A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  I puzzled, as every stranger must, about the mingled origins of this pungent civic character, and the first strain I identified was undoubtedly the Irish. The simplicity of St John’s is streaked, I came to sense, with a particularly Irish reproach, wit, and irony – sometimes I felt that Ireland itself was only just out of sight through that harbour entrance. The prickly pensioners and layabouts who hang around on Water Street, ‘The Oldest Continuously Occupied Street in North America’, look pure Cork or Wexford. The instant response that one gets from nearly everyone is Ireland all over. And the complex of buildings that surrounds the Basilica of St John the Baptist, episcopal, conventual, didactic, societal buildings, is a reminder that here Irish values and memories, however dominant the British colonial establishment of the place, proved always inextinguishable.

  But that establishment too still flies its flags – literally, for at city hall they flaunt not only the ensigns of the city, the province, and the Confederation but actually the Union Jack too, for reasons defined for me as ‘purely sentimental’. As a sign reminds us on the waterfront, The British Empire Began Here – when Sir Humphrey Gilbert established the first permanent settlement of New Founde Land in 1583 – and the city is appropriately rich in heroic memorials, commemorative plaques, royally planted trees or dukely laid foundation stones. Newfoundland was a self-governing British possession within my own lifetime (no school stamp collection of my childhood was complete without the 1¢ Caribou of our oldest colony), and within the city centre it is still easy enough to descry the old power structure of the Pax Britannica. The governor’s mansion is recognizably the social fulcrum that it was in every British possession. The garrison church is spick-and-span. The Anglican cathedral is authentically unfinished, like all the best Anglican cathedrals of the Empire. The old colonial legislature is properly pillared and stately.

  The general view seems to be, all the same, that the British Empire never did much for its oldest colony. Most people I asked said that emotionally at least they would prefer to enjoy the island independence signed away to Canada in 1949, but a good many told me that if they had the choice they would opt for union with the US. This did not surprise me. In some ways St John’s is very American. It does not feel to me in the least like Canada, being altogether too uninhibited, but I can conceive of it as a half-Irish, half-Empire Loyalist backwater of New England.

  A century ago the Newfoundlanders were all for free trade with the Americans, at least, and would have got it if the British government had not intervened. Today half the people I met seemed to have American connections of some kind or another, mostly in Boston. When I suggested to one elderly lady that closer links with the United States might in the end mean more corruption, exploitation, and general degradation, she seemed quite affronted. ‘That’s only the fringe of things down there,’ she said. But I looked her in the face as she said this, and I rather think I detected in it, through the patina of the years, the bright eager features of a GI groupie of long ago. ‘I can assure you that at heart the Americans are very good people,’ my informant firmly added, and as we parted I swear I heard, as in historic echo, a giggle in the shadows of McMurdo’s Lane, and a distant beat of ‘In The Mood’.

  These varied inheritances and associations save St John’s from any suggestion of provincialism. History does it, one might say. The fateful gap of the Narrows is like a door upon a world far wider than Canada itself, while the city’s particular kinds of expertise, to do with ships, and fish, and ice, and seals, and perilous navigations, make it a place beyond condescension. Memorial University of Newfoundland has a formidable reputation, the Marine Institute is world famous, and ships of many nations and many kinds, perpetually coming and going through the harbour, give the town a cosmopolitan strength – rust-streaked fishing vessels from the deep Atlantic grounds, hulking coastguard ships, coastal freighters, ocean research vessels, container ships and warships and ships bringing salt for the winter roads – ships in such ceaseless progress that each morning of my stay, when I walked down to the waterfront before breakfast, I found that some new craft had come out of the night like a messenger while I slept.

  The historical continuity of St John’s, too, allows it a status beyond its size. The world has been passing through St John’s certainly for a longer time, and perhaps with a greater intensity, than through any other Canadian city – from the Basques, Dutch, French, and English of the early years to the GIs of the Second World War and the Russian and Japanese seamen who are familiars of the place today. All their influences have been absorbed, in one degree or another, into the city’s persona. No wonder St John’s, though long reduced to the condition of a provincial capital, remains so defiantly itself. There is no false modesty here. ‘You’re right, but it isn’t true of St John’s,’ a man told me when I remarked that the citizens of most Canadian cities wanted to talk about nothing but themselves – and he went on to rehearse in loving and elaborate detail all other superiorities of the civic character.

