by Derek Johns
In the city itself,
Another layer … is darkly mediaeval, straight-descended from the times when the Arab conquerors, storming in from their Eastern deserts, seized Egypt in the name of Islam. Look westward from your eyrie on the hill, and you will see a mottled section of the city brownish and confused, from which there seems to exude (if you are of an imaginative turn) a vapour of age, spice and squalor.
James didn’t write about the Suez Crisis at length in a book, but he covered it comprehensively as a journalist. Having been posted to the Canal Zone by The Times in 1952 and sent back in 1954, he had seen at first hand the rise of Nasser’s revolutionary nationalism. When the crisis broke in 1956, he was on hand. But not for The Times.
The Suez Canal was dug in the 1860s by a French company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps. In an act of splendid opportunism the British government under Disraeli later bought the shares that Egypt had been given, thus acquiring a significant stake. In creating a channel for large ships between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea it rendered the East much closer to the West, and for the British it opened up a new passage to India. Egypt benefited economically from it, but now had no ownership. All this changed in June 1956 when President Nasser announced he was nationalising the canal. The alarm this aroused in Britain was great indeed. Even if the empire was now gone, unobstructed passage to the East and to Australia and New Zealand remained vital. The prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, had in recent years conceived a personal hatred of Nasser, and this hatred was now translated into policy.
The response of the British and the French to this provocation was to encourage Israel to invade Egypt and seize the Canal Zone. The British and French would then also invade, under the pretext of keeping peace between Israel and Egypt. It was a shoddy business that was to end in disaster. Throughout it Eden briefed the editor of The Times, Sir William Haley, regularly in return for the support of the paper for his actions. This was too much for James, who was still then the Middle East correspondent. He resigned, and went over to the Manchester Guardian.
While reporting for the Guardian James accompanied Israeli troops from the Negev desert across Sinai to Egypt. Along the way he saw countless burned-out Egyptian tanks that appeared to have been attacked by something more lethal than shell-fire. He was unable to send despatches back without falling foul of Israeli censorship, and so he flew to Cyprus to file his report. While there he took a stroll one day to the nearby military airport, and there saw French warplanes and got into conversation with their pilots. They told him they had been flying missions in support of the Israeli invasion, and had used napalm. This was the horrific new substance the effects of which James had witnessed on the tanks in the desert. James filed his report, and the new editor of the Guardian, Alastair Hetherington (just days into the job), had to decide whether to print evidence of actions which had been flatly and repeatedly denied by both the British and French governments.
In an action that was brave bordering on foolhardy, Hetherington printed James’s story. The official denials continued, however, and the British Army invaded. James flew from Cyprus to Tel Aviv and from there rejoined Israeli forces and went with them to Port Said. The city was by now occupied by British troops, and much of it had been damaged by shell-fire and bombs:
Soon, as in a daze, you are entering the town. A squadron of Centurion tanks sprawls among churned mud in its outskirts. The big buildings along the waterfront are spattered with shell-fire. Part of the Arab quarter lies devastated, and a faint smell of death lingers in the streets, but it is not the tragedy of war that strikes you most forcibly as your bus rolls towards the Canal. It is the dreamlike quality of the experience. Something has happened in Port Said that shatters any previously held conception of the laws of probability. The British Army has seized it by force.
This is war reportage Morris style. James was to witness war at first hand very little in later years, and anyway had no taste for it. But the Middle East was his bailiwick, and the last throes of the British Empire his great subject.
By now the international community, and particularly the United States, was bringing pressure to bear on Britain and France to withdraw, and this they eventually did. Eden was forced to resign, and Britain never again engaged in this sort of adventurism. James had secured another coup, not as romantic as the Everest coup perhaps, but far more dramatic in its consequences. And once again he was ambivalent about the meaning of it:
It was in pathetic desperation that the tired British acted that autumn, not in arrogance. I hold no brief for the methods of the Conservative Government, for the web of deception and secrecy that surrounded their policies, for the successive shifty excuses with which they explained away the half-cock invasion of Egypt. As I talked to my Israeli colonel that day beside the desert road it seemed to me that a nasty air of dishonesty infused the operations. But I believe there was a despairing, pitiful dignity to the part the British played in that forlorn campaign, as of a thoroughbred gone wild among stallions.
This final sentence won’t do nowadays, of course, as Jan would be the first to acknowledge; it comes across as special pleading, and is tortured in its logic. James’s patriotism was leading him, as it had before and would again, to a view of the British that could not be justified. His ideas about the place and actions of Britain in the world would change in future years. But for now he was still something of a sentimentalist where his country was concerned.
