Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet

  I’d told myself no one could write fiction about Cuba; through my trips, I’d collected notes, 800 pages of them, for a non-fiction book on one friend I’d met who’d finally schemed his way out of the island. It would be a sequel to the two books I’d already written, on the way cultures dream of one another and on one woman, in Japan, who’d taken the first steps towards making her dreams real life.

  But then a forest fire swept through the hills of Santa Barbara and reduced my family’s house, and with it every last note (in those pre-computer days), to ash. I had to write about the country by which I was possessed, but I knew I could not begin to put most of what I’d experienced into the entirely fictional novel I now made up. Two brothers in countries separated by only 90 miles of water: neither knows the first thing about the other’s circumstances and each, more poignantly, longs to be rescued by the other.

  In a novel who’d believe that? It would seem too pat, too easily ironic. In life it was as humbling as every heartbreak is. The story keeps going around and around in my head, even as more and more of our screens sing brightly about how we’re living in a small, small world.

  The Way to Hav

  BY JAN MORRIS

  Jan Morris was born in 1926. After graduating from Oxford, she spent ten years as a foreign correspondent, first for The London Times, then the Guardian, and was the only reporter with the expedition that first climbed Mt Everest in 1953. Since then she has written some forty books of travel, history, memoir, biography and imagination. The Pax Britannica trilogy evokes the climax and decline of the late British Empire. The memoir Conundrum concerns the author’s change of sexual role in the 1970s, and Hav is a fictional account of an entirely imaginary European city. Morris has also written literary studies of Wales, Spain, the USA, Canada, Venice, Oxford, Sydney and Hong Kong, and unorthodox biographies of Abraham Lincoln and the British admiral Lord Fisher, who died in 1926 and with whom she proposes to have an affair in the afterlife. She is an ardent Euro-Welsh patriot, standing for a sovereign Wales within a British federation, a European confederation and eventually a conciliated World, and lives with her life’s partner, Elizabeth, and her Norwegian forest cat, Ibsen, in the top left corner of Wales, in frequent contact with their four children.

  Years ago, feeling that I had written quite enough, and more than enough, about the great cities of the world, I decided to invent a brand-new metropolis of my own. I called it Hav. I imagined it, imprecisely, as being somewhere on an eastern Mediterranean coast, and I wrote two books about it. The place was totally fictional, all out of my head.

  To my surprise, however, I found that many of my readers took it to be a real city, and wrote to ask me how to get there. How to get there indeed? How to get to Hav? The more I thought about it, the more clearly I realized that I had indeed made a long, long journey to reach my imaginary destination, a journey in the mind as well as in the body, through history as through geography. It was my life’s journey, really, mirrored in fancy, but I sent my readers there by a convenient short cut. ‘I made it all up,’ I told them.

  Of course that was no more than a half-truth, because to my Hav books, as to all fiction, there was a sub-stratum of fact. There never was such a city as Hav, but the experiences that created it in my mind, the emotions and the illusions that swirled about my prose, were not made up at all. Real places were blurred in my mind, sometimes only in my subconscious, and things that had happened in reality to me, during half a lifetime of travel, were transmuted willy-nilly into experiences of Hav.

  In my books I imagined the geographical and historical circumstances of Hav ranging from the Middle Ages to our own times, and I see now in retrospect that I drew them from my acquaintance with half a dozen real cities. There was Gdansk, for instance, sometimes a city-state, sometimes a fief of one empire or another. There was Trieste, all alone at the head of the Adriatic, where cultures, languages and histories overlapped. There were the queer little Åland islands, only half subject to Sweden; Cetinje which was once the capital of the Montenegrin monarchy; and pockets of minority cultures like the Yezidis of Iraq or the Karaim Jews of Lithuania. And in the later pages of my Hav books brazen new cities of the 21st century insidiously suggested themselves, tinged with greed and tourism …

  All, every one, old and new, northern and southern, occidental and oriental – all lay along my route to Hav.

  Many encounters on my life’s real journey, too, have found themselves metamorphosed into Hav’s imagined scenario. Have you heard the trumpeter of Krakow, whose heartrending hourly call from the tower of St Mary’s has always seemed to me a very epitome of Polishness? Well, no doubt his call was sounding in my mind when I invented the trumpeter, traditionally an Armenian, whose call has for several centuries awoken Hav each morning to its work and its proud memories. The Electric Ferry which swims silently across Hav’s harbour has surely chugged there, more noisily, directly from the waterfront of Bergen, and I first heard the characteristic banging of its slatted seats upon the Star Ferry in Hong Kong. The Conveyor Bridge across the Hav Narrows is undoubtedly related to the grand old Transporter Bridge that carries cars backwards and forwards across the mouth of the Usk in Wales. The strange Chinese tower of Hav owes something to the tomb towers of Iran.

  I think images of Michael Jackson may have influenced my evocations of Nijinsky, who had come to Hav with the Diaghilev Ballet in the 1900s. No doubt the Circassians I met long ago in Amman, guarding King Hussein of Jordan, were related to the Assyrians who attended the exiled aspirant to the Caliphate in Hav. Only now, though, as I scour my subconscious for this essay, do I realize the genesis of the self-righteous ex-Hauptsturmfuhrer, exiled in his old age to Hav, who so insistently tried to persuade me of the Holocaust’s redemptive justice – ‘tragic millions’, as he saw it, ‘in pilgrimage to their own Calvaries’. Did I not draw him, all unwitting, from my memories of the trial of Adolf Eichmann at Jerusalem, when the ultimate mass murderer in his glass cage suggested to me ‘an elderly pinched housewife in a flowered pinafore’, priggish and petulant in his self-justification?

  Much of my own life’s pilgrimage has taken me through the shadow of the lost British Empire, and I felt its presence also in Hav, which was British for a time itself. The ambiguous grandeur of that once-majestic dominion has always haunted me, not least in the crumbling memorial slabs I have stumbled across from Tasmania to Alberta. It is not surprising that I discovered a moving specimen down by the waterfront at Hav, commemorating an officer of the Royal Engineers who had ‘Left this Station to Report to the Commander of a yet Greater Corps’.

  But then again I have always been subject to the seductions of Araby, and Hav in the old days was marvellously endowed with mosques, caravanserai, quartertone music and sensual lyrics – Ah (as one of the best known Hav poets put it) what need have we of mosque / Or learned imam, / When into the garden of our delights / Flies the sweet dove of Allah’s mercy, with her call to prayer?’ Where did I first hear the gentle cadence of that verse, or did I make that up too?

  I am an old Welsh patriot, but I have a taste for the cosmopolitan. Between the wars Hav had been a ward of the League of Nations, governed jointly by the French, the Germans and the Italians, and I found myself delightfully at home hearing about the thriving multicultural Hav of the 1930s, when the night-clubs flourished and people like Benny Goodman and Maurice Chevalier were pleased to perform in them. I spent happy evenings myself, too, in what remained of those old night-spots, and it’s an odd thing that while all my life I have preferred to go to bed early, in Hav I often found myself carousing the night away to the blast of jazz and the thudding of drums, until the Armenian trumpeter up on the hill alerted us all to the coming of the day.

  Much of all this, this correlation between fact and fancy, the dream-journey and the actual, has only come back to me now, as I write this piece. I have always been more aware, though, that I have travelled my life itself in allegory, as it were. Mine was an allegorical journey, minutely re
flecting grander motions of humanity, and the Hav books that properly represented its destination are literary symbolisms themselves.

  They are built, I now realize, around a great defining moment of our times, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, which more or less coincided with the virtual destruction of Hav itself. The first book describes Hav as it was before that epochal calamity – a city rooted in the long historical past, reflecting and glorying in the whole kaleidoscopic variety of an ancient European city, rich in quirks and anomalies and references and contradictions, messy, colourful, funny, endlessly surprising. The second book, though, reflects the world, and the city, that has evolved since 2001, and its rebuilt Hav is far less engaging. Now the place is without bumps and laughter. It is governed by dubiously fundamentalist theology, and by a particularly greedy kind of capitalism. Its architecture is loveless, its freedoms are muffled, and its old sense of intriguing mystery has hardened into something more sinister.

  So do you still want to know the way to Hav? Probably not. Better to think of the old place as pure make-believe …

  A Tango with Freud

  BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

  Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over eighty books on a wide variety of subjects. He has lived and worked in Africa, the setting of his well-known series of books, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. He has travelled extensively and now makes regular tours of the many countries throughout the world in which his books are published. He lives in Scotland with his wife, Elizabeth, a doctor.

  Most of us, I suspect, have a list within ourselves of journeys we would like one day to undertake. The more organised among us go on to make these journeys, ticking them off one by one. Mongolia, riding horses by day and sleeping in yurts by night: done. The train journey from Singapore to Penang: done. And so on. Neither of these happens to be on my list, although both might be, if I had the time. My list, like many such things, features odd places that bear no real relation to one another, but that have for some reason caught my imagination.

  I would like to get to Bolivia some day to speak to people about the Bolivian navy. Why? Bolivia is a landlocked country and it interests me that a country that has no access to the sea (they lost that a long time ago) should feel so strongly about having a navy. The fact that one has no sea should not inhibit one unduly, of course: they have a lake and that’s enough of an excuse to have a large number of admirals – and an immensely popular Navy Day. And the kindly Argentineans allow them to keep a ship in one of their ports. I can imagine long conversations in cafés about the importance of having a navy and the difference between brown-water navies (lakes and rivers) and blue-water navies (the sea).

  Bolivia remains unvisited, but then there is Mobile, Alabama, that I have visited on more than one occasion now. The name is what attracted me: Mobile, Alabama. What sheer poetry! What lovely, mellifluous, feminine sounds! And I had read that Mobile, by long tradition, is said to have more ghosts than any other town. Why, I wondered? When I went there I found the answer: the streets are shaded by oaks that form a natural canopy across the road. Ghosts, as everybody knows, like shade – and a slow, Southern life-style.

  Alice Springs, in the middle of Australia, was ticked off the list only last year. Alice is an unexceptional town – apart from being in the middle of the immense waterless heart of a continent – but it had the good fortune of being in the title of Nevil Shute’s great romantic novel, A Town Like Alice. It was because I had read that as a teenager, and loved it, that I knew that I must go there.

  Casablanca was on the list for the same reason, and I shall never forget the sense of satisfaction, mixed with excitement, as my battered Mercedes taxi drew out of the airport at night, its headlights sweeping through the darkness to illuminate a road sign that said, simply and enticingly, Casablanca.

  But the journey that I really wanted to make above all others was to Buenos Aires. Now, many people want to go to Buenos Aires because of the tango and the bars and cafés with which the dance is associated. The Argentineans say that they invented the tango, and that claim is widely accepted – except by the Uruguayans, who argue that it originated there. To most dance pilgrims, I suspect, it is no contest: Buenos Aires is the place.

  The tango was not what drew me there, however. My interest in Buenos Aires is tied up with my interest in Freud and psychoanalytical theory. That in turn stems from a reading, in my early twenties, of W. H. Auden’s poem In Memory of Sigmund Freud. This poem, written at a time when Auden still believed that psychology, and science in general, could provide us with the solutions to the problem of human evil, is a beautiful and moving tribute to a man who changed the way in which humanity looked at and understood itself. Auden’s tribute inspired me to read more Freud, and over the years that followed I dipped into a wide range of Freudian literature. Some of that, of course, stretches credulity to breaking point; some is quite frankly funny (the tennis as a substitute for sex school of Freudianism); other parts contain profound and valuable insights. Overall, I felt that Freud liberated us in just the way in which Auden suggested.

  Then I came across an item in an issue of the late lamented review, Encounter. A boxed snippet caught my attention. Buenos Aires, it suggested, was the epicentre of contemporary Freudianism, more so even than New York, where psychoanalysis was becoming a bit passé. Streets were named after prominent figures in the Freudian movement, it revealed, and the conversation in cafés was as likely to be about neuroses as it was about sport or politics. I filed this information away mentally, thinking that it would be interesting one day to visit the Freudian quarter in Buenos Aires and see just how Freudian it was. It struck me as remarkable that a city, outside the dreary example of the Communist world, could be so in thrall to what, after all, was a secular religion as to celebrate it through the naming of the streets. It seemed to me that this was an alternative, parallel world of the sort dreamed of in fiction. Imagine a city, for instance, where the delivery of flowers is sufficiently important to merit the equipping of florists’ vans with flashing blue lights to allow them through. Nowhere like that exists, but it could. Imagine a city where what is important to people is not commerce and the making of money, nor fashion, nor power, but the analysis of dreams …

  Over the years, Buenos Aires remained on the list. I got close, but did not actually make it. On one occasion, we travelled round the coast of South America on an ocean liner, calling on Tierra del Fuego along the way, but going nowhere near Buenos Aires. Then my wife and I received an invitation to spend a couple of weeks with a friend who was then the European Union’s ambassador to Uruguay. Montevideo is but a hop on a plane from Buenos Aires and I decided that this was the time to make the trip. I wrote to the representative of the British Council in Argentina (a cultural diplomacy body) and asked for assistance in finding an interpreter and guide who would arrange for me to meet and interview psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires. They readily agreed to do this, and went further in offering to host a dinner for writers in the city to coincide with my visit.

  Travelling somewhere with a purpose is so much more rewarding than travelling somewhere with no purpose beyond looking at the usual sights. I could not wait to see the Freudian quarter, and was taken there soon after arrival by my guide. The quarter is known as Villa Freud, and is centred on the Plaza Güemes in the Palermo area of the city. My guide no doubt had her views as to the sanity of a visitor whose preoccupation is seeing psychoanalysts, but if she did harbour such reservations, she did not reveal them. I was taken first to a street in which every second door seemed to have a small plate outside it announcing the presence of a psychoanalytical studio. There was a bookshop, too, that had nothing but psychoanalytical texts in its window and on its shelves. And there, as I had hoped, was the Café Sigi, named after the man who had started the whole process. The coffee seemed normal, although I imagined that most of those drinking it in the café that morning were not long out of their hourly encounter with their analys
t, or perhaps on the way there.

  We visited two psychoanalysts, chosen from opposite ends of the spectrum. One was a man who practised from a very modest office in Villa Freud. He spoke quietly and with passion about the difficult days he had experienced during the time of the generals. Psychoanalysis had been suppressed during those years, he explained, and its teaching in universities had been discouraged. I was not surprised: Auden’s poem on Freud has something very pertinent to say about how psychoanalysis threatened what he called the ‘ancient cultures of conceit’ and how it would lead to the destruction of their ‘lucrative patterns of frustration’. Exactly. Generals do not like psychoanalysis, and they had made those days very dark for its practitioners.

  The other analyst operated in the higher echelons of Argentinean society. She received me in an extremely elegant penthouse flat, the glass walls of which afforded a striking view of the city. Her practice was made up of wealthy people and it kept her, it seemed, in considerable style. ‘I spend part of the year in Paris,’ she announced. That, again, should be no great surprise: Argentinean psychoanalysis was heavily influenced by Lacan’s theories and continues to look to Lacanian leads.

  The dinner took place that night. About fourteen people were around the table, mostly writers and journalists, but there were also a few university students. That, of course, is hardly a representative sample of the population, but nonetheless it struck me as quite remarkable that all except one or two of them were undergoing or had undergone psychoanalysis. This was revealed when my conversations of the earlier part of the day were mentioned. ‘But of course I’ve had analysis,’ said one of the guests. ‘Who hasn’t?’