  In fact the people of St John’s are irresistible talkers about themselves, and their peculiar accent, which strikes me as a cross between Irish, Devonian and Atlantic Seal, makes the flow of their infatuation all the more unguent. Since everyone seems to know nearly everyone else, throughout my stay I felt myself encompassed within a web of overlapping reminiscence, amusement, and complaint. Gossip flows lively in St John’s; images of scandal, joke, and mischief passed before me like figures on a wide and gaudy screen. The moneyed dynasties of the town were dissected for me in richest idiom whether living or extinct; politicians suffered the sharp sting of Newfoundland iconoclasm; as I was guided around the streets one by one the pedigrees and peccadillos of their structures stood revealed. Here was the store which was all that was left of the Xs’ fortunes, here the mansion where the wildly successful Ys resided. One of the less estimable of the lieutenant governors lived in this house, a whiz-kid entrepreneur had lately installed eight bathrooms in that.

  All this makes life in the city feel remarkably immediate. There is no lag, it seems, between introduction and confidence. By my second day in town I was being given under-the-counter comments on the local judiciary by a well-known politician. By my third day I was being treated to the lowdown about some spectacular financial goings-on. Hardly had I been introduced to a member of one of St John’s oldest families, who has one house in town and another on its outskirts, in a kind of Newfoundland version of the transhumance system – hardly had I met this distinguished citizen and his wife before they were explaining why their cat is named after – well, I had better not say who it’s named after, let alone why.

  Extend Arm (says a notice at a pedestrian crossing outside City Hall)

  Place Foot on Street

  Wait Until Cars Stop

  Thank Driver

  This strikes me as a quintessentially St John’s announcement, with its blend of the amiable, the unexpected and the tongue-in-cheek. If reading this essay makes you too feel rather as though you are being slapped in the face with a dried codfish, that is because I was beguiled by almost everything about the city and its inhabitants.

  I was conscious always all the same, as I wandered so enjoyably through the city, that life and history have never been easy here. Beneath the charm there lies a bitterness. St John’s is full of disappointment, and is an exposed and isolated place in more senses than one. One afternoon, by driving the few miles out to Cape Spear, I made myself for a moment the easternmost person in North America, and was chilled to think, as I stood there in the wind, that while at my back there was nothing but the ocean, before me there extended, almost as far as the imagination could conceive, the awful immensity of Canadian rock, forest, prairie, and mountain. St John’s is the edge of everywhere, the end and start of everything. The sign for Mile ‘0’ of the Trans-Canada Highway stands immediately outside city hall.

  And to this day, though much of the activity of St John’s has moved inland, everything in this city looks down, if only meta
phorically, to the Narrows. Even the stolid Confederation Building, erected with a becoming diffidence well back from the bloody-minded seaport, peers cautiously from its distance towards that dramatic fissure. I found myself bewitched by it, repeatedly driving up to its headlands, or around the southern shore to the lighthouse at the end, or waving goodbye to the ships as they trod carefully between the buoys towards the open sea – a distant slow wave of an arm, from wheelhouse or forecastle, returning my farewell as seamen must have responded down all the centuries of Atlantic navigation.

  Once I was contemplating that hypnotic view from the bar of the Hotel Newfoundland, which looks immediately out to the Narrows and the Atlantic beyond. It was evening, and the prospect was confused by the reflection, in the plate-glass windows, of the people, plants and ever-shifting patterns of hotel life behind me. Beyond this insubstantial scene, though, I could see the stern outline of the cliffs, the floodlit Cabot Tower on Signal Hill, the white tossing of the ocean breakers, and the slowly moving masthead light of a ship sliding out to sea.

  The hotel pianist was playing Chopin – and as he played, with the recondite inflections of Newfoundland conversation rising and falling around me, mingled with laughter and the clink of glasses, somehow the riding light of that ship, moving planet-like through the mirror images, brought home to me with a frisson the grand poignancy that lies beneath the vivacity of St John’s. I thought it sad but exciting, there in the air-conditioned bar.

