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The Times, UK
May 20 2006
Required reading
Last letters from a traveller
As Jan Morris reaches 80, she has returned to Hav, the mythical
destination of her first novel. Salley Vickers celebrates a lifetime
of journeying
HAV
by Jan Morris
Faber (June 1), £16.99; 301pp
WHEN MY YOUNGER SON turned 16, we went to open his bank account. The
bank manager looked dubiously at my son's passport, which bore a name
that differed from the one on the account forms. My son had tried,
but failed, to have his given name changed legally: at that time you
could change your surname by law, but your forename was apparently
carved in stone.
By way of explanation, my son announced: `I have the same problem as
Jan Morris,' at which the bank manager became first flustered and
then propitiating. Afterwards, I said admiringly: `You realise what
he . . .?' `Sure,' my son said. `I said it to disarm him.'
This sums up some of the cultural impact of Morris, whose most
famous, if not her greatest contribution to our age was publicly and
courageously to cross - besides many geographical ones - the gender
boundary and who insouciantly remarks in Pleasures of a Tangled Life:
`I cannot recommend too highly the pleasures of androgyny.' Jan
Morris's writing has been as catholic and genial as James Morris's
was. Venice, published when she was still James, a book which
eloquently discloses a city close to my own heart, is rightly
considered a classic.
Her later, and in some ways even better book The Venetian Empire,
written as Jan, explores that remarkable state's maritime expansion
through the eastern Mediterranean. The book is written through the
vista of a voyage, and the draw of the ocean is discernible in
another of Morris's later works, the strange but somehow typical
Fisher's Face, a biography of Lord `Jacky' Fisher, Admiral of the
Fleet, a man of mighty contradictions.
Fisher's transformation of the Royal Navy was truly prodigious. His
inspirations and miscalculations were equally so, and only a writer
as naturally sympathetic to eccentricity as Morris could capture such
idiosyncratic genius and lunacy.
Morris has always been proud of her Welsh origins and that is the
country where she has felt finally at home. She said in a BBC
interview that of all her many achievements her proudest was being
elected a member of the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards. From her book on
Wales, `the damp, demanding and obsessively interesting country', I
learnt why it is home to so many ancient yews and that beavers still
lived and built dams there until well into the 18th century.
If her father secured her attachment to Wales, it was probably from
her mother, educated in Germany, that Morris acquired her acute
feeling for the complexities of Europe. Yet, paradoxically, the
strongest element of that sense is precisely its non-existence, or
rather its ideational existence, a concept exemplified in what was
announced as her `final' book, Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere.
Morris has movingly said that Trieste is her ideal city because for
her it is the capital of `that great empire, which is nowhere', `a
fourth world, beyond the Third World, where the people all feel the
same, where, whatever their colour or sex or religion or, or anything
at all, they really at heart feel a certain way about important
things . . . wherever you go in the world you'll find somebody with
whom you immediately feel at home. And you know that they feel at
home with you.'
That Trieste turns out not to be her last book is a matter for
celebration. For, in her 80th year, we have a new creation from her
intrepid inner traveller.
Hav is the sequel, or second half, of her only novel, Last Letters
from Hav, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985. The country of
Hav is a mythic place, whose non-existence in the physical world
exemplifies Morris's deeper affinity with the reality of that `fourth
world'.
In Hav `nobody knows what native is. Now as then, you can take your
choice! Chopin, for example, when he came here with George Sand in
1839 after their unhappy holiday in Majorca . . . rented a house in
the Armenian quarter of the Old City and briefly took Armenian
lessons with the city trumpeter of the day. On the other hand James
Joyce spent nearly all his time at the Cafe München, the famous
writers' haunt on Bundstrasse, while Richard Burton the explorer, as
one might expect, went entirely Arab, strode around the city in
burnous and golden dagger, flagrantly snubbed the British Resident
and was rumoured to have got up to terrible things in the darker
corners of the Medina . . .'
By the end of the first book, the warships of an enemy power were
menacing - and in the revisited Hav we see the incursions of a
depredating world that has, in the 20 intervening years, in our
parallel one, become salient.
