by Jan Morris
DAY 41
Fact or fiction? As an old pro of the writing game, I don’t recognize the distinction. The two kinds are irrevocably mingled in my own work, and to one degree or another, I suspect, in most other writers’ work too. The thing is, truth is not absolute. It’s all in the mind. For centuries it was absolutely true that the earth was flat, and only the other day I read as scientific fact that the universe was a hundred times bigger, or it may have been a thousand times bigger, than reference books had assured us for years. What’s true to some people is untrue to others. What’s true now may not be tomorrow, and vice versa. Just think, after all these centuries some people maintain that there is no such thing as God!
I do admit, though, that I have occasionally written things that are demonstrably, and permanently, untrue. Long ago I told a story about the great Sherpa climber Tenzing, and the pleasure he had from a very good claret at a State banquet I attended. This was absolutely untrue, as I discovered only recently, when I unearthed a menu of that very dinner and found that only burgundy had been served. Then again, I once reminisced romantically about an evening in Australia when the great wings of the Sydney Opera House (I wrote) soared like a benediction over our content. It did not soar over us at all, I later realized, because the Sydney Opera House hadn’t been built yet.
But as for a subtler kind of truth, the inner kind that is seminal and personal to every one of us, I will defend to the death my right to exploit it. What I see in a picture, or a place, or a face, or even an event, is not necessarily what you see. It is my truth that I am recording. People sometimes complain to me about it. ‘My memory of Oxford [or Trieste, or Rorke’s Drift, or the Kentucky Derby],’ they maddeningly say, ‘is not in the least like the evocation of it in your book.’ ‘Well, of course it isn’t,’ I always feel like replying, ‘you didn’t write the book! My mind isn’t your mind!’
But I never do. I know what they mean, the oafs.
DAY 42
I slept badly last night, having had trouble meeting the deadline for an essay I was writing, and so I fell into a sort of half-dream, a technique I have evolved for the purposes of recording these Thoughts.
I imagined myself seeing the earth as a whole, as astronauts do from space, and layer by layer, as I approached it, analysing its condition. First there was a universal stratum of decline – the general corruption of air and atmosphere, the filth of the seas, the vanishing wildlife and all that. Then, a layer down, I reached the frightful confusion of human enmities that seemed to be becoming permanent, with all its ancillaries of racism and spite, from refugee drownings to nuclear threats, starvation to cruelty to plain bigotry. Closer to home, what decency could I see down there? Only a welter of political and financial ambition, greed, moral degradation, a morass of uncertainty enveloping all the nations and fostering bitterness everywhere, in democracies as in despotisms.
And, finally, I reached my own sweet home, among my friends, in the country I loved. And I forgot about my unfinished essay then, turned over and went to sleep.
DAY 43
‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.’ The phrase pursued me for years, in the days when I was still called James myself, and it made me wonder how many of the catchphrases of my time are still active, or even remembered. ‘Home, James’, I discovered, has got into the dictionaries, if only because legend attributes it to Queen Victoria, addressing a favoured coachman. But there must have been many more, especially in the adolescent years of radio and television, which entered the language from showbiz or America, and must surely have entered my own lingo. Are they still hanging around?
It is certainly true that if I say to my twelve-year-old granddaughter ‘See you about, trout’, she may well retort ‘See you later, alligator’, but I am fairly certain that if I said to somebody ‘Cheerio’, I would not get the retort ‘Pip, pip’, which was common enough in my youth. What about ‘spot on’, meaning ‘exactly so’, or ‘step on it’ or ‘super’, or ‘wizard’ as an exclamation of delight? Gone, all gone, I suspect – or did suspect until a moment ago, when the Oxford Dictionary assured me that ‘wizard’, though dated, could still just mean ‘wonderful’. (It recognizes ‘lingo’ too …)
But anyway, if phrases fade, so does the excitement of new things and new ideas. Where, for example, are the pressure cookers of yesterday’s kitchens? What happened to the hovercraft, that marvel of engineering, so magnificently splashing its way from Dover to Calais? Your old snaps from the Polaroid, not so long ago a miracle of modernity, are browning now in forgotten drawers, and so are the elegant playing cards and stationery items that they used to dish out on that lost Monarch of the Skies, the Concorde. Gone, all gone, such ikons of yesteryear, and it won’t be long, I fear, before we say farewell to that virtuoso performer of punctuation, that champion of the Individualist Style, the Exclamation Mark.