  I first went to St John’s in the 1960s. In the Newfoundland of those days, still a British colony, it was necessary to find a local guarantor before one could cash foreign money orders. Knowing nobody in town, and discovering that the public library possessed a book of mine about Venice, I introduced myself to the librarian and asked if she would endorse a traveller’s cheque. How could she confirm, she sensibly said, that I was who I said I was? By a simple literary test, said I: surely nobody else on earth could recite by heart the last line of my Venice book, which she had upon her own shelves. Solemnly she reached for the volume. Nervously I stood at her desk while she turned to the final page and ran her eye down the paragraphs to the end of it. Well, she said? I cleared my throat. The concluding words of my book were not very stately. ‘No wonder,’ I mumbled then, feeling distinctly disadvantaged, ‘no wonder George Eliot’s husband fell into the Grand Canal.’ Without a flicker that librarian of old St John’s closed the book, returned it to the shelf and authorized my money.

  In London my book about Canada was called O Canada!, but hardly anyone bought it amyway – ‘Canada! What on earth could you find interesting to write about in Canada?’ In Toronto its publishers honoured the national reputation by calling it City to City …

  25

  There Stood China

  I had been repeatedly rebuffed in my attempts to get to China, and when I did manage it in 1983, for Rolling Stone magazine, the country was still getting over the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, and reeling rather after the death of Mao Zedong and the start of the allegedly liberalizing policy called the Open Door. I sailed there on a coastal steamer from Hong Kong.

  And in the distance, through the porthole, there stood China.

  Of course wherever you are in the world, China stands figuratively there, a dim tremendous presence somewhere across the horizon, sending out its coded messages, exerting its ancient magnetism over the continents. I had been prowling and loitering around it for years, often touched on the shoulder by its long, long reach – watching the Chinese-Americans shadow-box in San Francisco, say, or being dragged screaming and kicking to the Chinese opera somewhere, or interviewing renegade patriots in Taiwan, or debating whether to go to the fish-and-chip shop or the Cantonese take-away in Dublin. It had seemed to me always the land of the grand simplicities, pursuing its own mighty way through history, impassive, impervious, where everything was more absolute than it was elsewhere, and the human condition majestically overrode all obstacles and reversions. I had wondered and marvelled at it for half a lifetime: and here I was at last on my way to meet it face to face, on a less than spanking Chinese steamship, rust-streaked, off-white, red flag at the stern, steaming steadily northward through the blue-green China Sea.

  My fellow-passengers assiduously prepared me for the encounter. They showed me how best to suck the goodness out of the smoked black carp at dinner. They taught me to count up to ten in Mandarin. They drew my attention to an article in China Pictorial about the propagation of stink-bugs in Gandong Province. Mrs Wang, returning from a visit to her sister in Taiwan, vividly evoked for me her hysterectomy by acupuncture (‘when they slit me open, oh, it hurt very bad, but after it was very strange feeling, very strange … ’). The Bureaucrat, returning from an official mission to Hong Kong, thoroughly explained to me the Four Principles of Chinese Government Policy.

  Around us the sea was like a Chinese geography lesson, too. It was never empty. Sometimes apparently abandoned sampans wallowed in the swell, sometimes flotillas of trawlers threshed about the place. Red-flagged buoys mysteriously bobbed, miles from anywhere, grey tankers loomed by high in the water. Islands appeared, islands like pimples in the sea, like long knobbly snakes, islands with lighthouses on them, or radio masts, or white villas. And always to the west stood the hills of China, rolling sometimes, sheer sometimes, and once or twice moulded into the conical dome-shapes that I had hitherto supposed to be the invention of Chinese calligraphers. Ah, but I must go far inland, the Bureaucrat told me on our third day at sea, I must go to Guangxi in the south, to see such mountains properly – mountains like no others, said he, the Peak of Solitary Beauty, the Hill of the Scholar’s Servant – ‘But look’ (he interrupted himself) – ‘you notice? The water is turning yellow. We are approaching the mouth of the Yangtze!’

