by Jan Morris
58 Little spas
There are little spas all over Europe, and some of them are charming. For example west of Rostock, on the Baltic coast of Germany, there stands the small watering-place called Bad Doberan, where we saw a little train chuff by back on page 245. This was once a summer retreat of the Grand Duke Friedrich Franz I of Mecklenburg, who at the end of the eighteenth century built the first of all German sea-bathing resorts on the coast a few miles away. ‘The idea of a fashionable Bathing place in Mecklenburg!’ ironically scoffed Jane Austen – ‘How can people pretend to be fashionable or to bathe out of England!’ But both the Bathing place and the spa flourished, and are delightful still. Bad Doberan is the classic spa in miniature. Graceful little pavilions ornament the civic park, and the Kurhotel, two doors away from the Grand Duke’s own palace, is a very sublimation of a spa hotel. I had an attic room when I was there in 1993, low-beamed and cosy, and when I opened my window upon the spire of the minster among its great trees, and the rose-gardens of the palace along the road, I felt I could almost see His Grace himself, with his ladies and his friends, promenading in the evening down below, serenaded by a string quartet perhaps, and gossiping about inessential courtly scandals.
For in their heyday most spas had their own style or class of clientele. Baden-Baden in Germany has always cultivated the grand manner, and is still a resort of the very rich, who can alternate between the baths and the casino, and sometimes weigh themselves before dinner to see how much they can allow themselves to eat. Bath, having been the centre of all things modish in the eighteenth century, was in my childhood an exemplar of dingy respectability, where aged assistants in black suits waited with hooded wheelchairs at the railway station for their patients to arrive. And no spas were more specialized in custom than the minute watering-places which thrived in Victorian Wales: if Llanwrtyd Wells and Llangammarch were the favoured resort of Nonconformists, no self-respecting Welsh Anglican hypochondriac would go anywhere but Llandrindod.
59 At the seaside
In earlier times going to the seaside, too, was seen primarily as a health cure, and sea-bathing as a kind of therapy. ‘Dr Brighton’, they used to call the first of the salt-water bathing-places, on the Sussex coast in England, and Abbazia, now Opatija, the Habsburg Empire’s own Brighton on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, was founded by a medical entrepreneur and officially proclaimed a Health Resort by a congress of doctors in 1885. Even in my time people used to go to Weston-super-Mare, on the English coast of the Bristol Channel, specifically because it was believed there were health-giving qualities to the ozone that came out of its mud. The Communist Governments of eastern Europe thought in the same way: the modern concrete hotels that were built for trade unionists and their families along the coasts of the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Adriatic were built not just to give them fun, but to make them healthy for further exertions in the factories. ‘Strength Through Joy’, as the Nazis had put it – and the ultimate pleasure-plant would have been their own never finished development called Prora, on the German Baltic island of Rügen, which would have housed 20,000 communal holiday-makers in one huge block, and, having been converted into a barracks, remains today a ghastly memorial to totalitarian tourism.
Whatever the reason, seaside towns, like spas, were often places of fashionable resort – San Sebastian indeed, one of the most handsome of them, became the summer residence of the Spanish court. If they have mostly become less modish now, as mass tourism overwhelms them, and are one and all dismal out of season, often enough they remain architecturally pleasant. Of all the European seaside resorts, Clifton in Ireland to Zlatni Pyasâtsi in Bulgaria (a.k.a. Golden Sands), I think my favourite is Trouville in France. The English invented the modern salt-water resort, but the French turned it into a genre of art, and it was at Trouville in Normandy that Monet and Bonnard first realized the beauty in the stoop of the child beside his sandcastle, and the preen of the promenading ladies. Trouville has long been overtaken by racier resorts, and diminished rather by the oil tanks and apartment blocks of Le Havre across its estuary, but that old aesthetic of the seaside is still recognizable there in all its tangy charm. Exuberantly the old hotels and villas still cluster around the beach, like so many jolly old gentlefolk in lace and grey toppers, out to enjoy themselves. Some are encrusted with coils, domes and classical flourishes. Some are half-timbered. There are houses built like castles, like fairy palaces, like Persian caravanserais. The rooftops of old Trouville are punctuated with golden birds, pineapples, crescent moons, spindles, metal flowers and urns, and all the way up the hillside behind the beach the mansions stand in majesty among their trees, unabashed by shifts of taste or society, and still looking, behind their ornamental gates and protective shady gardens, almost voluptuously comfortable. Trouville is wonderfully composed. When, in the years after the Second World War, unexploded mines and bombs occasionally turned up on the beach, the municipality officially classified them as ‘Objets Bizarres’.
60 The ski-culture
Another thing that brings Europe together is sport. Hundreds of thousands of people cross and recross the continent to watch games and contests from wind-surfing to car-racing, to have a go at water-skiing or toboganning or playing golf or paragliding. They go to Switzerland for the Cresta Run, to the Isle of Man for the motor-bike races, to Italy for the Siena horse-race, to Spain for the Pamplona bull-run, and every single journey makes some part of Europe a little more familiar to the rest. The universally shared passion for soccer has not only cross-fertilized the nations by the transfer of professional players, but has accustomed many parts of Europe to hooligans from elsewhere. And the late-twentieth-century ski-culture has made what is almost a manner of life equally familiar to the people of many nations. Fortunately it is to my mind an enthusiasm that beautifies almost everything it touches, down to the very sleaziest of après-ski discos, down to the most unprepossessing of jumped-up Hooray Henry enthusiasts, because of its innate elegance.
