Travelling Genius: The writing life of Jan Morris, Dispense di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Travelling Genius: The writing life of Jan Morris e più Dispense in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! GILLIAN FENWICK Sh The University of South Carolina Press  Life Ali my life ve been the most egotistical of writers. . . . AIl my books are about me. When l write about a city, l'm writing about a citys effect on me. Interview with Johm Flinn, San Francisco Examiner, 28 Apri] 2002 James Humphry Morris was bon at Clevedon, in Somerset, in southwest En- gland on 2 October 1926. His father, Walter Henry Morris, was ‘Welsh. His moth- èr, Enid, was English. The comfort and security of his childhood seem to have been almost stifling. Jan Morris describes being loved and being loving, brought ‘up “kindly and sensibly” spoiled to “a comfortable degree,” with an early love of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Alices Adventures in Wonderland. He was “taught to cherish my animals, say grace, think well of myself and wash my hands before tea. I was always sure of an audience.”! From an carly age James was drawn not only to the adjacent sea, the murky Bristol Channel, but to the Welsh mountains beyond, which he could see through his telescope. It is easy to see why a boy growing up în a comfortable middle-class English home would be attracted to the world beyond the win- dow—the sea and iis passing ships, the distant blue mountains—particularly if there were also family and historical connections. The family took pleasure in its differences and quirkiness. Home was not a place where conformity was valued. The family had emerged from “odd forebears and unusual unions?? of Welsh, Norman, and Quaker people, so that James Morris never felt that he was much like anyone else. As the youngest child, with his brothers away at boarding schooî, he grew up happily in his solitary state, drawing, reading, and playing alone. But Morris also describes a sense of loneliness and isolation, realizing that whatever fantasies he wove about himself and the people he looked out at, he was alone, separate from others, inhabiting a different world: “They were all together, I was alone. They were members, 1 was a stranger.” Mortis attaches e: "<<  write no more books. She said in an interview that she was withdrawing from the public aspect of. literature: “Tm tired of primping mysell up for the camera or going on television. Tm sick to death of critics and publishers and the whole racket of contemporary literature. So I prefer to have nothing to do with it.°6 But the years pass, and she is still publishing. new books. It suggests that she cannot stop writing, that it is a way of life for her if not a fundamental need. The story of her writing life becomes clear through a close examination of her publications. Along the way Jan Morris also gives the reader glimpses of herself. Often they are concealed behind bravado and what she loves to call swagger. She is by her own admission an outsider, an onlooker, and a loner? She has spent a lifetime observing events and places, and she has written extensively about them for the public, but she has also been observing the effect of those events and places on herself and her sensibility. Her book Hay (2006) reflects her growing interest in allegory, an interest she calls an obsession. She says, “I don't believe anything is what it entirely seems to be any more. . . . Td spent my life looking at cities and countries around the place, and 1 realised when I was probably in my 60s I suppose that I hadn' really understood what I was writing about. 1 didn't know what the great forces were that drive cities especially. And so I wrote a book to be an allegory expressing this feeling I had that I didn't know what 1 was writing about." It is a concept her regular readers will find complex and vnfamiliar but one that, being Jan Motris, she will no dotrbt eventuaily explain in her familiar, easy compelling style. It is impossible to imagine her not contin- uing t0 write her disciplined twelve pages a day and to publish. The revelation that she has already written what will be a posthumous volume of thoughts and meditations on her allegorical view of life is typical of Morris.? In life as in work she has been in her own words passionate, infatuated, and obsessed. She has done nothing by halves, and the whole with intelligence, humor, and an irre- pressible, idiosyneratic spirit. 6 Traveling Genius Three Places There crop up moments, experiences, or places which in retrospect, rather like faces in an identification parade, we recognize as markers, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, 199 it is impossible to discuss Jan Morris without looking at the hundreds of places ‘about which she has written. They provide a background to her writing life. Sometimes she has made journeys in order to write about places; but often her travels lead to writing that is, if not incidental, then not their primary purpose. In Conundrum she says that the more distracted James Morris was by his years of sexual ambivalence, the more obsessively he traveled.1 She identifies places that ‘influenced him at this time, including Africa, but overall it appears that the more permanent places, where she has lived for extended periods or to which she returns again and again n her travels and in her writing, are che more crucial. In that category it is possible to identify three cities in particular: Oxford, Venice, and Trieste. Because they have been so central to her life and to her writing over rnany years, Itis difficult 10 discuss them chronologically, and yet there is a pat- term to their place in her life that is related to time and to travel, though the time is quite fluid and the travel is sometimes in the mind as much as in physical space. Oxford Morris said, “Oxford made me.” James Morris had written poetry and plays for school magazines and productions at Lancing College. After that he worked for the Western Daily Press in Bristol in the early 19405. Following his career in the army in the Second World War, he came up with the idea of, in his view, doing something for the Arabs, for whose cause in Palestine he had developed en eamest sympathy3 He t00k an Arabic course in London and found a job with the  Arab News Agency in Caîro. So one way or another he had been writing for pub- Hicacion for several years. But it was his return to Oxford în 1949, this time as an 1undergraduate, that led to a more serious commitment to writing. At the age of twenty-four, he was older than the typical student, although the late 19405 saw a large number of more-mature men, many of whose education had been halted by the war, beginning or completing university study. Perhaps because of his rel- ative maturity and his previous work as a journalist, he was appointed editor of the student magazine, Cherwell. His own articles there included reports on Oxford Union debates, gossip, university