listed above. The Thames River is shown in light gray, black lines are the various streets, dark gray areas are squares, parks and other similar bigger areas, including the Isle of Dogs. In addition to these, the six red dots and the remaining blue one represent the book’s seven churches: the red ones are those that also exist outside the novel’s fictional universe, and the one completely fictional is drawn in blue. The somewhat bigger green squares stand for other locations that the text refers to: churches by other architects, the various homes of Nicholas Dyer, Bedlam, and so on. Because of the size and complexity of the sketch, the names of the elements are not provided, since this would lead to an overcrowded look needlessly complicating analysis. With the help of the list of places above, and a detailed map of London, one could easily identify the individual locations shown.

One should note here, however, that not only is the seventh church purely fictional, but so is the street where it is supposed to be located: Black Step Lane. As Luc Herman (1990) explains, “Little St Hugh is allegedly located in Black Step Lane, a side-street of Long Alley. These two London streets have been invented by Ackroyd. The last and identical walks of Dyer and inspector Hawksmoor can be nicely followed on the map, but once the men leave a street called Moorfields, the reader who tries to retrace their steps is suddenly lost” (119). While it is not clear whether Herman is talking of a contemporary map or an 18th century one, and the streets’ absence from contemporary maps would not be sufficient reason to give up searching for them, his conclusion is nevertheless at least partially correct: Black Step Lane is purely fictional. Long Alley, however, although disappeared since the 18th century once existed, even in two copies. Henry A. Harben’s A Dictionary of London (1918) identifies Long Alley to have been “Near Fleet Ditch, at Blackfriars” and claims that it was “[n]ot named in the maps.” F. H. W. Sheppard’s (1970) Survey of London further explains that “[i]n c. 1738 the narrow passage called Long Alley leading south to the Strand where Agar Street now runs, was rebuilt” (263-265) and although it was “intended that the name of the passage should be changed from Long Alley to New Exchange Row […] that name does not seem to have been used and it is marked as Castle Court on later maps, until its replacement by Agar Street in 1830” (263-265). This street, however, cannot be the one Dyer and Hawksmoor follow, as it is too far from Moorfields. Sir James Bird’s (1922) Survey of London, however, talks of another Long Alley, in his description of Moorfields: “The eastern portion of this district, lying between the two streams, and divided down its centre by Long Alley” (88-90). Thus, although I could not find the exact location of the street, I have to conclude that not only did it exist, contrary to Luc Herman’s (1990), claim, but it was even located where the novel claims it to have been. Not so with Black Step Lane, since it is not listed in either Harben (1918), Bird (1922), Sheppard (1970), Baker (1998) or Lysons (1795).

This is not so surprising, however, considering that Peter Ackroyd admittedly likes playing with inventing purely fictional details, and selling them for historical fact. In fact, he does that not only in his novels, but also to some extent in his biographies. As he explained to Attila Vékony (1997), the reason for “mixing fact and fiction” is that “[i]t’s more fun” (244), and therefore, in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, for example, he refers to “exact manuscript codes according to which these texts can be found in the British Library” (244), yet these very codes are “all made up” (244). Likewise, in connection with his biography of T. S. Eliot, he mentions a similar example to Patrick McGrath (1989). In his book, there is a mention of Eliot turning up at a party with his face painted green, which information in turn is attributed to the diaries of Virginia Woolf. Yet, in the interview he claims: “I probably made that up too” (46), since “there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make things up like that” (46).

Nevertheless, the church of Little St Hugh is a part of Figure 2. The reason is that although the exact place of it cannot be established, as it is a fictional church in a fictional street, yet, based on the information available about the route there and the streets nearby, it is possible to show an approximate location. A similar approach was used with Nicholas Dyer’s and Thomas Hill’s home in Black Eagle Street, and the street itself. Although this street is not fictional, it disappeared because of the expansion of a nearby brewery (see above). Again, I show them at the most likely locations.

Looking at Figure 6 it is apparent that just as the cartographic fictional space of E. E. Cummings’ New York, that of Hawksmoor’s London is limited, and does not cover the whole of the city. It is by no means as limited as that one, though, as many more parts of the city are included, and it in fact extends to most of the city center. A localized representation is, of course, logical, since a smaller area can allow for a more detailed portrayal. Likewise, since the novel is partially based on historical figures, even if in a heavily fictionalized and modified manner, this fact may also limit the fictional space to those places that are connected to their lives. As Peter Ackroyd himself explains:

I need to have a place, a definite place: Clerkenwell in Dr. Dee, Limehouse in Dan Leno; I always try to focus on a specific locality as much as possible. I don’t know why that is, I just have a predilection for that, rather than seeking to see the city as a whole; Dickens sees the city as a whole, doesn’t he? (Wolfreys 1999, 99)

What is apparent though is that except for one of the churches and three streets, which are but briefly mentioned, the novel’s portrayal almost completely ignores the part of the city that lies on the Southern bank of the Thames. Primarily since the river itself appears repeatedly throughout the story.

Yet, even if Hawksmoor’s London is limited to certain areas, just like Cummings’ New York, it nevertheless certainly differs in terms of detail. There are dozens of individually named streets, most of them recurring throughout the novel, and while many of them are well-known, important throughways, crossroads or sites of interest, there are just as many small and obscure lanes and alleys, some of which have already disappeared. What is more, exact paths taken during walks or coach/car-rides are routinely described with minute attention to providing the names of the streets and buildings passed on the way. Just one example of the many that could be mentioned:

I had no sooner walked into Whitehall than I hollad for a Coach; it was of the Antique kind with Tin Sashes not Glass, pinked like the bottom of a Cullender that the Air might pass through the Holes: I placed my Eyes against them to see the Town as I passed within it and it was then broken into Peeces, with a Dog howling here and a Child running there. […]

The Crush of the Carriages was so great when we were got up into Fenchurch-Street that I was forc’d to step out at Billiter Lane and mobb it on foot along Leaden-Hall-Street; at last I managed to shoot myself thro’ a Vacancy between two Coaches and cross’d the Street that went up into Grace-Church-Street. I walk’d into Lime Street, for I knew my path now and passed thro' many ways and turnings until I was got into Moor-Fields; then just past the Apothecary whose sign is the Ram I found the narrow lane, as dark as a Burying vault, which stank of stale sprats, Piss and Sir-Reverence. And there was the Door with the Mark upon it, and I knocked softly. (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 10-11)

Not only does the reader get a precise enough description to be able to “retrace their steps” on a map (Herman 1990, 119), but one is also provided with a detailed description of the look, feel and even smell of these locations.

Thus, one could safely conclude that Iain Sinclair’s comment about Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem could in no way be applied to this novel. The more than two pages long list of individual locations mentioned, the rather complex and detailed map of the book’s cartographic fictional space, as well as its abounding descriptions of retraceable paths and vividly described locations basically prove that in connection with Hawksmoor one has no reason to talk of not “burden[ing] [the] narrative with the tedium of a convincing topography” (1994, 21). Even if slightly limited, as pointed out above, the topography is definitely detailed and precise enough to be convincing.

At the same time, this charge recalls a similar and slightly related claim made by Alex Murray (2007). In his opinion, Ackroyd’s novels, including Hawksmoor, create “a ‘blue plaque London’: a range of sites that enable the recollection of a potentially safe and secure version of the past” (5). In terms of the present novel, one could easily agree to the site-bound presentation of the town, if for no other reason, then at the very least for the centrality of the seven churches in this project. Yet, to what extent the sites with which the novel deals turn it into a “blue plaque London” is another question. The churches themselves by all means qualify: one would have difficulties to find better examples of places that remind one of the “site-specific historical culture that developed in postwar heritage culture” (5) and tourist guidebooks. And even if in a more dire tone, so do the places of (in)famous murders and murderers listed by Dyer (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 92-94) and Hawksmoor (115-116). Not necessarily so, however, in the case of places like the pub called Black Mary’s Hole:

This was such a Place that the Walls were adorned with many unsavoury Finger-dabs, and marks sketched by unskilful Hands with candle-flame and charcole. The Floor was broken like an old Stable, the Windows were mended with Brown- paper and the Corners were full of Dust and Cobwebs. Over the Mantle on a little Shelf were half a dozen long bottles of Rosa Sous with an Advertisement for the speedy Cure of a violent Gonorrhea.

There was a handful of Fire in a rusty Grate and a large earthern Chamber Pot in the chimney-corner: the Mixture of Scents that met us when we first entred were those of Tobacco, Piss, dirty Shirts and uncleanly Carcasses, but Hayes was so drunken that he did not so much as regard it. (149)

Nor would the charge of a blue-plaque London apply to the house where Dyer was born: “a wooden house which was tottering to the last degree and would have been pull’d down but for the vast Quantity of wooden dwellings on either side” (11), with its “narrow mean Chamber” (11). Or one could just as well mention the various later dwellings of the architect, or even the flat of inspector Hawksmoor. That is to say, while blue-plaque places may indeed play the role of locations of central importance, other layers are also certainly there.

This, however, brings up the question of the churches and their location to each other. This is an issue that is discussed in detail even in the novel itself, so covering it here is especially warranted. The inspector gets a letter in his mail, in connection to the murders:

When he looked at the desk again, another letter caught his attention. The phrase DON’T FORGET was printed across its top, suggesting that the lined paper had been torn from a standard memorandum pad. Four crosses had been drawn upon it, three of them in a triangular relation to each other and with the fourth slightly apart, so that the whole device resembled an arrow: […] The shape was familiar to Hawksmoor; and suddenly it occurred to him that, if each cross was the conventional sign for a church, then here in outline was the area of the murders  - Spitalfields at the apex of the triangle, St George's-in-the-East and St Anne's at the ends of the base line, and St Mary Woolnoth to the west. (166)

The drawing in the letter, as it appears in the novel, is reprinted below as Figure 7. But the letter that Hawksmoor receives does not end the discussion of the churches’ positioning relative to each other. This is a topic that Dyer himself also discusses, and, in fact, he provides the reader with even more information about this:

And thus will I compleet the Figure: Spittle-Fields, Wapping and Lime-house have made the Triangle; Bloomsbury and St Mary Woolnoth have next created the major Pentacle-starre; and, with Greenwich, all these will form the Sextuple abode of Baal-Berith or the Lord of the Covenant. Then, with the church of Little St Hugh, the Septilateral Figure will rise about Black Step Lane and, in this Pattern, every Straight line is enrich’d with a point at Infinity and every Plane with a line at Infinity. Let him that has Understanding count the Number: the seven Churches are built in conjunction with the seven Planets in the lower Orbs of Heaven, the seven Circles of the Heavens, the seven Starres in Ursa Minor and the seven Starres in the Pleiades. Little St Hugh was flung in the Pitte with the seven Marks upon his Hands, Feet, Sides and Breast which thus exhibit the seven Demons -Beydelus, Metucgayn, Adulec, Demeymes, Gadix, Uquizuz and Sol. (186)

Figure 7: The diagram Hawksmoor receives in the novel

Figure 8: The location of the seven churches

Ignoring the symbolism for the time being, with the use of the map above (or any other map), one could check whether the mentioned figures can really be drawn the way Dyer and Hawksmoor’s letter claims it. Once one removes everything but the churches from Figure 5 what remains is what one sees on Figure 8. And connecting the first four of Hawksmoor’s projects indeed gives a triangular diagram similar to what Hawksmoor got in his letter (Figure 9), even if one has to acknowledge that it points in a slightly different direction, and the sides of the triangle also have a somewhat different ratio. This, however, can be due to a different projection used by those maps that gave the basis of the two diagrams. Thus, although Hawksmoor’s assistant, Walter, alleges that “[t]he crosses may not be churches” (166), one can safely conclude that Haksmoor’s categorical statement that “they must be churches” (167) is warranted. Luc Herman (1990) mentions about this triangle that “the drawing resembles a so-called mason mark, a sign that was originally placed by the masons on their buildings and which was taken up in freemasonry to symbolize the separate members of the lodge” (122). And indeed, apparently a similar mark was found, for example, at Canterbury Cathedral or Carlisle Abbey or even in France (Brindal 1992).

The situation gets more complicated once one tries to follow Dyer’s description and extend the drawing to a pentacle star, then to a sextuple and a septilateral figure. Luc Herman (1990) made some interesting claims about this. He warns that “[w]hen the locations of the seven churches are connected, the result is an irregular pentagon” (119), contrary to Dyer’s statement about a “Septilateral Figure” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 186) or even a “Sextuple abode” (186) for that matter. He further reminds one that this fact was even noted “by an ironized character in Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London” (119). Herman even provides a drawing to prove his point, an illustration reproduced here as Figure 10. There is, of course, no need to duplicate his drawing by testing his locations on Figure 8, as even a quick glance above, at the location of the seven churches, suffices to convince one of the preciseness and validity of his statement: if one connects the seven churches in this manner, it indeed results in an irregular pentagon. Herman goes on, however, to claim that even though the star, as well as the sextuple and the septilateral figure are not to be found, there distinctly is “a figure based on five (rather than six) angular points” (Herman 1990, 120), and that this might also be a distinct link to freemasonry. As he puts it:

On the wall of a lodge, one often finds a regular pentagon, with in it a G, which stands for the Grand Geometer, God himself. This pentagon – and here the link between the quotation from The Great Fire of London and Hawksmoor becomes clear – is also the centre of the five-pointed star (variously called “pentalpha”, “pentacle”, “pentagram” or “pentangle”), an important symbol in freemasonry, which can also be found on the cover of Hawksmoor. (121-122)

Figure 9: A reconstruction of the arrow

Figure 10: Luc Herman’s (1990) diagram showing the pentagon

One could not help feeling this argument a bit far-fetched, since in other words, what he says, in an oversimplified form, is basically the following: the freemasons use a regular pentagon as their symbol, and Dyer here created an irregular one, so he is probably a mason. Not that there are not enough good reasons for thinking of Nicholas Dyer as a freemason, but this irregular pentagon is somewhat too far-fetched to be taken for a proof of that.

Figure 11: The pentagram or “Pentacle-starre”

Nor does one necessarily have to agree with him in his solution for connecting the seven churches, and claiming that Dyer made a “geometrical mistake” (121) in not being “conscious of” (121-2) the fact that his churches will only provide him with a pentagon, not a hexagon or a heptagon. Granted, it is possible to connect the churches in the way Luc Herman did it, but that in no way proves that there are no other ways of drawing a figure using the five, six or seven churches, just as Dyer claims in the novel. Even more so if one considers that although Herman excludes the possibility of a pentacle star, Iain Sinclair claims, similarly to Nicholas Dyer in the book, that it is possible. In his opinion, “Hawksmoor [the historical architect] arranged Christ Church, St. George’s in-the-East, and St. Anne’s, Limehouse, to form a power-concentrating triangle” (Onega [1999] 2005, 44) and then “St George’s, Bloomsbury, and St. Alfege’s, Greenwich, make up the major pentacle star” (Sinclair 1975, 5). While it is not possible to indeed draw one along the guidelines of Sinclair using only the six churches that appear in the novel (Sinclair talks of eight churches and some obelisks), it is important to notice that the novel slightly modified Sinclair’s claim and Dyer in the novel says: “Spittle-Fields, Wapping and Lime-house have made the Triangle; Bloomsbury and St Mary Woolnoth have next created the major Pentacle-starre” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 186). And with these five churches in question, it is indeed possible to draw a five-pointed star, although not a completely regular one (Figure 11). Again, however, it is worth noting that maybe if the map was using a different projection, the distortion would be smaller or at least different, not to mention that 18th century maps in general were rather heavily distorted in general, and the location of the churches was set up by an 18th century architect.

Figure 12: Four possible hexagons using the six existing churches

Likewise, there is no reason to say that Dyer is wrong in claiming that “with Greenwich, all these will form the Sextuple abode of Baal-Berith or the Lord of the Covenant” (186). He does in no way mention a hexagram, much less a regular one: he only talks of a figure with six points, and there are several possibilities for such arrangements. I provide some in Figure 12. And, of course, the same is the case with Dyer’s final claims that “with the church of Little St Hugh, the Septilateral Figure will rise about Black Step Lane” (186): Figure 13, as a possible example, shows that it is indeed possible to connect the churches in a way that it ends up having seven sides.

And at this point yet another issue arises: the precise interpretation of Dyer’s claims. While it is, of course, possible and logical to take Dyer’s words about a “Septilateral Figure” (186) and a “Sextuple abode” (186) meaning a geometrical shape with seven and six sides respectively, he may have just as well used these expressions in a more general sense, simply referring to a combination of seven (and in the other case six) points. Even more so, once one realizes that Dyer mentions that the shape created by the location of the churches is supposed to correspond with “the seven Starres in the Pleiades” (186). That is to say, contrary to Herman’s (1990) claim, Dyer has not made any “geometrical mistake” (121), but placed the churches in an imitation of the Pleiades, as noted by Susana Onega (2002), as well: “with the seven churches he is building in London and Westminster a replica of the pattern cast by the seven fixed stars in the Pleiades” (164).

Figure 13: A possible heptagon using the seven churches of Nicholas Dyer

3.5. Sacred Heterotopias: An Alternative Reading of the Urban Sphere of Hawksmoor

It has been pointed out above that Alex Link’s (2003, 2004) understanding of the novel’s urban sphere as a construct based on the repression of the abject female body is unfounded. The present chapter proposes a different understanding of the city’s spaces: one that is based on Mircea Eliade’s dichotomy of sacred and profane space, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, as well as those previous interpretations of the novel that discuss it in terms of the occult and/or magic.

Peter Ackroyd denies having been either influenced by, or even too much aware of the theories of Mircea Eliade: “I’ve heard of him, but neither have I read his works nor have I been really influenced by him” (Vékony 1997, 245). Yet, there are nevertheless good reasons to postulate a strong connection, or at least parallelism, between Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Eliade’s theoretical writings. As Adriana Neagu (2006) explains, in his novels, “the space of the urban is written in the vocabulary of hagiography” (232), that is to say, in his “dramatisation of sacred and profane mysteries, sacramental rites, apocryphal traditions, the cabbalistic and the esoteric, Ackroyd subscribes to a numinous order of sacred space and time” (225). Thus, in Neagu’s opinion,

claims to universality accompanying Ackroyd’s London-centrism are more relevantly analysed within the framework of ideality of his homo religiousus make-up. The category, as expounded by […] Mircea Eliade, designates the individual as permeable to the manifestation of the sacred in human experience. Through constant recapitulation of rite and myth, the religious individual chooses to remain in the sacred, permanently renewing his connection to the primordial time. Ackroyd’s re-enactments of scenes, forms, voices and vocabularies of old, his painstaking attempt at the consecration of space are just that, efforts at revalorisation of the symbolical order. The religious then pervades Ackroyd’s texts in multiple ways, whether in the form of liturgical representation or in that of repetition, ritual, and imitation. (225-6)

In other words, the category of the sacred, as understood by Eliade, not only determines Ackroyd’s representation of the city and its spatial sphere, but also its structure. For the purposes of this study, however, the analysis of parallels will be limited to the area of urban space.

Rather than just contrasting the opinions of Peter Ackroyd and Adriana Neagu on the relation of the spatial realm of the London novels, I provide textual evidence below for the commonality. As the architect Dyer explains in Hawksmoor, while sitting in a coach riding through the city, “[he] placed [his] Eyes against them to see the Town as [he] passed within it and it was then broken into Peeces” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 10). In other words, he sees a fragmented, non-homogeneous urban space. This is in perfect harmony with Eliade’s central tenet about spatial experience: “For the religious man, space is not homogeneous: it shows ruptures and fractures”{27} (Eliade [1957] 1965, 25; my translation). And although at that already mentioned instant Dyer actually utters something like this, that is by no means the only place when one could encounter space falling apart. While Hawksmoor was walking, “the street lamps flickered alight, and the shape of the church itself altered in their sudden illumination” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 196). Likewise, one of Dyer’s seven churches is noted to have at first “changed its shape as [Thomas] came closer to it” (28) and then even “ceased to be one large building and became a number of separate places – some warm, some cold or damp, and some in perpetual shadow” (28). Not to mention Dyer’s reference to the city as something fundamentally “out of all Shape” (48).

One could, of course, interject at this point that, as it has been already discussed above, in Mircea Eliade’s model, space’s fragmentary nature is but one of the two basic components, and the alternating presence and absence of the sacred is just as important. As Eliade ([1957] 1965) himself explains, “this non-homogeneity of space is experienced as an opposition between sacred space, the only one that is real, the only one that really exists, and all the rest”{28} (25; my translation). This, however, is not in contradiction whatsoever with the city as it appears in Ackroyd’s work. After all, it is not only Neagu (2006) who talks of “sacred and profane mysteries, sacramental rites, apocryphal traditions, the cabbalistic and the esoteric” (225) or of a “numinous order of sacred space and time” (225). Natalie Taylor (2006) likewise sees these works as “novels [that] map out mystic spaces” (7), and claims that in Ackroyd’s writing one sees an instance of a “re-imagining of the human and the sacred” (126). Martina Vránová (2010) also emphasizes, in a similar way, that “[b]eing a Catholic [...], even though not a practicing one, enables Ackroyd to keep a sense of the sacred, a teleological orientation” (11). And perhaps the author’s most eminent commentator, Susana Onega ([1999] 2005) also imagines Hawksmoor in this light, as evidenced by her statement that the “vision of London as an intricate net of emblematic buildings accumulating through time the occult power of its millenarian inhabitants is the basic idea around which the plot of Hawksmoor develops” (44). And so does Peter Ackroyd himself:

My early experience of Catholicism as a child, namely, being an altar server and the fact that I learnt Latin, gave me a tremendous interest in ritual, ceremony, symbolism, drama and theatre. […] I ceased practising when I was about eighteen, but that, what you might call religious awareness, never leaves you. So, you are always confronted with spiritual realities rather than material realities. (Vékony 1997, 241)

In other words, looking for a sacred spatiality in line with Eliade’s understanding seems to fit quite well into the existing critical reception of Peter Ackroyd’s work, with the notable exception of Alex Link’s (2003, 2004) views.

Just as above, here one could, again, offer yet another critical remark about the seemingly too smooth and easy identification of the book’s dark, occult, mystical, and in some opinions even Satanist vision with the sacred. This, however, may not be such a problematic issue, as it seems at first sight. As Susana Onega ([1999] 2005) explains, “the fact that [Nicholas Dyer’s] act of recreation of the cosmogonic act has been achieved by evil means is immaterial, for according to occultism […] the true God is the totality of everything, containing all good and evil and reconciling all opposites” (54). And whether or not he was to share the critic’s opinion about Dyer’s alleged cosmogonic project, Peter Ackroyd certainly shares her view that there is a possible and even logical connection between the sacred and the occult: “[t]he sense of the sacred can be easily coerced into a sense of the occult and if you can’t use religion straight on as a plot, the occult is an excellent thing as it were because it has the same sense of sacredness” (Vékony 1997, 245). In fact, he goes even further to claim that “[t]he idea of the sacred just as the idea of worship and awe, power and terror, which is all the sacred implies, has nothing to do whatsoever with moral categories of good and bad. It faces them and transcends them” (245).

Nevertheless, nothing talks more for the use of Eliade’s ideas on space as a possible model for the understanding of London’s appearance in Hawksmoor, then the text itself. The most obvious clue of a sacred organization of space is the very fact that the text’s central spatial loci are churches. And it is this set of churches that organize both the flow of events and the city’s space. Yet, they are not only manifestations of a sacred order in the obvious sense, as Christian churches, but also as structures that incorporate another, hidden layer of the occult. As Nicholas Dyer explains in the novel, “in each of [his] Churches [he] put[s] a Signe so that he who sees the Fabrick may see also the Shaddowe of the Reality of which it is the Pattern or Figure” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 45), but in a way so that it is not apparent to anyone but the initiate, since otherwise, “the Mobb, being in Ignorance, will teare them down in their Feare” (24). Thus the double structure of the surface appearance of everyday Christian churches and the deeply embedded occult symbolism emerges.

That the churches are built to a sacred plan (though a dark one), is often hinted at by Dyer in his reminiscences. As he explains, “Architecture aims at Eternity and must contain the Eternal Powers: not only our Altars and Sacrifices, but the Forms of our Temples, must be mysticall” (9). That is why he finds it important to emphasize that, unlike Sir Christopher Wren, he builds “not to Harmony or to Rationall Beauty but to quite another Game” (9). In fact, he goes so far in his respect for this way of planning that he finds it important in one of his churches to “have one Bell only since too much Ringing disturbs the Spirits” (9). Likewise, it is not some kind of sick preference that makes him indulge in shadows and create dark and gloomy churches in order to “build what is most Sollemn and Awefull” (7). It is true that he keeps very strongly to the maxim that “the Heart of our Designe: [is] the art of Shaddowes” (5), but this is duly explained and placed in context when he explains that “the true God is to be venerated in obscure and fearful Places, with Horror in their Approaches, and thus did our Ancestors worship the Daemon in the form of great Stones” (57). Furthermore, no church of his making is complete and ready without a “Sacrifice to consecrate [the] Place” (63). And not just any sacrifice at that, but that of either a child, or at least someone who could be taken for a child: “need the Sacrifice be a Child, and not one who has become a Child?” (64)

One can also easily find Eliade’s strong contrast between the sacred space of the churches and the profane sphere of the rest in Hawksmoor. The churches are following a refined plan where “Lines necessarily beare upon one another, like the Web which the Spider spins in a Closet” (5), and are in effect “uncovering the trew Musick of Time which, like the rowling of a Drum, can be heard from far off by those whose Ears are prickt” (21). In fact, as it has already been mentioned in the chapter dealing with the cartographic fictional space of Hawksmoor, the pattern the churches follow is not only intricate and carefully designed, but in fact are aimed at recreating a cosmic pattern on Earth:

And thus will I compleet the Figure: Spittle-Fields, Wapping and Lime-house have made the Triangle; Bloomsbury and St Mary Woolnoth have next created the major Pentacle-starre; and, with Greenwich, all these will form the Sextuple abode of Baal-Berith or the Lord of the Covenant. Then, with the church of Little St Hugh, the Septilateral Figure will rise about Black Step Lane and, in this Pattern, every Straight line is enrich’d with a point at Infinity and every Plane with a line at Infinity. Let him that has Understanding count the Number: the seven Churches are built in conjunction with the seven Planets in the lower Orbs of Heaven, the seven Circles of the Heavens, the seven Starres in Ursa Minor and the seven Starres in the Pleiades. Little St Hugh was flung in the Pitte with the seven Marks upon his Hands, Feet, Sides and Breast which thus exhibit the seven Demons -Beydelus, Metucgayn, Adulec, Demeymes, Gadix, Uquizuz and Sol. (186)

In fact, it all fits surprisingly smoothly into Eliade’s understanding of sacred space where he speaks of the necessity at the creation of sacred space to both consecrate it, and then to recreate the cosmic order through a rite of cosmogony: “An unknown, alien, unoccupied […] territory still participates in the fluid and larval modality of Chaos. In occupying it, […] man symbolically transforms it into Cosmos by a ritual repetition of the act of cosmogony”{29} (Eliade [1957] 1965, 33). And this is exactly Nicholas Dyer’s master plan: taking land away from the chaos, sanctifying it through ritual child sacrifice, and then repeating the cosmogony through creating a model of the cosmos on Earth.

This harmonic arrangement is in opposition with the rest of the city, and the contrast could not be more striking. For Nicholas Dyer, in the 18th century, it appears as “ratling and perpetual Hum” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 45), as “the Chaos of the Streets” (45), and his epithets for the town are the “Nest of Death and Contagion” (45), “the Capitol of Darknesse” (47), or even “the Dungeon of Man’s Desires” (47). In this town, outside the churches, there is nothing that is not chaotic and disgusting: “still in the Centre are no proper Streets nor Houses but a Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch” (47-8). In contrast to the sacred harmony of the seven churches, “London grows more Monstrous, Straggling and out of all Shape” (48). And one has to emphasize that the situation is not much different in the 20th century chapters, either. Here is one of the many possible scenes to illustrate this:

The group of vagrants were standing in a corner of some derelict ground, where unwanted objects from the city had over the years been deposited: broken bottles and unrecognisable pieces of metal were strewn over a wide area, crab grass and different varieties of tall ragweed partially obscured the shapes of abandoned or burnt-out cars, while rotting mattresses sank into the soil. (68)

Or one could likewise mention people’s voices getting “lost in the traffic noise” and “the sound of the drills blasting into the surface of the Commercial Road” that are so strong that “the whole area […] seemed to quiver beneath their feet” (26).

This shows that it is possible to think of Nicholas Dyer’s projects in terms alternative to those of abjection and repression. Yet, though the dichotomy of sacred and profane space can serve the function of an alternative interpretive paradigm, they are nevertheless not precise enough to provide the reader with much more than that. However, as it has been shown during the analysis of E. E. Cummings’ poems about New York, Mircea Eliade’s interpretive framework may be fruitfully combined with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. And indeed, just like Cummings’ bars and brothels, Nicholas Dyer’s churches can be considered heterotopias.

This, however, might be surprising at first, if one considers that heterotopias mostly “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. […] [T]he individual has to submit to certain rites and purifications” (Foucault 1998, 243). That is to say, in order to “get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures” (243). There seem to be no such procedures required in churches in general, and after all, Dyer’s buildings are also places open to the public. Yet, one should realize here that restricted entry may not only be understood in a literal, physical sense. After all, the architect keeps talking about how the message of the churches “can be heard from far off by those whose Ears are prickt” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 21) but only by those, since the “true Beliefs and Mysteries are not be inscribed in easy Figures since the Mobb, being in Ignorance, will teare them down in their Feare” (24). This way, in effect, he creates a heterotopic structure: although the signs are there for everyone, only the elect few initiated into the mysteries can actually see them. Thus, in a sense, only those who qualify to certain conditions can truly enter Dyer’s churches.

