by Derek Johns
It is to our great discredit that the rest of us have never been able to hear the whinny of ‘the second horse on the right’ at midnight on starlit Venetian nights.
The Basilica of St Mark is itself a wonder: ‘there is a tremendous sense of an eastern past, marbled, hazed and silken. St Mark’s itself is a barbaric building, like a great Mongolian pleasure pavilion, or a fortress in Turkestan: and sometimes there is a suggestion of rich barbarism to its services too, devout, reverent and beautiful though they are.’ Surely very few writers have described the Basilica of St Mark as ‘barbaric’.
The modern cult of Venice is an English phenomenon, created by the writers and artists who went there in the nineteenth century. Venice is replete with references to famous Englishmen and Englishwomen:
… it was the complacent English who founded her romantic cult: Browning among the splendours of the Ca’ Rezzonico … Byron swimming home along the Grand Canal after a soiree, with a servant carrying his clothes in the gondola behind; Shelley watching the sun go down behind the Euganean Hills … Ruskin, for fifty years the arbiter of taste on Venice, and still the author of the most splendid descriptions of the city in the English language. In Victorian times the English community even had its own herd of seventeen cows, kept in a Venetian garden in imperial disregard of the rules, and providing every subscribing member with a fresh pint daily.
(James felt a great affinity with Ruskin, and later published an edition of his great work The Stones of Venice. He and Ruskin seem to have viewed the city with much the same enthusiasms.)
Venice is supremely a city of ships and boats, and it satisfies James’s maritime tastes:
Backwards and forwards across the Grand Canal the ferry gondolas dart daintily, like water-insects, with a neat swirl and decoration at the end of each trip, as they curve skilfully into the landing-stage. The Prefect rides by in his polished launch, all flags and dignity. From the cabin of a taxi there reaches me an agreeable mixture of Havana and Diorissima, as a visiting plutocrat sweeps by towards the Danieli, with his pigskin suitcases piled beside the driver, and his blasé befurred wife in the stern. Outside the Accademia art gallery they are loading an enormous canvas, an orgasm of angels and fleshy limbs, into a sturdy snub-nosed lighter. Beyond San Trovaso, splendid behind the dome of the Salute, I can see, like the twigs of some exotic conifer, a warship’s intricate radar.
Animals, both real and ornamental, are everywhere in Venice. Jan later wrote a book entitled A Venetian Bestiary, naming and illustrating them. In Venice James describes:
… the myriad carved animals that decorate this city, and contribute powerfully to its grotesquerie. Often these figures conform to old animal symbolisms – the hare for lust, the fox for cunning, the pelican for loyalty, the lamb for meekness, the crane for vigilance, the spider for patience … Others, though, seem to portray degeneracies, cruelties, horrors and freaks with a perverse and peculiar relish.
The cruelties and horrors of Venice were not of course confined to sculptures:
Enemies of the State were precipitately strangled, beheaded between the two pillars of the Piazzetta, or hanged between the upper columns of the Doge’s Palace … Sometimes malefactors were publicly quartered, and the several parts of their bodies were exposed on the shrines of the lagoon … Sometimes it was all done without explanation, and early morning passers-by would merely observe, on their way to work, that a couple of fresh corpses were hanging by one leg apiece from a rope suspended between the Piazzetta columns. If a wanted man ran away from Venice, hired assassins of dreadful efficiency were almost sure to find him. If he stayed, he invited the attentions of the terrible Venetian torturers, the most advanced and scientific of their day.
But beauty prevails, as it generally does in Jan’s writings. All the great painters make their entrance – Titian, Tintoretto, the Bellinis, Giorgione, Guardi, Canaletto – and especially James’s favourite, Carpaccio (‘the only Venetian painter with a sense of humour’). In 2014 Jan published a lovely little book entitled Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation. In the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni one of Carpaccio’s masterpieces features ‘St George lunging resolutely at his dragon … St Tryphonius with a very small well-behaved basilisk … and one old brother on crutches, [running] in comical terror from the mildest of all possible lions’.