news, and a guide to places, people, and modes of walking in Oxford. The writing and editing experience was varied and useful not least for the contacts he made. As a result he was offered a job on the staff of the Times in London as a subeditor on the foreign desk; he realized he was being groomed for the job of foreign correspondent.4 Ten years later he gave up full-time newspaper work in order to have more freedom to travel and write. But the links with Oxford were still strong. In one of his early Guardian articles in 1961, soon after he became a freelance writer, Morris writes about how he was introduced to catching freshwater crayfish near Oxford. His first major book after becoming freelance was Cities (1963), in which “Oxford" is one of the essays. Soon afterward he was living there again, as a member of University College, and writing his first book about the city. Oxford, a personal, affectionate account of the city, was published in 1965 and remains in print, one of Morriss most successful books. Similarly the 1978 anthology The Oxford Book af Oxford, with selections chosen, edited, and heavily annotated by Jan Morris, is a classic ofits kind and is also still in print. “Oxford 1965” is one of the essays in'her final collected essays, A Writers World (2003). In other words Oxford was not only an early inspiration for James Morriss writing, but has remained an influence, a place always lurking in Jan Morriss consciousness, and a recurring theme. In a 1989 interview she said she thought of Oxford as the epitome of England, a place she could both detest and love at the same time: “It infuriates me. At the same time Pm moved and touched by it. lt so extraordinarily beautiful. 1 go there very often.”f It is worth examining in detail what Morris says and writes about Oxford because of what it reveals about her attitude to place in general and about her own development in particular. In Conundrum (1974) Morris says that through- out his childhood he was searching for what she calls an inner reconciliation of the female reality he felt, trapped in a male body? Oxford helped him or, as she writes, “Oxford made me."8 Being a chorister, later an undergraduate, and later still owning a house in Oxford have been important aspects of Morris® life. Oxford was beyond his childhood telescope range, and it brought into his life new values and new ways of living, beyond the confines of home. Children are often slow to recognize that their life at home may not be typical of the wider 8 Traveling Genius world, but boarding school in Oxford made that clear to Morris at the age of nine. ‘His education at Christ Church, whatever its academic and chora! benefits, satis- fied James Morriss inner cravings, and a world of—in her words—sacrament, fragility, and femaleness opened to him. It was an ‘unconventional education, not academically rigorous, and subject to constant interruption by the demands of ‘diary in the cathedral choîr. Even by the standards of the day it must have been ‘seen as an odd life for a small boy. Because there were only sixteen choristers, the school was exceptionally small. If it failed to offer a particularly good or tradi tional education, it at least held none of the horrors of the typical British public school. Being interested in poetry or having a taste for music, colors, or fabrics was not, in Morris! family, considered effeminate, and his life at Oxford was sim- ilarly one of “gentleness as againsi force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping more than leading." Oxford was for him a place of beauty and he felt himself succumbing to a specifically feminine influence. His references to Oxford confirm that view: the city is always “she”; his pleasure in it was physical: he felt a daily sense of what he terms vibrance and surrender in the schools playing fields, lying on the grass “ecstatic, in the heavy sweet-smelling hush of an Oxford summer afternoon.” Morris traces her attraction to places back ‘to those scented afternoons and “an allure that seems to me actually sexual, purer but no less exciting than the sexuality of the body"!9 Perhaps what she says about Oxford has a bearing on other places she holds dear, that she loved the idea of the place as much as the place itself, an accumulation of sensations involving the age ‘and tradition of the city, its oddities, and its quirks; glimpses through windows of ‘people and rooms; memories of a cake, a present, a party. As a child he did not question the higher purpose of Oxford or the university, “It was sufficient în its presence, not something thai must be defined or explained, but simply part of ife itself... a kind of country, where people were apparenily encouraged to pursue theîr own interests and pleasures in their own time and in their own way"! It was a kind of ideal landscape where the privileged might wrander. Oxford encouraged his sense of being different, what he calls his ambiguity. His teachers did not force him to conform, to join in the sports he disliked, or to - be religiously devour. As a result, perhaps, he created his own ideal Oxford, where he relished its traditions, enjoyed cross-country ranning, and took plea- sure in church architecture, ritual, and paraphernalia. Morris says that she was never a Christian and wishes that the great churches of Europe were devoted to something other than worship, yet Oxford encouraged in him a sort of întrospec- tive mysticism. She says it inspired in him something beyond his given sexuali- tx; and it was in the cathedral choir stalls that “1 moulded my conundrum into an intent”12 She says that as a boy she felt a secret complicity in the cathedral, a ‘place where ‘I could be myself . . . an apotheosis of innocence to which 1 aspire even now,”!3 and a sense of liberation, tolerance, and consolation. Three Places 9 «e ciuda :iiINIeEt\/ ]  ; In the “Oxford” essay in Cities (1963), James Morris writes about what now feels like a very old-fashioned Oxford în terms and descriptions that, more than forty years later, Ihemselves seem dated. The travelers approach to the city that he writes is, he admits, not much changed from that described by Thomas Hardy im Jude the Obscure in the 18905. But the modern trappings of the 1960s, the car factories and steel plants, are now gone. Morris captures the sense of place, people, and society in Oxford at a particular moment in history His description of 19605 Oxford is so precise that it is inevitably dated today He describes car-factory workers, plain but prosperous, shopping in the city center, youths hanging around coffee bars, and housewives with tins of food in their shopping baskets. He notes the closure of bookstores and watchmakers' and tailors’ shops, making way for what he describes as che tabloid newspaper sellers and purvey- ors of Woolworths cheap perfume. The writing style is typical of Morriss work then and now, with a measure of observation so precise that its obsolescence is all but built in. Morriss style is a mixture