by Derek Johns
When Jan set out to write Trieste she intended it to be her last book. And while there have been books since (A Writer’s House in Wales; an anthology entitled A Writer’s World; a ‘book of glimpses’ entitled Contact!; a revised edition of Hav; and the illustrated book on the painter Carpaccio) Trieste does remain her last full-length original piece of work. It was written in a mood of reflection, and towards its end it feels like a summation. It begins in this way:
I cannot always see Trieste in my mind’s eye. Who can? It is not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination. It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar melody, no unmistakeable cuisine, hardly a single native name that everyone knows. It is a middle-sized, essentially middle-aged Italian seaport, ethnically ambivalent, historically confused, only intermittently prosperous, tucked away at the top right-hand corner of the Adriatic Sea, and so lacking the customary characteristics of Italy that in 1999 some 70 percent of Italians, so a poll claimed to discover, did not know it was in Italy at all.
What then is its appeal to Jan, what is so interesting about this city that she should confer on it the distinction of being the last in the world she will write about? In chapters describing its complex history, wrangled over by the Austrians, the Italians and the Slavs, and its ethnicities, cultures and religions, the words ‘exile’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘regret’ frequently recur:
For me Trieste is an allegory of limbo, in the secular sense of an indefinable hiatus. My acquaintance with the city spans the whole of my adult life, but like my life it still gives me a waiting feeling, as if something big but unspecified is always about to happen … but its subliminal hints – of the visceral, the surreal, the lonely, the hypochondriac, the self-centred and the affectionate – roughly approximate my own reactions.
There we have it, then: Trieste is a mirror held up to Jan Morris, in all her complexity and contradictoriness, and a cracked mirror at that. She imagines it to have been a more exciting place in 1897, when Emperor Franz Joseph was about to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of his rule (and coincidentally when Queen Victoria was about to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of hers):
There are splashes of colour everywhere – braids and gilded epaulettes, bright silks of summer, gaudy parasols and pink fringed reticules. The music of a waltz sets people flirtatiously swaying as they chat: it sounds to me like something from Franz Lehar, and very likely is, since he is the handsomely pomaded bandmaster of the 87th infantry who is conducting it in the bandstand.
Once again the past draws Jan irresistibly back. But ‘they are only shadows now … these vestiges of Habsburg Trieste, like so much in this crepuscular city’.
There was a moment in 1914, however, when Trieste found itself the focus of the world’s attention:
On July 2, 1914, the 22,000-ton battleship SMS Viribus Unitis arrived at the Molo San Carlo in Trieste bringing the corpses of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew and heir to the Emperor, and his wife, Sophie. They had both been assassinated at Sarajevo, in the Austrian territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, five days before … Their coffins were carried in funeral procession through the streets of Trieste, before being sent by train to Vienna. This was an imperial frisson of an altogether new kind, and I can sense the shock of the occasion from an old photograph I have before me now. Sailors line the street, imperial infantrymen escort the cortège, led by mounted officers with cockaded hats. Every window and balcony, attic to ground floor, is crowded with people. Black flags or carpets are hung from walls and flagstaffs. A mass of citizenry fills the pavements, the women in dark clothes, the men removing from their heads the boaters which every self-respecting male wore in summer Trieste.
Five years later the Austro-Hungarian Empire had ceased to exist, and Trieste was appended to Italy.
The Trieste of today ‘makes one ask sad questions of oneself. What am I here for? Where am I going? It had this effect on me when I was in my teens; now that I am in my seventies, in my jejune way I feel it still.’ In the end,
There are places that have meant more to me than Trieste. Wales is where my heart is. A lost England made me. I have had more delicious pleasures in Venice. Manhattan excites me more than Trieste ever could, and so does Sydney. But here more than anywhere I remember lost times, lost chances, lost friends, with the sweet tristesse that is onomatopoeic to the place.
The reader is tempted to ascribe these words to Jan’s age when she wrote them, but this won’t do: she was nineteen when she first visited, and returned regularly throughout her life. The language of Trieste is the wistful language of much of Jan’s writings, and indeed of her life. Jan closes the book with a quotation from Kipling:
Something I owe to the soil that grew –
More to the life that fed –
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides of my head.
‘Triesticity’ (a word she has surely made up) is in Jan’s head and in every fibre of her being.
It might be supposed that the accomplishment of having described every significant city in the world should be enough for anyone. Not content with this, however, in 1985 Jan published Last Letters from Hav, which describes a city-state apparently on the Aegean coast of Turkey. Despite this book’s confident opening sentence – ‘There can be few people nowadays who do not know the whereabouts of Hav’ – this place is entirely imaginary, and Last Letters from Hav is a work of fiction.
Hav rates an entry in a wonderful book by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi entitled The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, alongside Atlantis, Brobdingnag, Ruritania, Utopia and many others. The remarkable thing about Hav, however, is that unlike these places it is depicted so plausibly by Jan, in the same terms she has used to describe real places, as to seem just another place along her way. Even after it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Jan continued to receive a voluminous mailbag from readers around the world expressing their frustration over not being able to locate Hav in any atlas or gazetteer.
