by Jan Morris
I went home thoughtfully then, remembering my late great love, our Norwegian Forest cat Ibsen, and wondering how happily, if push had come to shove, I would have taken him down to the beach on a lead to entertain the children and demonstrate our comity. I would have despaired. He would have hissed or pissed. Or both.
DAY 84
When I walk my daily thousand paces of exercise I generally do it in military style, which is to say that I march in the manner I learnt during my time in the British Army seventy-odd years ago. It was not at all a swaggering style, more stately if anything, arms swinging to shoulder level, head held high, eyes to the front. The parade pace was dignified and confident; the purpose, I assume, was grandeur.
I have noticed lately, though, that my marching style has changed. It’s not so stiff as it used to be, not so formal. I march more in the old American way now, more relaxed, bending my arms at the elbow, and even looking amiably around me. What would the old drill sergeants say?!
It is true that the armed forces of the deceased British Empire, now parading under very different flags, and to different ideologies, still sometimes march in a recognizably British manner, but generally I can hardly recognize my old Aldershot, Catterick or Sandhurst purposes in the military manner of today; and to pull myself together as I stride, I often find myself humming or whistling, to an imaginary symphony orchestra, Elgar’s marvellous tune ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
‘Dear God,’ I hear you exclaim. ‘That old bombast! Make us Mightier yet!’ Yes, because whatever the idiot jingoists do with the melody at the Promenade Concerts, clownishly jumping up and down to its rhythms, I believe this hymn nobly expresses grander values than mere patriotism. I prefer to think of its tremendous theme, whatever Elgar thought of it himself, not as bombast or plain swank, but as an anthem boasting of the heroic survival down the ages, in triumph as in tribulation, of all of us, all mankind together.
So as I come to the end of my walk, when I hear the ghostly command of the regimental sergeant-major ordering me to pull myself together, get my head up and pull my shoulders back, I gratefully do what I am told.
Like it or not, I remind myself, we are still on parade!
DAY 85
I am stunned, simply stunned, by the amount of stuff that is packed inside my perfectly ordinary brain. It is true that nowadays the mechanism isn’t working as well as it used to. I forget names now, and where I put things, and what the day is, and how to spell ‘rheumatism’, and even sometimes how to speak words. Nevertheless, looking up something now in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, I am astonished to realize how much of its contents – 1,075 pages of it – is stored in my mind already, with all its associations, and how it can be accessed by a simple trigger. For example, put in the words ‘lone and level’, and instantly up comes in my memory Ozymandias. ‘Smokestack’? Of course, I see in my mind’s eye a dirty British coaster. ‘Merrily, merrily shall I live now,’ and there is that sprite of the island celebrating his release. ‘Men will still say,’ and we can almost hear the drone of the bombers.
You know what I mean, I’m sure: somewhere in our skulls an entire encyclopedia is stored, only awaiting an index. And if you are musical, even more phenomenal is your brain’s command of melody. My brother Gareth, a professional musician, could infallibly identify for me from a single phrase, even a single note, what classical work it came from, and I am astonished to discover myself, from the quotations book, how readily I can summon an old tune from its first line or its title. Try it yourself!
‘A Couple of Swells’? ‘Fish gotta swim, Birds gotta fly’? ‘Hallelujah!’ ‘Over There!’ ‘All Through the Night’.
‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’.
There you are – if you’re anything like me you’re whistling already!
It’s all up there in the mind, all the time, or alternatively, in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
DAY 86
I have spent a happy few hours contemplating the work of the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (1742–1803). Do you know about him? He was a Radnorshire country gentleman who became in his youth a skilful disciple of Richard Wilson, the founder of British landscape painting, and spent some years in Italy cultivating his gifts. His pictures were generally admired: after his death they commanded good prices and were hung in galleries all over the place. His was never one of your household names, though, even among the cognoscenti, and he was never as celebrated as his master, until in 1954 there came to light a very small painting of his, a few inches square, that made him a celebrity in the art world.
It dated from his Italian days, it was called simply A Wall in Naples, and that was about it. It seemed to picture the blank and slightly crumbled wall of a perfectly ordinary old Italian townhouse, with three windows in a row, the left-hand one in good shape, the middle one with a balcony and a line of washing, the right-hand one apparently disused, or never completed and bricked up. The composition seemed so totally out of period, though, in style and in matter, that it was hailed as a first example of Modern Art, abstract art perhaps, containing subtle suggestions and messages. Some critics thought it really meant nothing at all. One declared it to be ‘the very stuff of illusion’, and to others the picture was some secretive kind of allegory, or evidence of the artist’s own habitual melancholy. There was something haunting about it.
The latest scholarly interpreter has been Mr Michael Tomlinson, who has written a brilliant long essay about the picture. It was published in the Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, and it has drastically affected my own responses to A Wall in Naples. For myself, I have long thought the picture might represent the Three Ages of Man, thus: window 1 – confident youth; window 2 (the one with the washing) – domesticized middle age; window three – elderly dereliction. Tomlinson, though, has taught me otherwise. He has convinced me that the picture has a solemn religious meaning, and is directly descended from the Passion scenes of the medieval Italian masters. The three windows are the three crosses of Calvary (the complete ones have cruciform shutter closures), and the strip of linen hanging from the central one identifies it, if you look at it in the right frame of mind, as the Lord’s own. Moreover, if you concentrate your attention, just to the left of that balcony do you not see signs that some liquid has been sloshed down the wall there – not poured, as you might expect, from the front of the balcony, away from the masonry, but at one side of it?
