Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

by Jan Morris

  For myself, absence from place is the truest exile. I first experienced its pangs when I was sent away to boarding school—exile was mine when, rising that first morning from prickly institutional blankets in a loveless dormitory, I crept to the window and saw outside a totally unknown landscape. Bunin in his exile pined not so much for Russian life as for Russia itself, because being far from the place you love can mean more than being far from the people you love. “Oh what have I done,” a nineteenth-century English imperialist was heard groaning from his bed, during a tour of duty in the generally delightful Ionian island of Cephalonia, “oh what have I done, that Her Majesty should banish me to this vile and abominable place?” Countless other expatriates, of all nationalities and in all ages, have cried the same, when the incurable and sometimes unaccountable longing for a homeland seizes them, and many of them have groaned it in Trieste.

  NAMELESS foreigners by the thousand have come to Trieste and lived here happily ever after—all those Greeks, Armenians and Turks of the Habsburg port, some of them so delighted to be here that before they had houses, they lived on boats in the harbour. Many of Trieste’s more famous expatriates, though, have not been content for very long. Waring himself, their poetic prototype, did not linger—his original was a poet named Alfred Domett who ended up as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Richard Coeur de Lion probably never came at all: legend says he was imprisoned here on his way from the Holy Land, and Arco Ricardo, the Roman arch we passed on the way up San Giusto hill, is supposed to have been called after him, but scholars scoff. Casanova stuck it here for two years between 1772 and 1774, having by his own account a pleasant enough stay, but as soon as the Procurators of Venice allowed him to go home, he was off within the week.

  The Austrian artist Egon Schiele came for a time, recovering from the effects of a short jail sentence, but he painted only a few watercolours of the harbour before hastening back to Vienna. And the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Winckelmann, “the Father of Neo-Classicism,” stayed in this city only eight days, because having arrived on June i, 1768, he was murdered on June 8, and thus provided the most dramatic of Trieste’s exile stories.

  Nobody really knows why this world-famous and universally admired scholar was killed. He had made an unhappily abortive visit to Germany from Rome, where he was living. On the way back he had stopped in Vienna, where Maria Theresa presented him with two gold medals, and he had arrived in Trieste planning to take ship to Ancona. He put up at the new Locanda Grande, one of the buildings which then blocked the seaward end of the Piazza Grande. There he apparently made friends with Francesco Arcangeli, a young man staying in the next room, and they spent much of the week strolling the city together. On the eighth day Arcangeli murdered him.

  The villain was caught, confessed, turned out to be a convicted thief and was broken on the wheel outside the doors of the hotel, providing it with the ultimate in publicity. His motives remain murky. Perhaps he had planned to steal the gold medals, perhaps he had some obscure political purpose, or perhaps he had embroiled the scholar in a homosexual entanglement. Winckelmann was famously ecstatic about Greek male statuary, “clothed with eternal springtime” and “perfumed by the essence of the gods.” Missing his home comforts even at the Grande, perhaps he had found himself a rough companion, had squabbled with him in a moment of jealousy or condescension, and had paid the price twice over.

  Nothing could be much sadder—far from his books poor Winckelmann died, far from his pleasant quarters at the Vatican, alone with a young scoundrel on a foreign shore. Classicist that he was, he thought Ulysses a symbol of longing for a fatherland, and in his last moments he must have been horribly homesick too. At the time all educated Europe, we are told, was saddened by the news of his death—“universal mourning and lamentation,” Goethe wrote—and the Winckelmann story long ago entered the somewhat meagre tourist repertoire of Trieste. It was Domenico Rossetti who thought of establishing a Lapidary Garden in his memory. It is close to the cathedral, a mellow clutter of slabs and ancient stones in an expanse of rough grass. In one corner stands a cenotaph in Winckelmann’s honour, erected under the patronage of an emperor, three kings and a grand duke, containing a fine marble image of Dr. Winckelmann and sundry examples of the busts, torsos, thoughtful muses and fragrant heroes of his enthusiasms.

