by Jan Morris
For myself, I long ago threw myself into its cause, in some ways still a struggle, in others heartily successful, and the immediate cause of my epiphany was this: sixty-odd years ago, when a campaign for the survival of the Welsh language had taken illegal routes, I was asked if we could give a temporary home to a young activist leader just released from jail. We lent him a flat on the top floor of our house, and so for a few weeks we were at the epicentre, as it were, of Welsh passion. Our guest upstairs was its charismatic talisman, a youth of great artistic talent who was to become celebrated as a singer, and who remains to this day an honoured champion of everything Welsh. We were enchanted and excited by his presence upstairs, and so it came about that I myself have remained, from that day to this, a devotee of his noble cause.
I wonder. Perhaps in centuries to come the two languages of Wales will coexist in happy equilibrium? I do hope so, but then I am at heart an Equilibrialist!
DAY 94
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It’s not often nowadays, in these generally laughless times, that in the daily course of events I am reduced – or elevated! – to absolute laughter, old-school farcical laughter. So I am happy to report that it happened to us yesterday, when Elizabeth and I went to do our mundane daily shopping, just for a change, a few miles up the road in a neighbouring village. A helpful acquaintance had asked me if we had tried the new café there, in the main street, the rather handsome small office building that used to be a bank? I didn’t know about it, so we popped up there for a coffee when we were done with our shopping.
The bank turned out to have been enterprisingly converted, so that it still felt amusingly bankish, with a big, defunct safe in one corner and in another a curious sort of multi-storeyed mock office suite, made perhaps of canvas, and it was this eccentric construction that gave me my farcical delight this morning.
It had been taken over by very, very small children. There were probably only a few of them really, but so gloriously vigorous were they, so wildly did they dash and clamber in and out, up and down that peculiar edifice, sometimes sliding down its unstable steps, sometimes disappearing into its bowels, now here, now there, up and down, in and out, backwards or forwards, that the whole thing seemed to be quivering with the dream-like energy of it all.
We never discovered just who they were, or just what they were doing there, but we left them at it anyway, full blast. Part incredulous, part baffled, altogether delighted, digesting our excellent coffees and clutching our groceries we staggered home to normality, laughing all the way.
DAY 95
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Never get old! Never have I felt its disadvantages more than I do this morning, when my computer system has not only gone wrong, but has brought home to me, over my breakfast, the absolute gulf that exists between me and the generations that have come after. For half the time we do not even speak the same language. Who is the Server, who declines to serve me on my screen this morning? What is the Fibre I must apparently upgrade to? My own grandchildren are fluent in the vocabulary, and for that matter an all-embracing culture, which I have never mastered, and I am left floundering in search of a tutor who will come up to Trefan Morys this morning to guide me into elementary clarity (e.g. remind me what my password is, and what it’s a password to, and who is Broadband).
He is very busy this morning, his answering machine tells me, and there is a waiting time of up to ten minutes to make an appointment. The wait will be extended, I’m sure, to at least half an hour of vapid recorded music, so I’ll tell you what we’ll do, you and I, if you care to join me. We’ll say ‘Go to hell’ to the whole lot of them, the whole caboodle, the whole bloody world of this morning, and go for a merry walk in the rain.
DAY 96
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A beloved friend of the Morris family was the horn player Dennis Brain, the most distinguished of his time, who was killed in a car crash in 1957 (he loved fast cars). I am often reminded of him, because his recording in particular of Mozart’s fourth horn concerto is regularly broadcast, and seems to me quite ethereally beautiful. There are brilliant recordings by other artists too, but none of them seem to me to express quite the same suggestion of mingled poignancy and virtuosity. Somehow it all seems easier to today’s horn players, and when I hear Brain’s interpretation I am always reminded of the sadness of his early death.
He was my brother Gareth’s closest friend and colleague, my mother wrote cadenzas for his concerto performances, he remains to this day a gentle presence in my mind, and I have sometimes wondered if the tragic circumstances of his death somehow made the beauty of his performances preternaturally more profound than the most brilliant interpretations of his successors. Well, yesterday it occurred to me to ask a wise musician of my acquaintance what she thought of this eerie notion. No, she thought, it was not divine intervention that so inspired Dennis Brain and made his playing of that concerto so poignantly different. It was merely the fact that his successors played horns equipped with a more modern system of valves than his was.
So. One need not make sacrifices to produce great art, but sometimes it evidently helps …
DAY 97
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For only the second time in my life I have just made a financial investment. The first one was the purchase of some shares in Hong Kong, and it helped to keep me solvent for years. The new one is £100 in a cooperative to ensure the survival of our village pub, whose admirable proprietors (who also make excellent marmalade, by the way) are retiring. In villages all over Britain one sees old inns empty or boarded up, beaten by the onslaught of the cyber-culture, if that’s what it is – you know what I mean, anyway. Here at Llanystumdwy, though, Y Plu – The Feathers – is determined to soldier on!