RIP to all of them, every one!!!!
DAY 44
There is much to be said for nostalgia. It can be debilitating, I know, but it can be agreeable too, especially when one reaches the years of discretion, and I spend much of my time wallowing in it.
In misty panorama the years and the places pass through my inner vision, and I remember events I have completely forgotten, see cities I can no longer identify, and even sense lost fragrances and seminal emotions. One of the pleasures of nostalgia, indeed, is the pleasure of chasing one’s memories. Memories, memories! They may be blurred, but they can be vivid too, and they can trigger long-lost associations. Only today there suddenly came into my mind a forgotten name – just a name. I can hardly spell it, let alone pronounce it properly, but it instantly summoned into my nostalgia a barrack room of some sort in Egypt long ago. I was among a group of foreign correspondents, from all over the world, covering some Middle Eastern crisis or other, and with that misty name some music came to me too. It was a popular song of the time, ‘Just One of Those Things’, and it was jauntily sung with a fairly mangled lyric by – by – by – who was it, who was it? Yes, got it, I remember. It was Nate Poliwetzky, if that’s how he spelt the name. Nate Poliwetzky, or perhaps Poliwesjzi, of AP, or UP, or AFP, or one of the other news agencies, and I can see him now in full performance, far away in time and place, half a lifetime ago. How we laughed! How we sang!
That’s what nostalgia can do. If you’re still around, Nate Poliwetzky, sing that song again for me, will you?
DAY 45
What is it with the birds? What are they on about? How do they steer? What are they up to? Who runs them? I can’t make them out at all.
This morning, I walked along the edge of a tidal meadow near our place, half grassland, half saltwater pools, and there I came across a multitude of Canada geese, plus a few whooper swans, all nibbling away at the grass in frenzied unison, as it were. After lunch, I went back to take another look at them, and lo! – every single one of those creatures, every one of those twitching, nibbling bundles of bird had vanished.
Where had they gone? Who ordered them to go? Where had they come from? Why did they come here? Who marshalled them? Why?
I don’t really want to know. I’m very pleased that they did come, and flattered that they should have flown, in their elegant V-formation, I assume, halfway across the world to our particular corner of another continent. I am glad that, so far as I know, years of scientific research, by generations of specialists, have not revealed to us (or to me, anyway) how birds work, how they remember those immense migratory journeys, how they know when to change course, or even how the half-dozen crows on the telegraph wire outside our house suddenly and unanimously decide, one and all, to take off and go home.
I spent an evening once at a shearwater colony in Australia, watching the little birds, as night fell, unerringly flying back to their own particular burrow in the dusk. Not a flicker of hesitation, not a single second thought, only swift, sudden swoops out of the sky on to the sand and into the underground. And I was proud to think that perhaps the most famous of all shearwate
rs should have been at least part-time Welsh. The small island of Ynys Enlli, Bardsey to the English, is almost within sight of my home, and it was the destination of the longest avian flight itinerary ever recorded – the half-century career of a Manx shearwater which, in its annual migrations between Cardigan Bay and the coast of South America, flew a million miles, or ten times to the moon and back.
What an impertinence, to ask it how it was done! No, let all the birds, big and small, friendly or aloof, keep their grand mysteries to themselves and leave us simple humans marvelling.