It is probably somewhat more obvious that the churches are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1998, 241) like most heterotopias. In fact, the very idea of hiding occult and, from the perspective of official Christianity, pagan temples inside, below or next to the space of Christian worship qualifies for this. Yet, this is by far not the only type of such juxtaposition. Dyer mentions that they “have built near a Pitte and there are so vast a Number of Corses that the Pews will allwaies be Rotten and Damp” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 7) thereby putting next to each other burial grounds and grounds of worship, and unwholesome, rotten places and newly built, fresh and clean structures. And in case of Christ Church, Spitalfields, there is even the juxtaposition of the simple and clear-cut structure of the church and that of a complex underground system of passages, in other words, a labyrinth: “As for the Chamber it self: it will be sollid only in those parts that beare weight, and will be so contrived within-side to form a very intricate Labyrinth” (24). And that the architect’s plan was turned into an enduring construct, nothing proves better than the myths and stories connected to the church and still circulating in the 20th century: “Stories had accumulated around this ‘house under ground’, as the local children called it: it was said that the tunnel led to a maze of passages which burrowed miles into the earth, and the children told each other stories about the ghosts and corpses which were still to be found somewhere within it” (29). But whereas myth might be based on hearsay, the reader gets ample proof about the actual existence of the underground passages when Thomas finds himself trapped inside its passages and dies there (39-42).

Another heterotopic characteristic feature of Dyer’s building is that it is “linked to slices of time” (Foucault 1998, 242), and is thus a place that is capable of “indefinitely accumulating time” (242), and providing a means of moving between various periods and epochs. As far as accumulating various slices of time goes, it is enough to mention the practice of building the churches near to, or directly at the location of ancient temples or burial grounds, as well as including the symbolism of long forgotten rites and religions. To mention just a few examples, the reader is told that the “Druides held their yearly Sessions in London, close by the Place now call’d Black Step Lane” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 22) where he built his church partially for this very reason, or that he placed in the churches signs representing various “forgotten” religions (42) and ancient ruins to combine “the effect of many Ages before History” (63). He likewise tries to collect previous murder cases and violent crime together in the building of the church at Wapping, thus again linking the different periods of time when that mass of murder and violence was committed to that of the church and that of the person entering the building at any given point in time:

in Rope Walk lived Mary Crompton, the bloody Midwife who had six Sceletons of children of several Ages in her Cellar […] It was next to this place, in Crab Court, where Abraham Thornton carryed out his Murthers and Tortures […] The Black-Boy Tavern in Red-Maide Lane is also very unfortunate for Homicides, and has seldom been Tenanted. […]

Here in Angell Rents next the Ratcliffe High-way was Mr Barwick barbarously killed […] The Murtherer was afterwards hang’d in Chains near the place of his Crime – thus it is call’d Red Cliff, or Ratcliffe, the hanging Dock opposite my Church (92-3).

Considering Nicholas Dyer’s explicit interest in trying to “bring News of the Night and of Sorrowe” (6) and his wish to “Build now,  […] in that place of Memory” (16) where his parents are buried, since he “cou’d not Weep then” (16), one could easily think of his buildings as massive projects aimed at creating chronicles in stone: memorials to things and people lost. After all, his teacher, Mirabilis also told him to “turn this Paper-work house (by which he meant the Meeting-place) into a Monument” (51).

Yet, there is more to the heterochrony of Nicholas Dyer’s projects than their ability to collect and juxtapose various out of the ordinary and often violent events, places and periods. The buildings are not museums or sites of memory, or at the very least not only. There is an equal possibility that they are meant to serve also as portals either in time or between the three zones of heaven, earth and underworld, or most probably both possibilities at the same time. Mircea Eliade reminds us that whenever sacred space is created (and Nicholas Dyer’s aim is clearly this), “[t]here where the breaking through of the zones appears due to a hierophany, there also comes into operation, at the same time, an opening upwards (to the divine world) or downwards (to the lower regions, the land of the dead). The three cosmic zones – the earth, the heavens and the lower regions – are made to communicate”{30} (Eliade [1957] 1965, 38). And indeed, Dyer talks of creating a place “where the Dead can once more give Voice” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 16), while at yet another occasion he mentions that “[i]f [he] put[s] [his] Ear to the Ground [he] hear[s] them lie promiscuously one with another, and their small Voices echo in [his] Church” (24). What is more, Dyer has had a similar experience even before building his own church, in the house of Mirabilis, where he “saw the exact Image of [his] Mother in that Habit which she used to wear, and working at her Needle” (19).

Of course, finding more examples of the connection of the earthly zone with that of the underground is not too difficult, since the narration of Nicholas Dyer is somewhat overly obsessed with death and darkness, yet it is also possible to find some evidence in the text for the existence of a similar connection with the zone of the heavens. The first 20th century victim, Thomas, for example, has the following vision: “He turned his face to the sun, and the clouds made a patchwork of shadows upon his body: he looked up at them and they seemed to be disappearing inside the church. And then he was climbing towards them, climbing the tower until the clouds hid him, climbing the tower as a voice called out, Go on! Go on!” (30). Likewise, Dyer himself, lying in fever in his bed, “look[s] up from [his] Bed as if to gaze at [his] Ceeling, [and] [he] see[s] its Tower and feel the Wind blowing about [his] Face” (204).

The question whether it is actually possible to also travel between the three zones through Dyer’s buildings, or it only opens up for communication, for exchanging information, is also answered by the text. In fact, Dyer emphasizes that with or without his churches, the threshold of the zones, in general, is penetrable. In the very least, the borderline is hardly hermetically closed, since he is not even the only one who can see and/or hear the dead. For Thomas’ mother “the ground was […] made of the thinnest glass through which she could see the abysses beneath her” (32). An experience that she most certainly shares with the architect, since he repeatedly warns that most people “walk as it were above the Precipeece with no Conception of the vast Gulph and frightful Abyss of Darknesse beneath them” (14) and, as it has already been mentioned, he claims to hear them, as well (24). Yet, Dyer claims more than that, since he states that “Daemons might walk through the Streets even as Men […] debauch themselves” (17), and likewise the local “children told each other stories about the ghosts and corpses which were still to be found” (29) in his underground labyrinth.

In fact, the very structure of Dyer’s churches seems to have been made in order to connect the three zones. As he explains in his notes, most of his churches have attached burial grounds or underground temples, so much so that could be said to be built “for the most part under the Ground” (17). Likewise, Thomas, one of the sacrificial victims, makes a connection in his mind between the Spitalfields church and hell:

And then later he went downstairs to stoke up the fire, as his mother had asked him. He turned it around with his poker so that the new coals tumbled into the centre and, as they stirred and shifted in the heat, Thomas peered at them and imagined there the passages and caverns of hell where those who burn are the same colour as the flame. Here was the church of Spitalfields glowing, red hot, and then in his exhaustion he fell asleep. (37)

Yet, the buildings’ connection with the heavens is also strong. Both in terms of the already mentioned general master plan of organizing the churches in imitation and recreation of the seven stars of the Pleiades, but also on the level of the individual churches. In Thomas’ experience, the link to the same seven stars is noticeable near a single church, and not only when the whole plan is present at the same time: “he could see the silhouette of the church roof, and above it seven or eight stars” (36).

A slightly related issue, although not necessarily exactly the same, is the ability of the churches to function as time portals. The phenomenon of time travel, or in the very least the possibility to appear in a time different from one’s own or for one time frame to influence another (the necessity of these distinctions will be apparent later) can easily be detected in the novel. As Brett Josef Grubisic (2001) notes, “Hawksmoor is filled with a tissue of echoes, repetition and coincidence that serves to affiliate 1711 with the late twentieth century” (202). Or to quote Susana Onega ([1999] 2005), “as we go on reading, we find more and more shocking reduplications of names, events, actions, and even identical sentences uttered by characters who live two centuries apart” (47). Yet, the situation of the churches is probably best summarized by Paul Smethurst (2000) when he claims that “[i]n the novel, architecture and writing – the church and the text – […] are attempts to transcend historical time by using these interstices in the matrix of the present almost as black holes – tears in the fabric of the universe through which time and space might slip” (182).

As evidence of the possibility of time travel in the novel, one could mention those scenes in which the two central characters, Nicholas Dyer and Nicholas Hawksmoor, come across people or locations that do not seem to fit in their age. Dyer, for example, on his walk in town notes that “by Hogg Lane [he] met with [his] own Apparition with Habit, Wigg, and everything as in a Looking-glass” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 206), while somewhat later he had a similar experience in his own room, where he “saw an Image again before [him] – a species of such a Body as my own, but in a strange Habit cut like an Under-garment and the Creature had no Wigg” (206), in other words, someone in 20th century outfit. This experience is, in fact, shared by Nicholas Hawksmoor:

as he passed the Red Gates, he noticed his own reflection in the frosted window, beneath a sign for Beers and Spirits. The reflection turned to stare at him before walking on: Hawksmoor passed his hand across his face and then called out, “Do I know you?” and several passers-by stopped in astonishment as he ran out into the road crying. “Do I? Do I?” No answer came and, as he tried to follow the retreating figure, the crowds of the city hampered his progress and closed him in. (211)

But these are by no means the only pieces of evidence for the possibility to appear in different time periods. Hawksmoor, for example, seems to have appeared momentarily in the past, possibly Dyer’s 18th century, losing his way near one of the churches:

He walked from the harbour and, catching sight of a church tower, turned down a small alley which seemed to lead in that direction. Almost at once he found himself surrounded by small shops in which there was very little light: they were of an old design, leaning forward over the pavement, and in his confusion he hurried down another lane only to stop short when the stone wall of the church apparently blocked off the end; but this was an illusion since a child then walked across it, singing. (188)

In fact, Nicholas Dyer even makes a hint at seeing the future, as well: “I see some one from the dark Mazes of an unknown Futurity who enters Black Step Lane and discovers what is hidden in Silence and Secresy” (205). What is more, he seems to have the mirror image of Hawksmoor’s walk, himself also accidentally wandering off to a different century:

Lord, the Coaches and Carts so shook the Ground that it was as like a natural Tremour or Convulsion of the Earth: and how many Days and Nights, thought I, have I laid in my fiery Feaver? What Time is this? […] I walked down Cranborn Street, where the Nuts and Oysters were piled high in Shops that ran upon Wheels. (207-8)

There is, of course, another possible way of interpreting the mysterious appearances and parallels between the 18th and 20th century chapters: it is not that time travel is possible, but time is not linear, but rather circular. That is to say, “nothing progresses in time, […] the same events repeat themselves endlessly, and […] the same people live and die only in order to be born and to live the same events again and again, eternally caught in what appears to be the ever-revolving wheel of life and death” (Onega 1991, 33). There certainly are passages in the novel that support such a reading. For one, Nicholas Dyer openly expresses the same view:

Time is a vast Denful of Horrour, round about which a Serpent winds and in the winding bites itself by the Tail. Now, now is the Hour, every Hour, every part of an Hour, every Moment, which in its end does begin again and never ceases to end: a beginning continuing, always ending. (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 62)

Passing by the Thames, Hawksmoor has a similar experience. He comments on the fact that “when he removed his glasses and again looked down, it seemed to him that the river itself was perpetually turning and spinning: it was going in no certain direction” (115). And this is by no means the only time he ruminates on this experience, either. He claims that although he “took long walks in the evening in order to avoid such [unpleasant] thoughts, […] he found that he was treading the same paths as before” (198; my emphasis), or elsewhere he comments on the fact that he is convinced that there is “in any case no future and no past” (199; my emphasis).

Such circular time would no doubt explain the recurring events and people in the story. If there is no change, no progress, just an eternally returning, and thus repeating, circularity, it is no surprise that the whole novel ends up being a collection of déjŕ-vu. The same murders in the 18th and 20th centuries, the same names, and more than that. To mention but a few examples: Sir Christopher Wren loses a compass (59) which is found in the 20th century chapter at the exact same place (71); Thomas falls from the tower of a church in the 18th century (25), and a tourist in a 20th century crowd asks “What was that falling there?” (26), and finally a boy by the same name dies underground falling from the stairs (39-42). And this is just a sample of the many repetitions and recurrences, sometimes with and sometime without minor modifications. In fact, there are so many of them that they make Jean-Michel Ganteau (2000) claim that the novel’s “great deal of repetition and redundancy (at the thematic, symbolical and narrative levels among others) [lead] to the establishment of a specific tonality and a superficial ornateness traditionally associated with things baroque” (22). Whether or not this is a baroque (or post-baroque) feature in terms of the text’s style, however, it certainly fits, as it has been pointed out, into a circular conception of time.

If this is the case, however, there arises the question of the function of the churches as heterochronic localities. That is to say, if time was linear, time travel would be a meaningful activity, but if there was no progress, only the same things were repeated over and over again, there would be little point in opening channels between different time frames, since all time frames would be the same one: one of the infinite numbers of its reiterations. In my opinion, there are two possible ways out of this dilemma:

1. The churches are built exactly as an escape route from the curse of eternal return, and thus they are built not to open a portal to a different point in time, but to a state outside of time.

2. Alternatively, the time conception is not circular at all, but something more complex, or completely different. Labyrinthine or network-based time, as well as the collapse of time are examples of this second possibility.

The first version, the churches as escape routes, is the one preferred by Susana Onega ([1999] 2005) in her reading of the novel. She explains that a circular time conception is “in keeping with Nicholas Dyer’s occultist faith” (43). This means that, in her interpretation, the recreation of the cosmic order on Earth, in fact, serves an even higher goal than one would suppose based on Eliade’s above mentioned theoretical stance on sacred space. Here, instead, one deals with an “intricate net of emblematic buildings accumulating through time the occult power of its millenarian inhabitants” (44) that allow them to function as powerful outlets of magic, bringing forth fields of power around them. There are many examples of this in the novel, of course. One can think, for example, of the fact that Dyer keeps talking about “an Assembling of Powers” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 24), and emphasizes that “[b]y day [his] House of Lime will catch and intangle all those who come near to it” (62), but the architect’s own statements are by far not the only pieces of evidence. The pyramid, belonging to one of the churches “was too hot,” (28) hotter than atmospheric and weather conditions could have made it. Likewise, the homeless character, Ned, at some point arrived at “the flight of steps which led down to the door of the crypt and, as he sensed the coldness which rose from them like a vapour, he heard a whisper which might have been ‘I’ or ‘Me’” (86). Similarly, Detective Hawksmoor “glanced up at the church” and that in turn “seemed about to fall on him” (115), and the same character had a tendency to speculate that criminals “were drawn to those places where murders had occurred before” (116), and felt at one of Dyer’s churches that it “had grown larger and more distinct in the face of death” (156). And these are by far not the only such examples.

In Onega’s ([1999] 2005) interpretation, this accumulation of power in a complex figure of seven points aims at “projecting a certain pattern […] that is capable of reflecting the ‘Proportion of the Seven Orders,’” through which he hopes “to submit to his will the seven planetary daemons who control them” (52). And this, as it has been pointed out above, is all in order to break out of the ever-returning, inevitable circularity of existence, since gaining control of those daemons “would permit his crossing the seven planetary orbs that separate the material from the spiritual world” (52), thereby creating a metaphorical “ladder between heaven and earth that he (and those willing to share his gnosis) ‘may run through laughing.’” (54).