For yes, even here, in this far corner of a small, lovely country, we are embattled. The world is too much with us, even here. You would not know it, though. When I had dropped off my cheque for the pub investment, I drove up to the top of a nearby hill for a moment’s contemplation. It was a lovely sunny day, and our local metropolis of Cricieth, population 1,800, lay there spread out as if in exhibition – so clean and brisk and timeless it looked, basking there in the sunshine beside the ocean, old in structure, young in style, crowned by its ancient castle, sheltered by the mountains of Snowdonia and gently lapped by the Irish Sea.
Don’t you believe it, friend. The world is too much with Cricieth too. Its friendly old family High Street is invaded by charity shops and estate agents, and half those pleasant villas are the second homes of the English bourgeoisie or investment properties on the holiday market. There are no friendly banks in Cricieth now, with friendly local managers – they have been consolidated in more worldly vortexes – but there are three cosmopolitan supermarkets down there, almost cheek-by-jowl …
Cheer up, though! Ours is still a lovely little place, still full of good, kind Welsh people, still holding its own against the cyber-world and investing its modest wealth in The Feathers, and I myself am only halfway through the pot of marmalade its late proprietors sent me for Christmas. Yummy! (And yes, there is such a word.)
DAY 98
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While the going is good I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to instil some order, or at least some sense of order, into the ghastly jumble of letters, pamphlets, cuttings, maps, memoranda, notebooks, proofs, illegible jottings and despairing scrawls that might, I suppose, in a more mature household be characterized as my Papers. I fear it all may be a miserable legacy for my poor executors, but in the meantime exploring the mess of it has revealed something of myself to me.
In particular, I find, buried in the confusion, phases of my past that I had forgotten all about. For example, how in my adolescence did I ever find the time, or the enthusiasm, to put together several stout loose-leaf volumes entitled, in very flowery pen and ink, STAMPIAU CYMRU – STAMPS OF
WALES, and containing rank upon rank of postage stamps, used and unused, appertaining in some way to Wales? Lots of them were standard Post Office issue of the time, and most of them were only tangentially Stampiau Cymru at all. They were in my album solely because there was an incidental appearance on a stamp of a Welsh breed of cattle, or a Welsh sheepdog, or a goat, of course, or a Welsh bard in a series of Poets, or a Welsh composer among some Great Musicians (was Vaughan Williams really as Welsh as he sounded? I apparently gave him the benefit of the doubt …).
Or what about these other four enormous albums, grandly entitled, in even more stately felt-tipped penmanship:
A COLLECTION OF IMAGES OF
VENICE
FAMILIAR AND UNEXPECTED
I was nineteen when the British Army introduced me to Venice, and I was evidently hooked from the start, because this collection is a really stunning ragbag of every conceivable memento of the place, lovingly stuck in the several hundred pages of the Collection: picture postcards and scraps of manuscript and auction records and gallery reproductions and letters and receipts and snaps of cats and details of ferry boats and Heaven knows what else I preserved long ago as a first big memento of what was to prove a lifelong passion – Venezia!
And so, as I rummage among the piles, stacks and muddled reminders of my life, I come across a third and final aide-memoire, bringing my nostalgias up to date. It’s that awful jumble itself. There is no fancy calligraphy to introduce it, only a single aerial photograph of a house, stuck in a cheap folder, but it means as much to me as those grander recollections ever could. For the house, you see, is Plas Trefan, Llanystumdwy, Wales, the home of my heart.
We do not live in it now, my Elizabeth and I, because when our family grew up, it was too big for us, but all we did was convert the old stables of the Plas, at the end of the drive, into the more modest Trefan Morys, where we have lived happily after. So it is Trefan in the abstract, so to speak, the Trefan that has been here for centuries that is honoured by my confusions. Here in our old age the home of our prime still smiles back at us: the old house itself in a multitude of photographs and drawings, and the mementos of visitors of all ages and many nationalities, scribbling their signatures, drawing their pictures, perpetuating their jokes and expressing their friendship down the generations, and I have responded, too, with a host of my own fondly amateurish sketches.
So there we are. Out of that desperate welter of muddled meanings I have extracted at least some pattern, for those three enthusiasms of long ago, remembered in those half-forgotten albums, live on to this day, as inspiring as ever! Beloved Wales, inspiring Venice, dear old Trefan – I love them still, all three of them, despite the unsortable, indescribable and indeed inconceivable debris of their legacies.
DAY 99
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I asked a young acquaintance the other day what she planned for her future, and she replied at once that she wanted to be a news correspondent. I assumed she was talking cyber-talk, but even so I suspect she was thinking partly of the supreme interest, long ago, of my years as a foreign correspondent, which I all too often talk about.
I baulked in reply. By and large what a fascinating time we had of it, we wandering reporters, at large in the years before Isis and co. or poisoned doorknobs – years when we might have been arrested but probably not tortured, when diplomatic niceties were generally sustained, and for the time being, by and large, in one way or another the world’s conflicts were at least comprehensible.