  By now his name is unknown to all but the most erudite visitors, but every tourist is directed to his monument. The great scholar is depicted in a toga, leading towards two ancient sculpted heads the adoring female figures of Architecture, Criticism, History, Philosophy and Sculpture, who are prettily holding hands. Such is Trieste’s remorseful tribute to—who was it again? Winkler? Vogelmann? That guy who got murdered? Winckelmann, that’s it, Winckelmann, whoever he was.

  EXILED royalty have sometimes found more comfortable refuge in this outpost of an imperial monarchy. It was a convenient substitute for a capital of their own. They would not be patronized, they could be reasonably anonymous if they wished it, there were agreeable villas to buy or rent and Trieste’s efficient communications could keep them in touch with affairs and well-wishers at home in Ruritania. Whether of ancient or of upstart blood, they could be fairly sure of respectful treatment, especially if they were rich (which, in the way of dispossessed royalty, they nearly always were).

  When two elderly daughters of Louis XV of France, Marie-Adélaïde and Victoire-Louise, arrived in 1797, escaping the revolution, they were accompanied by a large entourage, they were put ashore with a salute of twenty-one guns, they were honoured as Les Mesdames de France, and when they died they were buried ceremonially in the cathedral. Carlists from Spain were equally honoured. In a dim side-chapel of the cathedral a covey of them lies. When they failed to retain the throne of Spain against their Bourbon rivals they had gravitated naturally enough to Urbs Fidelissima, where they could be sure of official hospitality and protection against assassins. How grandly they must have moved through town, when State or Society called them, and how loftily patrician they must have seemed, descended from a hundred crowns, in this city of merchants! The most rigid Spanish etiquette protected them from the vulgar, and they received visitors in audience in a throne room in the Via Lazaretto Vecchio.

  In 1922 Ivan Bunin, then living in a dingy villa above Grasse, went down the hill to Antibes to see the lying-in-state of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, brother to the late Czar. He found that Russia itself was reconstituted around the catafalque: incense burnt, choirs chanted, officers of the lost imperial armies were magnificently uniformed, and for an hour or two Bunin felt that he was not in exile at all. In their deaths the Carlists of Trieste fostered the same illusion. They were given solemn stately funerals at San Giusto, with muffled drums and furled flags of Spain: the tomb of the first of them, in their shadowy chapel up there, describes him grandiloquently still as “Carolus V Hispaniorum Rex,” and since 1901 the last of them, the pretender Carlos VII, has mouldered in his grave dressed in the full regalia of a Spanish captain-general.

  SEVERAL Napoleonic notables spent exiled time in Trieste. Napoleon himself came in 1797, during one of his occupations of the city, but he stayed only a single night. His various myrmidons stayed longer. No doubt they had heard good things of the place from Comte Henri Bertrand, the most faithful Bonapartiste of them all, because he had been briefly Governor of Trieste in his hero’s phantasmagorical Province of Illyria, before following him to a less agreeable place of exile. Napoleon’s sister Elisa lived here during her brother’s last years, and his sister Caroline came here, bringing a niece of his Empress Josephine as governess for her children, and one of the best-known of all the city’s refugees was Prince Jérôme, Napoleon’s youngest and raciest brother. He was the so-called King of Westphalia, and turned up here in 1814, with a suite of fifty-four courtiers, when Napoleon abdicated in Paris. He was very much a man of the world, and had lived for a time in New York, where he found himself a wife. Napoleon had made him first a general, then a king, annulle
d his American marriage and wedded him off to a daughter of the King of Württemberg. In Trieste, his own trumped-up monarchy having collapsed, he called himself at first the Comte de Hartz; but when Napoleon escaped from Elba and he himself he went off to share the defeat at Waterloo, he returned to the city as the Prince de Montfort.

  Trieste suited Jérôme. He lived splendidly in a villa, not far from the waterfront, that had belonged to “Pharaoh” Cassis but which everyone called the Villa Napoleone; nowadays it is the Villa Necker, the Italian Army’s headquarters in the city, with an officers’ club attached, and a lush park behind. Jérôme thrived there, fathering three children and buying several ample properties as speculative ventures, and after his years in the city he never looked back. He went home to Paris, where his nephew had become Napoleon III, to be a Marshal of France, Governor of the Invalides and eventually President of the Senate. His son Jérôme Junior, better known to the world as Plon-Plon, was born in Trieste, and a plaque on the side of the Villa Necker acknowledges his loyalty to the city—“Never forget my birthplace Trieste,” he is said to have urged King Umberto of Italy, who happened to be his son-in-law. And nearly a century later the quasi-King of Westphalia’s grandson Charles, by his unfortunate American wife, became Attorney General of the United States.