of historical and contemporary observa- tion, with a heavy overlay of personal, and often very subjective, comment. Later in the essay he reveals a truth that for him presumably applies beyond Oxford, that he longs for the Oxford of the past, before what he calls disillusionment set in. Yet, when a visitor takes the time to absorb the atmosphere oî the place, he maintains, Oxford can still work its slow magic. Oxford, he believes, has its addicts despite its shortcomings and despite its paradoxes because it remains a very human place. If Oxford made him, it is also true that Jan Morris (and, earlier on, James Morris) in some way felt that she possessed the city. Living there, owning a house, and writing about it are ways în which she makes a place her own. She says about Oxford that home ownership there for much of her life bas doubiy ful- filled her criteria of possession by writing a book about a place. So while Oxford dominated his early life, it was largely a positive experience, showing him the value of tradition and unsentimentality and yet remaining tolerant, flexible, open to change, and willing to absorb new ways and fresh experiences. In return Morris has retained links with the city returning to it physically and through her writing, In a particularly telling paragraph, Morris describes how as a boy he did not analyze Oxford or what others were doing there, that its presence alone was sufficient and not something that had to be defined or explained. It was simply part of life. He thought of it like a country and the university as an ideal land- scape, “through whose thickets, hills and meadows the privileged may briefly wander.”!* What she writes about her attitude toward Oxford îs characteristic of her approach to writing about other places: absorbing the: atmosphere and essence of a place and its people and succinctly re-creating that spirit for her reader; recording anecdotes and overheard conversations; presenting a personal 10 Traveline Genius rid unashamedly subjective view; wallowing in escapism and romantic Images ‘and what she refers to often as a certain swagger. - Elsewhere she explains her writing technique in the context of James Morriss literal and figurative coming of age in the 9th Queen Royal Lancers. Morris found himself fascinated by how other segments of society worked, developing ‘ant almost anthropological interest in the forms and attitudes of society, feeling / {hey were separate and distinct from what he was actually observing—techniques he would later adapt to his writing. In the case of Oxford and her other special places, there is an added dimension, where she knows the city inside out and ‘where stepping back from the known to write about it might be difficult. But because of that ability to remain separate and distinct, she writes in an inquiring and yei always very personal way. She never loses her enthusiasm for the place. ‘The same applies whether she is new to a city or a long-time resident. There is a freshness to her writing. In Oxford she describes the changing aspect of the city “35 aged restlessness.!5 Without directly shifting that label to Morris herself, an element ol resilessness is in her approach itself. She gives the impression that she is always on the move, that there is always another place to dhe reached. She «rites in the same concluding chapter of Oxford? fertile variety, and this t00 can he applied to Morris herself. She seems always to be moving in search of new experiences and views of people and places, treating each one as unique. As she says of Oxford, it is as though a separate world exists with its own private timescale, and the same could be said of Morris and her writing. She remains separate though not aloof from her subject, qutside its time, and therefore able to look at it from an ambiguous, objective, and yet al times unashamedly subjec- Tive viewpoint. What Morriss books and essays on Oxford make clear is her sense of place and her eye and ear for the elements that make a place special. It is the ability to ‘summarize and to encapsulate, moving from the particular to the general, and then from the general to focus on the particular, illustrating a point with a detail, A good example of this is in the chapter “The Look of It in Oxford. Here James Morris begins with a narrow focus on the particular, in this case the High Street, often described in guidebooks as one of the finest thoroughfares in Europe. But, 25 he notes, at another level it is ordinary and mundane with bus quenes and traf- Rc lights. It is, incidentally; interesting to note his dismissal of what other travel ‘writers have said about the city. The implication is that the rest praise indiscrimi- nately withow looking closely at the detail. The detail is where his description begins, and he finds that detail prosaic. His point seems to be that sweeping gen- eralizations may in the end be correct but that they need not be the point of ‘departure. Once the detail is established he moves to the general, noting that ‘there is a special dignity to Oxford that can make it seem almost royal. For him Three Places ll  turtles, ox, dragons, cocks, lion, stag, wolf, gryphon, rat, bear, swordfish, and donkey—but none is described simply in a single word: there is, as ever, the clab- oration of adiectives, imagery; activity, and speculation. The lion, the symbol of the Venetian empire, gets a section all to itself. After a series of anecdotes about real lions in Venice, there is a list, so typical of the poetry of Morris& prose that it is worth quoting ar length. The city crawls with lions, winged lions and ordinary lions, great lions and petty lions, lions on doorways, lions supporting windows, lions on corbels, self-satisfied lions in gardens, lions rampant, lions soporifie, amiable lions, ferocious lions, rickety lions, vivacious lions, dead lions, rotting lions, lions on chimneys, on flower pots, on garden gates, on crests, on medallions, lurking among foliage, blatant on pillars, lions on flags, lions on tombs, lions in pictures, lions at the feet ot statues, lions realistic, lions symbolie, Hions heraldic, lions archaic, mutilated lions, chimerical lions, semi-lions, superlions, lions with elongated tails, feathered lions, lions with jewelled eyes, marble lions, porphory lions . . . Greek lions, Gothic lions, Byzantine” lions, even Hittite lions. There are seventy-five lions on the Porta della Carta. ... There is a winged lion on every insurance plate . . . a sorrowing lion... most imperial lion . . . ugliest pair of lious ... silliest ion. ... eeriest lion... most unassuming . . . most froward . .. most pathetic lion . . . most undemourished . . . most glamorous . . . most indecisive lion . . . most senile lions . .. most long-suffering . .. frankest lions . .. most enigmatical .. most confident . . . most athletic . | most threatening . . . most reproachfal ... jolliest.36 In another chapter, “Minor Venetians,” he gives two pages to children and nine to animals: cats, horses, pigeons, dogs, and crabs. It is list making gone mad, but a clear indication of the sort of detail in which Morris observes the city. It is also an example of his sense of humor. At times it combines with his chirst for melo- drama and a tale well told, as when he describes the four bronze horses on the facade of the basilica of San Marco whose muscles seem to ripple life. He says he has even seen them paw the stonework at Venetian midmights and once heard a whinny from the second horse on the right. The bestiary was clearly a favorite topic since he later came back to it with a whole book. Because he was still chiefly a journalist at this time, the tone ol the book is în pari one of reporting facts. As he states in the foreword to the first edition, he is a reporter, and this book is primarily a report on contemporary Venice.38 He adds that it is not a history book but that it necessarily contains a lot of details about Venetian history that he has integrated into the text. His summaries of che his- tory of Venice are therefore interwoven with contemporary people, events, and places, bringing them to life. It is a story of crusades, wars, business, and trade; 16 Traveling Genius ‘of-doges, merchants, artisans, artists, fishermen, and boatmen; of aristocrats and afmen cleaning out the studge of the canals; of fighting ships, cruise ships, gon- dolas, and motorboats. Above all it is the story of the life of the city, as it was and is it is, often seen through the eyes of an involved resident, Morris. He introduces fi:section on the doges, for example, by saying that he once searched the Venice telephone directory to see which of the names of the 120 doges were still repre- ‘sented there. What details such as this create is not only a vivid impression of the - doges and their descendants but also a picture of Morriss own life. Sometimes that image is more overt, as when, for example, he describes Venetian food and restaurants. He says he has tried thirty restaurants and is satisfied with none. He finds the service poor and sometimes rude, and the food monotonous, the meat - gristly; and the salads unimaginative—and all this as long ago as 1960, when British food writing was not famous or discriminating. It is the detail of everyday ife like this, set against detail of Venices history, that brings the city to life. While - the facts may not always be strictly true or the detail may be inaccurate, the book - is superbly entertaining, to an extent that no ordinary guidebook can match. It is all done in a light-hearted, often humorous way, but it is one of many reasons Why, despite the accuracy of the navigation instructions, no one would use Morris Venice as an accurate guide to the city: he is not that sort of writer, and in any case, as he says in the [oreword, it is not intended as a guidebook. James Morris is not afraid to let the reader into his own thoughts and emotions, indeed he uses them asa window from which to view the city. He says, for example, that io live in Venice is one of the worlds gredtest pleasures, that he has often heen very happy there, and enchanted by its variety.39 There are personal jolkes, almost imperceptible to che reader, but unmistakably intentional, as in the lisi of foreign ‘papers available in Venice: he says you can buy the newspapers of France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, England and Manchester®this at the time when Morris was working for the Manchester Guardian. Almost every page reveals some play on words or clever weaving together of images. The thinly- populated lagoon island ol Torcello, for example, is in his words a ghost with a private income.# Then, again, there is the device, typical of Morris, the punch- line that closes the chapter or section without further comment, so powerful] is its impact, For example, again on Torcello, he says he retains certain impressions of the island including “the lanley image of the Teotoca Madonna, tear-stained and accusing, which a child once gravely described to me as ‘a tlrin young lady, holding God:"#2 or the closing sentence that defies further comment, “No won- der George Eliots husband fell into the Grand Canal.” The impression he gives is one of overwhelming personal involvement with the subject, to a degree not often matched in even Jan Morriss most successful later books. Ît was very early in his life and in his career t0 have reached such a high point. He was only thirty-four when Venice was published, he was stili a Three Places 17  full-time journalist, and Jan Morris was still fourteen years in the future. Not until the publication of the Pax Britannica trilogy did he again achieve such a pro- fessional success. Despite what Morris later wrote about her sexual ambiguity at this time when he felt his manhood was meaningless,4* the time in Venice was professionally very successful and productive, and other books and essays about Venice followed over a period of several years; and, at least at some levels, it was a happy time. Yet, when Jan Morris came to make revisions for second and third editions in 1974 and 1983 she was in many ways dissatisfied: she no longer felt the enthusiasm for Venice that was the genesis of the book, and she found the text itself impossible to revise beyond trifling details. Having planned to revise the book she found that James Morris had created something so much of its time that Jan Morris was unwilling or unable to revise it or attempt to bring it up to date. It is clear that the 1960 first edition was a book about Venice at a particu- lar time in the citys and in Morriss history. She was later incapable of going back în time to revise it. Venice had changed, times had changed and Morris had changed. Writing a new foreword to the 1993 edition, she realized that one of the reasons was that the book was not the objective piece of reporting James Morris originally envisaged. As she writes in 1993, it was a very subjective account, romantic and impressionistic, less about the city than of his experience at that time. Because he was young, he wrote as a young man, seeing things through a young man® eyes. She says, though she adruits it is perhaps immodest, that the author and the city were at that time perfectly matched. Venice, she says, was the loveliest city in the world and James Morris a writer at the very peak of his young career. What she found later was that not only had the city changed but that the enthusiasm he had felt for it was gone, and not least because the city was no longer the sad, down-at-heel place it had been in the 19505. She now missed its sadness, its old magic and its paths. She says she found she was no longer in love with the city By the 19905 she finds it changed again: safe and ‘modern. She says that Venice has moved on, overcoming some of the strangling problems of its own history so that it no longer even aspires to be the city of con- sequence it once was. It is now a city without regrets. Again it is possible to draw parallels