Allegorizings by Jan Morris
First as a man, then as a woman, Jan Morris has travelled the world and written about it, showing it to readers through her unique vision. Her journalistic exploits include covering the first conquest of Mt. Everest, the 1956 Sinai War, as well as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the South African Treason Trial involving Mandela, the construction and destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the 1997 British handover of Hong Kong to China when the lease expired.
Among the moments I loved was the brief description of re-entering England through South Shiels, Tyneside. While two burly unsmiling officials in yellow raincoats stand by the immigration booth, the main man gives her passport a cursory glance. “That’s OK, pet. On you go. Sorry about the weather.”
In this small volume, she looks back not only over her travels but over a long life as a professional observer. Many of her musings naturally involve places she loves. Venice is one, and Trieste another — indeed, she has penned an entire book about that city, some of whose native inhabitants, she tells us, “have been governed in their own muddled lifetimes by Austrians, Italians, Germans, Britons, Yugoslavs and Slovenians.”
In a brilliant essay called “Here’s your Jersey, boy,” she riffs on the nonsensical aspects of nation-states, thoughts inspired by the graffito Fuk Nations, seen on a Trieste war memorial. In Wales, we learn, “you can play rugby for the county if just one of your grandparents happened to have been born within its frontiers.” Meanwhile, “you can change your nationality at the drop of a hat.”
It is her own view that national identity should be governed by your feeling: “if you feel you’re a Jew, or an Arab, or a Japanese, or an American, or a Scot, then in a deeper sense you are.“ Morris was born in England to a Welsh father and an English mother. She feels Welsh, and has lived most of her life — when not travelling — in Wales.
Speaking of jerseys. In a small town in Provence, she bought a sun-hat embroidered with the letters OM, fondly believing it represented “the calm Buddhist mantra…that means Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus, only to discover it really signified Olympique Marseilles, one of the most excitable football clubs in Europe.”
Like Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, this book was penned after her official retirement at the age of 80. A series of short and absorbing essays, it was initially conceived as a letter to a daughter, but evolved into a “retrospective portrait of the late twentieth century world.”
Ireland she finds “seriously rich” at the time of her visit, but feels the Irish are “less rash and racy than they used to be.” Nevertheless, she opines, the children’s playground by the Powerscourt waterfall in County Wicklow offers “such a marvellous variety of potential injuries as to make any health and safety specialist give up in despair.”
Visiting Dublin, she ponders the spike. Jocularly called by the stiletto by locals, this monument seems out of keeping with the Georgian buildings that surround it. In a conversation with a Dublin woman, the author is told the spike is “an awful waste of money, a disgrace, so it is.” Chuffed by this response, Morris inquires whether the modern monument better represents the soul or the soil of Ireland. Her interlocutor dismisses this question as “foolish — for ‘what would the one be without the other?’”
Long ago, off the beaten track in California, Morris found her way to a town to which no road sign points. In the “tumbledown little village” of Bolinas, she was greeted by “the whole uproarious repertoire of 1970s radical America. She found “the idealism and the nonsense, the mystic cults, the pony-tails and the junkies, organic turnips and aromatherapy, bold feminism, socialist slogans” and much more. The place was infused with “an exhilarating sense of live and let live.”
Thirty years later, “more by instinct than memory,” she found her way back to the same “hugger mugger hamlet.” Though “nowhere is immune to the world’s corrosions,” Bolinas is the closest to an exception, where “the ideas of those visionary, hallucinatory generations still survive.”
Morris also airs her disapproval of zoos, though she assumes the London Zoo’s Managing Director is well meaning. She assumes he “recognizes no wickedness” in what he is doing because he hasn’t experienced “the revelatory flash when you break through the species barrier, the ancient construction of assumptions, part atavism, part religion, which postulates a fundamental difference of privilege between mankind and the rest of the animal kingdom.” Her own view is that keeping animals “in perpetual confinement can surely no longer be condoned by civilized minds. You might as well organize conducted tours of maximum-security jails, or bring back public hangings.”
In a delightful vignette, the author explains the allegory of the bridge designed by Leonardo da Vinci for Sultan Bayazit II of Turkey. Intended to span the Golden Horn in Istanbul, the bridge was never built. But the sketch survived. Five hundred years later, Norwegian Vebjorn Sand used Leonardo’s drawing to build an allegorical bridge that stands alone, “far from a river or gorge, taking only a few sightseers and harumscarum bikers over the not terribly busy road below.” According to Jan Morris, Sand’s visionary project possesses “extra metaphysical power.” Not only does it “unite past with present,” it reminds the world that “technology is best when it is informed by a sense of the transcendental.” Sand, the bridge’s creator, she explains, aspired to creating a “meeting between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and the material realms.”
Born into what she recognized at age three as the wrong body, she deferred her transformation from male to female until her forties. As for the sex act, she deems it “a mere appendage to love,” which is far more important. Thus is is dismayed by the “impertinence” of the church in claiming that God values “a mere physical mechanism above the ultimate emotion.”