  SOME celebrated foreigners have come to Trieste to work, and their responses have usually been ambivalent. The French consul Marie-Henri Beyle, for example, posted here in 1830, was decidedly not happy, and it is not surprising. He was forty-seven years old when he was appointed, and since he was well-known for his advanced and outspoken political liberalism, he was hardly likely to be welcomed to their imperial port by the authorities of a reactionary monarchy. Still, he found himself a pleasant house on the city outskirts and he enjoyed the exotic nature of the place, its fine boulevards along the sea, its grand houses, the colourful Slavs and Levantines who frequented its waterfront—“amiable half-savages,” he called them, whose talk was “continual poetry.” But Trieste soon soured on him. The food was dreadful, the peasants were money-grubbing, the bora debilitated him. The Austrians gave him no peace, censoring his letters and watching all his movements, and after only five months they expelled him. It was his only experience of Trieste, but since he was also known as Stendhal, and within the year had published Le Rouge et le Noir, none of it really mattered anyway.

  Charles Lever, the Anglo-Irish novelist, was British Consul in Trieste during the 186os, and his experience of the place was not much happier. When Lord Derby the Foreign Secretary offered him the post it sounded fine—“six hundred a year for doing nothing, and you are just the man to do it.” It sounded like a rest cure for a wandering littérateur who normally had to live by his pen, but he soon found Trieste detestable. “Of all the dreary places it has been my lot to sojourn in, this is the worst. “The British residents bored him. The only Triestines he knew were dull business people. His heart gave him trouble, the bora blew, his wife died and he was plunged into periods of melancholy. Before he himself died on the job in 1872, he did have time to set a novel in the Trieste region, but it was no Le Rouge et le Noir, and only a few years later his grave in the Protestant cemetery was described as “a rubbish corner of stray papers and old tin pots.”

  Sigmund Freud was also frustrated here. In a city that later embraced his ideas with particular zeal, being organically inclined towards neurosis, he himself found only failure. He came to Trieste on the train from Vienna in 1876, commissioned by the Institute of Comparative Anatomy at Vienna University to solve a classically esoteric zoological puzzle: how eels copulated. Specialist as he later became in the human testicle and its influence upon the psyche, Freud diligently set out to discover the elusive reproductive organs of Anguilla anguilla, whose location had baffled investigators since the time of Aristotle. He did not solve the mystery, but I like to imagine him dissecting his four hundred eels in the institute’s zoological station here. Solemn, earnest and bearded I fancy him, rubber-gloved and canvas-aproned, slitting them open one after the other in their slimy multitudes. Night after night I see him peeling off his gloves with a sigh to return to his lonely lodgings, and saying a weary goodnight to the lab assistant left to clear up the mess—“Goodnight, Alfredo,” “Goodnight, Herr Doktor. Better luck next time, eh?” But the better luck never came; the young genius returned to Vienna empty-handed, so to speak, but perhaps inspired to think more exactly about the castration complex.

  HERE is another cameo of exile’s disillusionment. On October 29, 1904, a small lonely figure sat on a bench outside the Sudbahn railway station, at the foot of an obelisk commemorating The Yielding of Trieste to Austria, which showed an allegorical Trieste, head held gratefully high, emerging from a pile of Roman ruins. The obelisk has long gone, but the memorial to the Empress Elizabeth, “Sissy,” has lately been re-erected in the garden opposite the station entrance, and it will do just as well for us. There we see the little figure waiting, hour after hour, wearing a bonnet and a well-worn travelling dress, and with bags and bundles on the ground around her. Now and then she glances at the station clock, and she watches anxiously along the road to the city centre. And here at last comes the man she has been waiting for. Tall, skinny, be-spectacled, in a buttoned tweed suit and a straw hat, smelling slightly of liquor, here comes James Joyce to comfort his worried young mistress Nora Barnacle, who jumps to her feet, clutches her hat and runs tearfully to greet him.