Hav, as observed by both the book's narrator and its author (who are
almost one and the same), is the culmination of a life of meditation
on the philosophical and existential implications of travel and, as
such, its conclusions are intentionally ambiguous.
It is, as one might expect of this writer, a deeply civilised and
civilising book. Of all the qualities that Morris values, she places
kindness first. Kindness has the same root as kin. To be kind is to
recognise kinship, that we are all, in essence, of the same kind. We
are lucky to have Jan Morris, and her gift of transporting us to
other realms, and other, apparently foreign, sensibilities to aid us
in this lifesaving understanding.
EXTRACT FROM 'HAV'
Inside . . . I found remainders of the past: here a decidedly
Russian-style landscape (muffled ladies in long skirts snowballing
with preternaturally rosy children), here a chipped and rusted enamel
advertisement (TAKE THE TRAIN! MEDITERRANEAN EXPRESS DIRECT TO
MOSCOW, with a fanciful representation of onion domes and Cossacks),
and standing in a dark corner cold and unpolished, a fine old samovar
surmounted by a Russian imperial eagle. But they were no more than
hints, really, rather than relics of what had once been there.
`Oh dear me no, Miss Morris, the Impériale is not what it was,' said
Miss Yegen, when we settled down in her cosy sitting-room for, as she
put it, `a little light something before bed'.
`But what would you do? No trains, very few visitors - only Chinese
and Arab commercials, by and large - and certainly no help from the
Government. They wanted to pull the place down, actually, when they
pulled down the station ruins, and it was only because we all made a
fuss that they let it stand.'
So making a fuss did have some effect, in the new Hav? `Not often,
but sometimes. There's not much what you might call public opinion
these days. The papers don't spend much time on everyday matters - I
was surprised when the Mirror had that article about me and the
hotel, but that may have been the influence of Signor BIancheri,
who's always had a soft spot for the Impériale. Still, it was
certainly people making a fuss who saved the Roof-Race.'
I'd forgotten all about the Roof-Race.
`Oh feelings ran so high about the Roof-Race that those Cathars
really couldn't go ahead and do away with it. They meant to, you know
. . .'
May 20 2006
Required reading
Last letters from a traveller
As Jan Morris reaches 80, she has returned to Hav, the mythical
destination of her first novel. Salley Vickers celebrates a lifetime
of journeying
HAV
by Jan Morris
Faber (June 1), £16.99; 301pp
WHEN MY YOUNGER SON turned 16, we went to open his bank account. The
bank manager looked dubiously at my son's passport, which bore a name
that differed from the one on the account forms. My son had tried,
but failed, to have his given name changed legally: at that time you
could change your surname by law, but your forename was apparently
carved in stone.
By way of explanation, my son announced: `I have the same problem as
Jan Morris,' at which the bank manager became first flustered and
then propitiating. Afterwards, I said admiringly: `You realise what
he . . .?' `Sure,' my son said. `I said it to disarm him.'
This sums up some of the cultural impact of Morris, whose most
famous, if not her greatest contribution to our age was publicly and
courageously to cross - besides many geographical ones - the gender
boundary and who insouciantly remarks in Pleasures of a Tangled Life:
`I cannot recommend too highly the pleasures of androgyny.' Jan
Morris's writing has been as catholic and genial as James Morris's
was. Venice, published when she was still James, a book which
eloquently discloses a city close to my own heart, is rightly
considered a classic.
Her later, and in some ways even better book The Venetian Empire,
written as Jan, explores that remarkable state's maritime expansion
through the eastern Mediterranean. The book is written through the
vista of a voyage, and the draw of the ocean is discernible in
another of Morris's later works, the strange but somehow typical
Fisher's Face, a biography of Lord `Jacky' Fisher, Admiral of the
Fleet, a man of mighty contradictions.
Fisher's transformation of the Royal Navy was truly prodigious. His
inspirations and miscalculations were equally so, and only a writer
as naturally sympathetic to eccentricity as Morris could capture such
idiosyncratic genius and lunacy.
Morris has always been proud of her Welsh origins and that is the
country where she has felt finally at home. She said in a BBC
interview that of all her many achievements her proudest was being
elected a member of the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards. From her book on
Wales, `the damp, demanding and obsessively interesting country', I
learnt why it is home to so many ancient yews and that beavers still
lived and built dams there until well into the 18th century.