But just think what possible perils my dear young acquaintance would face now, in pursuit of just the same profession. I would lie sleepless in bed worrying about her, if she was out on the job in the maliciously hazy swamp that is today’s historical arena. Will she pursue her ambition? Probably. Would I do the same, if I were young and ambitious today? Oh, I fear not – and frankly, my dear, ‘fear’ is the right word …
DAY 100
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Dear God, another diurnal centenary! Is it possible? Is it desirable? The most disturbing thing about compiling a book in old age, I can tell you, is the audience it attracts. Most of the readers of this diary of mine are evidently old too, and write to me in kindly sympathy and understanding, when I would really prefer them to be half my age, at most, and write to me not as sympathetic confrères, but as amused, surprised or antagonized observers from other generations.
Well, there we are. That’s the way it goes. Keep smiling, anyway!
DAY 101
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‘Since I can never see your face,’ wrote the lyricist James Elroy Flecker, addressing a fellow poet a thousand years hence, ‘and never shake you by the hand, I send my soul through time and space to greet you … you will understand …’
But will he understand? Flecker was writing in 1910, and as poets are inherently young, whatever their age, perhaps he felt that a confrère in 2910 would be young of heart and temperament too – he would understand!
I am also a poet of sorts, though, in 2019, and I have a feeling that the world is losing its poetry – its lyrical instinct, I mean, its sense of a Beyond. Into our own times, it seems to me, humanity has assumed the presence, variously imagined, of some other kind of existence, and our efforts to shake its hand have expressed themselves above all in beauty – the beauty of faith, wonder and mystery.
But as I read my newspaper this morning, I get the sense, for what it’s worth, that humanity is hardening, and that even the poets, a thousand years from now, will have given up wondering.
DAY 102
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Here’s a touch of poignancy – sentimentality, if you prefer. Fifty years ago, I wrote a book evoking the city of New York at its climactic moment of success, when, at the very end of the Second World War, the first ship-load of American soldiers returned in triumph from their victories in Europe. They sailed into Manhattan, as it happened, on the iconic British liner Queen Mary, and I was touched by this conjunction. I loved the city and its meanings, I admired the ship and its heritage, and as a fervent Anglo-American, then and even now, I was proud of the moment’s allegory. So I wrote a book about it called Manhattan ’45, and I sadly dedicated it to four American soldiers who had died in action only a few days before the war ended.
As you can see, I was much moved by the human drama of it all, and I was grateful when the American publishers of my book, in New York themselves, gave it a photographic jacket which was wonderfully emotional and was later to become famous. You may know the picture. It showed an ecstatically celebrating Times Square, the emblematic heart of Manhattan, at that very same moment of victory and homecoming; and dominating it was a young American sailor who had evidently embraced a passing girl in the sheer rumbustious joy of the moment and given her a wholehearted and obviously irresistible kiss.
The picture became famous, and so did its anonymous sailor. They exactly illustrated the nature of my book and its intentions, and over the years I came to feel a true comradeship with that young seaman. I never met him, of course, until his death I never learnt his name, but I felt myself a real friend of his; and so it was that when I learnt from my newspaper this morning that he had left us, that delightfully impetuous young sailor on my long-ago book jacket, I had my moment of grateful poignancy.
PS His name was George Mendonsa, and he was ninety-five when he died. RIP.
DAY 103
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Business people of all sorts get such a bad press these cyber-days that it is always agreeable to learn of benevolent examples. I thought it wonderful to read yesterday that the venture capitalist magnate Sir Michael Moritz and his wife were to be the new sponsors and financiers of the Booker Prize for literary fiction. Mind you, I don’t myself approve of competitive prizes for writers (delighted though I was myself, long ago, when my one and only novel was shortlisted for the Booker – we writers are
only human, after all …).
But I am biased in favour of Moritz anyway. He is a generous paragon of a capitalist Magnate. Born and bred in Wales, fostered like me at Christ Church, Oxford, living in San Francisco, he was a writer himself before Magnateness set in, and he has since then expressed the condition in vastly generous philanthropic gestures. I have never met him, nor understand the exact nature of his Magnitude. Because of our shared love of Wales, however, some time ago I plucked up the cheek to write and ask him if he would consider paying the housing tax of a small literary centre I am bequeathing my house to become, specifically for the benefit of Wales, when one of these days I kick the bucket.
Back came the instant response, from the distant halls of plutocracy, from Silicon Valley, as it were, to Grub Street:
It would be a complete pleasure.
You see? And there’s style for you, too!
DAY 104
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It was a truly horrible day here yesterday – awesomely horrible, horrible as in unspeakable – and I had a mountain of mail to deal with. When elderly authors like me publish a new book, as I recently have, we get lots of kind mail about it, and I always feel it my duty, and my pleasure too, to thank their writers. This ghastly morning, as it happens, there were even more letters than usual. As I ripped open their envelopes, one by one, and composed a reply either for the post or for the computer, and as the wind rattled my windows and the grey rain poured down, I really felt rather pleased with myself, self-righteous, in fact, for behaving so punctiliously on such an awful day.