  She was relieved to see her Jim, of course, but he did not give her an easy time during the years they spent in Trieste. The Joyces came here from Zurich, on the promise of employment at the Berlitz School of Languages, and James left Nora so long beside the railway station that day because almost at once he had got into trouble. He had gone off to find somewhere to stay the night, but instead had promptly fallen in with a drunken party of seamen in the Piazza Grande, and there the police had arrested him. It took a reluctant British Consul to get him out of jail, and poor Nora might well have thought it was a sorry omen for their future in Trieste.

  She would have been right. Following them in retrospect through their time in the city is hardly a light-hearted experience. Joyce scratched a living as a teacher of English, partly at the Berlitz, partly privately, but he was hopeless with money, always in debt and frequently in trouble with landlords. Street after street remembers the couple, and you can still follow their progress from one drab apartment to another, first by themselves, then with a baby, then with Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, then with a second baby, then with his sister Eva and their two children, then with his sister Eileen—jam-packed, frequently testy and always hard up. They gave up once and went away for a few months to Rome, and they went away again during the first world war, but like so many others, if James Joyce was often disconsolate when he was in Trieste, when he was away from it he often pined for the place.

  Nora was the one to be pitied, though, and it is her small waiting figure outside the station that is my own most potent Joycean image of Trieste. Joyce himself had his genius to keep him company. He wrote the whole of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Trieste, and most of Dubliners, and he devised much of Ulysses. He also made close friends among his pupils and their families, most of them interested in the arts, and became an oddly welcome guest in some of the rich mercantile houses of the city. He even dabbled in business himself—there was a scheme to sell Irish tweed in Trieste, and another to start a chain of cinemas in Ireland. Then his son and daughter gave him great delight, and the city gave him inspiration. He called it Europiccola. He liked wandering its streets. He spent long hours in its churches, especially the Greek Orthodox church of San Nicolo, whose rituals fascinated him. There were hundreds of pubs, cafes and brothels to entertain him, and in general he enjoyed the flavour of K u K, which he found “charming and gay”

  But Joyce also wrote the play Exiles in Trieste. For all his pleasures, it appears, he was never easy in the city, and no doubt this was partly because of Nora. She was bored the
re—“now I suppose you will think I am very difficult but one cant live only for the sun and the blue Mediteranean sea.” She was not in the least interested in Joyce’s art, she seldom accompanied him to the houses of his friends or the taverns of his recreation, and year after year she had to keep the household together on skimpy pittances. She was an Irish colleen, born to be merry and reckless, and perhaps in his mind’s eye Joyce always saw her, as I do, sitting there beside the monument on that first day, her bags on the ground around her, while the trains whistled sadly behind her back, and he drank with the sailors in the piazza.

  During his later time in Trieste Joyce wrote to the young German publisher Kurt Wolff, in Munich, offering to send him an untitled novel he had written. Wolff turned down the unknown author. Long years afterwards he became my own original publisher, but I suspect that if he had published Ulysses he would never have bothered with me.

  IN SOME ways it seems to me that Joyce and Trieste were made for each other. If Mr. Bloom had not grown up in Dublin he might have been a Triestine. Sandymount Strand might have been the rocks of Barcola, out by Miramare, and Molly might well have opened her legs in some sleazy backstreet of the Old City. Other expatriates in this city, on the contrary, were miserably alien to the temper of the place, and pre-eminent among these was Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was as un-Triestine a character as it is possible to imagine, a spectacularly alarming man who presented himself deliberately to the world as an evil genius, with terrifyingly cold blue eyes to prove it. He had fought and explored all over the world, and besides being a great scholar and the author of celebrated books, he relished every kind of subterfuge and anomaly. He had been to Mecca in disguise; he had explored the homosexual stews of Karachi and investigated the polygamy of the Mormons. He never denied the rumour that in Arabia he had once murdered a man in cold blood.