with Jan Morris herself, by now over the difficulties of her earlier sexu- al ambiguity, content with her new state, with no regrets and, perhaps, without the professional aspirations James Morris had then felt. She seems to recognize this when she says, “To refurbish my Venice would be false; to rejuvenate myself would be preposterous,” and so the book remains as it was to her, a record of old ecstasies.45 Despite what Morris says, Venice can be read as a guide to the city and many a tourist goes with it in hand. It has gained a place as one of the classic accounts of Venice. Yet, like many of Morris other books, it is clearly in part autobio- graphical. It represents the young Morris in much ihe same way as Trieste and the 18 Traveling Genius Meaning of Nowhere ìs the aging Morris. It is in some ways dated, and yet in other Ways it is timeless. There are, for example, occasional, and these days very inachronistic, touches of unashamed snobbery, as in “many a lond and greasy visitor brings to Harrys Bar a sudden whilf of the used-car lot, the scrap-iron yard or the murkier upstairs offices in the City—for when you think of sudden for- ‘tunes you often think of Venice.”4 Yet the overall impact is one of timeless rele- vance. James Morris invites the reader to be part of the city great past in a manmer as apt today as it was when he wrote the book nearly fifty years ago. James Morris had found his ideal subject in the city, a place, and one he knew well, swaggering enough to impress him, full of history, and with full scope for creative, imaginative writing. The history of travel writing of course goes back ‘centuries before Morris Venice, and yet there was something new, fresh, and dif- ferent about this book in 1960, That it won high praise and even a literary award js not surprising, and yet it is worth noting that in 1961 it won the Royal Society of Literature W. H. Heinemann Award, whose purpose is to encourage writing ‘in gentes that did not normally make the current best-seller lists. Since that time, travel books have burgeoned in numbers and popularity, and it would not be ‘gverstating the case to say that Morriss Venice was one of the new pioneers în the field. Its enduring sales and classic status are a sure confirmation of its mer- its nearly half a century later. But Morris had not finished with Venice, and several books followed, although not until the 19805, by which time her personal life was more amenable ‘and, in her professional life, the monumental Pax Britannica trilogy was complet- ed. The first of the subsequent Venice books was The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (1980). IF Venice was about a city she loved and Pax Britannica abouta his- torical period she admired, The Venetian Empire was a.logical sequel. Ît is a trav- el book and a travelers book, geographically and in part chronologically arranged ‘but, because of its romantic, scattered subject, space and time mingle in ways ‘her readers had come 10 recognize as a typical Jan Morris book, personal and sub- jective but with a firm footing in the facts of place and history It is a lavisbly illustrated book, the black-and-white and color illustrations and the maps ‘accounting for more than 50 of the 184 pages, It is coffee-table-book size, and in ‘many ways a good pictorial appendix to Venice. Many of the stories and histories touched on in Venice are expanded here. It is a well-researched book with an index and a page of bibliographical references, new departures in a Jan Morris book and perhaps the legacy of techniques acquired in the writing of Pax Britannica. But Jan Morris cannot write the preliminaries to even a bibliography without a personal flourish. She says that her original research for the book was ‘a meandering, indolent “potter” through the Venetian waters, later leading her to fairly conventional and Îess escapist travel writers and sources whom she con- fesses to plundering “most shamelessly.*47 Three Places 19  The Venetian Empire, which Jan Morris says often feels like an abstraction rather than a geographical entity, lasted from the rwellth century to the eigh- teenth and was based on trade and money, with no imperialist ideology or mis- sionary aims for the outposts it held. Jan Morriss story begins with the people ‘and places of Venice itself and then proceeds on a literary voyage to the empire. Itis a self-consciously literary trip that begins with an invitation to che reader to follow the voyagers. Her method is to involve the reader, to write in the second person, “as your own ship ties up . . . wherever you look . . . As you step ashore,”48 and to encourage him or her to enter into the imaginative journey The first port of call is Constantinople, modern Istanbul. A journey to that city is one that regular Morris readers would already have taken a couple of times by 1980: James Morris had written the essay, “Istanbul” in the 19605, first for the maga- zine, the Queen, and then reprinted in Cities (1963); and Jan Morris had written “Istanbul, City of Yok," for Rolling Stone magazine in 1978, republished in Destinations (1980). There is some overlap of material and a similar travelers” approach, although The Venetian Empire is a fuller and more historical account. Returning t0 favorite cities, whether physically or in print, is a feature of Morris& life and work. But whereas elsewhere she concentrates om cities, here she looks at small poris and hinterlands and islands including Crete and Cyprus, looking at recent history as well as the Venetian past. Jan Morris retains James Morris& fascination with ships, fleets, and battles, and there are plenty of chem here. The details of the fighting are brought to life by her concentration on places and indi- viduals, on the physical settings and the buildings, and she and the reader are always part of the scene. It is an interesting technique, to take rhe armchair trav- eler into a physical location in the present to examine its history and to describe it in terms of similarly remote literary experience, since few of her readers will actually have walked into a battlefield or entered a bombed city She expects her reader to take an imaginative leap with her on this long, complex, and, so she says, sometimes dangerous journey. She cultivates that sense of imminent danger and excitement as part of the narrative, as though the unexpected may happen to the reader at any moment, past dangers being present even now, and old precau- tions and superstitions recommended. The journey ends back on the canals of Venice, in search of the artifacts and signs of empire in the modern city. It is a technique that works well she has showm her readers the historical events and now invites them to see the evidence on the ground. But, as ever, one of the attractions of a Jan Morris book is what the reader learns incidentally about the author. She is never afraid io introduce a personal, irrelevant element, often in a bumorous way For example, she says the Nikopoeia Madonna of Con- stantinople, an iconic image reputed to perform miracles, failed to preserve either the Venetian Empire or the Byzantine besides letting her down when she called on it to support the 1979 Welsh devolution referendum. What she is doing by 20 Travéling Genius 1980 is assuming an audience that has read her earlier books and kmows her interests and passions. In this way she can take up a subject with little or no con- ‘nection t0 the current context and assume reader understanding. It is like a pri- vate family joke or a recurring theme that does not require explanation. The con- tinuity between her books is recognized again with another reference to the four ‘bronze horses of San Marco from Venice that now closes The Venetian Empire. In the years separating the books the statues have been ‘moved indoors to preserve them. Now, în her view, they are mere museum pieces, and despite their proud forms and noble bearing, greeting the visitor as before, the life, she says, has gone out of them. The bronze horses are back again in Morriss 1982 book, A Venetian Bestiary, a tidle and subject she explored in Venice. This is another illustrated coffoe-table style book and, like the other Venice books, full of historical detail and personal abservation. It was published by Thames and Hudson and not by Faber and Faber who, through the 1950s, 1960, and 1970s had been Morris primary pub- }isher. But from this time she increasingly worked wilh Oxford University Press, leaving a gap with Faber and Faber between 1987 and 2001. But A Venetian Bestiary was the sort of book in which Thames and Hudson specialized, fully illustrated, aimed at a popular market, and with many related subjects în its cata- logue. - In a prefatory note Jan Motris says that she has perhaps written too much. about Venice over the years, through the various stages of her life and through her various feelings about the city, and that this book is therefore by way of an epilogue, dedicated to the many Venetians, human and animal, who have allowed her to share their city. The book begins with an enigmatic essay on the origins of Venice and the reasons why its connections with animals and wildlife of many kinds and în many media are so strong. The book opens with an alphabetical “Cast of Creatures," and the first chapters closing paragraph is another typical Morris list. ..beasts fender and ferocious, historical and imaginary, repulsive and enclianting—furred, feathered, scaled, skinned and occasionally all four at once—beasts in paint and in stonework, beasts of bronze and beasts of mar- ble, beasts symbolic, beasts heraldic, haughty beats of political import, sweet bensts born of Iyric fancy—beasts dead on market stalis or dinner plates, beasts in the memory or the metaphor, beasts in the desire, and above all beasts alive and breathing still, soaring dream-tike above your head, yapping trough wicker muzzles among the legs of the Piazza tourists, scutiling here and there among the barnacles, or complacently washing their whiskers after meals of lefi-over spaghetti in the shadowy undersides of bridges.® Three Places 21 GRCGOE”E”/UQ]/]@(BE'UJ;_: El àìb’MÙÌ:EE:R]::RR”'ERREEES -.—._G__\_ù©Nri.AA 5  capitalist side of the Iron Curtain, they never found a role for it.6* Like Venice, ii is a city with a great and prosperous past, but unlike Venice it sees few tourists; and although it is reachable by road, rail, air, and sea, it is far more isolated than the Venetian islands. It is still very cosmopolita, but it has an aging population, looking to the past. It is, as Jan Mortis says, “an allegory of limbo, in the secular sense of an indefinable hiatus,” hanging “at the end of its Italian umbilical.*& For Jan Morris it is one of her favorite places in the world. James Morris first went to Trieste as a soldier at the end of the Second World ‘War. Ever since Morris has felt an attraction to the city, not just because it reminds her of her youth but because it also holds the key to many of her life- Jong preoccupations. It is in part a result of the sentimental, romantic melancholy to which she is prone, what she calls the Trieste effec1,97 but also to a suggestion of sensual desire. She says she is seduced by Trieste. But sexual elements are never what they seem with Jan Morris, and she describes how James Morris once drove a fellow officer to his first sexnal experience at a brothel in Trieste, al- though he himself chen drove away His first published essay on Trieste is in Cities in 1963. He writes that despite the postwar controversy, by the early 1960s Trieste has vanished from the news- paper headlines and is forlorn and demoralized, forgotten by the world. Trieste has long been a place between ideologies, but now, despite îts occasionaliy im- portanti past, it is a city that is bored with life. The essay is a lively, short account of the city but gives nothing away to indicate the strength of feeling Morris later confesses to feel for Trieste. Jan Morris wrote again about Trieste in the essay “What Became of Waring,” first published in Rolling Stone ‘magazine in 1979 and later in volume form in Destinations (1980). In a prefatory note she admits a strong bias in favor of Trieste, the first city she lived in as an adult, so she says. The Trieste she revisits in 1979 she finds neither developing much nor very set- ted. She describes it as a place where wanderers and éxiles turn up, and she men- tions James Joyce, Freud, Richard Burton, Mahler, and the Archduke Ferdinand. Jen Morris also regularly turns up în Trieste. She says she is drawn there though not much changes, but then nor is it fixed. It is, she says, a place of chance and opportunity, where nothing is ever settled or sure, and this is presumably its attraction for her. To illustrate what she means, she describes Trieste as “a ful- crum of nothing, but an extension of much more," and she offers two examples of the essence of Trieste. The first is the image of a train passing along the quay- side in the early moming sun, covered in snow from some foreign but unknown point of origin. The second is a dazzlingly lit building filled with jewelers and speculators examining and weighing gold, stones, chains, and watches, where you can buy bracelets by the gram, using whatever currency you like. The rea- sons for her attraction to Trieste begin to come to life for the reader. She calls 26 Traveling Genius tfiem the inklings and allusions that attract her there, the chance occurrences and ‘uncertainties. / © The physical geography of Trieste is strange and impressive: the isolation on a narrow strip of Italy never more than ten kilometres wide, suggesting the rémoteness of an island, cut off from the rest of the world; the harsh, infertile ter- rain of the Carso—karst limestone sceneryright behind the downtown core; - {ie strong, cold Bora wind that periodically hits the city. Its illustrious past is still visible in Roman, mediaeval, and Habsburg structures. Its sweeping bay and port ‘afee visible from a great distance. Its piazzas are huge. Its café society is famous and cosmopolitan. Its market is vibrant. Nothing about Trieste is parochial or provincial. As Jan Morris says, from its strangeness Trieste has acquired toler- aNice. It is a city with style, even if that style is nostalgie. Jan Morris labels it clublike.?? Its banks are housed in the old imperial buildings, full of heavy mar- le, mosaics, mahogany, and fin de siècle ornament. / Itisthe echoesof the exaggeration and the detail of a time gone by that she ‘2dmires. In the railway station she is happy to find that it is still possible to take {Fains to Belgrade, Vienna, and Moscow, She finds the bus station an imperial experience, with foreign nationals from many of the old Austrian Empire coun- ‘ties still coming to Trieste to shop. It is this nostalgia that attracis her, and it is part of the ambiguity of the city. She finds this is a place where the lines between fact and fiction, past and present, and the explicit and the enigmatic are unclear. “There may be uncertainty, but it is not an optimistic kind. It is instead melan- choly and indistinct, wanting to look forward yet always glancing back, and this 160 attracts her. She writes that there is no other place where she would rather ‘spend a few days, escaping from the real world, to the point where she sometimes ‘questions if Trieste really exists other than in her imagination. t For Morris, Trieste is not an oddball city, but rather has an Establishment air. Ti other words it is quirky and individual, yet pleasingly traditional, comfortable, ind old-fashioned, cautious and calculating. It is an interesting coincidence that the Welsh separatist movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to the defeated 1979 teferendum proposal, which Jan Morris had supported, at almost the same time that she was noting the growth of a separatist drive in Trieste, frustrated by the Blind eye Italian bureaucracy turns to the city, which she describes as defiant. She ‘ses the adjectives skeptical, charming, tragic, solid, pleasant, indeterminate, tinfulfilled, sweet, modest, and—repeatedly—melancholie to describe Trieste.She éven describes herself as “loitering with my adjectives” in Trieste. It is just the Dlace for “the introspective, the melancholic, the solitary, the deserter and the inrecognised genius,”?? It is a city outside the bounds of clocks and timekeep- ing. AIl are characteristics she admires, and in one way or another they also apply lo Morris. Three Places 27 “litio  In advance of the books 2001 publication she was already announcing what she had written in it and that this was to be her final book. In an informal “Note to the Reps” al Faber and Faber, she indicated that 1 believe in a rounded life, and to end my career as a writer 1 wanted a sub- Ject which 1 could use as a medium for some last thoughts about five sub- jects, in particular, that have concemed me always. One is love, together with its concomitants lust, fun and families. The second is pathos, especial- 1y as expressed in the end of empires. The third is balance, between order and anarchy, for instance, between male and female, between races and nationalities. The fourth is death, and its adolescence, old age. And the fifth is cities, about which I've written many books and couniless essays since Faber published my first on Venice. It seemed best to choose a last city for ray last book, and Trieste is a place that has haunted me all my adult life, besides illustrating in itself all my five chemes. My approach to cities has always been highly subjective, and this is much the most subjective of all my city books. I have seen Trieste as a sort of mirror-image ol myself, and so in evoking it I have expressed many of my own emotions between the lines.?3 But, never someone to take herself too seriously for long, Morris ends the note by stating, “There we are. If you can sell this title on fhe strength of such gob- bledygook, you must all be bloody geniuses.” Despite the finality of her statement, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere was not her final book. In fact she has published three new books since then, A Writers House in Wales (2002), A Writers World (2003), and Hav of the Myrmidons in the newly titled novel Hav (2006). The publication date does not, of course, indicate when the first of these was written, and the second is in fact a collection of pieces from her writing life between 1950 and 2000. Whatever its place in her chronology, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is an important Jan Morris book. To experience Triestes poignancy and to recognize her affinity with the city is to understand another facet of her life and work. The book is therefore not just a book about the city but a book at least in part about Morris herself. It is as tel- lingly autobiographical as Conundrum, Pleasures of a Tangled Life, and A Writers House in Wales. She îs clear that when she goes to Trieste, whether physically or merely in her mind, she is not simply revisiting the place but reexamining her- self. It is, she finds, a realm of introspection and self-indulgence.? The place takes her out of time, to nowhere, to a state of limbo and hiatus. This is in con- trast to the rest of the world that attracts her. And yet ît is also a city, and cities have always been important to her and to her writing. She is excited by cities, and, as elsewhere, her method is to share that enthu- siasm with her readers, inviting them to take a tour of Trieste with her. So the 28 Traveling Genius fairative moves into the first person plural with our first sight of Trieste, our few over a hill, and our approach to the waterfront. Like a city guide, she points ‘it places of interest and explains their history mixing modern-day Trieste with 3t6-past and blurring the lines between the real and the imagined. She invites her fellow travelers to adopt a historical persona and then takes us in the present day tg the hotel, the shops, and the museums, telling us that we have missed the bus hecause of a schedule change. She entertains the reader, not only with descrip- ziéns and history, but with conversational banter: “What this, now? A Roman arfiphitheatre. Who that? Verdi, composing on a plinth in a garden. Which way re we going? Search me." She says she prefers a civic blur"S to a sightseeing 401r, and although what she writes is clear and succinct, what she offers ìs not a conventional city visit. It is the city seen from cafés in the piazza; it is coffee, ‘wine, and toasted sandwìches; it is noting that some emperor or another stands of a column;7 and what seems to be a pile of rubble is in fact a fountain, In other 5 “gords she knows that any visitor to the town who wants the names and identi- ties made absolutely clear will have another book in hand, a conventional guide ‘ig:che city, and so she makes no attempt to offer that sort of information. Instead her civic blur occasionally picks out a romantic castle to admire, and its story is set in both its immediate context and its historical past. Without making heavy weather of it, she offers a brief but personali history of the Habsburg Empire and ‘its impact on Trieste. She tells part of the story in the present tense, so a visit to ‘a museum becomes a visit to the aristocratic family home it once was, an evening pérty în progress. She calls this sniffing the imperial breezes,8 and it leads her to the railway station, the hospital, and the post office, places where she says it is “{ asy to recall Trieste! past glories. So vividly does she do all this, making the past / come alive, and creating colorful images and situations, îhat it is a real disap- / pointment when the next paragraph begins with the statement that they are only ‘shadows now. Jan Morris admires what she calls style, or swagger. At times it is an old-fash- joned, anachronistic concern with the rich and famous. So one chapter begins ‘with her visit to Baron Rafaelle Douglas de Banfield-Tripcovich. Being Jan Morris, this is probably deliberately done to impress, because she too has that swagger 10 her writing. There is a sense in which she Knows it is a pompous and preposter- ‘gus chapter opening, and yet part of her is glad to be able to start this way. This format, switching between personal anecdote and wider historical perspective works well, the one seamlessly acting as an introduction to the other. What emerges is both a biography of the city and a background of autobiographical ‘anecdote and reflection. For example, she identifies her own racial mixture of Welsh and English and the occasional problems that has brought her with the ‘wider and more serious racial tensions that have sometimes troubled Trieste. She says that in a place that has moved back and forth across international boundaries, Three Places 29  ideas of patriotism and nationalism lose their force, and she takes from the exam- ple of Trieste lessons about her own ideas on shifting and sometimes contradie- tory loyalties. There are parts of che book that readers familiar with her writing will recog- nize. The chapter “The Nonsense of Nationality” for example, begins with the passage from Fifty Years of Europe: An Album (1997) in which the young James Morris siis at the waters edge, writing an essay on nostalgia, and there are other echoes back to the essays in Cities, Destinations, and Locations. It is no wonder she repeats herself, so ofien has she been to Trieste and written about it. But while in other places about which she has written she admits to feeling a sense of her own transience, in Trieste it is the city itself that exudes a feeling of imper- manence and creates in her feelings of homesickness that are only partly connect- ed to her feelings about her life and her family in Wales. It is all part of the Trieste effect, and while she suggests that it is foolish to antlropomorphize a city, she really does feel that Trieste has a spirit and a will of its own. Perhaps for this rea- son she is optimistic about its future: for its famous Illy coffee, its tourist poten- tial, and its literary heritage in Joyce, Rilke, and Svevo. She concludes that Trieste is an existentialist place whose purpose is just 10 be itself, the capital of nowhere, an elusive Utopia. The book revolves as much around herself as it does around Trieste, She ends with a reflective passage on birth and death, not least her own, and what she calls the bookends to a life. Trieste, she feels, is in some way a mirror of herself, and she admits that much of this book is self-description. Although Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere has not turned out to be the final book she claimed it to be, there is nonetheless a certain element of closure in it. She looks back in the end not just to Trieste past and her visits there over a lifetime, but to the past as a foreign country, just as she feels old age is strange and unknown. She sees transience everywhere, fact and fantasy merged, Trieste between the lines of Last Letters from Hay, and Trieste ai the cemer of her view of Europe. Eloquently yet sadly, she comments that the books she has written are no more than “smudged graffiti on a wall. . . . Critics? To hell with 'em. Kindness is what matters, all along, at any age—kindness, the raling principle of nowhere!” She imagines her afterlife, largely spent by the river near her home in Wales, but n0w and then in a boat at Trieste, haunting a place that has happily haunted her. In a BBC radio interview in 2006, Jan Morris said of Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, “I thought [it] was the best book Td ever written, and I decided I couldni do such a good book again, and that I wouldn't try. Pd rather not go downhill.”8° These three places, Oxford, Venice, and Trieste, can be seen as land- marks in Jan Morriss life and in her development as a writer. To write about the city where James Morris first traveled alone as a young boy, Oxford, was a naru- ral step. James and later Jan had returned there again and again, renewing her 30 Traveling Genius love for the city and deepening her understanding and appreciation of it. Its familiarity made it a comfortable and easy place to write about. Returning to the city and the subject allowed for reassessment, not just of the place but of Morris ‘nerself. Her reactions to the city provided a yardstick on just how far she had iraveled as a person and as a writer. The same is true of Venice, the first foreign city where the Morrises spent settled time together as a family, and where one of “their children was born. Morris returns to a city he had visited carlier in his life, when he was in the army Again he is a local expert. It is a place he knows well ‘And loves. As time passes and he writes more about it, we see him falling our of love with the city, perhaps also disillusioned with himself and with his life as it ihen was. When he revisits Venice to revise the book, he finds he cannot. Yet, reassuringly, Jan Morris goes back, writes about ìt again, and the affection returns, Trieste is another récurring motif in Morris life and writing. Even when ‘she writes fiction and creates an imagined landscape, the setting is recognizably Trieste. She has written more about Trieste than any other single city in the world. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is, as she acknowledges, the pinnacle ‘of her writing career, and it would have been a fitting conclusion had she stuck ‘to her resolution to write no more books. In Morriss life of traveling, the three cities form a reassuring network of reference points. They are places where Mortis has, il not roots, then strong per- sonal connections. Oxford, Venice, and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere are ‘probably Morris three best-known and most-admired works, landmarks in her writing life, always in print in editions around the world, and loved by readers who may never have visited the three places. Three Places 31