There is the almost unfailing elegance of setting, for a start, and there is the elegance of the apparatus: the skis look so supple, the helmets are so bright and shiny, and there is nothing more functionally proper than your modern toboggan, with its steering-wheel and its brakes. The sounds of the culture are very satisfying – crunch of snow beneath racing skis, clunk of chair-lift passing pylons, glug of Ovomalt on the sunlit decks of mountain restaurants, sweet laughter of babes-in-arms as they execute particularly demanding slaloms at Kinderland. The movements are lovely. I am invariably seduced by the passage of the young bravoes crouched double and rubbery as they slam themselves down the pistes, but the endless calm motion of the chair-lifts can also be beautiful, and I never tire of watching the peculiar walk demanded of people wearing the modern kind of ski-boot – a sort of spacewalk, part dance, part goose-step, which is accompanied by intriguing creaking and clicking noises.
Helicopters whirr by in ski-places, and paragliders, like pink, red or yellow eagles, float around the snow-slopes, or come swooping down the valleys casting their eccentric shadows below them. Sometimes they look almost transparent, membranous against the sun. Sometimes they give me the feeling that they must be circling always out of sight up there, night and day like angels.
61 Inter-crime
On page 28, you may perhaps recall, I was robbed of my possessions by motor-bike thugs in Palermo. The city police took me on a leisurely tour of thieves’ quarters by patrol car, but admitted that it was a waste of time, because by then my passport and credit cards were almost certainly in the hands of the Mafia. So far as I know this was my only direct contact with the organized crime systems which apparently extend over most of Europe and form another potent layer of the internet. The very word ‘Mafia’, which used to refer specifically to the Sicilian criminal guild, has now become a generic term for institutionalized skulduggery in many parts of Europe, and especially for the tide of criminality surging out of the old Soviet Union. Since that incident in Palermo long ago I have for
tunately stayed clear of this amorphous subworld, having no arms to sell, no currency to launder and no hunger for cocaine: but from Dublin to Vilnius, and down to Sarajevo, I have often sensed its agents prowling round me.
It was always so, so the French historian Fernand Braudel says. Even in the Middle Ages capitalist skulduggery transcended national boundaries, and smart practitioners could always rig the odds in their own favour. They manipulated credit, traded bad money for good, and ‘grabbed up everything worth taking – land, real estate, rents’. There were godfathers about even then.
62 Spheres of influence
The phrase ‘spheres of influence’ was invented as an imperialist device, and during my time in Europe it has had baleful connotations as a euphemism for the impositions of the Cold War. However there have also been beneficent spheres of influence within the continent – realms in which nations have affected each other without brutality, by force of example or presence, and thus helped to make Europe a little more of an entity. Often, of course, it has been a rich or powerful nation affecting a poorer one. All over Europe to this day countless Hotel Bristols remember the lavish spending of the fourth Earl of Bristol, Bishop of Derry, scattering largesse, injecting wealth into the local economies while he trundled around Europe in his coach-and-six as the swankiest and most eccentric of the English milords. For centuries the French, as the most cultivated of the Europeans, distributed around Europe mementoes of their passing presence. And most of the greater European nations have launched into the continental consciousness works of art which are representative of their own particular culture but are now the property of all.
The greatest creations of art, music and literature rise above national identities, but are often rooted in them nevertheless. Like it or not, Beethoven is undeniably German, Shakespeare indisputably English. Everyone identifies Michelangelo with Italy, Chopin with Poland, Ibsen with Norway, Camoëns with Portugal, Rembrandt with Holland, Voltaire with France. Books like The Good Soldier Švejk, Don Quixote, Buddenbrooks, À la recherche du temps perdu, Oliver Twist represent for millions of readers the truest essence of their patron nations. Yet at the same time they are an undeniable part of the common European heritage, familiar to educated Europeans everywhere, and linking them in a stronger bond than any political arrangement. I remember once standing bemused before a theatre poster in Stockholm trying to puzzle out the name of the play it advertised – Som Ni Behagar by W. Shakespeare. A passing Swede caught my eye. ‘As You Like It,’ he said – ‘the one with the melancholy Jaques.’
63 Italianate
Shakespeare frequently took his plots from Italian originals, of course. For centuries Italy has been lodged in the imagination of all Europe, and in my time has constituted a special kind of influence. Football, food, clothes, shoes, cars, opera – innumerable aspects of life, all over Europe, are Italianately tinged. At Christmas-time the trains of Europe are full of Italians, going home for the holiday, because Italians have settled, too, in every corner of the continent. Although they generally assimilate easily, and soon become part of local communities, still they maintain their links with Italy, and often go back to live there in their old age. There can be no big city of Europe without its Italian restaurant, and Italian restaurateurs were always the first to open their doors when the Iron Curtain dissolved and foreign cuisines were permitted in the countries of the East. To homesick travellers who have eaten their fill of borscht and dried cod, exhausted themselves trying to speak Latvian or Polish, feel themselves hopelessly alien to the Croatian temperament or the Icelandic scale of values – to such weary wanderers stumbling upon a Luna Caprese, with its familiar decor of fishing-nets and pictures of Vesuvius, can be like crossing the threshold of home.
