Hiking on the brink of war

By the time John Gould Fletcher attended the premier of “The Rite of Spring,” he was living in a London suburb with a married woman, Daisy Arbuthnot, and her two children. Mrs. Arbuthnot owned the house, and Fletcher posed as a boarder.

Fletcher met Daisy Arbuthnot in the summer of 1912, through her husband, Malcolm, a photographer who worked with Alfred Stieglitz among others, to “improve the quality of photography until it should rank as an independent art.”

Mrs. Arbuthnot indicated the nature of her interest in Fletcher on a long walk on the Mersey Shore near Liverpool, where Mr. Arbuthnot had taken a job in a camera factory. Fletcher promptly departed for London, and then for the continent, spending the late summer of 1912 on a hot frustrating tour of French cathedrals, trying to recapture some of the delight he’d felt in cathedrals the year before.

Fletcher returned to London and accepted a visit from Mrs. Arbuthnot. A series of walks in Kew Gardens led to a full affair, and Fletcher, in a crisis of conscience, visited Mr. Arbuthnot in Liverpool to confess.

The latter accepted the confession; he told Fletcher that he wished to give up his job at the camera factory and set himself up as an independent photographer in London,

which he could do if Fletcher were to take up residence at Mrs. Arbuthnot’s house in suburban London and support her and the two children.

At this point in Fletcher’s story, a reader might be forgiven for wondering if the British couple had conspired to take advantage of the rich, naive American—the stuff of a Henry James novel. Fletcher actually signed a legal agreement committing himself to the support of the other man’s family.

But the arrangement seems to have been a matter of unorthodox pragmatism on the part of Mr. Arbuthnot. His lack of jealousy, of possessiveness, is alarming. There’s something bloodless about it. Not quite human.

And it’s distressing to think of John Gould Fletcher, who became one of the great anti-moderns, participating in something so utterly modern, so cool and rational, in which relationships are fungible.

Leisure travel is the curse of the leisured class—not the annual salubrious visit to Lake Michigan or the Gulf Coast, or invigorating visits to great American cities, but the endless trips to formerly exotic places just for the sake of having been there.

From the era of Thomas Cook’s guidebooks (listing the high-culture items you had to take in) to the era of social media (with similar requirements for documenting your experience), it’s all the same, and it’s burdensome most of all upon the traveler.

During John Gould Fletcher’s affair and domestic arrangement with Daisy Arbuthnot, sea holidays were becoming an expectation for families who could afford them. As the summer of 1914 approached, Mrs.

Arbuthnot decided that it would be better if she and her children took a holiday with their father, and she urged Fletcher to take a trip to the continent.

So he went to hike the Swiss Alps, leaving Victoria Station for Paris on July 26, 1914. “Although … I had read in the London newspapers the daily accounts of increasing tension between Austria and Serbia, nothing was further from my mind than the thought of an immediate war between all the countries of Europe,” he writes.

In Paris, while moving from the Gare du Nord to the Gare du Lyon, Fletcher noticed French soldiers and newspaper headlines more concerned with the possibility of war than what he’d seen in British newspapers, more interested “in the suffragette outrages, or the Ulster troubles.”

But he carried on to Switzerland and began his hike. In case anyone doubts the salubriousness of walking, I offer the testimony of John Gould Fletcher, confirmed melancholic, who said that each day left him sunburned and happy.

Getting off the continent, back to England, and back to America would present a challenge.