In this version, thus, the churches function as portals that allow the informed and initiated user to leave to a zone where the rules of circular time do not count. In Sebastian Groes’ (2012) formulation, it is a “mystical attempt to dislodge the human mind and body trapped in space and time” (125). This zone outside circular time can be either spatially outside the reign of never-ending cycles of returns, in a different sphere completely off the limits of this logic (i.e. Onega’s “heaven”), or alternatively in the exact same sphere (i.e. Onega’s “earth”), but in a different, alternative dimension. This would certainly explain why he seems not so much to reoccur or teleport to the 20th century, but rather to be present at both time frames at once, and in fact one even gets the feeling that his 18th century existence is not even his real origin or anchoring point, and “that he may have lived in a period prior to the 18th century and might even be reincarnated in the twentieth century” (De Lange 1993, 152) and even beyond.

One can easily find textual hints of Nicholas Dyer’s successful escape from existence dictated by circular time, be it to a different sphere or a different dimension. Hawksmoor, looking up at the sky, has the feeling of being surveyed by “an eye which had suddenly opened” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 187). Likewise, on the seventh church, there is “a circular window above the porch, like an eye” (216), and looking up at the sky again, he sees “a cloud which for a moment possesse[s] the features of a human face” (216). And Dyer himself, talking of his plans, mentions that he will not “leave this Place once it is completed: Hermes Trismegistus built a Temple to the Sunne, and he knew how to conceal himself so that none could see him tho’ he was still withinne it” (205). Or one could also mention some of the characters experiencing that they are being watched by someone, yet do not see anyone. At the pyramid, Hawksmoor “felt a wave of disorder – and, with it, the sensation that someone was staring fixedly at him” (196), to mention but one such example.

The second option, or to be more precise, labyrinthine time, is favored by Hendia Baker (1996) who points out that such an arrangement may also account for what looks like time travel: “[i]n fictional texts which deal with or are structured as temporal labyrinths, time is no longer linear and characters move around in time, which seems unatural” (301). This interpretation heavily builds on various twentieth century theories of relativity, as well as those of time and space and their interrelation. Baker emphasizes that the linearity of time is more or less an illusion that results of modern science no longer support. However surprising it may look at first sight, “each individual, depending on his/her position and velocity in space […] has his/her own measure of time. Time is thus, at least partly, relative to the observer” (303). That is to say, space and time, rather than being independent categories as one is wont to imagine them, are interrelated and mutually interdependent concepts. Quoting Louis de Broglie (through two different sources citing him), Baker (1996) warns the reader that:

In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc […] Each observer, as his time passes, discovers […] new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them. (Zukav 1979, 238 and Capra 1975, 195) (305)

Even more radically, if there is a direct link between space and time, and the two are not independent from each other, it in fact may be possible to travel not only in space using up time (as one is accustomed to do), but also in time (using up space). This springs from the thesis that “[i]n everyday life, we perceive all spaces as existing at a particular moment in time. In accordance with the notion of space-time, time and space cannot be separated, so that it would be equally accurate to say that all times exist at a specific point in space” (305).

This would, of course, explain Dyer’s churches being built on historically significant locations: this is not only due to his attraction to older religions, sacrifice, violence and the macabre. The reason is that those places are heavily burdened with past events from various periods, and the character may feel that this way these locations could provide for a more effective time portal, since they accumulated more slices of significant past events. This, of course, may be just an illusion, and unnecessary complication of the plans, since the dictum that “all of time exists all of the time” (305) is universal and thus is just as potent at a freely chosen location than those that Dyer chose for his churches. Yet, one should not underestimate the architect’s knowledge and expertise on the issue of time travel and the behavior of time. One might just as well find enough evidence in the text for the contrary. After all, he utters many such statements that show a deep understanding of the problem of time-space. When he got lost in his thoughts he remarked that his “[t]houghts were running on my seven Churches and were thus in quite another Time” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 6), and he emphasizes that in his studies he “was uncovering the trew Musick of Time which, like the rowling of a Drum, can be heard from far off by those whose Ears are prickt” (21). The fact that he may have spoken of the same thing as Baker, and not a different concept of time, could be possibly supported by his exclamation that “[n]ow, now is the Hour, every Hour, every part of an Hour, every Moment, which in its end does begin again and never ceases to end: a beginning continuing, always ending” (62), a conveniently ambiguous statement that might just as well stand for simultaneous time and circular time. Surprisingly enough, Detective Hawksmoor shares an insight with him when he considers “running the time slowly in the opposite direction (but did it have a direction?)” (157), and another one while uttering that “there was in any case no future and no past” (199). Likewise, one can find evidence of the reversibility of time in the novel: “[w]hen Hawksmoor tries to imagine the past, he sees nothing in front of him (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 214) and he remembers the future (199), as does Dyer when he remembers things that will happen in Hawksmoor’s time centuries later (131)” (Baker 1996, 306).

The metaphor of labyrinthine time is, of course, all the more convincing because the text is full of references to actual labyrinths, both in time and space. In spatial terms Dyer talks of building “a Labyrinth where the Dead can once more give Voice” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 16). He interrupts his narrative of his childhood in order to provide the reader with a very detailed description of one of his labyrinthine creations. It is done as a “Preface to [his] Church in Spittle-Fields, for it is a long way which has no Destination, and in this instance leads us to the Sepulchre or Labyrinth which [he] will build beside that sovereign Church” (23), and emphasizes that his “House under Ground will be dark indeed, and a true Labyrinth for those who may be placed there” (23). He explains that the sepulcher “will be sollid only in those parts that beare weight, and will be so contrived within-side to form a very intricate Labyrinth” (24) yet is stable enough that “if Violence does not happen, and it remains burried from vulgar Eyes, this Labyrinth will endure 1000 yeares” (24).

In a non-spatial sense, Dyer mentions having “found the Thread in [his] Labyrinth of difficulties” (18) or that the idea of destroying the person who knows about his secrets “became the Thread of [his] Thoughts which led [him] through a Labyrinth of Fear” (104). Likewise, commenting on, and disapproving of, the methods of science, he claims that “Nature will not be so discover’d; it is better to essay to unwind the labyrinthine Thread than hope to puzzle out the Pattern of the World” (139). In refusing to comment on the meaning of an ancient statue to Christopher Wren he also uses the same metaphor: “I said nothing, for who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?” (56). Once he even uses it directly in reference to time: “And I hugg my Arms around my self and laugh, for as if in a Vision I see some one from the dark Mazes of an unknown Futurity who enters Black Step Lane and discovers what is hidden in Silence and Secresy” (205).

But the symbol does not only appear in connection with the architect. Thomas, the first twentieth century victim, creates the model of a building that gets more and more complex. In fact, “so great was his enthusiasm that the little building already resembled a labyrinth” (36). He is also aware of the existence of Dyer’s construction, however: “[s]tories had accumulated around this ‘house under ground,’ as the local children called it: it was said that the tunnel led to a maze of passages which burrowed miles into the earth, and the children told each other stories about the ghosts and corpses which were still to be found somewhere within it” (29). But he soon enough encounters Dyer’s labyrinth from the inside as well when he falls off the stairs of this underground complex, breaks some of his bones and subsequently dies. While struggling, he recalls that he has “heard many times, from the adults as well as the children of the neighbourhood, that there was one tunnel in this labyrinth which led straight into the church, and it was in this direction that he must surely try to go” (40). His mother, realizing his absence is also attracted to a labyrinth: “she peered down at the model which he had been constructing – her face immediately above the miniature labyrinth” (41). In addition, Christopher Wren also uses the phrase once, commenting on Nicholas Dyer’s interest in occult readings: “This is but a windy Conceit of Knowledge, Nick, a Maze of Words in which you will lose your self” (146).

However much Dyer himself builds a labyrinth, however, it is not that maze that also makes time work like one. As Baker (1996) explains:

The second type of labyrinth, which agrees with Eco’s rhizome, the temporal labyrinth, is virtually uniquely twentieth century. […] Eco (1988, 81) describes the rhizome as a net in which all points are connected to constitute an unlimited, potentially infinite, territory without a centre, exit, or outside. There can be no global vision of all its possibilities but only local visions of the closest ones, which can be no more than falsifiable hypotheses about its further course (82). (299)

In other words, if Dyer talks of chaotic, labyrinthine time and space, it is not something that he creates, but something that he experiences and describes. The maze-like behavior springs from the very qualities of space-time.

It is obvious, however, based on the above analyses carried out as yet in the conceptual framework of linear and circular time, that Nicholas Dyer nevertheless tries to influence the behavior of space-time. He builds the churches for a reason, and he picks both the buildings’ location on Earth very painstakingly and also makes sure that at the same time they are also linked to the cosmic order. What is more, if there is anything that seems to be constant in all of the given moments in time that appear in the book, those are the churches. It is as if they were anchored down, regardless of Dyer’s own claim that “[a]ll things Flow even when they seem to stand still” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 87).

In addition, people who die there seem, in a way, to leave the usual space-time in their death and no longer return. As Thomas, one of the victims, meditates: “‘Here is the church,’ he whispered to himself, ‘And here is the steeple. Open the doors and where are the people?’” (32) Connecting this with the fact that the churches seem to have an attraction on people that is impossible to resist, Baker (1996) considers the churches are black holes:

Even the beggars who reappear from century to century in Hawksmoor have “passed into a place, one might almost say a time, from which there was no return” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 70). It is generally accepted that nothing can escape from the event horizon of a black hole (Hawking 1994, 94). (307)

In a way then, in this version, the solution for the problem of escaping from the traps of time, this time a labyrinth, not a cycle, is to get sucked in by a black hole that annihilates, but makes one free from the shackles of existence at the same time. The usual rules of time and space cease to be binding and in this sense, one indeed is “begging on the threshold of eternity” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 217).

Whether one deals with linear time, circular time, or labyrinthine time, however, one thing remains the same. Dyer’s churches in all three versions function as special portals that allow him to escape from the chains of his existence. The difference whether it is to a different time, a different sphere, a different dimension, or to complete annihilation is irrelevant from the perspective that the function of the churches is in all cases that of a route of escape.

In addition to this, one can find ample evidence in the novel that this escape route may, in the end, not only be for himself, but whoever who is willing to follow in his path. He mentions that “the trew Musick of Time […] can be heard […] by those whose Ears are prickt” and that it is in his “Churches that [he] will bring […] once more into the Memory of this and future Ages” all the “ancient Teachings” (21). Even though they may “not be inscribed in easy Figures” (24), they are most certainly not knowledge kept only for himself. In fact, he explicitly claims that “in each of [his] Churches [he] put[s] a Signe so that he who sees the Fabrick may see also the Shaddowe of the Reality of which it is the Pattern or Figure” (45). There is even a direct call to do as he did: “every Stone of them bears the marks of Scorching by which you may follow the true Path of God” (102). And, finally, the text that is inscribed on the painting of Little St Hugh in the church named after him may also be a reference to Nicholas Dyer’s real aims in building the churches to a cosmic order: “I Have Endured All These Troubles For Thy Sake” (216).

If this is the case, however, then the architect cannot really be taken as an evil, selfish mass-murderer or a cruel Satanist. If he takes all the trouble upon himself, the murders, the illnesses and the semi-legal existence in order to save those who believe in his teachings and follow in his steps from eternal suffering, then he is a savior-figure, rather than a self-proclaimed “god, building everlasting structures” (Sağlam 2007, 114). And, in fact, the closer one looks at some of his sentences, the more they look like allusions to or close paraphrases of the Bible, or even Jesus himself. The statement “can be heard […] by those whose Ears are prickt” (21) reminds one of “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mark 4:9). Or likewise, his claim that his teachings are “not be inscribed in easy Figures” so that it is not understood by “the Mobb, being in Ignorance” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 24) recalls Jesus explaining to his followers the following: “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but those who are outside get everything in parables, so that while seeing they may see and not perceive, and while hearing, they may hear and not understand, otherwise they may return and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11-2). Just as the sentence, “I Have Endured All These Troubles For Thy Sake” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 216) resonates with the following passages: “Therefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate” (Hebrews 13:12) and “[f]or you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps” (1 Peter 2:21).

This may look like a contradiction in terms at first, since how could someone venerating the dead, dark powers, and pagan gods (amongst others) be a savior? Yet, the contradiction is illusory. If one takes Nicholas Dyer’s words at face value, it ceases to be a paradox. In fact, he equates all gods and does not distinguish between them on the basis of being good or evil, light or dark. As he explains:

that Sathan is the God of this World and fit to be worshipp’d I will offer certaine proof and, first, the Soveraignty of his Worship. The inhabitants of Hispaniola worship goblins, they of Calcutta worship the statues of the Devil, Moloch was the god of the Ammonites, the Carthaginians worshipped their Deity under the name of Saturn and it is the Straw Man of our Druides. The chief God of the Syrians was Baal-Zebub or Beel-Zebub, the Lord of Flies: his other Name is Baal-Phegor, the Gaping or Naked Lord, and his Temple is call’d the Beth-Peor. He is call’d Baal Saman among the Phoenicians, by which is meant the Sunne. Among the Assyrians he is call’d Adrammalech, and also he is called Jesus, the brother of Judas. Even on these British islands Baal Saman was worshipp’d after the manner of the Phoenicians, and this Tradition was carryed on by the Druides who committed no Thing to writing but their way of delivering the Mistery was by the secret Cabbala. […] And this further: demon from daimon, which is us’d promiscuously with theos as the word for Deity; the Persians call the Devill Div, somewhat close to Divus or Deus; also, ex sacramentiis expounded in Tertullian as exacramentum or excrement. And thus we have a Verse:

Pluto, Jehova, Satan, Dagon, Love,

Moloch, the Virgin, Thetis, Devil, Jove,

Pan, Jahweh, Vulcan, he with th’awfull Rod,

Jesus, the wondrous Straw Man, all one God. (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 21-2)

There is an equation in his thinking between deities that one would not normally consider compatible. From this perspective, the fact that his acts are considered evil by worshippers who do not see the issue from his viewpoint which is beyond such categories is irrelevant.

And such a view is, in fact, shared by other commentators. The writer himself, for example, emphasizes that “[t]he idea of the sacred just as the idea of worship and awe, power and terror, which is all the sacred implies, has nothing to do whatsoever with moral categories of good and bad. It faces them and transcends them” (Vékony 1997, 245). Aleid Fokkema (1993) also comments upon Dyer’s “holistic world-view” in which “everything is connected and all gods are one” (171). But the best summary of the situation is probably provided by Susana Onega ([1999] 2005):

Dyer’s task may be seen as that of a Redeemer, struggling to bring about the liberation of humankind from this mundus tenebrosus […] In this respect, the fact that his act of recreation of the cosmogonic act has been achieved by evil means is immaterial, for according to occultism […] the true God is the totality of everything, containing all good and evil and reconciling all opposites. (54)

That is to say, from the perspective of the occult, as well as from that of Nicholas Dyer, there is no contradiction whatsoever in him acting as a savior, bringing redemption from the sufferings of being entrapped in a circular or labyrinthine time that allows for no escape in any other way.

