by Derek Johns
If Jan had not become the sort of writer she is, she might easily have been an architectural historian. Her reading of Ruskin attuned her to the language of buildings (and her readers are often reminded of Goethe’s phrase describing architecture as ‘frozen music’). The range of references and the extent of the elaborations in her writing amount to something monumental in its own right. In its plundering of architectural styles New York is perhaps, or certainly once was, the greatest showcase of buildings in the world, and this is one of the reasons Jan loves it so much.
Manhattan ’45 provides a perfect stage for Jan’s talents. It is dedicated to nine servicemen from New York who were killed in action and so not present on that great day in June 1945. Their names are listed at the beginning but the explanation for this is given only at the end. It is as if their ghosts haunt the book throughout.
In Pleasures of a Tangled Life, published a couple of years after Manhattan ’45, Jan wrote about the United States thirty-five years after she had first gone there:
Still, draw what morals you may, all these various spasms, tendencies and reactions have helped to keep America inexhaustibly varied and interesting. It is a much more interesting country now, in fact, than when I first saw it, inhabited by a wider spectrum of humanity and dominated by more various aspirations. Its exceptions have not been ironed out, its excesses wax and wane still. It is hard to be bored in America …
Ten years later, in a book about Abraham Lincoln, she wrote: ‘Unchallengeable as it had become as the one superpower, contemptuous of the United Nations, [America] seemed more convinced than ever that its way was the only right way, to be distributed willy-nilly among the lesser nations.’
Both of these statements seem incontestably true, and both might as easily have been applied to Britain a century earlier. Jan wants nation states to behave well, to be good. But she knows that for much of the time this isn’t possible. She admires power when it is honourably employed (as much in fire engines and ships as in nations), and detests it when it is abused.
The America shown on the screens of cinemas in Bristol in the early 1940s was an admirable one. It was also glamorous and exciting. Jan’s first visit was glamorous and exciting too, and her subsequent visits brought her stimulating and pleasurable experiences of many different kinds. America seems to have released her from certain constraints, its acceptance of the variety of human types and experience liberating her to be who she wanted to be.
TRAVELLER
I had visited and portrayed, during thirty years of more or less constant travel, all the chief cities of the earth.
Jan has been a traveller all her life – it is her condition. But from the early 1960s onwards she went her own way, resigning from the Guardian and accepting commissions from newspapers and magazines all over the world. In Conundrum she writes: ‘I spent half my life travelling in foreign places. I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately recognized that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey.’ Two very great changes were taking place for her in this decade, the first being hormone therapy preparatory to a gender reassignment operation, the second a transition from being thoroughly English to being thoroughly Welsh. Taken together, these indicate a state of almost perpetual flight from the status quo. Home life was stable throughout this period, however. The family lived in a rectory near Oxford for a few years and in 1965 moved to a house, Trefan, in North Wales, where with the exception of brief periods elsewhere Jan has lived ever since. Elizabeth and the children were always there when she returned from her wanderings.
James’s first collection of essays, Cities, was published in 1963. There were to be several more such collections, published despite James’s protestation, in the second one, that travel essays were a ‘fading genre’, and despite also the fact that essays would seem generally to be best read individually rather than one after another in book form. In Conundrum Jan wrote of ‘the specious topographical essay which had been my forte’. There is nothing specious in any of her writings, and as an essayist she is one of the finest of her time.
James had an ulterior motive on many of these journeys, which was to conduct research for his history of the British Empire. In 1963 he appointed a literary agent in New York, Julian Bach, and in 1965 an agent in London, Michael Sissons. Between them they were able to secure James visits to many of the sites of the former empire, where, having filed his story, he would then steal away to do his own research.
James’s boyhood travels were limited to bicycling trips from Lancing into Wales. He didn’t travel abroad until he was posted to Palestine in 1946. Later came Everest, America, the Middle East, and eventually practically everywhere in the urban world. By the 1980s Jan was running out of new places to go, and began a series of return visits, looking at cities as they changed and as her responses to them changed. She developed certain simple techniques. One was ‘wandering aimlessly about’. Another was innocently asking people the way, even when she knew it perfectly well, so as to get into conversation with them. Another was looking through the local telephone directory to see the sort of names that stood out. (In Venice she looked up all the inhabitants who had the names of former doges.) And finally there was ‘the smile test’: she would smile benignly at random people on the street and see where this led. Usually it led to an interesting encounter, but of course sometimes it was misunderstood (though often enough misunderstood in an interesting way).
The Guardian sent James to South Africa in 1957, and out of this came a book entitled South African Winter. This was not a journalistic assignment as such, though it inevitably involved some reporting. James’s editors were interested in the interplay between him and his surroundings, as was he. Jan describes the resulting book now as being ‘embarrassing but prophetic’. It was written before the international chorus of disapproval over apartheid had reached full volume. But there was no doubting the nature of the society it described:
The darkest and most universally disliked of these miasmas surrounds the Union of South Africa, the strongest country of the African continent, and proclaims her something special among the nations: an outcast, a pariah, a skeleton in the upstairs cupboard … In the African winter of 1957 I spent some months trying to penetrate this particular lamina, to delineate the national features that lay beneath and to determine whether poor South Africa was as evil as her reputation. The country was then doubly disunited. The three million whites were bitterly divided among themselves, Afrikaner against English, with the Afrikaner Nationalist Government rampantly in control; and the Europeans as a whole were in desperate conflict with their ten million black and brown cohabitants.
Johannesburg was James’s base, from which he ranged widely throughout the country. It was a city ‘chilled by a condition of appalling tension’:
Johannesburg is lapped by another metropolis, the vast housing estates and slums of the segregated black locations: and every breath of its air is thick with the broodings of apartheid. Hate and suspicion are integral parts of the Johannesburg atmosphere. With the resentful African proletariat lying sullen about the city’s perimeter, it sometimes feels like an invested fortress – except that each morning, very early, thousands upon thousands of black besiegers pour into the city to work. You are apart from the black men, and yet they are among you; you are afraid of them, yet you need them in your office or factory; you despise them, but you welcome their good hard cash in your till. Johannesburg is a schizophrenic city.
So far, so properly liberal and thoughtful. But then come the embarrassments:
There are some aspects of South African liberalism that I myself find unattractive … I tire easily of the saintly black heroes of the liberal novels, and the African archaisms in which they so often express their aspirations. There is often a holier-than-thou flavour to it all, an unctuous disregard for normal human frailties, that I find hard to stomach. And oh, the agony of inter-racial parties, when you must listen starry-eyed to some indes
cribably boring tale of discrimination from a nasty Zulu Marxist; and your African friend from Drum winks at you in uneasy embarrassment and wishes he could go home …
Jan would probably have uttered similar sentiments at an all-white cocktail party in London. It is humbug she dislikes. But things get worse:
Short of some mass apotheosis to sainthood, I can see no reason at all why the Europeans of South Africa should admit all the Africans to political equality. Most white people feel, and I agree with them, that it would lead to a loss of efficiency and an even further weakening of integrity. They believe the whole flavour of the country would be altered, and much of the work of their forefathers undone. They think it would lead eventually to inter-breeding, an idea which they, like my grandmother, abhor. They are afraid it might result in some of the horrors of reconstruction and black revenge.
Embarrassing, certainly. And prophetic? Now that the hopefulness of the Mandela years is in the past, South Africa remains deeply divided. James regains his sense of balance, however, later in the book:
… the concept of complete apartheid, the deliberate sundering of the two racial groups, has a mystical flavour to it. Here the doctrine of ends justifying means is carried almost to lunacy. These gentle dons of Stellenbosch, sipping their coffee and arguing, are defying the whole gigantic movement of history. They ignore all the shifting balances of power and development, the rise of the black and brown nations to independence and eminence, the decline of Europe, the emergence of the great inter-racial nations like Russia and the United States, the eclipse of the old-school empires, the debunking of old racial theories, the existence of the United Nations, the advent of humanism itself. They are grandly insulated from it all.
It is easy to criticise people for views they held more than half a century ago, and especially easy to criticise writers who have committed those views to print. South African Winter does not rank alongside Jan’s best books. It is by now a period piece, and some of its ideas are best forgotten. (And it seems remarkable that the despatches on which it was based were written for the Guardian, the mouthpiece of British liberalism.) But it is nonetheless interesting in terms of the development of thought which would later lead to Pax Britannica. It also describes a fascinating encounter. James decided one day to consult a Xhosa witch-doctor:
The divination then began, after the wise woman had performed various preliminary rites, entailing some degree of grunting, murmuring and rattling of bones. A great change was overcoming me, she announced through the interpreter. That was the cause of all my pains, those pains in my head and kidneys, those dizzy spells. My life was going to alter. All the past would be past, and the future future, and my destiny was destined. She could read it all as in a book.
James is necessarily coy here about what this change might be. But writing fifteen years later in Conundrum, Jan states flatly that the wise woman assured James he would one day be a woman. Fortune-tellers everywhere generally tell their subjects things they think they want to hear. It is interesting to consider the extent to which the thirty-year-old James was communicating some sort of unspoken desire in that tent in the Transkei.
The next destination, at least for an extended stay, was Venice, a place which was to become one of the most important in Jan’s life. James was not sent to Venice in 1959; rather he told the Guardian he was going. For many readers the name of James Morris is inextricably linked with the wonderful book he wrote about it soon after his nine-month stay there. Venice is a classic, both within Jan’s oeuvre and beyond.
James’s first experience of Venice was as a nineteen-year-old subaltern in the army, in 1946. He was on his way to Palestine, and was camped for a few weeks in the valley of the Tagliamento river nearby. One day his commanding officer told him he had some bad news. A junior officer must be seconded to Venice to oversee the use of the motor-boats there, the best of which (like the hotels) had been requisitioned by the allied forces, and as the most junior officer James was the obvious choice. It was a menial task, but someone had to do it. At least this is the way Jan tells it: it is in fact difficult not to suspect that the officer knew perfectly well he was giving James an enviable task.
Venice was half deserted then, and there was not a single tourist. The war had left the city unscathed but melancholy, and ‘it lay silent and abandoned in its lagoon, clothed always (it seems to me in memory) in a pale green light, and echoing with footfalls’. What would the tourist of today give for such an experience of this miraculous city, for empty squares and alleyways, and vaporetti with clear decks! It was the melancholy as much as the beauty that James responded to. Something tugged at him in Venice, and has continued gently but insistently to tug ever since. He loved it then, and Jan loves it now, even if she does not like it. It is easy to imagine how its crumbling palaces must have appealed to James, whose love of old buildings had been inculcated not so many years before in Oxford, a city whose essential femininity Venice shared.
James was billeted in a palazzo requisitioned from a diplomat, which he shared with another subaltern. His duties were light, consisting mainly of meeting visiting officers and dignitaries at the station and ferrying them to the Danieli Hotel. He describes the ‘sternest faces among them softening as wonder succeeded wonder, light dappled against light …’ as they glided down the Grand Canal. His stay was not long, and was immediately followed by another brief glimpse of a strange city, Trieste. But Venice remained brightly glittering in James’s imagination, and thirteen years later he seized the opportunity to return.
James and Elizabeth and their sons Mark and Henry set up in an apartment on the Grand Canal, near the Accademia. James bought a little sandolo, a row-boat with an outboard motor. He then proceeded to spend the next nine months genially exploring the city and the lagoon, sending stories back to the Guardian and composing his thoughts about a book.
Venice is an unclassifiable book. It is not a travel guide, nor a history, nor a journalistic report on the city at the time. It contains elements of all these, but woven into what is in a sense a chapter in the autobiography of James Morris: he is always present, always commenting shrewdly and wryly. It is a book to be read in conjunction with a travel guide or a history, not in place of them. First published in 1960, it has been revised many times since, and has never been out of print. There is wonderful writing throughout Jan’s work, and her book on Trieste is her personal favourite; but there is something superb about the writings on Venice. Superb and, as is appropriate to the Serenissima, serene. In these pages the student of Shakespeare and the King James Bible gives free rein to a prose style that is richly allusive, that is charged with apposite but often unexpected adjectives and adverbs, that veers between the erudite and the colloquial, and that at times adopts a tone such as to cause its readers to feel they are being granted confidences, let in on secrets.
The opening words of Venice are justly famous:
At 45º 14' N, 12º 18' E, the navigator, sailing up the Adriatic coast of Italy, discovers an opening in the long low line of the shore: and turning westward with the race of the tide, he enters a lagoon. Instantly the boisterous sting of the sea is lost. The water around him is shallow but opaque, the atmosphere curiously translucent, the colours pallid, and over the whole wide bowl of mudbank and water there hangs a suggestion of melancholy. It is like an albino lagoon.
These resonant words welcome the reader to the city. (The giving of latitude and longitude figures became something of a trademark in later writings, by the way. It’s as though, having been almost everywhere, Jan always needed to situate precisely the place she now happened to be in.)
The early chapters of Venice do indeed constitute a history:
So the Venetians became islanders, and islanders they remain, still a people apart, still tinged with the sadness of refugees. The squelchy islands of their lagoon, welded over the centuries into a glittering Republic, became the greatest of trading States, mistress of the eastern commerce and the supreme naval power of the d
ay. For more than a thousand years Venice was something unique among the nations, half eastern, half western, half land, half sea, poised between Rome and Byzantium, between Christianity and Islam, one foot in Europe, the other paddling in the pearls of Asia.
In the pages of Venice, however, the marshalling of facts often enough gives way to whimsy. James loved the four bronze horses that stood on the façade of the basilica (until, to his dismay, they were taken inside and replaced by replicas):
Yet for all their wanderings they remain ageless and untired. The gold that once covered them has almost all gone, but their muscles still ripple with vigour. I have often seen them paw the stonework, at starlit Venetian midnights, and once I heard a whinny from the second horse on the right, so old, brave and metallic that St Theodore’s crocodile, raising its head from beneath the saintly buskins, answered with a kind of grunt.