James remained with the Guardian until 1961, under a loose arrangement that allowed him to do whatever he wanted. He admired the paper (and especially so for its stand on Suez), but didn’t love it, as he had The Times. Writing years later in the pages of Conundrum, and relating his journalistic experiences to the matter of gender, Jan said:
I was least comfortable with the Guardian. This surprises people. If there was one organ in the land which seemed to enshrine the principles generally considered feminine, it was that prodigy of liberalism: pacific, humanist, compassionate, with a motherly eye on underdogs everywhere and a housewifely down-to-earth sense about everyday affairs. The Guardian was kind to nearly everyone, and kindest of all to me, for it let me go more or less where I liked, and seldom cut a word or changed an adjective. Yet I was never at ease with it. There was, I thought, something pallid or drab about its corporate image, something which made me feel exhibitionist and escapist, romantically gallivanting around the world while better men than I were slaving over progressive editorials at home.
The Guardian was indeed very good to James, and there is something a little disingenuous about this characterisation. Geoffrey Moorhouse, who worked for the paper at the time and was a distinguished writer of many books, wrote in a festschrift published to coincide with Jan’s eightieth birthday that he envied ‘Morris’s greater freedom and … wistfully admired the essays that might come from almost anywhere between Goondiwindi and Cox’s Bazar, the banks of the Rio Grande and the shores of the Baltic, always brilliantly observed and astute, ineffably and sometimes whimsically cheerful, with a particular flair for the memorably telling phrase …’ If in the end Jan and the Guardian were not entirely comfortable with each other, the writings that resulted from their arrangements were a credit to them both.
James was to cover two significant events in his last years on the Guardian, King Hussein’s press conference in Amman in 1958 and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Adolf Eichmann had been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and sent to trial for war crimes. This aroused huge interest around the world. Years afterwards Jan was to characterise it as if not exactly a show trial then certainly an expression of Jewish symbolism. At the time James described the figure Eichmann cut in these terms:
I looked at Eichmann to see how he was reacting [to the charges], half-expecting to see some flicker of perverse pride crossing his face, to be counted among such fearful company. But he was sitting well back in his chair now, with his hands in his lap, blinking frequently and moving his lips, and he reminded me irre
sistibly of some elderly pinched housewife in a flowered pinafore, leaning back on her antimacassar and shifting her false teeth, as she listened to the railing gossip of a neighbour.
Surely no one but James Morris could have described a notorious war criminal in this way. It expresses something similar to Hannah Arendt’s observation on the banality of evil (also about Eichmann), but it is uniquely Morrisian in its sly humour and uncanny accuracy. (It is also the case that James’s report was published before Arendt’s book.)
By now James had been a journalist for over a decade. He had scored some notable successes and had finely honed his observational and literary skills. But he was chafing under the burdens of being a staff writer, and wanted to go his own way. From 1961 onwards, while he continued to write now and then for the Guardian, he was a free spirit, travelling where he pleased and recreating the world in his own image.
AMERICAN
All these various spasms, tendencies and reactions have helped to keep America inexhaustibly varied and interesting … It is hard to be bored in America.
Jan’s first impressions of the United States are very clear: ‘I found an America bursting with bright optimism, generous, unpretentious, proud of its recent victories, basking in universal popularity but still respectful of older cultures … I doubt if there has ever been a society, in the history of the world, more attractive than this republic in the decade after the Second World War.’ Between 1953 and 2015 she visited at least once every year.
Writing much later, in Pleasures of a Tangled Life (1989), Jan said she had dreamed of America always. James’s first ideas about America, like everyone’s, were formed by the cinema. America appealed to the showboating side of his character. But if it is dangerous to generalise about any country, it is especially dangerous to generalise about a country as diverse as the United States. In the course of a year’s travelling in 1954, and subsequent stays and visits, Jan was to see the country in all its guises, from east to west and from top to bottom. She wrote three books about it, Coast to Coast, The Great Port and Manhattan ’45, and many essays. Indeed it is in 1945 that Jan says she wishes she had been able to go there first, since she believes this to have been the moment of an apex in America’s character and fortunes. But 1953 was close enough.
The by now world-famous conquerors of Everest undertook a whistlestop tour of the United States and Canada in the autumn of 1953, just a few months after the expedition itself. James was invited to join Edmund Hillary, George Lowe and Charles Evans on this tour. They gave lectures in many cities, James often acting as a kind of moderator, and attended a banquet at the White House. James was in an almost exalted state in those days, and given the way he was received in America it is hardly surprising that he decided the country was a good thing. The Everest story led directly to his being granted a Commonwealth Harkness Fellowship. He was still on the staff of The Times, but the editors agreed that he could go so long as he provided regular despatches. This was to be for an entire year’s stay in the US, the only stipulation from Harkness being that he must write a report at the end of it. In the event he wrote a book, Coast to Coast, based on his writings for The Times, and offered this in lieu.
James and Elizabeth and their two young sons went first to Chicago, which was James’s choice because it was more or less in the centre of the country. The family was given accommodation on the campus of the university, but they soon found this to be constricting, both physically and intellectually. One day James got into conversation with the owner of a bookshop in downtown Chicago who promptly invited the family to stay in his large house in Lake Forest, a high-end suburb north of the city on the shores of Lake Michigan. Jan describes their stay there in opulent terms, cocktail parties every night, ‘polished oak tables, monogrammed napkins, candles’ and all:
… the evening is likely to be an agreeable one. The guests will find themselves in one of two kinds of houses: a comfortable and well-preserved little mansion built by some complacent plutocrat in the early years of the century, and having a parklike garden and an atmosphere if not exactly horsey, at least distinctly doggy; or a house of uncompromising modernity, with mobiles floating about the drawing room, a hostess who keeps Abyssinian cats, and a host who talks about the G-factor of the roof … Americans do not take their eating lightly, and there is no dishing out an old stew or reaching for the sausages when Lake Foresters entertain.