To sum it up, it is possible to interpret the urban space of Hawksmoor in a way alternative to the abject-repressive model proposed by Alex Link (2003, 2004), and proved to be lacking. The text shows clear signs of being an example of Mircea Eliade’s sacred space, in which the seven churches both correspond to occult symbols and represent the cosmos on Earth. These very same buildings in turn, also serve as heterotopias, providing portals that may connect the three zones of underworld, earth and heaven, and/or provide escape routes from the fate of Earthly time, be it linear, circular or labyrinthine. At the same time, the architect, Nicholas Dyer, in his effort to save not only himself, but leave behind encoded signs for those who are willing to interpret them, becomes a savior-figure, redeeming those who follow in his footsteps.

4. The Urban Space of E. E. Cummings’ Poetry and Peter Ackroyd’s Fiction: A Comparison

As one could see in the previous chapters, the urban space of the poetry of E. E. Cummings and the prose of Peter Ackroyd may, with good reasons, be called of a sacred nature. The use of the auxiliary, “may”, however, is nevertheless fully warranted. It is important to mention that in neither of the two cases does this book provide a wide enough grasp to make the conclusion extendable in a more general sense. In the analysis of the poetry of E. E. Cummings, the grasp was intentionally limited to poems explicitly or presumably devoted to New York City: all other locations were excluded. As for Peter Ackroyd, only one novel, Hawksmoor, provides the basis for such an evaluation. That is to say, it would be necessary to include further, wider analyses in both cases to be able to say with complete certainty that urban space is of a sacred nature in the oeuvre of the two authors in all cases.

Yet, there is good reason to consider the thesis potentially applicable to the rest of the work of both authors. In both cases it can be stated without a possible misrepresentation or too far-fetched generalization that these two locations are the most central ones in their urban writing. For E. E. Cummings, it is enough to compare Appendices 3 and 4. The first one shows all urban poems, the second one only those that deal with New York City. The difference is 42 texts; the poems that deal with New York City comprise 72.37% of all city poems. As for Peter Ackroyd, one only rarely finds novels that take place elsewhere than in the British capital. As Alex Murray (2007) emphasizes, “[w]hile a range of other authors utilize London as a locale for their fictional worlds, Ackroyd and [Iain] Sinclair share an obsession with the city, exploring its past and present in a majority of their works” (5). As for the issue of the presence of a sacred quality in the rest of the oeuvre, this is not a problematic issue for Cummings, since the present monograph deals with the overwhelming majority of his urban poetry. In connection with Ackroyd, one can say that there are good grounds to suppose that a similar, sacred spatial organization would appear elsewhere, too, for the reason that many interpreters of his oeuvre comment on the presence of the sacred in the entirety of the author’s oeuvre. Martina Vránová (2010) emphasizes that “[b]eing a Catholic like [Robert] Clark, even though not a practicing one, enables Ackroyd to keep a sense of the sacred, a teleological orientation” (11). Adriana Neagu (2006) likewise claims that “Ackroyd subscribes to a numinous order of sacred space and time” in general, not only in one of his novels, in fact so much so that the spiritual can be considered as “[o]ne of the chief unifying components of his work” (225). Susana Onega ([1999] 2005) likewise considers the sacred and the visionary as a general category for the author’s urban fiction:

We have seen the central role Ackroyd gives in The Great Fire of London and The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde to London as the visionary city built on the accumulated wisdom of numberless generations of Londoners whose roots go back to the dawn of English civilization. This vision of a numinous London is also the topos around which Hawksmoor and the other London-based novels develop. (43)

And the author himself also admits that “[e]very street in London is a rosary of sorrowful mysteries to [him]” (Vékony 1997, 247) and further talks of his general tendency to use an occult variety of that sacred quality (245). That is to say, even though further analyses of the city spaces of Peter Ackroyd’s fiction would probably help in reaching a more precise and detailed picture, there is a strong probability that the general lines of those spaces would be similar to those of Hawksmoor.

In any case, however, it is visible that the sacred nature of space is a central feature that at the very least the analyzed poems of E. E. Cummings, and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor share. They both qualify on the basis of the fragmented nature of space, as well as on the basis of the basic and defining contrast between sacred sites and the rest of the urban sphere, as it has been shown in the previous chapters. In Hawksmoor, on top of that, the recreation of a cosmic order on Earth, Eliade’s third feature of sacred space, also appears.

If this was the only reason for considering their urban spaces sacred, however, one could easily argue that this similarity springs from the use of the same theory on both texts, and is not an internal quality of the texts themselves. Yet the numerous parallels, allusions and references in Cummings’ poetry to Biblical scenes, as well as the occult symbolism in Peter Ackroyd’s novel, together with sacrifices and ritualistic practices can easily convince the reader that this is not the case. It is not that a religious frame of interpretation is imposed on the two authors’ works from the outside, but quite the opposite: those texts call for a model that can account for manifestations of a sacred character. Likewise, although obviously the text of the analyzed writings is in the center of this study, and it is also of a higher importance than evidence of any other sort, one should not forget that in both cases there are corroborating statements or notes from the authors. Peter Ackroyd openly discusses in interviews his fascination with the sacred in his urban fiction, while E. E. Cummings’ fascination with Christian symbolism and his plans to make it appear in his own writing are supported by his available notes. And one could also mention that in Peter Ackroyd’s case, Alex Link’s (2003, 2004) alternative reading, based not on a sacred, but an abject city-space, is unsupported either by the text of the novel or the theory he applies.

In terms of the specific organization of space, it was possible to identify a set of heterotopic localities that organize and control the urban sphere both in E. E. Cummings’ poetry and in Peter Ackroyd’s novel. While the number of these locations is different (three for Cummings, seven for Ackroyd), it is important to note that both three (McSorley’s, Dick Mid’s Place and Hassan’s Place), as well as seven (the churches that appear in Hawksmoor) are magical numbers and could then easily fit into an occult/sacred interpretation. Three is, of all numbers, “probably the most important sacred number”{31} and is “also a basic number of myths, fairy tales and magical procedures,”{32} while seven “is the holy number of God’s manifestation in the world, as it is the sum of divine (3) and earthly (4) perfection”{33} (Hoppál et al. 2004; my translations). However, even beyond this common feature of those numbers being special ones, the very fact of sharing a small, limited number of locations that organize urban space would be a shared characteristic feature, regardless of the differing number of those locations.

As far as the specific functions of these heterotopic localities are considered, one can also find them at least partially similar. In both cases they allow for some kind of communication, or even travel, between the three zones of underworld, earth and heaven, and/or time travel. They also share their ability to bring together spaces, elements and symbols that would otherwise not be compatible with each other, and that they operate with restricted entry and are thus only accessible to the chosen ones.

Likewise, the two oeuvres share the fact that their urban spaces are mostly populated by misfits, outsiders, beggars, prostitutes and other downtrodden elements. This was tackled in detail in the analysis of the urban space of E. E. Cummings’ New York City. On the other hand, in the case of Hawksmoor, those characters appear too much part of the background to have warranted special analysis in my chapter on the London of the book. For Ackroyd, most of the action is focalized by the dual character of Nicholas Dyer/Nicholas Hawksmoor, and the former is certainly the one who is responsible for the organization of space. Nevertheless, in terms of populating that space, Hawksmoor shares its focus on the lowest layers of society with Cummings’ city poems. In other words, even if the importance of these characters is not the same in the two cases, they certainly share common characteristics, and come from the same background.

Finally, in both texts, the creation and functioning of sacred space is strongly bound to a central character, a savior-figure. For E. E. Cummings, the savior is the city herself, constantly sacrificing herself and getting resurrected or at least reborn. In Ackroyd’s novel, it is the architect, Nicholas Dyer, who becomes a savior, since he builds his churches to provide an escape route and save the city’s inhabitants from the trap of time. While doing this, both of them visibly rework the classical savior-figure of Jesus Christ into a more controversial and subversive one: E. E. Cummings into a sexualized female version, whereas Peter Ackroyd into an occultist mage, beyond the reach of any one religion, who sacrifices not himself, but seven virgin boys (or their symbolic equivalents) to absolve his followers.

As for the possible reasons behind these similarities, one can mention, for example, their common affiliation with Modernism. This, however, at first might seem a surprising statement since one of the authors is a contemporary one, usually listed amongst the most eminent representatives of postmodern historiographic metafiction. It is enough to think of statements like these: “many of Ackroyd’s texts draw on post-structuralist theories to interrogate the nature of their own language” (Rosenstock 2007, 147), “[the novel] is a postmodern reworking of certain basic assumptions underlying modern thought” (Smethurst 2000, 181), or even “Ackroyd is the Tory postmodernist” (Levenson 1993, 32).

Yet, there are good reasons to think of Peter Ackroyd in terms of Modernism, rather than Postmodernism (or post-structuralism). One could start by remembering the author’s professed anti-Postmodern stance. Whenever he is asked in an interview about his affiliation with this movement or identified by the interviewer as one of its iconical figures, he fervently denies it and to some extent even doubts its very existence:

What you call poststructuralism is part of the native English sensibility. Its [sic] not some new invention. Hawksmoor, for example, would devise a Gothic, Baroque or Romanesque faade [sic] and the employer would choose one to be built up. That sort of playing with styles and almost historical parodies is very much part of the English native genius. Its [sic] not something that emerged twenty or thirty years ago. (Vékony 1997, 241)

He even goes on to claim that it is “absurd to label or to create a whole new discipline called postmodernism or poststructuralism out of what is a very fundamental, intrinsic and continuous aspect of literature” (242). In another interview, when asked by Susana Onega (1996) about his mixing of high and low, he also claimed that this has “nothing really to do with postmodernism” (218).

Yet, his own statements in interviews are by far not the only evidence for such a possible connection. The biographies Peter Ackroyd has written also show his fascination with American Modernism. He devoted a volume to the lives of two of its most iconical figures: Ezra Pound (Ezra Pound and His World) and T. S. Eliot (T. S. Eliot). Even more importantly, however, at the beginning of his career, he wrote a theoretical treatise that professes an affiliation with the Modernists even in its very title: Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (1976). In fact, so much so that in it he claims that it is a “polemic” (9) with the academic and literary life of the seventies in Britain. As Brian Finney (1992) summarizes:

He […] deplores the English subscription to a great tradition of literature (as defined by Leavis) built on a conventional aesthetic which rests on key notions of “subjectivity” and “experience.” This old humanistic belief in the referential instrumentality of language, Ackroyd argues, was replaced by the modernist aesthetic. “Modernism is the movement in which created form began to interrogate itself, and to move toward an impossible union with itself in self-identity. […] Language is seen to constitute meaning only within itself, and to excise the external references of subjectivity and its corollary, Man” (Ackroyd 1976, 145). But England has insulated itself from “that formal self-criticism and theoretical debate which sustained European modernism” (147). (Finney 1992, 241)

His active theoretical engagement with the issues and working philosophy of Modernism he shares, in fact, with E. E. Cummings who tackled the background and the importance of what he termed as “New Art” in his graduation piece by the same title: in this piece he hails the new tendencies for, in them, “we seem to discern something beyond the conventional” (Cummings 1965, 8) or the “triumph of line for line’s sake over realism” (6) while venturing on “a courageous and genuine exploration of untrodden ways” (11).

In fact, even if Peter Ackroyd is sometimes routinely listed amongst Postmodernists, and interpreted in harmony with such an understanding, his association with Modernism has been noted by some of his interpreters. Aleid Fokkema (1993), for example, mentions that in Hawksmoor, “Hawksmoor and Dyer have a vision of eternity that is interesting for its echo of T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton” (173) and emphasizes that “referring to the later Eliot is relevant beyond the game of postmodern intertextuality; it supplies the text with a concept of time that will only become more prominent in the course of Ackroyd’s work” (174). Likewise, Ana Sentov (2009) stresses that although “[o]ne of the features of postmodern novels is to organise narrative time in non-linear fashion and to present the story line as fragmented and disrupted,” the very same “has been a feature of modernist fiction as well” (123). And in a similar, very cautious fashion, Jean Ganteau (2000) claims that if Ackroyd’s fiction is to be taken as Postmodern, “it is a brand of postmodernism which does not reject the cultural past and acknowledges its link with the modernist canon” (41). Perhaps Sebastian Groes (2012) goes the furthest when he claims, just as the present book does, that “[r]ather than categorizing Ackroyd as a postmodernist, it would seem more apt to call him a late modernist who aligns himself with repressed intellectual traditions” (130).

What makes this strong affiliation with Modernism important for the purposes of this dissertation is that it can potentially explain the similarities between the urban spaces of E. E. Cummings’ poetry and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor not only indirectly, as a common cultural context, but even directly, since Modernism can be said to have its own way of thinking about space. As Stephen Kern (1983) explains, “From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinct new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space” (1). In the period, various thinkers and artists “challenged the popular notion that [space] was homogeneous and argued for its heterogeneity” (132), and claimed the “social relativity” of its experience (137). Likewise, in the same period, Elie de Cyon and Jacob von Uexküll were actively discussing the possibilities of parallel worlds and more dimensions:

[Cyon’s] hypothesis was that the sense of space is rooted in the semicircular canals of the ear. Animals with two canals experience only two dimensions and those with one canal are oriented in one. Humans experience three dimensions, because they have three canals set in perpendicular planes, and three-dimensional Euclidean space corresponds to the physiological space determined by the orientation of these canals. […]

Uexküll modified and extended Cyon’s theory to the entire animal kingdom and concluded that the sense of space of all animals, however rudimentary, varied with their unique physiology. […] Among the throng of worlds and living spaces, he speculated, there may also be higher worlds of greater dimensions that we are unable to see, as the amoeba is unable to see the stars in our sky. (136-7)

And modern physics basically agreed with this as a result of Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity: “there is an infinite number of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each other” (Einstein 1961, 139 qtd. in Kern 1983, 136). Beyond more, possibly unknown dimensions, the multiplicity and subjectivity of spaces, the idea of space being discontinuous and fragmented also appears: “The truth, the real, the universe, life […] breaks up into innumerable facets and vertices, each of which presents a face to an individual” (Ortega y Gasset 1916, 116 qtd. in Kern 1983, 151), with “Cubism as a reflection of the fragmented space of the modern age” (Kern 1983, 148).

Some of these claims sound as familiar as if they were direct quotes from the works of the two authors in question. It is enough to recall Cummings’ fragmented city spaces in poems such as “[writhe and]” with its “tortured / perspective,” “splintered / normality” or “sag of planes” (Cummings 1994, 61), or “[i was sitting in mcsorley's.      outside it was New York and beauti-]” with its “creases” (110). Likewise, such statements in Ackroyd’s novel are exemplified by Nicholas Dyer’s claim of seeing the town being “broken into Peeces” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 10) or by a church that “ceased to be one large building and became a number of separate places” (28). In a similar way, the existence of dimensions beyond those directly available and apparent is reflected in Dyer’s many references to people’s unawareness of “the vast Gulph and frightful Abyss of Darknesse beneath them” (14) and his very project to provide a gateway to escape from everyday existence. What is more, he even talks about “so many Worlds hanging above one another, moving peacefully and quietly round their Axles” (134). In Cummings’ oeuvre, Death appearing in McSorley’s Pub, or the fact that the citizens are not aware of the existence of the town as a woman, the body of whom they are constituent parts, are easily available examples of one or more dimensions being available beyond those visible and available to citizens appearing in the poems.