In South Wales the first Italians were a pair of brothers named Bracchi, who went from the Po valley in 1890 to open a café in the tumultuously booming South Wales coalfield. It was a great place to make money in those days, and opportunists were pouring in from everywhere to get their share of the pickings. The Bracchis were like saloon-keepers in a California gold rush. They prospered, were followed by many more Italians, and have left behind them a thriving progeny of café proprietors, ice-cream sellers, grocers and video-shop renters, almost all claiming descent, if not from the same family, at least from the same part of Italy. It is they who gave South Wales much of its legendary fizz – perhaps some of its physiognomy too, for you often see young men there who have a decidedly Mediterranean look, if not in the bone structure, at least in the eye and the strut. To this day the South Wales Italians and their shops are known affectionately as ‘Bracchis’.
64 Frenchified
In my half-century the influences of France upon the rest of Europe have been mostly pleasurable – and I write as one unbeguiled by the songs of Edith Piaf, the boulevards of Baron Haussmann, the furniture of Louis XIV, the vainglory of Napoleon, the conceit of Charles de Gaulle, people who turn ideas into movements, and for that matter ideas themselves when too pressingly articulated. Cultural Frenchness has generally been a blessing to Europe. A glorious language which long remained the diplomatic language of the continent (almost, as the phrase seems to imply, its lingua franca, though actually the original lingua franca was mostly Italian). A cuisine which was until recently the ultimate to which cooks of all European nations aspired, until it lost many admirers by attenuating itself into the briefly fashionable nouvelle cuisine – the best of all French cuisines, for my own tastes, but hardly the thing for those hearty gastronomes who used to thrive on rich French sauces, hearty French meats and heavy French red wines. Architecture which cast its spell across all the nations, so that even Bucharest used to look French, and loved to call itself the Paris of the East. Spacious town plans based upon dominant boulevards, and copied by many militant regimes on the principle that bullets do not go around corners. Furniture which spoke always of olden courtly times, spindly gilded elaborations of woodwork which were copied everywhere and were considered just the thing for weddings. Cars which were boldly original – the Citroën DS with its hydraulic suspension, lifting its chassis over awkward bumps at the touch of a button; the primitive little 2CV which became, in the 1960s, the livery-carriage of the ecological and conservationist classes. Films which gradually found their way out of the art cinemas of the continent into the general public awareness, and made some of their actors household names throughout Europe. French poodles. French letters, which is what an earlier generation of Britons used to call condoms (and an earlier generation of Frenchmen called English umbrellas). French kissing. French cricket, which is what English schoolboys used to play in the schoolyard at break. ‘Pardon my French’, as an English apology for bad language. French defence, in which Black replies with P-K3 to a White opening move of P-K4. French flu, which is what Arthur Koestler called an excessive fondness for all things French. And fashion.
65 At the salon
In my time the French fashion industry hasn’t been quite what it was, having been challenged by upstarts of one sort or another in every part of the world, not least in Italy and Spain – and England, where the wild fashion of the streets in the 1960s not only offered a fresh way of dressing smartly, but also gave a new cachet to the hitherto fusty reputation of the English. Haute couture gave way to ready-made clothes even in many of the richest households. Even so, my one incursion into the world of Parisian high fashion was a fairly heady experience for me. I had been invited to write about one of the summer collections for an American newspaper, and sat in the front row among the condescending New York buyers and unbelievably ugly priestesses of American fashion journalism who could between them, I was assured, make or break any collection. How awful they looked, draped in their furs, red-taloned, emaciated to the point of grotesquerie, while all about them graceful exponents of the art of French allure glided silkily around the room and along the catwalk (it was before the day of the sullen strut and pout). The audience otherwise seemed to be mostly composed, to my bemused eye, of cha
racters from Proust; around the doorways seamstresses and lovely models clustered; the room, which appears in my memory to have been fabulously hung with chandeliers, was also extremely expensively perfumed.
I thought it all seemed, like so many French influences, a trifle passé – over the hump, striving with great charm and delicacy to sustain the traditions of a greater past, while making obeisance to cruder times. The clothes were so sumptuous! The prices were doubtless so astronomical! The models were so aristocratic! It reminded me of the old Jean Bart at Toulon.
66 Anglicized
The British (or the English, as continental Europeans almost invariably call them) were riding very high indeed when my European experience began. Half-ruined though they were by the Second World War, they were more admired and popular in Europe than they had ever been since their triumphs in the Napoleonic conflicts. People did not realize how poor they had become, or how their importance in the wider world had declined. They alone had stayed the terrible course against Hitler, from the first to the last, and it had been their inspiration that had kept the hope of freedom alive in Europe.