What is that, Mr Tomlinson surmises, but Jones’s own reminder to us of the blood and water that flowed from Jesus’s side, pierced by the soldier’s spear and immortalized by generations of earlier artists. This reverent new interpretation has clinched for me the enigma of A Wall in Naples, and convinced me of its profounder genius. ‘Far from being about nothing,’ says Mr Tomlinson, ‘it is about everything.’
Only one nagging surmise remains in my own mind. What if Thomas Jones, surveying his own rather barren townscape picture, decided to make an allegory of it after all, and added all the holy hints? Anyway, A Wall in Naples now hangs in the National Gallery in London, and is haunting still.
DAY 87
That’s odd. I don’t seem to have thought anything today. It does happen.
DAY 88
I’ve been reading about an Anglican bishop, somewhere in England, who adamantly won’t recognize the right of women to be priests. Although there are many women priests in his own diocese, he says he certainly wouldn’t accept Holy Communion, the ultimate sacrament of his beliefs, from one of them. In fact, he wouldn’t even accept Communion from a male priest who had been ordained by a woman, and he belongs to a society of clergy supplied with cards that trace their own ordinations back to ordinations by predecessors who were themselves, thank the Lord, NOT FEMALE!!!
As a fairly muzzy agnostic myself, I certainly do not expect rationality in religion – anything but! – but I really do think this takes nuttiness too far, rivalling any of those medieval absurdities about angels dancing on pinheads. And I certainly
cannot understand why Christians demand anything more of their faith than what they get from the teaching of Jesus – embodied, just to make it easy for them, in the marvellous semi-fable of his life. They needn’t believe all the stuff about miracles, etc.; just observe what he does and says himself – ‘Go, and do thou likewise!’
Old-school mumbo-jumbo may be dead and gone, but magic of a far profounder kind lives on in philosophy and art. All the great religions, I suspect, absorb those marvellous imponderables somewhere in their often confusing creeds, and good people everywhere, ordained or not, go forth and do likewise …
DAY 89
I have always been fond of the Anglo-French word ‘louche’, though I have not always translated it correctly. I used it admiringly in writing an obituary, years ago, of my friend and colleague Ralph Izzard, and his widow gently rebuked me for it. It is true that the Oxford English Dictionary says ‘louche’ implies ‘sordid in a rakish or appealing way’. I rather hazily think of it, though, as being elegantly urbane, experienced, ironical and fun, and that’s how I think of Ralph still … I think of cities that way too. In particular, I cherish the memory of Manhattan before the rot set in, and just occasionally wish I could still be there, in a small sophisticated bar somewhere, dimlit, with love around and soft musicianly jazz on a white piano. So ‘OK,’ said I to my own love early last night, ‘let’s go downtown and get ourselves a martini.’
The joint we went to was not dim-lit, somewhere on the Upper West Side. No yellow cabs went by. No piano played, and I had known the waitress’s family for years. But the sun was setting over the bay outside, lights were flickering in our little Welsh town, love was in the air and I felt proper louche.
DAY 90
I’ve been thinking a lot about walls, having lately spent some hours contemplating a particularly enigmatic example of the genre in an eighteenth-century painting, and it occurs to me that The Wall, in capital letters, is one of the dominant symbols of the human condition (together, perhaps, with its unassuming alter ego, the ditch). I don’t know if the Garden of Eden was walled, but down the centuries many thousands of humans have accepted that God himself is ever present in the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem.
And from that supreme destiny, think of all the other walls that have lodged themselves into our languages and our psyches: Hadrian’s Wall, the Aurelian Wall, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, Offa’s Dyke, Thisbe’s Wall, Trump’s Wall, the stone walls that don’t a prison make, the monstrous concrete wall that damned developer’s putting up … It is not, on the whole, an agreeable aura – is it? – that attends the idea of The Wall. To be sure, the construction is often protective, but it is far more often alienating, and it is not generally kindly of numen or appearance.