So where exactly is Hav? It doesn’t matter, of course, but it’s enjoyable to speculate. Many references to the eastern Mediterranean place it on the Aegean coast of Turkey, and a particular reference to Izmir suggests this must be close. It is described as being on an isthmus, and indeed there is a quite prominent isthmus jutting out into the sea to the west of Izmir. Whether this is in fact where Hav is located Jan will not say. And of course, like Trieste, Hav is essentially Nowhere. On the last but one page of Trieste Jan says: ‘I wrote a novel once about an entirely imaginary Levantine city, and found when I finished it that between every line Trieste was lurking.’ Other historically contested cities, like Gdansk (formerly Danzig), may have contributed to the character of Hav, but Trieste is truly the inspiration.
In Pleasures of a Tangled Life Jan has a chapter entitled ‘My Favourite City’: ‘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.’ Having done so, she later ‘learned that one cannot heedlessly play about with truth or time. It was no good after all creating a city to my own taste, because art like life has a way of discovering its own endings.’
The experience of reading Last Letters from Hav is uncannily like the experience of reading one of Jan’s books on a real place. There is no plot as such, and the narrative proceeds in just the way Jan’s usually do: she is her readers’ guide, exploring all the city’s aspects for them. The historical background is intricate, the features of the city vividly brought to life. These include the castle, from which the Armenian trumpeter plays at dawn the great lament of Katourian for the knights of the First Crusade, the Venetian Fondaco, the Caliph, and the Kretev caves above the city, which are reminiscent of the karst landscape above Trieste. Every year the young men of Hav run a Roof Race around the city. Many famous people have passed through Hav, including Marco Polo, Ibn Batuta, T. E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. The truth of Adolf Hitler’s one-night st
ay there is however disputed by some historians. Jan wanders in a leisurely way around the city, making friends and poking her nose into things that often the locals would prefer she did not. Here is a taste of Hav:
It is not known for sure how this fascinating institution [the Roof Race] began, though there are plenty of plausible theories. The race was certainly being run in the sixteenth century, when Nicander Nucius described it in passing as ‘a curious custom of these people’; and in 1810 Lady Hester Stanhope, the future ‘Queen of Palmyra’, was among the spectators: she vociferously demanded the right to take part herself, and was only dissuaded by her private physician, who said it would almost certainly be the end of her.
Taken out of context, this passage might have appeared in any number of Jan’s books. No wonder some readers were confused.
Twenty years after Jan published Last Letters from Hav she wrote a sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons, and this was published as the second part of a revised edition, now under the overall title of Hav. The preface to this edition tells the reader that Jan had been invited back by the ‘League of Intellectuals’. This is another sly Morrisian joke, which gets even funnier when later she has one of these intellectuals say, ‘There is no subject that we cannot discuss, and all subjects make us angry.’ As Jan was leaving Hav twenty years earlier there were warships on the horizon, and the ‘Intervention’ was about to begin. The Hav of 2005 is then a completely different proposition, apparently governed by a Cathar administration, but showing all the evidences of modernity. Jan stays in the new tourist quarter, which is called the Lazaretto! (the exclamation mark is included in the name). Once again Jan is having fun, taking a word derived from the Venetian term for a leper colony and endowing its modern counterpart with hotels, casinos and beaches.
Hav is highly entertaining. Perhaps the 2005 revisit isn’t quite as charming as the original 1985 visit, but it doesn’t matter. What does seem to matter, however, is the question why Jan wrote it. Her witty remarks in Pleasures of a Tangled Life are typical in their blithe denial of any seriousness of intent. It was just a couple of years before first publication of Last Letters from Hav that she wrote that she had fulfilled her ambition to see and describe everywhere in the urban world. Perhaps like Alexander the Great she felt by now that the world was not enough. Perhaps she simply couldn’t bear the idea that she had run out of new places to write about.
In later years Jan began to describe Hav as an allegory. If indeed it is an allegory, then an allegory of what? It is completely successful as an expression of Jan’s usual methods and interests. If an allegory is a description of a subject under the guise of another subject, then Hav hardly qualifies: it is a description of somewhere that exists only in the imagination of its author, and this would seem to be something different. The idea of allegory has come to interest Jan greatly in later life, and after her death there will be published a book entitled Allegorisings, something she wrote ten years ago expressly to be held back until after she is gone. This book is not within the province of Ariel, but its mere title is suggestive.
The playfulness of Hav returns the reader to the question to what extent Jan has been romancing in all her work. There are hints towards the ‘imaginative’ in all of Jan’s writing. At the baggage carousel in Toronto airport, for instance,
… like a wayward comet through these distinctly fixed stars there staggered ever and again a very different figure, a middle-aged woman in a fur hat and a long coat of faded blue, held together by a leather belt evidently inherited from some earlier ensemble. She was burdened with many packages elaborately stringed, wired and brown-papered, she had a sheaf of travel documents generally in her hands, sometimes between her teeth, and she never stopped moving, talking and gesticulating. If she was not hurling questions at those expressionless bystanders in theatrically broken English, she was muttering to herself in unknown tongues, or breaking into sarcastic laughter … and when at last she perceived her travelling accoutrements – awful mounds of canvas and split leather – erupting onto the conveyor, like a tank she forced a passage through the immobile Canadians, toppling them left and right or barging them one into another with virtuoso elbow work.
