by Jan Morris
They generally come in pairs, and they cavort meaninglessly around the place, only occasionally pausing to visit a flower of some sort, just for a second or two, but mostly just aimlessly swooping here and there, or suddenly breaking away from each other at terrific speed for no apparent reason. Their power-to-weight ratio must be extraordinary – I reckon that sometimes, sporadically, they must be moving at forty miles an hour up there, before they apparently lose heart, or vigour, and subside into a listless flutter.
What is it all about? Can a species have no conscious purpose at all? Coleman takes it all in his encyclopedic stride, but when the other afternoon I asked a visiting Red Admiral what on earth the Cabbage Whites were all about, he simply did the butterfly equivalent of a tap on the side of the head.
DAY 129
Here, for once, is a pleasant surprise for an old fogey. I have lately become averse to most things televisionic, from news bulletins to drama serials, with the result that I am, as it were, half illiterate by contemporary standards. Like President Trump (for once), I suspect much of the news I get on the TV channels to be Fake, and many of the so-called experts to be overpaid phonies. As for Star Wars and The West Wing and even Downton Abbey, with such as them I am altogether out of my depth, and if I had not been left cold by Bilbo and the hobbits when they were characters in a novel, I surely would have been by their reincarnations on the silver screen.
So it is hardly surprising that Harry Potter and co., J. K. Rowling’s worldwide blockbusting creations, should not have entered my field of acquaintance until last night. Last night? Last night, and even then not between book covers. After supper, when I turned on at random my despised television, I found myself bowled over by a brilliant Anglo–US film adaptation of one or other of her novels. I don’t know which one it was, but it seemed to have its full complements of wizards and school champions and villains and magic plots, and it seduced me.
Technically, it was obviously brilliant, as even I could see, with amazing camera angles, cuts and perspectives, but artistically too it seemed to me wonderful. This was partly because throughout the film eminent English actors and actresses appeared incongruously disguised, invariably bringing to the performance a taste of classy diction. It was partly because the entire cast of supporting actors and bit players seemed to me wonderfully convincing. But it was chiefly because the very conception of the whole fantasy, paper to screen, struck me as a work of high art.
It was a totally unexpected delight. I am late in recognizing the stature of the work, and I realize too that by now some of those young actors, strangers to me, are international stars themselves. But I’m not too late to pull myself together, recognize a brave new genre (well, fairly new) and even have another go at those hobbits.
DAY 130
Every morning I take my breakfast (muesli, tea, toast and bitter marmalade) out of the kitchen into the library, where I eat it – alone, Elizabeth being still in bed.
There is a ceremonial aspect to this procedure. The marmalade is a different one every morning of the week, from a rack of seven; the tea is Twining’s English Breakfast; the muesli is Special Fruit and Nut; and my breakfast tray began life as a communication from the editors of Rolling Stone magazine in New York, who years ago sent me a hand-drawn alphabet of their elegant new typeface, signed by its designer with a courteous message. I had this converted into a tray with gilded handles, and upon it, every morning, I carry my victuals from one room to the other. So, as you see, the occasion is not without ceremony.
Yesterday, though, for no particular reason, it did occur to me what fun it would be to drop the whole caboodle on the floor, all of it – English Breakfast, Fruit and Nut, Ty Newydd Special Marmalade, Rolling Stone Old Style, gilt-handled tray and all. Instant crash chaos, with its ingredients spreading in a sticky slush from one room to the other! Wouldn’t that be worth a Thought?
It was not altogether original. From long ago I remember a Hollywood farce in which one of the great comedians of the day – Danny Kaye? – pulled an immensely long tablecloth off a table laid with infinite splendour for some inconceivably grand dinner. He did it with a single explosive tug, sending not just the dinner-table crockery, but the whole preposterous occasion into shattered ridicule. I loved that outrageous performance, and ever since I have told myself, now and then, that when the time came, I would do it myself.
I did it yesterday, as a matter of fact, but it was only in my mind. I ate my breakfast decorously, as usual, so Elizabeth in her cosy bed had no idea of the marvellous slapstick that was being mentally enacted next door, and never actually got up to find a viscous mass of marmalade, tea and muesli oozing turgidly from one room to another.
Another time!
DAY 131
I am ashamed that I have not been to the Welsh National Eisteddfod this week – especially as, peripatetic as it is, it is taking place this year on the island of Anglesey, not far from us. What makes me the more ashamed is the fact I am proud to be a member of the Gorsedd, the governing body of the Eisteddfod. Worse still, in recent years I have let slip my grasp of the Welsh language, which is the whole raison d’être of the institution. My forgiving son Twm says I faltered in my use of yr hen iaith after I had brain surgery some years ago, and he may be right. But that’s really no excuse, and I am sorry.
O my goodness, I forgot, perhaps you have never heard of the Eisteddfod. It is a week-long festival of music and the arts which is descended from immemorial traditions of the Welsh culture, and which in its present form has been celebrated annually since 1881. It happens in a different Welsh location every year, north and south alternately, and is said to be the biggest such celebration of a nation’s culture in Europe. It certainly grips Welshspeakers (some half a million of them) with passionate enthusiasm. Much of my own family is in Anglesey at this moment, on the rain-sodden field that is this year’s site (and which will be remembered always by the mystic circle of stones that every national Eisteddfod leaves behind it).
The occasion dominates the Welsh-language media, so at least I have been able to participate, sort of, via television. As always, it has moved me greatly. Of course, there is much to deplore in our country, even the Welshest aspects of it, but not just now, not this week. So many eager, honest faces are there on the screen, singing their hearts out or declaiming poetry in the stylized theatrical manner that is endemic to the occasion: fresh young children’s faces, earnest and determined, or the middle-aged, enthusiastic faces of ladies’ choirs, or the stern, resolute faces of the massed bravos, old and young, whose male-voice choirs have made their art a very epitome of Welshness down the generations.
They must be a mixed lot really, I know that – the children a nuisance sometimes, the ladies catty, the gentlemen of the choirs not always gentlemanly at all – but to me this week, as I sit shamefaced before my TV screen, they all seem to be people to be proud of, people to love and to be grateful for, like the little nation they represent and its ancient lyrical language.
It’s the last day of the Eisteddfod today, and Suki and Meilyr are dropping in for tea at Trefan, on their way home to Goginan.
DAY 132
Today is the first Monday in August 2017, and it must be for ever remembered as a dies horribilis in the annals of Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the most delightful small cities in America. I have been interested in the place for half a lifetime, because I loved it when I first turned up there in the 1950s, because I have dear friends there, and because it has always seemed to me a kind of paradigm of decent Americanness.
It was the home, for a start, of President Thomas Jefferson, chief author of the Declaration of Independence and a man of civilized resource. He founded the University of Virginia there and himself designed for it what are, for my money, the most delightful academic buildings in America, besides creating one of the most delightful houses, his home of Monticello up the road.
Then again, I liked Charlottesville at once because it seemed to me to speak of the style
, the romance and the dash of the old American South. Looking back now, seventy years on, I am more aware that the style, dash, etc., had essentially been the dash and style of the slave-owning Confederate South. But so what? I put that out of my mind, I suppose, and when I came across a jolly song about Robert E. Lee, the final Confederate commander, the slavists’ champion, I assumed it referred to a Mississippi steamboat of that name, which had won a famous river race in 1870. I was often disconcerted by prejudices in the USA of the 1950s, but as I remember it, not particularly in Charlottesville …
Alas, after today the place will always be remembered differently, even by me, because today’s savage rioting in the city did arise out of that old American curse – race. Would you believe it, today’s calamity really began with the Civil War of a hundred and fifty years ago, and specifically with Robert E. Lee, my steamboat man? The city fathers had recently decided that his statue, in one of the main squares of the city, should be removed – he was, after all, a hero specifically of the slave-owning South and, indeed, an owner of black slaves himself. This decision has infuriated right-wing white racists, Ku Klux Klanists, neo-Nazis and such; and so, what with one development and another, the revival of age-old prejudices and resentments burst into hideous violence, and thus added today’s ugly page to the annals of sweet Charlottesville.
What a mess! Where do I stand? The city fathers were honouring, I suppose, their own liberal principles – good on them, and I am told that all over the South such statuary often does deliberately honour the ugly principle of white supremacy. But if to be a slave-owner in the nineteenth century was to be a sinner in the American memory, then Tom Jefferson, to my simple mind the very soul of Charlottesville itself, was a false idol. Who said history was bunk?
DAY 133
Now here’s an innocent cameo, in a world where innocence, just at the moment, seems in short supply.
I stand beside our garden gate, waiting for the postman to come on his morning rounds when he has collected the outward mail from the postbox at the end of the lane. I have done something foolish, being slightly senile these days: last night I posted in that box four postcards, in reply to four strangers who had written to me about my work, and in my fuddled way I had mixed them all up and addressed each card to the wrong recipient.
‘Never get old!’ say I to the postman, when he rolls up in his red van, but he is quick to comfort me. He has with him last night’s outward mail, says he, to take to the sorting office, and yes, he says, fumbling in his big canvas bag, here are my postcards, virgin mail, so to speak, unspoilt and unsullied, and he gives them back to me to readdress, and we laugh, and he kids me, and all is well. How lucky I am, think I, to live and work among friends.
But it seems to me, nevertheless, that he is not quite his benign self. Is he, at heart, just a little irritated by my inefficiency? Could it be, I wonder, that he was disobeying some Post Office regulation in giving me back my mail? But no. It was his dog, he confesses to me, that is on his mind – his dear old dog, a friend for many years, whom he has just taken to the vet, perhaps for the very last time. He will get a diagnosis, he tells me, wiping away the suggestion of a tear and declining a quick whisky, when he finishes his rounds this morning – and his hand waves bravely from the window of his van as he drives away through the dusty potholes.
O the world may be out of joint, and sadness reigns, but decency still lurks there all the same, up by all our garden gates.
DAY 134
The other day I broadcast a programme on the BBC, and I’ll tell you why I did it: I was sorry for the United States of America!