Sometimes, though, walls do strike me as intriguingly arcane, and fortunately for me, a few examples of that hazy allure wind their lonely dry-stone way over the mountains behind my home. Just what they are for, I know not. Once, no doubt, they formed a boundary of some sort, or even a frontier, as they did in many such landscapes of the Celtic north. Perhaps they still serve some such purpose, concerned with grazing rights or tithe collection. Mostly, though, I prefer to think, they are meaningless, purposeless, suggestive, understood only by themselves and the wandering sheep – unless, of course, they are all subsidiary accommodations of the Wailing Wall …
DAY 91
Our modest and crumbling house, Trefan Morys, is just about as old as the United States of America, but has this to be said for it: it has its fill of curiosities. Here are some of them – stand back! Scores of model ships, of many kinds, materials and nationalities, are scattered through its rooms, and they include a large steamship flying the fated flag of the Free City of Danzig (1920–39), and the greengrocer’s barge from which we used to buy our groceries when we lived in Venice, and a wooden New York tug built (it says on the bottom) by Colonel Willsey Dubois, and an Arab dhow, and a Faroe Islands fishing boat, and a Bristol Channel pilot boat …
Then again, framed in our library is a bit of the metal pipe through which was watered the original Morgan horse, in Vermont, at the end of the eighteenth century, and framed close by is a manuscript of the poem ‘The Country Clergy’, written for me in his own hand by the greatest of modern Welsh poets, R. S. Thomas (died 2000). That iron trident was used long ago by predecessors in the house to spear salmon in our river, and under a carpet, to keep it flat, is a glorious Atlas of Egypt, published in 1928 and dedicated to His Majesty King Farouk. On the somewhat ramshackle little terrace outside is a bronze bust, which I commissioned from an eminent New Zealand sculptor, of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, who died in 1920, and with whom I propose to have an affair in the afterlife.
‘Enough, enough,’ do I hear you grumble? ‘Give us a rest!’ Well, there’s more to come, and who’s in charge here, anyway?
DAY 92
As I warned you yesterday, here are some more eccentricities of our home in Wales. Scattered through it are some thirty architectural models and toys, of buildings ranging from the house itself by way of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Caernarfon Castle, the Burj Al Arab at Dubai, the Royal Crescent at Bath, the Radcliffe Camera, a Thai stilt-house and an inn in Wyoming. Then again, that framed letter over there is a farewell note from a reader who was about to enter a closed-order convent, the big photograph in the kitchen of the liner Queen Elizabeth entering New York I keep because its publishers got the name of the ship wrong, while in the bathroom that enormous coloured print of the SS New York also entering the city was presented, I am told, to every first-class passenger on the vessel’s maiden voyage in 1888.
The peculiar bright paintings on the landing were preliminary cartoons for some mighty imperial panels painted by Frank Brangwyn in 1930 for the House of Lords; the project was rejected by their lordships, and the panels themselves now adorn Swansea City Hall. The cartoons are bright and breezy.
All five members of my immediate family are represented by miscellaneous works of art, strewn through the house from one end to the other, and under the stairs a slate dutifully awaits the departure of Jan and Elizabeth Morris, ‘at the end of one life’, when it will be placed with happy ceremonial, I hope, on an islet we possess in the nearby River Dwyfor.
And finally, several million books are embedded and entangled, as it were, in the very character, psyche and ethos of Trefan Morys. I have read them all, and written most of them.
There you go! Keep Smiling!
DAY 93
‘Chaos’, the dictionary tells me, is a state of complete confusion and disorder, such as existed before the cosmos was created. I know it well, and I know that, whatever the ancients thought, it is a perpetually renewable condition. It grows more completely frightful, in fact, as civilization progresses, at least as it can be estimated by the condition of desks. Just think how ordered our forebears’ work desks must have been, before electronics arrived, let alone cybernetics. The steam age presumably made little difference to Great-Grandfather’s working conditions: a notebook or two, a pen rack, a bottle of ink and blotting paper, a simple address book, some writing paper and a pen, and he was perfectly equipped for senior management of the workhouse, or at least for family authority. But look at your own desk – or more pertinently, look at mine. To an almost legendary, pre-biblical degree, Chaos is here. Beneath my feet there is a sinuous confusion of wires, twisting and coiling down there as though they are about to squirm up and throttle me. They may even be hissing. Other tentacles come wriggling out of nowhere among the miscellaneous computers, telephones, iPads, printers, discarded mechanisms and scrumpled packets of wine gums that litter my workspace above.
And yet, and yet … I do not resent this minor maelstrom. That song about old familiar places – remember it? – comes into my mind as I untangle myself from those electronic coils, hazily work out the right thing to click, optimistically ignore the blue light blinking on that black box over there and invite into the morning old friend Google. Oh good,
there’s one wine gum left. Contentedly humming that tune about familiar places, I start work on my ninety-fourth Thought …
DAY 94
One of the most marvellous inventions of the time, it seems to me, is sight recognition. You know, devices that automatically know the look of you, unlock your car or authorize your passport. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could be made to remember names for you at moments of need – match them, that is, against faces that you have known for years and years, but can’t at that moment for the life of you identify?
The infuriating thing is that it is actually in your possession. At the moment the old acquaintance reaches out his hand to you, clear as daylight his name is shining or blinking somewhere inside your brain. You know it perfectly well, but you just can’t get hold of it in there. What a miracle it would be if in a flash your Photo Recognizer would send a requirement to your Face Register, instantly find a match and transfer it to your Consciousness!
‘Fancy recognizing me after all these years!’ good old What’s-’Is-Name would exclaim in astonishment. ‘My wife will be impressed.’
‘Oh,’ you would affectionately reply, ‘I never forget a face. Never forget a name, for that matter. How is dear Audrey, by the way?’
DAY 95