If her father secured her attachment to Wales, it was probably from
her mother, educated in Germany, that Morris acquired her acute
feeling for the complexities of Europe. Yet, paradoxically, the
strongest element of that sense is precisely its non-existence, or
rather its ideational existence, a concept exemplified in what was
announced as her `final' book, Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere.
Morris has movingly said that Trieste is her ideal city because for
her it is the capital of `that great empire, which is nowhere', `a
fourth world, beyond the Third World, where the people all feel the
same, where, whatever their colour or sex or religion or, or anything
at all, they really at heart feel a certain way about important
things . . . wherever you go in the world you'll find somebody with
whom you immediately feel at home. And you know that they feel at
home with you.'
That Trieste turns out not to be her last book is a matter for
celebration. For, in her 80th year, we have a new creation from her
intrepid inner traveller.
Hav is the sequel, or second half, of her only novel, Last Letters
from Hav, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985. The country of
Hav is a mythic place, whose non-existence in the physical world
exemplifies Morris's deeper affinity with the reality of that `fourth
world'.
In Hav `nobody knows what native is. Now as then, you can take your
choice! Chopin, for example, when he came here with George Sand in
1839 after their unhappy holiday in Majorca . . . rented a house in
the Armenian quarter of the Old City and briefly took Armenian
lessons with the city trumpeter of the day. On the other hand James
Joyce spent nearly all his time at the Cafe München, the famous
writers' haunt on Bundstrasse, while Richard Burton the explorer, as
one might expect, went entirely Arab, strode around the city in
burnous and golden dagger, flagrantly snubbed the British Resident
and was rumoured to have got up to terrible things in the darker
corners of the Medina . . .'
By the end of the first book, the warships of an enemy power were
menacing - and in the revisited Hav we see the incursions of a
depredating world that has, in the 20 intervening years, in our
parallel one, become salient.
Hav, as observed by both the book's narrator and its author (who are
almost one and the same), is the culmination of a life of meditation
on the philosophical and existential implications of travel and, as
such, its conclusions are intentionally ambiguous.
It is, as one might expect of this writer, a deeply civilised and
civilising book. Of all the qualities that Morris values, she places
kindness first. Kindness has the same root as kin. To be kind is to
recognise kinship, that we are all, in essence, of the same kind. We
are lucky to have Jan Morris, and her gift of transporting us to
other realms, and other, apparently foreign, sensibilities to aid us
in this lifesaving understanding.
EXTRACT FROM 'HAV'
Inside . . . I found remainders of the past: here a decidedly
Russian-style landscape (muffled ladies in long skirts snowballing
with preternaturally rosy children), here a chipped and rusted enamel
advertisement (TAKE THE TRAIN! MEDITERRANEAN EXPRESS DIRECT TO
MOSCOW, with a fanciful representation of onion domes and Cossacks),
and standing in a dark corner cold and unpolished, a fine old samovar
surmounted by a Russian imperial eagle. But they were no more than
hints, really, rather than relics of what had once been there.
`Oh dear me no, Miss Morris, the Impériale is not what it was,' said
Miss Yegen, when we settled down in her cosy sitting-room for, as she
put it, `a little light something before bed'.
`But what would you do? No trains, very few visitors - only Chinese
and Arab commercials, by and large - and certainly no help from the
Government. They wanted to pull the place down, actually, when they
pulled down the station ruins, and it was only because we all made a
fuss that they let it stand.'
So making a fuss did have some effect, in the new Hav? `Not often,
but sometimes. There's not much what you might call public opinion
these days. The papers don't spend much time on everyday matters - I
was surprised when the Mirror had that article about me and the
hotel, but that may have been the influence of Signor BIancheri,
who's always had a soft spot for the Impériale. Still, it was
certainly people making a fuss who saved the Roof-Race.'
I'd forgotten all about the Roof-Race.
`Oh feelings ran so high about the Roof-Race that those Cathars
really couldn't go ahead and do away with it. They meant to, you know
. . .'