  So we were. In the small hours that night, when I looked out of my porthole again, I found we were sailing through an endless parade of ships, gloomily illuminated in the darkness: and when at crack of dawn I went on deck to a drizzly morning, still we were passing them, up a scummy river now, lined with ships, thick with ships, barges and tugs, and container ships, and a warship or two, and country craft of shambled wood so fibrous and stringy-looking that it seemed to me the Chinese, who eat anything, might well make a dish of them. Hooting all the way we edged a passage up the Huangpu, narrowly avoiding ferry-boats, sending sampans scurrying for safety, until after thirty miles of ships, and docks, and grimy warehouses, and factories, we saw before us a waterfront façade of high towers and office buildings, red and shabby in the rain. It was my China landfall: it was the city of Shanghai.

  *

  ‘Moonlight Serenade!’ demanded the elderly American tourists in the bar of the Peace Hotel, ‘Play it again!’ The band obliged – half a dozen well-worn Chinese musicians, a lady at the piano, an aged violinist, an excellent trumpeter: Glenn Miller lived again in Shanghai, and the old thump and blare rose to a deafening climax and a smashing roll of drums.

  The Americans tapped their feet and shook their hands about, exclaiming things like ‘Swing it!’ The band’s eyes, I noticed, wandered here and there, as though they had played the piece once too often. They have been playing it, after all, since they and the song were young. Their musical memories, like their personal experiences, reached back through Cultural Revolution, and Great Leap Forward, and People’s Revolution, and Kuomintang, and Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone, back through all the permutations of Chinese affairs to the days of cosmopolitan Shanghai – those terrible but glamorous times when European merchants lived like princes here, Chinese gangsters fought and thrived, the poor died in their hundreds on the streets and the Great World House of Pleasure offered not only singsong girls and gambling tables, but magicians, fireworks, strip shows, story-tellers, mah-jong schools, marriage brokers, freak shows, massage parlours, porn photographers, a dozen dance platforms and a bureau for the writing of love-letters.

  No wonder the musicians looked world-weary. The Great World is the Shanghai Youth Palac
e now, the past of its former prostitutes being known only, we are primly told, to their Revolutionary Committee leaders. The band plays on all the same, and in many other ways too I was taken aback to find Old Shanghai surviving despite it all. The Race Club building, it is true, has been transformed into the Shanghai Public Library, and the racetrack itself is partly the People’s Square, and partly the People’s Park, but nearly everything else still stands. The pompous headquarters of the merchant houses still line the Bund, along the waterfront, surveying the tumultuous commerce that once made them rich. The Customs House still rings out the hours with a Westminster chime. The celebrated Long Bar of the Shanghai Club, which used to serve the best martinis at the longest bar in Asia, is propped up now by eaters of noodles with lemonade at the Dongfeng Hotel. The Peace Hotel itself is only the transmogrified Cathay, where Noël Coward wrote Private Lives, with its old red carpets still in place, 135 different drinks still on its bar list, and the Big Band sound ringing nightly through the foyer.

  Even the streets of Shanghai, where the poor die no longer, seemed unexpectedly like home. There are virtually no private cars in this city of 11 million people, but I scarcely noticed their absence, so vigorously jostled and tooted the taxis, the articulated buses and the myriad bicycles: if there were few bright flowered clothes to be seen along the boulevards, only open-neck shirts and workaday slacks, there were still fewer of the baggy trousers, blue jerkins and Mao caps that I had foreseen. The theme music from Bonanza sounded through Department Store No. 10; there were cream cakes at Xilailin, formerly Riesling’s Tea Rooms; the Xinya Restaurant still ushered its foreigners, as it had for a hundred years, into the discreet curtained cubicles of its second floor. On my first morning in Shanghai I ate an ice-cream in the People’s Park (admission 2 teng), and what with its shady trees and winding paths, the old men playing checkers at its concrete tables, the students at their books, the health buffs at their callisthenics, the miscellaneous meditators and the tall buildings looking through its leaves above, I thought it, but for an absence of muggers and barouches, remarkably like Central Park.