DAY 46
I am happily susceptible to the abstraction the Welsh call hiraeth. Dictionaries define it simply as longing, but to Welsh poets down the generations it has meant far, far more. The fourteenth-century master Dafydd ap Gwilym, for instance, declared it variously the Son of Memory, the Son of Intention, the Son of Grief and the Son of Enchantment. Fortunately, the conception has always treated me kindly, and twice, in the course of my daily exercise, it has given me a moment of epiphany – a brief lovely conviction that all would eventually be well, for me and for all others, as the old world turned again.
And lo, it happened to me once more today as I walked up our lane. I paused for a moment to take in the beauty of the morning – blue, blue sky with soft and genial clouds, two high trails of aircraft hastening romantically to the west, a dusting of snow on the mountains, a squawking of rooks somewhere and fifty-nine sheep (I counted them) speckling the Parrys’ fields all around. Eureka!
Hiraeth!
When I got home, I found an e-mail from America, almost despairing at the miseries of everything – terminal depression, my friend thought, in a devastated country ‘spinning downward’. I replied at once, with a loving message that all shall be well, all shall be very well, straight from the Son of Enchantment.
DAY 47
Last night, at the house Trefan Morys in Wales, we saw the Burning of the Books.
Doesn’t the very phrase strike a chill down the spine and raise hideous images in the mind? Those dim burly figures prancing in the firelight? Those ghastly connotations of bullies, bigots and evil ideologies? Surely the burning of books anywhere, the symbolic shredding of the human mind’s own sacred liberties, is as unforgivable at Trefan Morys as it was in Berlin long ago?
But hang about. I have better excuses than the Nazis did. It was very cold at Trefan Morys last night, and I was disconcerted to discover, as darkness fell, that we were entirely out of logs for our wood-burning Norwegian stove. What to do, when we all began to shiver and even the stove itself seemed to be looking back at me sadly?
I am not one of those enviable colleagues whose books, their publicity people tell us, have been translated into fifty or sixty foreign languages. No such luck. However, I have been printed in a few, and when this happens their obliging publishers always send me four or five copies for my own gratification. I add one at once to the row of my Collected Works, where everyone can see it and I can gloat over it in private. Other copies I give to the French, Italian, German or Spanish people who happen to turn up here in remotest Wales and might like a souvenir of their experience in their own tongue.
But I am left with translations into scripts that are as meaningless to me as they would be to my friends, neighbours and casual visitors – unwanted even by any second-hand booksellers or charity shops or indigent public libraries within a hundred miles of Llanystumdwy. So these unhappy volumes, often very handsome but with scripts back to front, or from top to bottom, or apparently upside down, in unrecognizable letterings and languages, and only a grinning photograph of yours truly on the back cover to identify them even to me – these poor victims of ethnicity end up in a black plastic container called the Disposal Box.
And from there last night, while the Welsh wind blew and the owls hooted, they suffered the Burning of the Books. I mourned for them as they flickered and blazed there, disintegrating before my eyes, and this morning the grey pile of their ashes, already cold in the grate, reproaches me in unknown tongues.
DAY 48
In all the anthologies of verse that I have in my library, few lines have more persistently pleased me than a little lyric written by Dorothy Fields in 1928, supposedly after overhearing a young New Yorker saying to his girl, as they looked longingly into Tiffany’s jewellery window on Fifth Avenue, ‘Gee, honey, I’d like to get you a sparkler like that, but right now I can’t give you nothin’ but love.’
Everything about this little anecdote seems to me just perfect (especially when it’s linked to the catchy tune that Jimmy McHugh wrote for it back then, and which I can still whistle for you, if you like). It is so absolutely of its period, from the argot of the young man (‘Gee, honey’, ‘sparkler’, ‘right now’) to the social implications (the Great Depression of the 1920s) and the underlying All-Americanness of it (in a 1931 movie the song was sung as a duet by Mickey and Minnie Mouse).