Everyone I knew there – lifelong friends, recent acquaintances, strangers who wrote to me for one reason or another – every American seemed to be downcast, despondent and dismayed, like the distorted lyrics of an old song, by the condition of their country.
We all know that the USA has never been perfect. Indeed, in our own time it has sometimes been downright horrid, in public life as in private goings-on. It has plastered the world with influences that were often degrading, and has sometimes led us all into catastrophe. But I have loved the old republic for most of a lifetime, and it has saddened me to see it not only behaving badly and unsuccessfully, but knowing it. I admired its old swank and panache, and I wanted to do something to revivify the idea of America and remind us all of its happier times – the 1960s, say, when it was still flushed, beloved, generous and victorious in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Part of my broadcast was a slightly soppy and sentimental reminiscence of my own relationship with the USA at that time, but partly it was a sort of musical potpourri of 1960-ish Americanisms. Here are the seven compositions I chose for uplift: ‘Shenandoah’, ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’, ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill’, ‘New York, New York’, ‘Come Home’, ‘One for My Baby’, ‘Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor’.
And here are the artists represented: Liza Minnelli, Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Peggy Lee, Irving Berlin, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Felix Mendelssohn.
‘Felix Mendelssohn?’ I hear you expostulate. ‘Felix Mendelssohn?’ Why not? Was not that grand old America welcoming to one and all? Wasn’t that the point of it?
DAY 135
This morning I drove my Elizabeth into town to have her hair done, and on the way she warned me, as she often does, that I should keep more to the right, or more to the left, I forget which. I was about to remind her testily how long I have been driving a car when this memory came into my mind:
Years ago, in London, I was driven back to my hotel, after lunch, by a very well-known novelist, now long dead. She was of a certain age, a little shaky, and as we approached the traffic maelstrom of Hyde Park Corner I ventured to ask her if she was OK to drive through it. ‘My dear Jan,’ she haughtily replied, ‘I have been driving around Hyde Park Corner for seventy years, and I should know my way around it by now …’
So, no, I did not reply haughtily to Elizabeth this morning. I did what she suggested, whatever it was, and remembered instead what old John Donne taught us all: ‘for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’.
DAY 136
One of the fascinations of Wales is the fact that it has two languages, a circumstance not always cherished even by many of its own inhabitants, but to my mind lovely. Yesterday a friend coming to tea with us brought along her bilingual five-year-old son, who, between hearty mouthfuls of cake, prattled convivially on about his affairs and preoccupations of the moment.
He is a delightful little fair-haired boy, and he brought with him, I thought, a particular kind of elegance. Fluent as he is, sometimes he chose to use a Welsh word, sometimes an English one, and there were momentary pauses in his discourse while he considered which. Perhaps he was not sure that he had got the word itself right, in one language or the other, but I preferred to think that his pause was a matter of art or instinct, and I thought there was something truly beautiful in those moments of silent hesitation, poised between two ancient tongues – as though, thought I, he was in touch with angels.
What a load of nonsense, I tell myself now, but I am tempted all the same to quote Gregory the Great’s famous dictum, ‘Non Angli, sed Angeli,’ except that ‘Angli’ most certainly will not do …
DAY 137
I’m not entirely sure yet, but I think I must opt out of the world’s affairs. Yesterday I was invited to write an article for a well-known London publication, and I replied thus: ‘It’s very kind of you to think of me, but to be honest I can’t be bothered.’ I expected a stiff reply, but when it came, by instant e-mail, it was simply, ‘Bravo!’
On the other hand, I have been reading this morning, as I always do with my cornflakes, the Guardian’s correspondence columns. Today several scores of readers contributed their opinions on world affairs. Some wrote learnedly, some crudely, some rudely, some passionately, some preposterously and a few evidently so outrageously that the editors found it
necessary to expunge their contributions. I must assume that all of them, though, wrote at all because they thought their opinions could somehow affect the state of the world – as indeed at a pinch they might, I suppose, when filtered through the infinite mesh of democratic politics.
I am not of their company, though. I used to write letters quite frequently to The Times, but few of them were published, and as I remember it they were mostly to express outrage at monarchical flamboyances. Today I don’t care how royalty displays itself, and for that matter can hardly summon the phlegm to spit at anyone else, so you will not find my name on any newspaper’s letter page (unless, of course, it be in the Caernarfon and Denbigh Herald).
As for the multifarious controversies that so excite the readers of the Guardian today, well, I confess they are beyond my ageing ken. I have only recently learnt that Myanmar is what Burma used to be. I am really past caring if Mrs May is going to win the next election, or if President Macron has been spending too much on make-up, or if President Trump is going to be impeached, or if a man called Kim, who I always thought was a beloved character of fiction, is likely to attack the island of Guam with a nuclear-armed rocket, or if the National Health Service will go bust because of its expenditure on demented old folk, or if the Royal Navy is investing in immense outmoded warships, or if world-respected athletes turn out to be corrupt, or if the Chinese are taking over Asia, or if the Russians go in for cyber-spying, or any other of the numberless issues that excite the press, Twitter, Facebook, etc., and all those fervent subscribers to what I still prefer to think of as the Manchester Guardian, RIP.