This is of course a classic Morrisian character sketch, replete with the sort of details that bring her writing to glorious life. But the next paragraph begins, ‘No, I have not invented her – touched her up a little, perhaps, as I have heightened the characteristics of the others, in the interests not so much of art as of allegory.’ Touching up and heightening are colours in the writer’s palette, of course; the question is the extent to which they are used. Jan will admit to altering words in conversations she has had, but that is all. Now and then, however, she will make a coy confession. Writing in Sydney she says at one point, describing a lunch,
For years I remembered every detail of this seminal occasion – the food itself, my stalwart epicurean host, the blue Australian sky above us, the olive-green of the trees, the white sails of the harbour yachts and, crowning it all like a benediction upon the experience, the soaring white wings of the Opera House. Only quite recently did it dawn upon me that the Opera House hadn’t been built yet.
A wonderful tall story is told in James’s essay in Cities on Marienbad. This famous spa town was by then Mariánské Lázne in Czechoslovakia. James had long associated it with one of his heroes, John ‘Jackie’ Fisher, Admiral of the Fleet before the First World War, who he knew had enjoyed many visits there. James asked his hosts whether there might be anyone who would remember him, and was told that there was indeed someone, a cleaning lady who still inhabited the house Fisher had stayed in. She was found, a dirty crone who looked like ‘some spiritless old animal’. When asked about Jackie Fisher, however, ‘a glimmer entered her eye, and warmed, and flourished, and very nearly sparkled: and turning her head stiffly to look at me, and straightening her drab-cottoned back, she answered in a perfect, clear-cut Edwardian English. “Ah!” she said. “Jackie Fisher! Jackie Fisher! What a face that man had!”’
It is somehow appropriate that the subject of this story should be someone who Jan feels is a sort of alter ego. She later wrote a book about him, Fisher’s Face, which describes her fascination with his striking visage. Indeed she says she would like either to have been Jackie Fisher or to have been in love with him. As to the latter, she intends to ‘have an affair with him in the afterlife’. Fisher was a colossal figure to his contemporaries, and a man of great charm and charisma. His face presented a haunting combination of ‘the suave, the sneering and the self-amused’. A man’s man in most ways, he possessed style and grace, and there was something sexually ambiguous about him that Jan responded to. There is a life-sized photograph of Fisher hanging on the inside of a wardrobe door in Jan’s bedroom. He is ever present.
Jan has a romantic view of the world. She has great gifts as a writer and story-teller, and the ability to engage with people and draw them out. If the Morrisian world is a colourful one then surely her readers ought to be grateful for that. It is colourful because she possesses the skills to make it so.
ARIEL
Sometimes I think I understand it, but then a cloud passes the sun and I am in mystery once again.
The fact that James Morris became Jan is widely known. The fact that James the proper Englishman (chorister and undergraduate at Oxford, subaltern in the British army, correspondent of The Times) became Jan the Welsh republican is not so widely known. James’s father was Welsh, his mother English. In Conundrum Jan writes:
I call myself Anglo-Welsh, but I have always preferred the Welsh side of me to the English. When I looked Janus-like to my double childhood view, it was always the line of the Black Mountains that compelled me, with their suggestion of mysteries and immensities beyond, and their reminder that there lay their strongest roots. If some of my troubles lay perhaps in dual affinities, so did much of my delight: for by and large the Anglo-Welsh, spared the heavier disciplines of purer Welshness, are exceedingly happy people, and concede it mo
re regularly than most.
James’s first experience of Wales, other than gazing at it across the Bristol Channel, was on cycling holidays from Lancing. His life then took him in quite different directions. In Pleasures of a Tangled Life Jan says that in the early 1960s a man appropriately named Jones, the general secretary of the then fledgling Plaid Cymru party, wrote to him out of the blue, having read some of his writings about Wales,
… to suggest in me a change of attitude. I should not be writing about Wales as an outsider. I should embrace it in its fullness and make myself a true part of it. I was much moved by this unexpected call … I took his advice, and if I have fulfilled myself anywhere, I have fulfilled myself in Welshness.
The apparent ease with which James moved from being English to being Welsh is telling. Mr Jones would seem either to have been unusually persuasive or, more probably, to have had a simple task: James was leaning westwards anyway.
Taking Jan’s gender reassignment and move to Welshness together, along with the apparently compulsive desire to be on the move, the reader is given the impression of someone in constant flight from the conditions of the moment, any moment, in her life. The beloved home and the beloved family are delightful to return to, but very soon she must leave them again. It is not the intention of this book to psychoanalyse Jan – this is more properly left to experts, and readers of her writings may form their own ideas based on the evidence presented in them. But however fortunate, one might even say blessed, she has been in her life, there are clear signs of torment, torment sublimated in different ways but never entirely resolved.