For of course those lines could only come from America, and from an America of a particular period, before true greatness set in, and disillusionment. As it happens, I met Dorothy Fields before she died in 1974, and I have always been sorry that she does not figure in the Oxford Book of American Light Verse. Never mind, in 2009 the 44th President of the United States, in his inaugural speech, quoted some more immortal lines of hers – not the ones about nothing but love, but the ones about picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves down …
DAY 49
Spur of the Moment
This morning, as I began my breakfast, a kind e-mail reached me from foreign parts. A few moments before, I suppose, an old friend had read something of mine in a newspaper. He told me that he was sitting in a transit lounge at Changi airport in Singapore, just in from Yangon (where’s that?) and waiting for a flight to London, and he was surrounded by whimpering children and their doubtless exhausted mums. I know the scene too well! But at once, there and then, having read those unimportant paragraphs in the paper, he had sent me an appreciative message on his iPad.
Isn’t spontaneity wonderful? That touching little communication meant far more to me because he had written it there and then, impulsively, on the spur of the moment. Nothing is less convincing, in my view, than the previously prepared compliment, unless it is the odiously practised witticisms of politicians or, dear me, the traditional funny bits in the best man’s encomium. Even many professional comedians, the ones that obviously have joke books or assistants, sound to me all too rehearsed; only the true masters, seldom your standard TV clowns, display the true genius of quip and repartee.
Anyway, when I got that delightful message over my cornflakes this morning I spent half an hour fashioning a suitable response, but decided in the end upon ‘Thanks a lot. Love Jan.’
DAY 50
‘Let us now praise Famous Men.’ Who wrote that, and why? It seems to me that all too many famous men are soon forgotten, and often deserve to be …
Sixty or seventy years ago, when I was a young and footloose journalist, I stuck in a scrapbook page pictures of Famous people I had met in the short course of my career, and now here the page is before me. Fifty people (only one a woman!) are immortalized there in fading photographs or cartoons – statesmen, rulers, politicians and miscellaneous magnates, with a few artists and sportsmen. I wonder how many are Famous still, or will be much longer?
The Queen of England, of course, is Famous ex officio – Elizabeth II until the end of history. So are one or two of the American presidents. T. S. Eliot is certainly not forgotten, and nor is Walt Disney, but what about those transient swells and potentates, those Luces and Onassises, Dr Moussadeks, Crown Prince Abdullah, Shepilov?
Shepilov? Who was Shepilov? Famous in his time, evidently, or he wouldn’t be in my scrapbook, but like many another, his light must have flickered and faded even before the old reaper came round.
PS By the way, the man who told us to praise Famous Men was the anonymous biblical author of the Book of Ecclesiasticus (as against the Book of Ecclesiastes), who includ
ed, incidentally, among the exemplary champions of his Chapter 44 people who ‘find out musical tunes, and recite verses in writing’.
PPS I never met President Kennedy, but I attended one of his political rallies, and reported to the Guardian my prescient instinct that he would never grow old. Alas, I never met Leonard Cohen either, but I did once meet his mother.
PPPS You think I’m rambling rather? So?
DAY 51
Half a century in cricketing terms, nearly seven weeks of my Thoughts! And today I wish to pay a tribute to Progress. The world is too much with us, God knows, but there is one implement of the new age that seems to me a blessing: the electronic tablet, which has become not just a useful tool to me, but a true benediction, and should in my opinion be made available, by government decree, to every citizen from birth to death, especially to inmates of HM prisons and the terminally lonely.
Just think! Only yesterday I wanted to confirm the origin of a particularly obscure biblical phrase, not included in my Oxford reference books. Not only was it there on my iPad, large as life, with sundry side references too, but before I returned to my desk I was able, almost without trying, to see and hear Daniel Barenboim playing a Beethoven sonata in a palace somewhere in the 1950s. I could just as easily have switched for a laugh with the late Tommy Cooper, or played a game of solitaire, or found a recipe for a goat-cheese quiche, or consulted the opinions of the world’s best doctors about excessive urination, or, for that matter, sent a small contribution to the lifeboats.
