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Cold feet in literature

The act of writing has a long history of being associated with romantic reluctance. The figure of speech ‘cold feet’ made its debut in print in 1896 in Stephen Crane’s Maggie as a riff on the idea of writing as a kind of forward movement. Crane’s novel about the life of a New York slum girl called Maggie, begins with a decision to run; Maggie’s brother Jimmy thinks better of his resolution: “dese micks can’t make me run”, and sets off. Jimmy is a stand-in for the writer (who might be Crane or anyone) who has no appetite for his subject, and perseveres just for the sake of it. Later on, Crane imagines Jimmy “going into a sort of trance of observation” behind the reins of his horse-drawn truck, as if he were mentally describing the events of the story. In revising the book for republication, Crane strengthened this link between writerly and fictional progression by inserting the phrase ‘cold feet’ into the scene where Maggie’s lover Pete suddenly becomes fascinated by “a woman of brilliance and audacity” called Nell. Ironically, Pete reveals his ‘cold feet’ through his hot pursuit of someone new, whereas Crane is stuck with Maggie: his title commits him to maintaining an interest he often quite obviously doesn’t feel.

Or, this is the conceit. It rests on the illusion that Crane has no choice but to tell Maggie’s story: that he writes in a “trance of observation.” This idea of passive writing is one of the signals that Maggie is designed to be read as a Naturalist novel – that is, a novel that’s so comprehensive in describing the granular minutiae of a story that the writer can seem like a recording device, with no will of his own. In an anonymous review of Crane’s London Impressions (1897), the author of Maggie’s spin on the Naturalist method is compared to the efforts of a “locust in a grain elevator attempting to empty the silo by carrying off one grain at a time.” The motif of reluctance in Maggie could perhaps suggest that Crane saw his method in the way his reviewer saw it – as a kind of locustic Sisyphian labour – but whether or not this recognition is designed to cast doubt on its appeal and value (as it does in the review) is hard to know. Writerly ‘cold feet’ might be an effect we enjoy and credit with sophistication.

John_Singer_Sargent_-_The_Archers
John Singer Sargent, ‘The Archers’. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Naturalist investment in telling a story step by step was offset by an investment in formal experimentation. The new avant-garde impulse to challenge convention by doing without plot in writing novels or ignoring metrical rules in writing poems, pulled attention away from what was going on on the level of a text’s content towards issues of expression. But within this preoccupation with form there was also a capacity for boredom and reluctance. In 1940, one of Modernist literature’s most acute early critics, Randall Jarrell, compared the experimental poems of the 1930s to a biological “species that [has] carried evolutionary tendencies so far past the point of maximum utility that they actually became destructive to them …” This ‘evolutionary’ process of overcomplication finds its modern-day equivalent in postmodernism. In David Foster Wallace’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way (1989), the sense that the only way to write fiction is to engage in “gratuitous cleverness, jazzing around, self-indulgence, no-handsism” afflicts the budding writer Mark Nechtr with a case of ‘cold artistic feet.’ Nechtr’s cynicism doesn’t put him off, however; he continues to write in dribs and drabs, just as he goes ahead with his marriage to a fellow writer called D. L. whose own knowing postmodernist ‘no-handsism’ turns his stomach. He doesn’t allow himself to translate reluctance into retreat.

Both the granular style of writing that characterises Naturalism and the preoccupation with form that characterises twentieth-century literature are likely to inspire reluctance, and the literature of the first half of the twentieth century is particularly likely to register these two kinds of reluctance at once. John Rodker’s Adolphe, 1920 (1929) is simultaneously conscious of itself as an overdetailed story and as a piece of metafiction. When Rodker’s protagonist, Dick, is cornered by an ex-girlfriend who wants him to explain his change of attitude towards her, Rodker draws our attention to his “difficulty” in “begin[ning] to talk” by reminding us of his cold feet; he writes: “How cold his feet were …” and “his feet were cold …” The act of writing itself can also be reluctant. In Jeremy Prynne’s A Gold Ring Called Reluctance (1968), the impetus to write is a kind of death wish; he opens: “As you drag your feet or simply being/tired, the ground is suddenly interesting;/not as metaphysic but the grave maybe …” The blank verse – made up of a series of five metrical ‘feet’, or two-syllable components – drags itself along in the absence of rhyme or much of an iambic pulse. The effect of this ‘dragging’ metre is reminiscent of mortality, but it’s ultimately just an ‘idea of the end’ that occupies the poem. What we get instead of a meditation on death is a meditation on writerly hesitancy that sometimes whimsically calls to mind death. And even this hesitancy isn’t terminal. The poem comes to a halt as soon as it directly states its reluctance to continue, with the lines: “The ground on which we pass,/Moving our feet, less excited by travel.”, but the echo between the idea of a focal gravitation towards the ‘ground’ and the opening impression that “the ground is suddenly interesting” creates a circuit, or a “gold ring” – a marriage – while the pun on “pass” invites us to find movement in cessation. We could say that, like Crane, Wallace, and Rodker, Prynne links the condition of ‘cold feet’ with perseverance, though the poem’s continuation relies on our willingness to project type into a blank space, like footprints in the snow.

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