Despite her agnosticism Jan loves churches, and the feelings ‘bottled up’ in them. Her view of religion has come to be that if you think something is holy, then it is. One particular church evokes this feeling strongly:
No little building in the world is more fascinating than the Renaissance church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, hidden away behind the Rialto like a precious stone in ruffled satin. It has all the gentle perfection, and some of the curious dull sheen, that marks a great pearl from the Persian Gulf, and it seems so complete and self-contained that it might be prised from the surrounding houses and taken bodily away, leaving only a neat little church-shaped cavity, not at all unsightly, in the fabric of the city … I cannot imagine the most truculent of atheists failing to remove his hat as he enters this irresistible sanctuary.
Venice is more than the city itself, and the islands of the lagoon also contain treasures. In the cathedral of Torcello:
… there stands against a dim gold background, tall, slender and terribly sad, the Teotoca Madonna – the God-Bearer. There are tears on her mosaic cheeks, and she gazes down the church with an expression of timeless reproach, cherishing the Child in her arms as though she has foreseen all the years that are to come, and holds each one of us responsible … there are some who think that the Venetians, through all their epochs of splendour and success, never created anything quite so beautiful.
Like many writers before and since, James sometimes wondered whether the lagoon should not claim back Venice in the end. ‘She sprang from the sea fifteen centuries ago, and to round her story off aesthetically … she only needs to sink into the salt again, with a gurgle and a moan.’ But:
… in my more rational moments I do recognize that letting Venice sink, my own solution for her anxieties, is a counsel of perfection that cannot be pursued. She will be saved, never fear: it is only in selfish moments of fancy that I see her still obeying her obvious destiny, enfolded at last by the waters she espoused, her gilded domes and columns dimly shining in the green, and at very low tides, perhaps, the angel on the summit of the Campanile to be seen raising his golden forefinger … above the mudbanks.
These words were written before the terrible flood of 1966, and long before the advent of MOSE, the huge underwater barrier now being erected precisely to save Venice from the waters.
Finally James must leave Venice:
Then a curious sensation overcomes you, as you pass among the retreating islands of the lagoon – a sensation half of relief, half of sadness, and strongly tinged with bewilderment. Venice, like many a beautiful mistress and many a strong dark wine, is never entirely frank with you. Her past is enigmatic, her present contradictory, her future hazed in uncertainties. You leave her sated and puzzled, like the young man who, withdrawing happily from an embrace, suddenly realizes that the girl’s mind is elsewhere, and momentarily wonders what on earth he sees in her.
Venice appealed to the melancholic, the rueful, the ironic, the feminine, in James’s nature. If ever a city found its true chronicler, it is surely Venice in James Morris. Just as great novelists – Dickens, Scott, Balzac, James – came to be associated in readers’ minds with great cities – London, Edinburgh, Paris, New York – the name of James Morris became indissolubly linked with Venice. It will be simply impossible for any writer to improve on Venice, not for lack of ability but for lack of opportunity: the city’s moods are less complex now than they were sixty years ago, and it is becoming more depopulated and denatured every year. Beginning with his instruction to run the motor-boats in a deserted city in 1946, James had an experience of Venice that few, besides the Venetians themselves, could equal.
In the spri
ng of 2015 Jan made her most recent return journey to Venice for a piece commissioned by Vanity Fair magazine. In this she wrote of life in the city that ‘It was all a performance, I thought, but then who was I to talk? I had spent my own Venetian years in voluntary self-delusion. It was my own personal Venice that I had fostered, my own dream of it.’ Jan’s readers have been fortunate to share this dream with her.
James’s relationship with the Guardian came to an end in 1961 with two commissions to go to South America and Australia. In both cases he travelled extensively, setting his own itinerary and agenda. His despatches were afterwards collected into two pamphlets which were published by the Guardian, and James adapted much of the text of these for some of his essays in Cities.
James’s tour of South America was not to be repeated in later life, apart from one visit by Jan to Rio de Janeiro. His account begins with characteristic flair:
First you see the hills, swirling with white mist and streaks of cloud, tightly crinkled with foliage, like green astrakhan. Then the virgin shore is beneath your wings, just as the conquistadors saw it long ago, fringed with foam and inhospitable, a long, steady, empty shore, riding away to Guiana and Brazil. And suddenly, on a sheltered circular inlet, a small group of skyscrapers, shining with glass and concrete in the early sun, stands tall and opulent beside the water. They are the very first signs of life that greet you out of the sea, and in a flash, as you fasten your seat belt, you realise the power, the pace, the style, the prodigious possibilities of South America.
But these possibilities are never properly realised. James acknowledges the woeful ignorance the British have of the continent (and even devises a quiz, inviting readers to admit just how ignorant they really are). ‘Because we never ruled the place it is a blank spot in our concern …’ Then this lack of interest begins to be justified by the facts. Bogotá is ‘faceless, unprepossessing’. Colombia generally is ‘a country oppressed with malaise’. La Paz is ‘a harum-scarum kind of place’. In Peru you can ‘smell misery, and you need not sniff too hard’. Buenos Aires is ‘middle-aged and a little pompous’. Brasilia ‘to my taste falls uncomfortably between the graceful and the imperial’. Brazil as a country is ‘a shot in the arm, an injection of volatile ebullience laced improperly with rum’, but Rio de Janeiro hardly rates a mention on this first visit. James is happier in Machu Picchu, where he observes that ‘a touch of the theatrical does journalism no harm …’ In the end he asks, ‘Will it ever really work, this ramshackle prodigy of a region?’ and we have the impression he thinks it will not.
South America and James simply didn’t click. There wasn’t enough pageantry in the history, the buildings weren’t beautiful enough, and there were vast tracts of emptiness everywhere. Nor were the people his kind somehow. One of the reasons he scarcely returned was that his concerns became increasingly focused on the countries of the former British Empire, and South America just didn’t qualify. But it is nonetheless remarkable to consider that this lifelong world traveller simply crossed one of the continents off the map.
Undismayed by James’s reports from South America, a few months later the Guardian sent him to Australia on the same sort of mission. He began his tour not in Sydney or Melbourne but in Darwin, where the airliners of the time had to stop to refuel. Darwin was ‘a town that prides itself on its frontier manners, its horse-rug flavour, its traditions of bludgeon, horn and hoof, the weird animal life that leaps and wallows about it, kangaroo to buffalo, crocodile to dingo. Never did a town greet its visitors more boisterously,’ he wrote. ‘As an introduction to Australia, Darwin is a work of art: for here, carefully fashioned by climate, custom and inclination, is a mosaic of all the reputed Australian virtues …’ James spent some time with a prospector, a ‘fossicker, or goudger, as he would call himself’, who lived in a shack 150 miles south of Darwin, veering between brief spells of great wealth and, once the money had been gambled away, great poverty. He then moved on to take in the entire country.
The Englishness of Australia in the early 1960s was very apparent, especially in Brisbane, where ‘the bandsmen who gather almost in the shadow of the British Empire Stores seem to retain all the fustian and lovable integrity of some vanished England – a North Country England, I suspect, rich in aspidistras and old-fashioned aphorisms …’ There was in effect a White Australia policy then, and it would be decades before immigrants from Asia were allowed in. James deplored ‘the confusion of emotions that underlies it, resentment, love and envy intermingled, the conflict between loyalty to Britain and loyalty to the Crown, the fervent support for the Commonwealth ideal on the one hand, the contemptuous dismissal of an interracial Commonwealth on the other’. But he reserved a special ire for Sydney:
Sydney is a harbour, with a bridge across it that everyone knows by sight and a city around it that nobody can quite envisage. The origins of Sydney are unsavoury, her history is disagreeable to read, her temper is coarse, her organisation seems to be slipshod, her suburbs are hideous, her politics often crooked, her buildings are mostly plain, her voices rasp on the ear, her trumpeted Art Movement is, I suspect, half spurious, her newspapers are either dull or distasteful, and in the end, when you hunger for beauty or consolation in this famous place, you return willy-nilly to the harbour front, where the ships tread with graceful care towards their moorings, and the great humped bridge stands like an arbiter above its quays.
These words almost certainly represent James’s most damning assessment of any city in the world. They aroused howls of protest, and many letters to the Guardian. James was criticised for making hasty judgements based on a brief visit, and for sheer cruelty. Jan was to revise this view of Sydney in later years. In 1990 she spent several months living there researching a book about the city, and in the introduction to it she wrote that in 1961 James was young and brash, ‘a bloody Pom journo fresh out from Britain, and writing about God’s Own Country for that pinko rag the Guardian …’ By that time Sydney had changed dramatically, and was a cosmopolitan world city. Having expressed such a bilious view of the place in 1961, Jan was never again quite so disobliging about anywhere.
As he left Australia James asked himself, ‘Did I like the place? What a question! Wild kangaroos would not drag me back to live there, but I would be a dullard or a bigot indeed if I did not enjoy much and admire more in so vast and remarkable a territory … Did I like the place? In parts.’
In Conundrum a decade later Jan said that after resigning from the Guardian she ‘set off on my own path professionally as I had so long trodden it in my private life: for by then I found the figure I cut in the world, however innocuous it seemed to others, abhorrent to myself’. If indeed her feelings were this strong, they would to some extent explain the testiness that so often characterises James’s writing about South America and Australia in 1961. It may be that James would have responded to these parts of the world in the way he did whatever his state of mind; but it is interesting to consider whether these two journeys were undertaken at the moment in his life when he was least likely to be generous.
In 1963 James’s first collection of essays, Cities, was published, and this provides more comprehensive evidence for his views of the world. Seventy-four cities are described in its pages, and it is astonishing that by his mid-thirties James had travelled so extensively. The essays were originally published in magazines such as Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Horizon and Encounter, as well as in the Guardian. In his foreword James writes that Cities possesses ‘two binding unities – unity of vision, unity of time’:
I have seen all these cities for myself, and I have seen them all in a single decade. If I had been born a generation earlier, I could scarcely have done it in a lifetime. If I had the cosmos to explore, I might not bother to try. But mine is the moment of the jets, between the steamships and the rockets, and this is how the earth’s cities seemed to me, during the last of our earthbound years.
James was being a little over-optimistic about the future of space travel. But
his observation that jets had enabled his travelling and writing in a hitherto unprecedented way is very true.
As James acknowledges, no reader should attempt all of these seventy-four essays consecutively. A reader at Faber reported that she found the book ‘indigestible’. At the time of publication James did not envisage collecting future essays in books, but a market for them existed, and several more were to follow: Places, Travels, Journeys, Destinations, Locations. By the time of publication of the last of these Jan must have been running out of synonyms. Eventually the best essays were collected in a book entitled Among the Cities, and for a reader today who wishes to appreciate Jan’s essay writing this would be the place to start.
The essays are arranged in alphabetical order, and the first is on Accra:
Like splendid pickets down the West African coast stand the strongholds of the Portuguese, erected one by one, with guts, bloodshed and slavery, as the caravels of Henry the Navigator probed southwards towards the Cape. They are spacious, flamboyant, arrogant structures, given a sense of dark power by their origins, and a sense of piquancy by the tumble of exotic trees, palm shacks, long boats and African fizz with which their gorgeous ramparts are invested: and in their cynical old way they still contribute powerfully to the flavour of these territories, like so many country mansions left high and dry among the housing estates.
The tone is by now familiar: confident, historically informed, replete with detail, all contained in the form of a shapely paragraph. The ‘I’ of James is sometimes present, sometimes not. In Fort-de-France, in Martinique:
