by Derek Johns
Farewell the Trumpets begins with the story of Kitchener’s retaking of Khartoum, and goes on to tell of all the various triumphs and failures of the late empire, the failures gradually supplanting the triumphs, the red areas on the map inexorably shrinking. The Boer War, finally won after a fashion but shaking British confidence mightily along the way, is celebrated as much for its scrapes as anything else. From the siege of Mafeking Robert Baden-Powell disseminates information to the world:
… carefully, in a flow of vivacious and not always strictly accurate messages home. If he made things in Mafeking seem more desperate than they were, that did not detract from the tonic effect it all had upon the spirits of the people at home, or its propaganda value elsewhere; at a time when Black Week had profoundly depressed the nation, and sadly damaged British prestige in the world, Mafeking was like a breath of the old allure.
By now stories like this oddly seemed to arouse the British people more than stories of victory.
Farewell the Trumpets does not dwell on the two wars in Europe, except at the margins in which for the British they remained imperial wars. The war against the Ottomans, taking in Gallipoli and the story James had told in The Hashemite Kings, for instance takes precedence over the war in the trenches. Gallipoli was:
… the greatest reverse to British arms since the American Revolution, and if it was launched as a resurgence of the imperial bravado, it was lost in the deadweight of imperial tradition. Its senior commanders had all been nurtured in the colonial wars, a debilitating legacy, and the old burden of class, which Kipling so anathematized after the Boer War, contributed again to the debacle …
The end of the First World War brought a new liberalism into the world, led by President Wilson and enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles. Now self-determination was the international watchword:
For though self-determination was a clumsy word, it was full of lucid suggestion. It spoke not merely of national freedoms, but of personal liberties too, of all those inalienable rights that the Americans had won for themselves, and now seemed to be claiming on behalf of everyone else. And just as the British Empire had been the enemy of the Founding Fathers, so inevitably it seemed to stand now as a vast and ancient barrier to these aspirations. The very notion of self-determination was incompatible with the Empire’s survival; the whole trend of affairs, the whole conception of a world order embodied in the League of Nations, ran directly counter to British imperial positions.
Nowhere better illustrated this than India, the ‘jewel in the crown’, and no one better personified it than Mahatma Gandhi:
Nobody then, nobody later, knew quite what to make of Gandhi – Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi the Pure Soul, Gandhi of the round disarming spectacles and the toothless smile. He shared with T. E. Lawrence the quality of enigma, so that he seemed to one man a saint, to another a hypocrite, and sometimes seemed to exchange the roles from one day to the next. A very small man, 5 foot 4 inches, and slight to the point of emaciation, he had vivid black eyes, spoke very pure English with a vestigial South African accent, and enthralled nearly everyone with his suggestion of almost unearthly wisdom.
By the 1930s the empire was ‘threadbare’: ‘not exactly an Empire any more, but a group of independent Powers of more or less common origin and generally compatible policies. Federal solutions had been abandoned …’ The empire was now the Commonwealth: ‘The British had tried hard, since the death of Queen Victoria, to give substance to a mystery. Now they gave mystery to a substance. The British Commonwealth of Nations was cloudy from the start.’
As with the First World War Farewell the Trumpets focuses on the Middle East, with the Second World War it focuses on North Africa and the Far East, on the desert campaigns and the humiliating fall of Singapore. And just as the world was remade after the first war, it is remade again after the second. India must have independence now, and Lord Mountbatten was the ideal man to preside over it:
Mountbatten! The perfect, the allegorical last Viceroy! Royal himself, great-grandson of the original Queen-Empress, second cousin of George VI, though by blood he was almost as German as he was English, he seemed nevertheless the last epitome of the English aristocrat. He was a world-figure in his own right, too, for as Supreme Commander in South-East Asia he had commanded forces of all the allied nations … Moreover he was a recognized progressive, sympathetic to the ideals of Labour, anything but a reactionary on the meaning of Empire, and with a cosmopolitan contempt for the petty prejudices of race and class.
By now the story of the empire was one in which Jan had been a contemporary observer, and even a participant. Though she warns the reader in her introduction, it comes as something of a shock in this context to read about the Everest expedition of 1953 (though she doesn’t name herself, simply referring to the news being ‘rushed in time by runner and diplomatic radio from the Himalaya’). Her descriptions of the final days of the empire have an elegiac tone that stems as much from her own feelings as it does from the facts of the matter. ‘It was nearly over now. Future historians may well say the British Empire ended at Suez, for there it was finally made plain that the imperial potency was lost.’ When mentioning Oman, Jan cannot resist a personal note: ‘the desert hinterland behind … had only recently been crossed from coast to coast by its first European.’ A footnote below these words reads simply ‘Me!’ These reminders of Jan’s admittedly peripheral role in the drama of the end of empire are salutary.
The moment Jan chooses to bring down the final curtain is not Suez but the death of Churchill. To the very end he remained a champion of the empire:
He had by then passed beyond the bickerings of party politics, and had become the living exemplar of British glory. Loathed and reviled in earlier life, he was to be calumniated again after his death, as is the way of legends; but for the moment, as he lay massive on his bed in death, ninety-one years old and the most universally honoured man on earth, he was beyond criticism.
At the end of Farewell the Trumpets Jan asks, in a characteristic way,
Is that the truth? Is that how it was? It is my truth. It is how Queen Victoria’s Empire seemed in retrospect, to one British citizen in the decades after its dissolution. Its emotions are coloured by mine, its scenes heightened or diminished by my vision, its characters, inevitably, are partly my creation. If it is not invariably true in the fact, it is certainly true in the imagination.
This reads very like a justification for all of Jan’s writings, almost like a creed. In these pages the reader will find Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica, and not anyone else’s. In the years since these books were published (almost forty now since the third) many other writers have written histories of the British Empire. There seems no consensus among them, some believing the empire to have been an unconscionable evil, others believing it to have been on balance a good. It is doubtful whether any of them have brought the empire to life in quite the way Jan does in Pax Britannica. The publishers retained an Oxford academic, David Fieldhouse, to vet the manuscript, and he concluded (writing much later, in 2006) that Jan ‘broke through the limits of conventional historical writing to create virtually a new genre … I would still recommend anyone entering the field of modern British imperial history to read them first’. Pax Britannica makes for compulsive reading.
A few years after the trilogy was completed Jan contributed the texts to two illustrated books, The Spectacle of Empire and Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj (with Simon Winchester). Spectacle was as its title suggests a lavish collection of paintings and photographs. Stones illustrates the buildings of the Raj not only as physical objects but as reflections of the empire’s mingled emotions. Jan’s fascination with things imperial continues to this day.
Two books closely related to the Pax Britannica trilogy are those about Hong Kong and Sydney, first published in 1988 and 1992 respectively. Jan’s interest in these two cities proceeded directly from her interest in the empire, and the books are laced with history. Indeed, the subtitle of Hong
Kong is Epilogue to an Empire.
Jan had been a frequent visitor to Hong Kong, but in 1987 she decided to spend some time there, precisely ten years before the handover of the colony to the Chinese was due to take place. (And as she was leaving she reserved her hotel room for June 1997, when she would return to write about the ceremony itself.) She thought the city especially beautiful in its setting:
Hong Kong is in China, if not entirely of it, and after 150 years of British rule the background to all its wonders remains its Chineseness – 98 per cent if you reckon it by population, hardly less if you are thinking metaphysically … It may not look like it from the deck of an arriving ship, or swooping into town on a jet, but geographically most of the territory is China still. The empty hills that form the mass of the New Territories, the precipitous islets and rocks, even some of the bare slopes of Hong Kong Island itself, rising directly above the tumultuous harbour, are much as they were in the days of the Manchus, the Ming or the Neolithic Yao … The generally opaque light is just the light one expects of China, and gives the whole territory the required suggestion of blur, surprise and uncertainty.
Jan is customarily present throughout this book, taking boats and walks, being entertained by locals as the celebrity she by then was, sampling very strange food. She finds the city fascinating but overwhelming, and is less in sympathy with it than she had been on earlier visits. Its god is money, its churches the tall glassy skyscrapers of the banks. She regrets a ‘frequently malignant muddle’, and at the end of the book expresses a hope that the British and the Chinese may before 1997 come to an agreement under which some version of British influence might be maintained. But on her return in 1997 she must awake from any such daydreams:
It seemed to me, as I thought about it then, that the Hong Kong the British were leaving behind them was neither quite as good as the place might be, nor quite as bad. Economically, reunion seemed to be, if anything, a shot in the arm. Socially the territory was free and mostly fair … the political condition of the place was rather better than we feared it might be … but rather worse than we hoped.
This visit represented Jan’s ‘final exercise in reportage’. It also represented the absolutely final act of imperial Britain. For Jan this visit to Hong Kong provided yet another instance in which she somehow contrived to impose upon a historical event a meaning of her own.
Jan had been back to Australia many times since her first visit in 1961. In 1992, in the ‘Introductory’ to Sydney, she writes that ‘I did not much like the place, and said so. In 1961 this was playing with fire, and the fury of resentment that fell upon me did not subside for years, and was even detectable when thirty years later I set about writing this book about the city.’ This time, however, she stayed for months rather than weeks. Sydney was utterly changed, a cosmopolitan world city in which the influence of Australia’s Asian near neighbours was now properly apparent. Nevertheless, Jan returned to Sydney as essentially an ‘aficionado of British imperial history’. It remained a little too brash for her taste, and the harbour remained more appealing than the city itself. Its history still had somewhat dismal origins:
… tatterdemalion gangs of male convicts clanking about in irons, incorrigible female prisoners screeching ribaldry and obscenities, soldiers everywhere with high hats and enormous fixed bayonets, petty offenders sitting in the stocks, sex-starved sailors raunching around the grog-shops and Aborigines wandering stark naked or in cast-off English finery … Hundreds of ragged homeless children mooched through the streets; on the island called Pinchgut, off the cove, swung the skeletonic remains of a hanged Irishman, as a memento mori for the rest.
There are trademark word choices here – ‘tatterdemalion’, ‘incorrigible’, ‘mooched’ – that mark this as a piece of writing by Jan Morris and no one else. These words resonate in the reader’s ear and linger in the memory.
But the present was rather better, even for the former scourge of Sydney:
But we will find ourselves some secluded harbour spot, above a little-used pier perhaps, where all those bright lights are far away, the rumble of the traffic is almost silent, the great city around us seems astonishingly remote, and a more ambiguous magic settles on the scene. The evening is warm, with a scent of night-flowers somewhere … The harbour is all at peace, the city is one of the world’s happiest … the recession is officially said to be over its worst, the bridge is strong, the Opera House is lovely, the flags are fine …
Jan was in her early sixties when she made these visits to Hong Kong and Sydney, and throughout the books the reader is often reminded that she is not the young, virile James but a middle-aged woman of different tastes and strengths. To return to the question of gender, any change in the tone of Jan’s writings may just as easily be ascribed to age.
A few years after Sydney Jan published a book entitled Fifty Years of Europe: An Album. The title was taken from a line in a poem by Tennyson (‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay’) and referred to the fact that it was composed fifty years after James had first travelled abroad. The book begins and ends in Trieste, where James was posted on his way to Palestine: ‘On a fine warm day in my twentieth year, in the summer of 1946, I started to write an essay about nostalgia, sitting on a bollard beside the sea on the Molo Audace in Trieste.’ Its mode is neither essays nor a consecutive narrative, but rather brief sketches of all the places in Europe that Jan had visited (in other words, pretty much all the places that exist in Europe). Its themes include ‘sacred complexities’, ‘geographical confusion’, ‘miscellaneous surprises’ and ‘six attempts to make a whole of Europe, from the Holy Roman Empire to the European Union’.
Jan credits the Cold War with creating the opportunities she had to travel throughout Europe, noting that the immediate post-war period was a time of stability, the impasse between West and East, whatever its other consequences, banishing wars until the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Indeed she reserves much of her nostalgia for the countries behind the Iron Curtain:
… I began to find hotels of the former Communist Europe downright nostalgic. Some, of course, were very soon internationalized, and became much like hotels anywhere in the West – the Bristol in Warsaw, for whose management, back in the 1950s, I had banged out a simple brochure on my portable typewriter, presently became a member of the Leading Hotels of the World association. But I rather missed the old hotels, the Party hotels, the bugged and commissared hotels … Here is the stony-faced receptionist demanding your passport. Here is the sly porter wanting to change your money. Ahead of you down the brown corridor with its wrinkled carpet and forty-watt bulbs, as you are conducted to your room, strides the statutory burly figure with his coat slung over his shoulder and a mock-leather briefcase in his hand. On tables around are distributed the ill-printed hotel brochures, not unlike the one I wrote for the Poles, with their pages decoratively pleated, like napkins.
It is this sense of Jan as an eye-witness to the past, however recent, which lends the pages of Europe (as the book was later retitled) the flavour of history as much as travel. By now the earliest events described here are seventy years in the past, not fifty, and receding rapidly, and Jan is a traveller in time as well as space. Europe is a literary cornucopia, full of delights. It is in a sense complementary to the empire history, taking up a new story just as the old one is petering out. All of Jan’s work is permeated with this sense of history.
ROMANCER
After half a lifetime of urban wandering I had been asked so often to describe my favourite city that in the end I made one up.
Trieste is the start and end point of Europe for a reason: it is a city that Jan feels embodies a mutable spirit she identifies in herself. After Venice it was the first foreign place James knew, and while Venice was intoxicating, Trieste seems to have evoked feelings that were deeper and harder to access. It would seem odd that a nineteen-year-old should be writing ‘an essay on nostalgia’ on the Molo Audace and not a lively description
of the city behind him or a letter home. (This essay is contained in a dog-eared notebook which apparently exists in some corner of Jan’s house but which has proved difficult to find. Either this or Jan would actually prefer that it remain difficult to find, hidden under the stairs.) The book that Jan wrote about Trieste much later, in 2001, entitled Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, is her favourite among all her works.
In addition to the presence Trieste already had in Jan’s imagination, it became the principal model for her ‘favourite city’, Hav. This city will not be found on any map (though many readers have attempted to do so), since it doesn’t exist. In both Trieste and Last Letters from Hav Jan is romancing, one of her most agreeable pastimes.
Indeed romancing is so agreeable to Jan that her readers must sometimes wonder, especially when encountering in her writings a perfectly formed vignette, whether the actuality could have been as neat as the rendering of it. As has been observed earlier, Jan feels a responsibility to the facts. But all acts of writing involve selection, shaping. Jan has often described her aspiration to write imaginative literature – it is one of the reasons she declines to think of herself as a ‘travel writer’. We recall the injunction of the Sudanese cabinet minister to write ‘thrilling, attractive and good news, where possible coinciding with the truth’. Jan certainly writes thrillingly and attractively. A reading of all her work suggests that she has indeed observed a responsibility to the facts, but that this has not prevented her from adding some embellishments.