The Modernist idea of architecture is a related concept that appears in both of the two oeuvres. Instead of engineers creating frames or structures around space imagined as a void, they appear as sculptors of space with a physical existence. As Stephen Kern (1983) explains:

around the turn of the century architects began to modify the way they conceived of space in relation to their constructions. Whereas formerly they tended to think of space as a negative element between the positive elements of floors, ceilings, and walls, in this period they began to consider space itself as a positive element, and they began to think in terms of composing with “space” rather than with differently shaped “rooms.” (155)

It is easy to see a striking similarity between this and Nicholas Dyer’s identification of “the art of Shaddowes” as “the Heart of our Designe” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 5) instead of talking about walls, arches and other similar structural elements. Likewise, he finds it important to emphasize that his underground chamber will be “sollid only in those parts that beare weight” (24), opening up the rest for his spatial creation, rendering the built part secondary to the space within. There is, of course, no architect in Cummings’ poems who could talk about his building philosophy, yet there are examples of buildings described in terms of their use of space, rather than in terms of their building materials or structure. In the poem, “[structure,miraculous challenge,devout am],” the building is described as “upward deep most invincible unthing / —stern sexual timelessness” (Cummings 1994, 352), where the word “unthing” has the connotation of a lack of solidity typical of space (as opposed to walls), while depth is also a spatial term. Likewise, in “[writhe and],” the city is not described in terms of its substance, but its use of space:  there is absolutely no reference to stone, steel, concrete or other materials, while spatial and visual expressions are used in abundance: the poem describes “tortured / perspective,” talks of the “crackle and / sag / of planes” and shows “the young city / putting off dimension” (61).

However, not only did the Modernist conception of architecture include the idea that the architect is a sculptor of space rather than an engineer of structures, but also the principle that buildings actively influence a person’s mental and emotional state. “In 1903 [Theodor] Lipps argued that our bodies unconsciously empathize with architectural forms. […] In 1914 [Geoffrey] Scott elaborated an ‘architecture of humanism’ based on this theory. Architects project human feelings into a building, and it in turn impresses viewers with an immediate physical response” (Kern 1983, 157). The building philosophy of the Nicholas Dyer appear to be virtually the same: he explains that “[b]y day [his] House of Lime will catch and intangle all those who come near to it; by Night it will be one vast Mound of Shaddowe and Mistinesse, the effect of many Ages before History” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 63). And this is not the only occasion of him discussing the effects his churches have on the person entering them or merely observing them:

look upon my Churches in the Spittle-fields, in Limehouse, and now in the Parish of Wapping Stepney, and do you not wonder why they lead you into a darker World which on Reflection you know to be your own? Every Patch of Ground by them has its Hypochondriack Distemper and Disorder; every Stone of them bears the marks of Scorching by which you may follow the true Path of God. (102)

In other words, the architect aims at a distinctly puzzling and disturbing effect leading to the spectator reflecting on the human condition and potentially finding the path opened up by the churches. It is thus not a pleasant and satisfying effect he aims to create: “regard my Churches and the way their Shaddowes fall upon the Ground; look up at them, also, and see if you are not brought into Confusion” (102). Of course, in the case of Cummings’ poems, the situation is once again similar to that explained in the previous paragraph: there is no architect to explain the workings of buildings, so one can only find examples of the description of actual locations to support their conformity to the tenet of Lipps and Scott. It is possible to think of the lines “of this wilting wall the colour drub / souring sunbeams” (Cummings 1994, 131) in these terms. Another such example is provided by the first four and a half lines of the poem “[between nose-red gross]”:

between nose-red gross

walls       sprawling with tipsy

tables the abominable

floor belches smoky

laughter (80)

Whereas in the first case, the color of the wall drubs even sunbeams into a sour unhappyness, in this second one, the place has such a strong atmosphere that it basically “belches” laughter. Or one can also read of houses whose “chimneys converse / angrily,their / roofs are nervous with the soft furious / light” (101).

At the same time, Peter Ackroyd and E. E. Cummings may share more in their world view and belief system than a common affinity with Modernism, including its spatial thought: both of them are routinely identified (and to some extent even self-identified) as conservatives and traditionalists. Discussing another of Peter Ackroyd’s novels, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, Brett Josef Grubisic (2001) talks of the book’s “decidedly non-Marxist version of London history” (131). Jeffrey W. Roessner (1998) goes even further in claiming that in reaction “to the perceived threat of an increasingly diverse, multi-cultural society, Ackroyd spatializes British literary tradition in an attempt to recuperate the cultural legacy of the white English male” (93). Finally, Alex Murray (2007) uses similarly strong terms in his judgment of the author’s oeuvre: “the politics of historical representation in Ackroyd’s fiction are inherently conservative, with historical events, periods and personages trapped in a narrative form of spectacular historical echolalia” (21). In a similar vein, E. E. Cummings, at least in the later part of his career, could be taken for a conservative poet. As Milton Cohen (2007) explains:

over the course of his career, Cummings evolved from the playful enfant terrible of the 1920s, who valued openminded, independent thought above all and who naughtily resisted all forms of the conventional thinking, to the embattled iconoclast of the 1930s, who reacted with increasing bitterness and dogmatism to being displaced from the avant garde by Leftist critics, to the rigid, dogmatic curmudgeon of the late years, whose reductive world view grew increasingly solipsistic (87).

In fact, his conservativism went as far as to support McCarthyism, or to talk of America being “leftist (“pink”) and “liberal,” (as well as effeminate), even though a Republican administration had just been re-elected” (86).

This conservative stance gets relevant in terms of the urban sphere of their works, once one realizes that the sacred nature of that sphere seems to be in direct opposition to their above mentioned propagation of Modernist spatiality. After all, the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is also the time of “the collapse of traditional faith” leading to a radical change in the organization of space: “The most material consequence of the loss [of the validity of traditional Western values] was a blurring of the distinction between the sacred space of the temple and the profane space outside” (Kern 1983, 179). That is to say, in this respect, Cummings and Ackroyd seem to be affiliated rather with “the rear-guard of the avant-garde” (Sharifi 2007): authors who, at least in one or two issues, support older models of thinking and representation than their more revolutionary contemporaries. As Kern (1983) mentions, there were some Modernists who “found the prospect of such a disappearance [of God] intolerable and struggled to create a new relation between man and God,” and this way “avoided nihilistic despair and learned to create their own sanctuaries” (179).

Such a strategy, creating a new sense of the sacred in face of the crumbling of the primacy of the traditional Christian sacrality of the West fits almost seamlessly into the reception of Peter Ackroyd’s writing. Martina Vránová (2010), for example, discusses a similar strategy in connection with history: “If in the postmodern world there are no objectively existing patterns of human existence, people have to make some for themselves, which is what Ackroyd does with his theory of the course of history. He invents an ontological frame” (12). This view, in different terms, is shared by Natalie Taylor (2006):

His exploration of the interpenetration of times and traditions repeatedly moves towards a mystical vision that is undercut even as it is offered as a possibility. In his work, he expresses a “yearning for mythical closure,” imaged, for example, in his treatment of London as a “mystic center of power”; yet he is intent on demonstrating the “constructedness” of world, text, writer and reader (Onega 1996, 208). (Taylor 1996, 100)

The strategy that is used for preserving the sacred, and its spatiality, in Hawksmoor, is to go beyond the confines of any one religious frame of reference, since each and any of these can be proved to have internal contradictions and claims that are not compatible with the Modernist philosophies that appear in the novel, and to create a new one above and beyond them. Thus, the poem recited in the novel by Nicholas Dyer is not only his own, personal statement of occult belief, but also a manifesto of the novel’s conception of the sacred: “Pluto, Jehova, Satan, Dagon, Love, / Moloch, the Virgin, Thetis, Devil, Jove, / Pan, Jahweh, Vulcan, he with th’awfull Rod, / Jesus, the wondrous Straw Man, all one God” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 21-2). This is, in fact, in harmony with the author’s statement on his views of religion: “I ceased practising when I was about eighteen, but that, what you might call religious awareness, never leaves you. So, you are always confronted with spiritual realities rather than material realities” (Vékony 1997, 241). In other words, no religious system is kept, only a sense of the sacred, a general experience common to all systems of belief. What takes the place of a specific religion in providing the “spiritual realities” behind the novel’s sacred spaces is a meta-religion.

Although, as it has already been pointed out, E. E. Cummings’ New York City also mixes some transcendental and animistic features with an otherwise predominantly Christian symbolism, the strategy followed in order to save the experience of sacred space in a Modernist oeuvre is fundamentally different. What one encounters here is not the creation of a meta-religious mixture of all religions that is beyond, or outside, the range of Modernist theories, but rather a revalorization of otherwise profane spaces. As Stephen Kern (1983) explains:

some people avoided nihilistic despair and learned to create their own sanctuaries. This was to be the great creative effort of the overmen, the artists and the intellectuals who affirmed life and learned to love their fate in the face of the void. If there are no holy temples, any place can become sacred; if there are no consecrated materials, then ordinary sticks and stones must do, and the artist alone can make them sacred. (179)

And this is exactly what happens in Cummings’ urban poetry. The three locations that serve as the temples that organize sacred space in his poetry are two bars (McSorley’s and Hassan’s) and a brothel (Dick Mid’s), Jesus appears on the street, Death in the already mentioned bar, and these are just a few examples.

A specific, and important, manifestation of the two authors’ conservative leanings is their professed reliance on and indebtedness to great works and authors of literary tradition. Peter Ackroyd, in his already mentioned denial of the existence of the postmodern, for example, emphasizes that what people, in his opinion mistakenly, call postmodern is “a reassertion of something that has been very much part of the English tradition for a thousand years” (Vékony 1997, 242; emphasis his), and when he is asked of specific techniques and devices, such as the mixing of styles, he claims that not only is this something very traditional, but starts listing the names of iconical predecessors in that technique: “Voltaire accused Shakespeare of not being serious because he went from tragedy to farce in the same scene. Also in the case of Dickens there is a streaky beacon effect where youve [sic] got pathos and pantomime, satire and tragedy in the space of a page” (242). Similarly, even in his already mentioned celebration of Modern art, Cummings focuses primarily on the connection of the new with the old, and tries to convince his audience about the fact that whatever is new in art is but a logical continuation of the old. He emphasizes that although the “New Art has many branches” one can certainly say that “[i]n each of these there is a clearly discernible evolution from models” (Cummings 1965, 5), and he compares a sonnet by Donald Evans to “Dante’s expressions of a precisely similar nature, occurring in the first and fifth cantos” (9). In discussing Gertrude Stein, instead of talking about unheard of new techniques, he talks of a traditional device, “literary sound painting carried to its extreme” (10). And finally he concludes that what one sees is an “unbroken chain of artistic development” (10) that “disproves the theory that modernism is without foundation” (11).

This shared respect for tradition, the canon and older generations of artists gains a particularly revealing light once one realizes that some of the literary influences may bring their own spatial structure with them. There is some mention of this in various analyses of Peter Ackroyd’s fiction. Discussing The House of Doctor Dee, for example, Natalie Taylor (2006) discusses the indebtedness of the text’s urban spaces both to William Blake’s poetry (114-9) and to St Tereza of Avila’s The Interior Castle. Aleid Fokkema (1993) likewise talks about Hawksmoor’s city being modeled, at least partially, on T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton and Little Gidding (173-7). Unfortunately, there is close to no information about this in E. E. Cummings’ case, the only such connection that I am aware of is mentioned above in my analysis: some of his poems seem to share their view on the city with the poems of Walt Whitman. This, of course, means that, as yet, there is not enough information about the pretexts of the two authors’ urban writing to say with certainty that some of the similarities are due to a spatial organization shared by some of their literary models, or due to their models being the same. Yet, such a possibility is, at the very least, not inconceivable.

Finally, one should not completely exclude the possibility that the similarity of urban space springs from the very fact that in both cases one deals with works with a heavy presence of sacred symbolism. After all, Mircea Eliade ([1957] 1965) set up his model of sacred space on the basis of a comparative analysis of religious experiences all around the world, and thus one can safely postulate that the type of spatiality he discusses appears in all cases when one faces either sacred experience or sacred symbolism. It is therefore logical to connect at least part of the similarity to the two works’ shared use of religious symbolism. Yet, one should not attribute too great a share to this explanation for several reasons.

First of all, if this was the only reason for a similar spatial structure, there would be no point in comparing the two authors’ texts: any two texts that are built on a sacred symbolism can be expected, on the basis of the above logic, to conform to the spatial organization postulated by Eliade and show the exact same spatial organization. A venture in showing that two freely chosen texts do so would be little else than proving the theory correct.

Further, the theory, in the actual analyses above, was proven useful and productive, yet is too vague and general to attribute for all the common features of urban space identified. Using only this framework of analysis, one could not go any further than recognizing a basic contrast of sacred and profane space, the fragmented nature of spatial experience, and the (re)modeling of the cosmos on Earth. This issue, in fact, was mentioned in the relevant chapters, and the theory was therefore accordingly extended by other ones.

And finally, having chosen the theory of sacred spaces as one of the tools to analyze the spatiality of the novels, and then attributing all commonalities to the fact their space is sacred would be an example of circular reasoning where one claims that the two texts are similar and the shared feature is their sacred symbolism, then claims that they share a sacred symbolism and this makes them similar.

In other words, while the fact that both authors use a sacred symbolism, and through that a sacred structure of space, it is not sufficient to explain all the similarities, much less the extent of the similarity. It is possible to show, however, that this factor indeed contributes to the organization of urban space in both cases, and thus plays a role in some of the more general features shared.

In sum, one can say that the poetry of E. E. Cummings and Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd share a number of distinct features in their urban space, and this can be attributed to two main factors. While they are from different periods and different countries and there is probably no provable direct influence between the two of them, they share a fascination with the sacred, and they are both affiliated with a somewhat conservative and traditionalist variety of Modernism (Cummings directly, and Ackroyd by association of his own choice). As it was shown above, both of these two characteristic features lead to certain types of spatiality with their own specificities that are parallel with those shown by the texts in question, and thus might account for them. That is to say, the common spatial structure exhibited by the poems and the novel is not a matter of coincidence, but is a result of the type of symbolism used, the texts’ cultural context, as well as the two authors’ conservative world view.

5. Conclusion

Although deep structural parallels between the urban spatial structures of E. E. Cummings’ New York City and Peter Ackroyd’s London seem at first sight unexpected, it was possible to show that they nevertheless exist. More importantly, these common features are not the results of coincidence, but have to do with the two authors’ similar relations to cultural and literary tradition, as well as religion and the sacred.

Through its analyses the present monograph radically resituates the poet E. E. Cummings by calling attention to the importance of Christian symbolism in his oeuvre, and thus contesting the primacy and virtual exclusivity of a transcendental/Zen-Buddhist understanding. Likewise, by focusing on the author’s almost completely ignored and marginalized urban poems, it helps in creating a more complex image of him, leaving behind the reductionist paradigm of Cummings as the lyricist of love, Spring and eternal happiness through individualism. This may, in turn, also help in slowly changing his reputation as a repetitive, unchanging and sentimental, thus second-rate author, a poet with a few first rate poems and an otherwise dull oeuvre. By providing a glimpse into one of the many areas of E. E. Cummings’ art that does not fit into the said sentimental/lyrical pattern it reveals that the seeming uniformity of his work is much more the result of a “critical misreading” by scholars devoted to his oeuvre than an actual feature of his artistic output.

Unlike E. E. Cummings, Peter Ackroyd is canonized as an author, or maybe even the author of London. Yet, paradoxically, although this opinion seems to be an axiom of interpretation, surprisingly few works are devoted to this topic as such. In other words, by examining an issue that seems to be the cornerstone of Ackroyd’s fictional world and is yet not so much investigated as merely acknowledged, it again contributes to a better and fuller understanding, even if not to such a radical extent as with the oeuvre of E. E. Cummings. At the same time, by postulating an alternative, sacred spatial structure for London’s urban space, it provides a model that fits better into the critical reception of the author’s work than that based on Alex Link’s Marxist reading of a supposedly abject city space.

As it was shown, the common framework of modernism (in one case a natural context, in the other an actively pursued affinity) through its specific thinking about time and space, together with the two authors’ conservative and traditionalist views, including their emphasis on a continuous and active literary tradition, are likely reasons for the commonalities of the spatial structures found. In addition, both E. E. Cummings’ poetry and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor are full of a religious symbolism that brings its own spatial structure with it. Finally, the possibility of the same literary works influencing both authors, although it is not examined in this work, cannot be excluded either.

The analysis of E. E. Cummings’ urban poetry showed a cartographically limited representation of New York City. All the locations that appear in the texts are inner-city locations, mostly in Manhattan and often in Greenwich Village. The amount of places that can be precisely located and identified, however, is even more limited, as only rarely are streets, squares, parks, buildings, bars and other locations named in the poems.

An even smaller set of loci function as heterotopic portals organizing the space of the city. These three places – McSorley’s Pub, Dick Mid’s Brothel and Hassan’s Place –bring together otherwise incompatible spaces, as well as the zones of heaven, earth and underground, and provide a channel of communication, and possibly travel between them. Controlling an otherwise sacred spatial order, these could be taken for temples; a surprising feature for locations traditionally associated with anything but supernatural experience or sacrality. The contrast is even stronger once one takes into consideration the people populating the city, but above all these very places: drunkards, prostitutes, gangsters and other criminals, and other lowly elements. Yet Death and Jesus both walk amongst, and even possibly converse with, those present.

The city itself appears as a living organism, or to be more precise a human being, and a woman at that. This woman, New York City, turns out to be a savior figure who goes through the stages of the life of Jesus Christ and daily sacrifices herself for the city’s inhabitants only to get reborn/resurrected at the break of dawn. At the same time the city is not described as an untouchable, distant divinity, but as a flesh and blood sensuous woman, at points appearing in genuinely erotic or even sexual contexts.

As for Peter Ackroyd’s London in Hawksmoor, the places mentioned in the text are similarly limited to the city center, this time to the North Bank of the River Thames. Space shows a basically sacred organization here, as well, organized around a set of not three but seven central locations. Similarly to Cummings’ bars, these also act as heterotopic locations bringing together otherwise incompatible spaces and time frames and ending up (and here also planned as) portals in time, space or space-time, depending on the interpretation. It is the architect, Nicholas Dyer, who appears as a savior-figure, building the churches as an escape route from the confines of human life. Although he creates this complex set of portals, mirroring the seven stars of the Pleiades on Earth, to be able to escape himself, he also leaves hidden signs and messages for his potential followers and offers to save them from their destiny through his example and his human sacrifices.

The common features of the urban space of E. E. Cummings’ New York City and Peter Ackroyd’s London (as it appears in Hawksmoor) are thus their limited cartographical coverage, their sacred nature and their being organized around a set of heterotopic locations functioning as portals in space, time or space-time. In addition, this organization is linked to a savior-figure who appears to be a subversive reworking of Jesus Christ in both cases.

While these results are interesting in their own right, the question of a possible broadening or continuation of research inevitably arises. No research is ever completely finished, much less perfect and without gaps and possible internal contradictions. This book is no exception: it is but a snapshot taken at a given point, saying what can be claimed with some probability at that moment. Thus, I try to provide a list of possible lines of development and related areas worth examining.

As far as the poetry of E. E. Cummings is concerned, the sampling of poetry represents more or less the whole of the poetic oeuvre, including poems not originally published in a volume-format, so the way ahead in terms of the poetry would be intensive rather than extensive. There would be a need to go through the remaining poems listed in Appendix 4 to see to what extent they fit into the established model, and in what way they would modify it. It would also be interesting and useful to compare the spatial representation used in the poems with those in his prose and his dramas. One could also imagine a comparison of New York’s urban space with those of the other two significant cities of his oeuvre: Boston and Paris. And maybe a comparison of his urban poetry with his rural texts from the perspective of space could also prove to be a fruitful undertaking.

In Peter Ackroyd’s case, Hawksmoor is admittedly overrepresented in the interpretive and critical practice, and this dissertation does not change this trend in any way. There would be a need thus to take a look at the author’s other London novels, such as The House of Doctor Dee and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, and see to what extent, if at all, the findings of this thesis are applicable to them. A comparison with First Light could also turn out to be a revelative venture. Although that novel takes place in the countryside, it even more openly discusses issues of time and space than Hawksmoor or the author’s other urban novels. In order to be able to establish to what extent this urban structure is unique to Peter Ackroyd’s fiction and/or his traditionalist and modernist leanings and to what extent it is shared by other contemporary London writers there would also be a need to compare his city spaces to those of Iain Sinclair, Jonathan Raban, China Mieville, Doris Lessing and others.

Of course, I do not claim that either of these lists is complete and exhaustive, nor do I plan to pursue all (or even most) of these fields of research all by myself in the future. It is just an attempt at showing what I see as possible routes forward. This list, however, illustrates rather well how productive research in the urban space of these authors can be, and to what extent it is related to their oeuvre, as well as to issues of canonization and context. It is on this note that I stop, rather than finish, writing this work.

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Appendix 1: A List of Cummings’ Words Presumably Used in an Urban Context

Names of Towns:

Aberdeen, Babylon, Bagdad, Boston, Cairo, Cambridge, Chicago/Shikahgo, Cincinnati, Duluth, Gainsborough, Lisboa, London/Lundun, Marathon, Moscow, Murano, New Orleans, New York/NY, Nineveh, Paris, Roma/Rome, Salo, San Francisco, St Louis, Thermopylae, Troy, Venezia, Wadsworth, Washington, Yonkers, York

Types of Settlements:

city, town

Specific, Named Parts of Towns or Buildings:

Broadway, Bronx, Parthenon, Coney [Island], Montparnasse, Woolworth [Building]

Numbers of New York’s Streets and Avenues:

3rd, 4th, fifth, sixth, 7th, eighth, ninth, tenth, 14th, nineteenth, twentieth, 33rd

Public Space and Its Components:

alley, aqueduct, avenue, bath/bath-house, boulevard/boollevares, bridge, curb, dam, drive, flag, fountain, grave, graveyard, harbour, lamp, loo, monument, outside, park, path, pavement, paytoilet, pissoir, place, port, quai, river, road, roadside, sidewalk, sign, sink, square, statue, street, street-lamp, toilet, tomb/tombstone, unstreet, urinal, wc, zone

Transportation:

accident, brake, car, carburetor, coach, crash, el [i.e. elevated railway], Ford, gondola, locomotive, motor, piston, radiator, rail, Royce, streetcar, subway, taxi, taximan, traffic, train, transport, trolley, tunnel, waggon/wagon

Surveillance, Power and Crime:

Bentham, cop, criminal, fireman, gang, gangster, police, policeman, prison, prisoner, protest, stalk, thief

Art and Music:

bassoon, bell, carnival, dance, entertain, fireworks, guitar, hand organ/handorgan, harmonica, harpsichord, hurdy gurdy/hurdy-gurdy/hurdygurdy/hurdysturdy, jazz, juke, mandolin, movie, museum, music, musician, newsreel, organ, percussion, phonograph/funnygraph, piano, pianola, podia, radio/raddio, record, saxophonic, shimmy, singer, spectator, stage, tambourine, theatre, tom-tom, vaudeville, Victrola, violin, waltz, waxworks, zither

Restaurants, Hostelry and Nightlife:

ale, bar, beer, billiard, bottle, cafe, card, cigar, cigarette, club, coffee, condom, corkscrew, cup, dart, domino, drink, drug, drunk, flask, host, hostess, hotel, headwaiter, lovehouse, madam/madame, match, McSorley’s [Old Ale House], [Dick] Mid’s [Brothel], mug, napkin, opium, peanut, prostitute, restaurant, Ritz, roasted, salad, shishkabob, slut, soup, spaghetti, spangle, speakeasies/eakspeasies, steak, strip, Strunsky’s [Apartments], tobacco, vacancy, vermouth, vino, waiter, whiskey, whore, wine

Health, Hygiene and Smell:

aborted, barber, bedbug, belch, bug, dirt, dust, fart, filth, flea, gonorrhea, insect, laundry, lice, muddy, Novocaine, odor/odour, pest, piss, puddle, puke, putrescence, putrid, rag, razor/razorblade/safetyrazor, reeking, rotten, rubbish, scent, shit, stain, stench, stink, syphilis, toothless, turd, vomit

Building Materials and Decoration:

cement, concrete, chrome, glass, marble, metal, mosaic, paint, plastic, and steel. Nor about furniture, decorative objects and household appliances: alarm/alarm-clock, bulb, carpet, chair, cooler, couch, curtain, drawer, furniture, hatrack, pillow, seat, stool, swivelchair, table, typewriter, vase

Parts of Buildings:

attic, bedroom, chimney, column, corner/cornerless, crack, dome, door, doorway, edge, elevator, escape/fire-escapes, exit, flight, floor, garden, gate, kitchen/kitchenette, lift, mantelpiece, pane, pillar, pipe, pool, portal, roof, room, spire, stairs, steeple, steps, stone, tower, tube, upstairs, verand, wall, watertank, window, window-sill

Business and Industry:

business, electric, file, forge, gas, hammer, industry, Lloyd’s, machine, manikins/mannikins, mechanical, mill/windmill, millstone, mine, oil, optics, shop, smoke, steam, store

Abstract Concepts:

architecture, address, cluttered, delapidation, height, light, locked, map, modern, papery, plane, solid, space, structure, supercolossal, transparent, vacuum, vastness, vertical

Types of Buildings:

building, home, house, inhabited, labyrinth, skyscraper, tenement, villa

People (Not Mentioned Above):

beggar, bum, citizen, crowd, habitue, inhabitant, mass, miser, mob/mobsucking, multitude, neighbor/neighbour, paperboy, parvenu, poor, public, salesman, shop-girl, stranger, tailor, tumult, visitor, workingman

Pets and Related Terms:

birdcage, canary, cat, dog, goldfish/gold-fish, kitten and puppy

Education:

college, Harvard, westpointer, Yale

Religious Architecture:

cathedral, church

Other:

erect, flicker, ground, laughter, mid-Victorian, mile, narrow, newspaper, noise, roaring, rod, scraggy, shimmering, slum, speech, spirit, stride/strode, stub, telescope, toboggan, trod, vicinity, Victorian, wander, worn

Appendix 2: A Revised List of Cummings’ Words Used in an Urban Context

Names of Towns:

Boston, Cambridge, Chicago/Shikahgo, Lisboa, Lundun, New York, Nooer Leans, Paris, Rome, San Fran[cisco], Sain Looey, Venezia

Types of Settlements:

city, town

Specific, Named Parts of Towns or Buildings:

Broadway, Bronx, Parthenon, Coney [Island], Woolworth [Building]

Numbers of New York’s Streets and Avenues:

4th, fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, 14th

Public Space and Its Components:

alley, avenue, bath/bath-house, boulevard/boollevares, bridge, curb, fountain, grave, harbour, lamp, monument, outside, park, pissoir, place, quai, river, road, roadside, sidewalk, sign, square, street, street-lamp, toilet, urinal

Transportation:

accident, car, coachman, crash, gondola, rail, Royce, subway, taxi, taximan, traffic, train, trolley, tunnel, wagon

Surveillance, Power and Crime:

cop, fireman, gang, policeman, prison, prisoner

Art and Music:

bell, dance, entertain, handorgan, harmonica, harpsichord, hurdy gurdy/hurdy-gurdy/hurdygurdy/hurdysturdy, mandolin, music, percussion, phonograph/funnygraph, piano, pianola, record, stage, theatre, tom-tom, violin, waltz, zither

Restaurants, Hostelry and Nightlife:

ale, bar, beer, billiard, bottle, cafe, card, cigar, cigarette, coffee, cup, drink, drunk, flask,  hotel, headwaiter, lovehouse, madam/madame, McSorley’s [Old Ale House], [Dick] Mid’s [Brothel], mug, napkin, peanut, prostitute, restaurant, salad, shishkabob, spaghetti, spangle, eakspeasies, Strunsky’s [Apartments], vermouth, vino, waiter, whiskey, whore, wine

Health, Hygiene and Smell:

barber, bedbug, belch, dirt, dust/sawdust/saw-dust, filth, flea, insect, laundry, lice, mud,  odor/odour, puddle, puke, putrescence, putrid, rag, rubbish, shit, stain, stink, toothless, vomit

Building Materials and Decoration:

chrome, glass, paint, plastic

Furniture, Decorative Objects and Household Appliances:

carpet, chair, couch, curtain, drawer, pillow, table

Parts of Buildings:

attic, bedroom, chimney, corner, dome, door, edge, elevator, fire-escape, flight, floor, garden, gate, kitchen/kitchenette, mantelpiece, pane, roof, room, spire, stairs, steeple, steps, stone, tower, tube, upstairs, wall, window

Business and Industry:

electric, gas, hammer, industry, mechanical, smoke, store

Abstract Concepts:

cluttered, delapidation, height, inhabit, locked, plane, structure, vertical

Types of Buildings:

building, home, house, labyrinth, skyscraper, tenement

People (Not Mentioned Above):

beggar, bum, citizen, crowd, habitué, mob, multitude, paperboy, salesman, shop-girl, stranger,  workingman

Pets and Related Terms:

cat, dog, goldfish/gold-fish, puppy

Education:

Harvard

Religious Architecture:

cathedral, church

Other:

flicker, ground, laughter, mid-Victorian, mile, narrow, noise, roaring, rod, stub, wander

Appendix 3: A Preliminary List of Cummings’ Urban Poems

[?]

[16 heures]

[5]

[a]

[a blue woman with sticking out breasts hanging]

[A chilly,murky night;]

[a connotation of infinity]

[a fragrant sag of fruit distinctly grouped.]

[a he as o]

[a man who had fallen among thieves]

[a round face near the top of the stairs]

[Above a between-the-acts prattling of]

After Seeing French Funeral

[a)glazed mind layed in a]

[along the brittle treacherous bright streets]

[a(ncient)a]

[And this day it was Spring.... us]

[as one who(having written]

[(as that named Fred]

[as usual i did not find him in cafes, the more dissolute atmosphere]

[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-]

[at the head of this street a gasping organ is waving moth-eaten]

[b]

[between nose-red gross]

[between the breasts]

[beyond the brittle towns asleep]

[buncha hardboil guys frum duh A.C. fulla]

[but observe;although]

[but the other]

[by god i want above fourteenth]

[come from his gal’s]

[curtains part)]

[dawn]

[Dick Mid’s large bluish face without eyebrows]

[dim]

[even if all desires things moments be]

[first she like a piece of ill-oiled]

[Float]

Fran

[“Gay” is the captivating cognomen of a Young Woman of cambridge,mass.]

Gert

[---GON splashes-sink]

[goodby Betty,don’t remember me]

[helves surling out of eakspeasies per(reel)hapsingly]

[hips lOOsest OOping shoulders blonde& pastoral hair,strong]

[how this uncouth enchanted]

[i go to this window]

[i met a man under the moon]

[I remark this beach has been used too.        much Too.         originally]

[i walked the boulevard]

[i was sitting in mcsorley’s.      outside it was New York and beauti-]

[i’d think “wonder]

[if within tonight’s erect]

[In Healey’s Palace I was sitting---]

[in Just-]

[in making Marjorie god hurried]

[in the rain-]

[infinite jukethrob smoke & swallow to dis]

[inthe,exquisite]

Item

[it is winter a moon in the afternoon]

[it started when Bill’s chip let on to]

[it’s just like a coffin’s]

[jack’s white horse(up]

[“kitty”. sixteen, 5’1”,white, prostitute.]

[ladies and gentlemen this little girl]

[(let us tremble)a personal radiance sits]

[(listen)]

[little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where]

[little ladies more]

[long ago,between a dream and a dream]

Mame

Marj

[,mean-]

Memorabilia

[memory believes]

[moon over gai]

[mrs]

[my eyes are fond of the east side]

[my humorous ghost precisely will]

[my sonnet is A light goes on in]

Noise

[nothing is more exactly terrible than]

[of this wilting wall the colour drub]

[on the Madam’s best april the]

[(one!)]

[one April dusk the]

[one slipslouch twi]

[one winter afternoon]

[only as what(out of a flophouse)floats]

[Paris;this April sunset completely utters]

[Paris,thou art not]

[Perfectly a year,we watched Together les enfants jumping and]

[Perhaps it was Myself sits down in this chair. There were two chairs, in fact]

[pieces(in darker]

[“right here the other night something]

[she sits dropping on a caret of clenched arms]

[six]

[Softly from its still lair in Plympton Street]

[somebody knew Lincoln somebody Xerxes]

[someone i am wandering a town(if its]

[sometime,perhaps in Paris we will]

[spoke joe to jack]

[Spring(side]

[stinging]

[structure,miraculous challenge,devout am]

[sunset)edges become swiftly]

[suppose]

[ta]

[Take for example this:]

[taxis toot whirl people moving perhaps laugh into the slowly]

[tell me not how electricity or]

[that melancholy]

[the]

[The awful darkness of the town]

[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]

[the comedian stands on a corner,the sky is]

[the hours rise up putting off stars and it is]

[The moon falls thru the autumn Behind prisons she grins]

[the moon looked into my window]

[The moon-lit snow is falling like strange candy into the big eyes of the]

[the other guineahen]

The Passing of the Year

[(the phonograph’s voice like a keen spider skipping]

The Rain is a Handsome Animal

The River of Mist

the waddling]

[the young]

[there are 6 doors.]

[there is a here and]

[thethe]

[through the tasteless minute efficient room]

[twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once]

[unnoticed woman from whose kind large flesh]

Vision

[wanta]

[what a proud dreamhorse pulling(smoothloomingly)through]

[when]

[when i am in Boston,i do not speak.]

[when the spent day begins to frail]

[when you rang at Dick Mid’s Place]

[when you went away it was morning]

[who(is?are)who]

[who knows if the moon’s]

[who sharpens every dull]

[Will i ever forget that precarious moment?]

[will out of the kindness of their hearts a few philosophers tell me]

[will suddenly trees leap from winter and will]

[windows go orange in the slowly.]

[workingman with hand so hairy-sturdy]

[writhe and]

[y is a WELL KNOWN ATHLETE’S BRIDE]

[you]

Appendix 4: Final List of Cummings’ New York Poems

[a blue woman with sticking out breasts hanging]

[A chilly,murky night;]

[a connotation of infinity]

[a fragrant sag of fruit distinctly grouped.]

[a he as o]

[a man who had fallen among thieves]

[a round face near the top of the stairs]

[Above a between-the-acts prattling of]

[a)glazed mind layed in a]

[And this day it was Spring.... us]

[as one who(having written]

[(as that named Fred]

[as usual i did not find him in cafes, the more dissolute atmosphere]

[at the ferocious phenomenon of 5 o’clock i find myself gently decompos-]

[at the head of this street a gasping organ is waving moth-eaten]

[b]

[between nose-red gross]

[between the breasts]

[buncha hardboil guys frum duh A.C. fulla]

[but observe;although]

[but the other]

[by god i want above fourteenth]

[come from his gal’s]

[curtains part)]

[dawn]

[Dick Mid’s large bluish face without eyebrows]

[dim]

[even if all desires things moments be]

[Float]

Fran

[“Gay” is the captivating cognomen of a Young Woman of cambridge,mass.]

Gert

[---GON splashes-sink]

[helves surling out of eakspeasies per(reel)hapsingly]

[hips lOOsest OOping shoulders blonde& pastoral hair,strong]

[how this uncouth enchanted]

[i go to this window]

[I remark this beach has been used too.        much Too.         originally]

[i was sitting in mcsorley’s.      outside it was New York and beauti-]

[if within tonight’s erect]

[In Healey’s Palace I was sitting---]

[in Just-]

[in making Marjorie god hurried]

[in the rain-]

[infinite jukethrob smoke & swallow to dis]

Item

[it started when Bill’s chip let on to]

[it’s just like a coffin’s]

[jack’s white horse(up]

[“kitty”. sixteen, 5’1”,white, prostitute.]

[ladies and gentlemen this little girl]

[(let us tremble)a personal radiance sits]

[(listen)]

[little joe gould has lost his teeth and doesn’t know where]

Mame

Marj

[,mean-]

[mrs]

[my eyes are fond of the east side]

[my humorous ghost precisely will]

[my sonnet is A light goes on in]

Noise

[nothing is more exactly terrible than]

[of this wilting wall the colour drub]

[on the Madam’s best april the]

[(one!)]

[one April dusk the]

[one slipslouch twi]

[one winter afternoon]

[only as what(out of a flophouse)floats]

[pieces(in darker]

[“right here the other night something]

[she sits dropping on a caret of clenched arms]

[six]

[somebody knew Lincoln somebody Xerxes]

[spoke joe to jack]

[Spring(side]

[stinging]

[structure,miraculous challenge,devout am]

[sunset)edges become swiftly]

[ta]

[taxis toot whirl people moving perhaps laugh into the slowly]

[tell me not how electricity or]

[that melancholy]

[the comedian stands on a corner,the sky is]

[the hours rise up putting off stars and it is]

[the moon looked into my window]

[the other guineahen]

The Passing of the Year

[(the phonograph’s voice like a keen spider skipping]

[the waddling]

[the young]

[there are 6 doors.]

[there is a here and]

[thethe]

[twentyseven bums give a prostitute the once]

[unnoticed woman from whose kind large flesh]

[wanta]

[what a proud dreamhorse pulling(smoothloomingly)through]

[when]

[when the spent day begins to frail]

[when you rang at Dick Mid’s Place]

[when you went away it was morning]

[who(is?are)who]

[who sharpens every dull]

[will suddenly trees leap from winter and will]

[windows go orange in the slowly.]

[writhe and]

[you]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zénó Vernyik has graduated from the University of Szeged and Masaryk University and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. He is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of the Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic. His primary research interests are the oeuvre of British writers of Hungarian origin (primarily Arthur Koestler and George Mikes), modern and contemporary American and British literature (mainly E. E. Cummings and Peter Ackroyd), spatial theory, and the representation of cities in literature. He has also published articles on Australian cinema and Belgian literature.

{1} “Le poème cummingsien fait de l’espace un objet d’expérience sans précédent”

{2} Timeless here means standing outside and above the usual flow of time.

{3} It is likewise interesting that those triple roles “of organ-grinder, tinker, and street-vendor” (Kidder 1979b, 189) never actually appear in the volume, or elsewhere, as those of the speaking voice: these are three unrelated individuals described from the external vantage point of the speaker.

{4} My claims as to the availability of sources are based on the following resources: MLA International Bibliography, Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, ProQuest Academic Research Library, ProQuest Central, EBSCO Academic Search Complete, JSTOR, Literature Online, and other, smaller databases, as well as the library collections of the Houghton and Widener Libraries of Harvard University.

{5} With the notable exception of Sebastian Groes’ (2012) study that imagines Ackroyd’s London as a city of intercultural and intersocial dialog.

{6} It is worth noting here that whereas six of the seven churches are exact equivalents of those designed by the 18th century architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor, the seventh one is completely fictional.

{7} This is not a unique feature of Hawksmoor, however. On the contrary, it is shared by all novels of Peter Ackroyd that have this double-narrative structure.

{8} It is enough to think of The Fall of Troy (2006), with its story focused on the relationship of Obermann and Sophia, or of First Light (1989) with its abundance of women.

{9} Nicholas Dyer refers to “Bear Lane, off Leicester-Fields”  (46), however, the present-day Bear Lane is very far from that location. There is a Bear Street nearby though, thus the present day equivalent of Dyer’s Bear Lane is probably this street.

{10} Probably an earlier name of today’s Swedenborg Gardens.

{11} The novel refers to it using its previous name, Leicester Fields.

{12} This Monmouth Street is not to be confused with the one in Camden near Covent Garden, as Dyer locates the street in the novel to be in “the Parish of Stepney” (11) near “Black-Eagle-Street” and “Brick Lane” (11). It disappeared in the 19th century as a “brewery sue […] between 1819 and 1826 was extended westward to cover the former site of Monmouth Street” (Sheppard 1957, 116-122).

{13} The street likewise disappeared from public view with the expansion of the same brewery, except it happened even earlier: “ When the main site was extended southward to include Black Eagle Street (now closed) is not clear but stylistic evidence suggests that the Directors' House facing east on to Brick Lane and abutting south on Black Eagle Street, was built not later than the 1740's” (Sheppard 1957, 116-122).

{14} While there exists a street by that name, it is not located in the vicinity it is claimed to be in the novel. Cf. “ he hurried towards his home in Eagle Street, which is off Brick Lane” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 31). The earlier Black Eagle Street, however, qualifies, thus it is supposed that all references to Eagle Street are but semi-modernized versions of the earlier place.

{15} In 20th century chapters, it is mentioned as Tabernacle Close. A further discussion of this location is provided below.

{16} In 20th century chapters, this location is referred to as Balls Street. A further discussion is found below.

{17} The book refers to this as Angel Alley. While there are possible candidates with the name Angel, the most likely is Angel Passage, since it is located at the river, Dyer mentions that he “would take [him]self to a little Plot of Ground close by Angell Alley and along the New Key” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 13). What is more, Henry A. Harben’s A Dictionary of London (1918) mentions about Angel Passage that it is leading “ South out of Upper Thames Street at No.95, adjoining Dyers' Hall (sic) and leading to Dyers' Hall Wharf” and that one of its former names was Angel Alley.

{18} I was not able to ascertain the present-day equivalents of Mews Yard, Dirty Lane and Castle Street.

{19} A street at Covent Garden, not the one in Westminster. Cf. “I was by chance walking through Covent-Garden. As I turned out of the Piazza, on the right hand coming out of James-Street” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 89). This street “within Covent Garden was fully occupied by 1638, when it was given its present name in the St. Martin in the Fields ratebooks” (Sheppard 1970, 178).

{20} The street by the name of “Hoare’s Rope-Walk” near St George in the East is listed in Daniel Lysons’ (1795) The Environs of London (432).

{21} Mentioned both under its previous name, as Old Gravel Lane in the book, as well as Wapping Reach. Cf. “Gravel (later Old Gravel, then Wapping) Lane” (Baker 1998, 7-13).

{22} The novel refers to Crab Court, which was “Called Clothier Street first July, 1906, the street being occupied for the most part by clothiers and dealers in old clothes” (Harben 1918).

{23} Maps these days only know Eastcheap, the street, however, had separate parts earlier. One of these was called Great Eastcheap: “In Leake's map, 1666, the eastern portion of the street extending from Tower Street to St. Mary Hill is unnamed, the portion from St. Mary Hill west to Botolph Lane is named ‘Smithers Lane,’ from Botolph Lane west to Fish Street Hill ‘Little Eastcheap,’ and from Fish Street Hill to St. Clement's Lane, ‘Great Eastcheap’” (Harben 1918).

{24} One of the gates of the city torn down in 1760 (Harben 1918).

{25} The book refers to it as “St Michael’s Lane” (Ackroyd [1985] 1993, 183).

{26} The Bethlam Royal Hospital or Bedlam has had several grounds throughout its long history, the the second location of which was in Moorfields, and this is the one the book refers to. (cf. Wikipedia).

{27} “Pour l’homme religieux, l’espace n’est pas homogène; il présente des ruptures, des cassures”

{28} “cette non-homogénéité spatiale se traduit par l’expérience d’une opposition entre l’espace sacré, le seul qui soit réel, qui existe réellement, et tout le reste”

{29} “Un territoire inconnu, étranger, inoccupé […] participe encore ŕ la modalité fluide et larvaire du ‘Chaos’. En l’occupant […] l’homme le transforme symboliquement en Cosmos par une répétition rituelle de la cosmogonie.”

{30} Là où, par la voie d’une hiérophanie, s’est effectuée la rupture des niveaux, s’est opérée en même temps une ‘ouverture’ par en haut (le monde divin) ou par en bas (les régions inférieures, le monde des morts). Les trois niveaux cosmiques – Terre, Ciel, régions inférieures – sont rendus communicants.

{31} “Talán a legfontosabb szakrális szám.”

{32} “A mítoszoknak, meséknek, mágikus eljárásoknak szintén alapszáma”

{33} “A világban megnyilvánuló Isten szent száma, mert az isteni (3) és a földi (4) tökéletesség összege.”