The ‘complacent plutocrat’ and the atmosphere ‘if not exactly horsey, at least distinctly doggy’ are classic Morrisian touches. Humour and irony run like glinting seams through Jan’s writings, decorating and illuminating it, and having the effect of drawing the reader into a sort of conspiracy with her. We are on her side, her responses to places are those we ourselves would have had.
Chicago was the ‘crown and symbol’ of the Mid-West. Yet James did not have to travel very far from Lake Forest to find a different urban landscape:
But despite the illusory grandeur of its waterfront, Chicago is a festering place. From the windows of the elevated railway, which clangs its elderly way through the city with the rather detached hauteur of a bath-chair, you can look down on its disagreeable hinterland. The different sectors of slumland each have their national character – Italian, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Lithuanian – but externally they merge and mingle in a desolate expanse of depression. Here is a brown brick building, crumbling at its corners, its windows cracked or shattered, its door crooked on its hinges, with a Negro woman in a frayed and messy blouse leaning from an upstairs window with a comb in her hand … here the misery of it all is given added poignancy by the circumstances of so many of its inhabitants, people of a score of races who came to America to be rich, and have stayed on to live like unpampered animals.
Jan is not a social commentator, or even a documentary writer as such. She writes about poverty simply as one aspect of the places she observes. The vibrancy of her prose illuminates everything she describes, but her tone is morally neutral. She is not a judge, and if she is sometimes a member of the jury she is usually inclined to acquit.
The Chicago of the 1950s was no longer the powerhouse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ‘Not so long ago Chicagoans were convinced their city would soon be the greatest and most famous on earth, outranking New York, London and Paris, the centre of a new world, the boss city of the universe …’ But now they ‘have accepted their station in life, no longer swaggering through the years with the endearing braggadocio of their tradition, but more resigned, more passive, even (perhaps) a little disillusioned. Chicago is certainly not a has-been; but it could be described as a might-have-been.’
Jan was later to acquire a high regard for Chicago, describing it as in some ways an ideal city. But for the moment it was simply the starting point of a tour that would take in the entire country. After a few weeks James bought a second-hand Chevrolet and hit the road. Coast to Coast is divided into sections on the East, the South, the West, the Pacific Coast and the Middle West.
California better than Chicago met James’s expectations of American fizz. In Los Angeles he was invited to the house of the retired actress Mary Pickford:
… her mansion, a pleasing white house in a country garden, is excessively grand. I was greeted by her manager, but by a misunderstanding he had not been told of the invitation. His manner, I thought, was a trifle forbidding. Might he see my credentials, please? Yes, yes, a visiting card was all very well, but how could he tell that I was who I purported to be? Did I not realize that Miss Pickford was a very important person indeed? ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘would you expect to go straight in and see the Foreign Secretary, back home? Do you realize people try to get into this house just to touch Miss Pickford? She is a fabulous personality, and we have to be very, very, careful who comes in here.’ I was stifling a surge of resentment at this Kremlinesque treatment when Miss Pickford’s secretary arrived, the impasse was resolved, the manager beat a rather embarrassed retreat, and I was ushered into the garden; whe
re Miss Pickford was drinking China tea, given her by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, with a young Episcopalian clergyman and a celebrated surgeon from Texas.
James was accustomed to meeting luminaries, starting with his interviews with American stars visiting Bristol in 1943. He did so now on rather more equal terms, however. In any description throughout Jan’s writings of an encounter with someone famous, the reader detects this sense of equivalence. Miss Pickford’s poor manager had picked the wrong person to patronise.
James was somewhat overwhelmed by Los Angeles, and it took subsequent visits for him to come to appreciate it. There were no such difficulties in San Francisco:
In some ways, it is true, San Francisco is a topsy-turvy place, built on the flanks of impossibly steep hills, so that driving home is an adventure, and walking back from the theatre in high heels or long skirts an hilarious impossibility … It is a city, too, of many races, jumbled in narrow streets and crowded quarters, Chinese and Mexicans and Italians, and sailors barging by from the quaysides; with the beloved cable-cars scurrying up the hills and swaying perilously around the corners; and cluttered wharfside restaurants, all mixed up with fishing-boats and wayside stalls, and smelling of prawns, lobsters and the succulent abalone; and gay gardens perched on the flanks of hills, with dainty shambles of artists’ houses all around … It is also a kindly city, where few people carry chips on their shoulders.
Jan later described America as ‘a happy country except for the question of race’. This was of course a very big question, a decade before the Civil Rights movement. And the South was where this question was most pointed:
