A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  *

  Toronto is Toronto and perhaps that is enough. I look out of my window now, on a bright spring afternoon, and what do I see? No Satanic mills, but a city clean, neat, and ordered, built still to a human scale, unhurried and polite. It has all the prerequisites of your modern major city – your revolving restaurants, your Henry Moore statue, your trees with electric lights in them, your gay bars, your outdoor elevators, your atriums, your Sotheby Parke Bernet, your restaurants offering (Glossops on Prince Arthur Avenue) ‘deep-fried pears stuffed with ripe camembert on a bed of nutmeg-scented spinach’. Yet by and large it has escaped the plastic blight of contemporary urbanism, and the squalid dangers too.

  Only in Toronto, I think, will a streetcar stop to allow you over a pedestrian crossing – surely one of the most esoteric experiences of travel in the 1980s. Only in Toronto are the subways quite so wholesome, the parks so mugger-less, the children so well behaved (even at the Science Centre, where the temptation to fuse circuits or permanently disorient laser beams must be almost irresistible). Only the greatest of the world’s cities can outclass Toronto’s theatres, cinemas, art galleries and newspapers, the variety of its restaurants, the number of its TV channels, the calibre of its visiting performers. Poets and artists are innumerable, I am assured, and are to be found in those cafés where writers and painters hang out, while over on the Toronto Islands, though permanently threatened by official improvements, a truly Bohemian colony still honourably survives, in a late fragrance of the flower people, tight-knit, higgledy-piggledy, and attended by many cats in its shacks and snug bungalows.

  I spent a morning out there, watching the pintail ducks bobbing about the ice and the great grey geese pecking for worms in the grass; and seen from that Indianified sort of foreshore the achievement of Toronto, towering in gold and steel across the water, seemed to me rather marvellous: there on the edge of the wilderness, beside that cold, empty lake, to have raised itself in 150 years from colonial township to metropolis, to have absorbed settlers from half the world, yet to have kept its original mores so recognizable still! For it is in many ways a conservative, indeed a conservationist achievement. What has not happened to Toronto is as remarkable as what has happened. It ought by all the odds to be a brilliant, brutal city, but it isn’t. Its downtown ought to be vulgar and spectacular, but is actually dignified, well proportioned, and indeed noble. Its sex-and-sin quarters, where the young prostitutes loiter and the rock shops scream, are hardly another Reeperbahn, and the punks to be seen parading Yonge Street on a Saturday night are downright touching in their bravado, so scrupulously are they ignored.

  The real achievement of Toronto is to have remained itself. It says something for the character of this city that even now, 150 years old, with 300,000 Italian residents, and 50,000 Greeks, and heaven knows how many Portuguese, Hungarians, Poles, Latvians, Chileans, Maltese, Chinese, Finns, with skyscrapers dominating it, and American TV beamed into every home – with condominiums rising everywhere, and a gigantic hotel dominating the waterfront, and those cheese-stuffed pears at Glossops – it says something for Toronto that it can still be defined, by an elderly citizen over a glass of sherry, with a Manx cat purring at her feet and a portrait of her late husband on the side-table, as ‘not such a bad old place’.

  *

  So this is the New World! Not such a bad old place! Again, for myself it is not what I would want of a Promised Land, were I in need of one, and when I thought of that woman at the airport, and tried to put myself in her shoes, wherever she was across the sprawling city, I felt that if fate really were to make me an immigrant here I might be profoundly unhappy.

  Not because Toronto would be unkind to me. It would not leave me to starve in the street, or bankrupt me with medical bills, or refuse me admittance to discos because I was black. No, it would be a subtler oppression than that – the oppression of reticence. Toronto is the most undemonstrative city I know, and the least inquisitive. The Walkman might be made for it. It swarms with clubs, cliques and cultural societies, but seems armour-plated against the individual. There are few cities in the world where one can feel, as one walks the streets or rides the subways, for better or for worse, so all alone.

  All around me then I see those same faces from the airport carousel, so unflustered, so reserved. I caught the eye once of a subway driver, as he rested at his controls for a few moments in the bright lights of the station, waiting for the guard’s signal, and never did I see an eye so fathomlessly subdued – not a flicker could I raise in it, not a glint of interest or irritation, before the whistle blew and he disappeared once more into the dark. It takes time, more time than a subway driver has, for the Toronto face, having passed through several stages of suspicion, nervous apprehension, and anxiety to please, to light up in a simple smile. Compulsory lessons in small talk, I sometimes think, might well be added to those school classes in Heritage Languages, and there might usefully be courses too in How to Respond to Casual Remarks in Elevators.

  Sometimes I think it is the flatness of the landscape that causes this flattening of the spirit – those interminable suburbs stretching away, that huge plane of the lake, those long grid roads which deprive the place of surprise or intricacy. Sometimes I think it must be the climate, numbing the nerve ends, or even the sheer empty vastness of the Toronto sky, settled so conclusively upon the horizon, wherever you look, unimpeded by hills. Could it be the history of the place, and the deference to authority that restrains the jaywalkers still? Could it be underpopulation; ought there to be a couple of million more people in the city, to give it punch or jostle? Could it be the permanent compromise of Toronto, neither quite this nor altogether that, capitalist but compassionate, American but royalist, multi-cultural but traditionalist?

  Or could it be, I occasionally ask myself, me? This is a city conducive to self-doubt and introspection. It is hard to feel that Torontonians by and large, for all the civic propaganda and guidebook hype, share in any grand satisfaction of the spirit, hard to imagine anyone waking up on a spring morning to cry, ‘Here I am, here in T.O., thank God for my good fortune!’ I asked immigrants of many nationalities if they liked Toronto, and though at first, out of diplomacy or good manners, they nearly all said yes, a few minutes of probing generally found them less than enthusiastic. Why? ‘Because the people is cold here.’ ‘Because these people just mind their own business and make the dollars.’ ‘Because the neighbours don’t smile and say hullo, how’s things.’ ‘Because nobody talks, know what I mean?’

  Never I note because the citizenry has been unkind, or because the city is unpleasant: only because, in the course of its 150 years of careful progress, so calculated, so civilized, somewhere along the way Toronto lost, or failed to find, the gift of contact or of merriment. I know of nowhere much less merry than the Liquor Control Board retail stores, clinical and disapproving as Wedding Palaces in Leningrad. And even the most naturally merry of the immigrants, the dancing Greeks, the witty Poles, the lyrical Hungarians, somehow seem to have forfeited their joie de vivre when they embraced the liberties of this town.

  Among the innumerable conveniences of Toronto, which is an extremely convenient city, one of the most attractive is the system of tunnels which lies beneath the downtown streets, and which, with its wonderful bright-lit sequences of stores, cafés, malls, and intersections, is almost a second city in itself. I loved to think of all the warmth and life down there, the passing crowds, the coffee smells, the Muzak, and the clink of cups, when the streets above were half-empty in the rain, or scoured by cold winds; and one of my great pleasures was to wander aimless through those comfortable labyrinths, lulled from one Golden Oldie to the next, surfacing now and then to find myself on an unknown street corner, or all unexpectedly in the lobby of some tremendous bank.

  But after a time I came to think of them as escape tunnels. It was not just that they were warm and dry; they had an intimacy to them, a brush of human empathy, a feeling absent from the greater city above our h
eads. Might it be, I wondered, that down there a new kind of Torontonian was evolving after all, brought to life by the glare of the lights, stripped of inhibition by the press of the crowds, and even perhaps induced to burst into song, or dance a few steps down the escalator, by the beat of the canned music?

  ‘What d’you think?’ I asked a friend. ‘Are they changing the character of Toronto?’

  ‘You must be joking,’ he replied. ‘You couldn’t do that in a sesquicentury.’

  *

  He’s probably right. Toronto is Toronto, below or above the ground. And you, madam, into whatever obscurely ethnic enclave you vanished when we parted at the airport that day, have they changed you yet? Have they subdued your peculiar accent? Have they taught you not to push, or talk to yourself, or hurl abuse at officialdom? Are you still refusing to pay that customs charge, or have they persuaded you to fill in the form and be sure to ask for a receipt for tax purposes? Are you happy? Are you homesick? Are you still yourself?

  Whatever has happened to you, destiny has not dealt you such a bad hand in bringing you to this city by the lake. You are as free as we mortals can reasonably expect. Street cars will stop for you, there are dumplings on your dinner plate and a TV in your living room, if not classic fluted columns in a sunken conservatory. Your heart may not be singing, as you contemplate the presence around you of Toronto the Good, but it should not be sinking either. Cheer up! You have drawn a second prize, I would say, in the Lottario of Life.

  Vancouver

  The Canadian piece of mine that has been most often quoted back at me appeared in an essay about Vancouver, but really had a more general application.

  All Canada, of course, is reserved, undemonstrative, unassuming. I put it down variously to the size of the country, the generally daunting climate, the lingering influence of the British and their debilitating traditions, and the presence of the marvellous, mighty, and terrible neighbour to the south. In Vancouver, however, decorum assumes a new dimension, and gives the whole city (to a stranger’s sensibility, anyway) a peculiarly tentative air.

  Consider the Smile Test. This is the system I employ to gauge the responsiveness of cities everywhere, and it entails smiling relentlessly at everyone I meet walking along the street – an unnerving experience, I realize, for victims of the experiment, but an invaluable tool of investigative travel journalism. Vancouver rates very low in the Smile Test: not, heaven knows, because it is an unfriendly or disagreeable city but because it seems profoundly inhibited by shyness or self-doubt.

  Pay attention now, as we put the system into action along Robson Street, the jauntiest and raciest of Vancouver’s downtown boulevards. Many of our subjects disqualify themselves from the start, so obdurately do they decline eye contact. Others are so shaken that they have no time to register a response before we have passed by. A majority look back with only a blank but generally amenable expression, as though they would readily return a smile if they could be sure it was required of them, and were quite certain that the smile was for them and not somebody else. A few can just summon up the nerve to offer a timid upturn at the corners of the mouth, but if anybody smiles back instantly, instinctively, joyously, you can assume it’s a visiting American, an Albertan, or an immigrant not yet indoctrinated.

  Whenever I have been back to Vancouver people have asked me how they’re doing nowadays in the Smile Test. I respond with a nervous smile myself.

  St John’s

  St John’s, Newfoundland, was the place I liked best in Canada – one of the places I like best in the whole world, and for my tastes perhaps the most entertaining town in North America.

  Thwack! Despite it all the personality of St John’s hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

  The moment you arrive they take you up Signal Hill, high above the harbour, where winds howl, superannuated artillery lies morose in its emplacements, and far below the ships come and go through the rock gap of the Narrows. Within an hour or two they are feeding you seal-flipper pie, roast caribou, partridge-berries or salt cod lubricated with pork fat. They show you the grave of the last Beothuk Indian and the carcass of the final Newfoundland wolf. They remind you that they, alone in continental North America, live three and a half hours behind Greenwich Mean Time.

  They chill you with tales of the corpses lying in Deadman’s Pond. They warm you up with Cabot Tower rum. They take you to the site of the city’s first (hand-operated) traffic signal. They show you the house into which the Prime Minister of Newfoundland escaped from a lynch mob in 1932, and the field from which the aviators Harry G. Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve failed to cross the Atlantic in 1919. They guide you down higgledy-piggledy streets of grey, green, yellow and purple clapboard. They explain to you in detail the inequities of the 1948 Confederation referendums. They tell you repeatedly about their relatives in Boston, and involve you in spontaneous and often incomprehensible conversations on street corners.

  Such is the nature of this city; windy, fishy, anecdotal, proud, weather-beaten, quirky, obliging, ornery and fun.

  *

  I start with ‘despite it all’ because St John’s is undeniably a knocked-about sort of town. Economic slumps and political hammerings, tragedies at sea, sectarian bigotries, riots, fires, poverty and unemployment have taken their toll, and make the little city feel a trifle punch-drunk. The very look of it is bruised. The outskirts of St John’s are much like the purlieus of many another North American city – malls, car dealers, airport, duplexes, a big modern university – but its downtown is bumpily unique. Set around the dramatically fjord-like harbour, overlooked by oil tanks and fort-crowned heights but dominated by the twin towers of the Catholic basilica, its chunky wooden streets clamber up and down the civic hills with a kind of throwaway picturesqueness, suggesting to me sometimes a primitive San Francisco, sometimes Bergen in Norway, occasionally China and often an Ireland of long ago.

  ‘Either it’s the Fountain of Youth,’ said a dockyard worker when I asked him about a peculiarly bubbling sort of whirlpool in the harbour, ‘or it’s the sewage outlet.’ St John’s is nothing if not down-to-earth, and the best efforts of the conservationists have not deprived the town of its innate fishermen’s fustian. The first dread fancy lamp-posts and ornamental bollards, the first whiff of novelty-shop sachets, the arrival on the waterfront of that most ludicrously incongruous architectural cliché, mirror-glass – even the presence of Peek-a-Boutique in the premises of the former Murray fishery depot – have so far failed to make St John’s feel in the least chichi. It remains that rarity of the Age of Collectibles, an ancient seaport that seems more or less real.

  I hear some expostulations. ‘Fishermen’s fustian,’ indeed! For all their hospitality, I get the sensation that the inhabitants of St John’s may prove prickly people to write about, and there is a prejudice I am told among some of the grander St John’s persons against the city’s association with the fish trade. Yet even the loftiest burghers’ wives could hardly claim that this is a very sophisticated place. It is like a family city, meshed with internecine plot, but still somewhat reluctantly united by blood, history, and common experience. It is the poorest of the Canadian capitals; it has little industry and few great monuments; its responses are those of a permanently beleaguered seaport on a North Atlantic island – which is to say, responses altogether its own.

  Actually within the city limits of St John’s there are pockets of the Arcadianism that Newfoundland picture postcards so love to show. Small wooden houses speckle seabluffs, dogs lie insensate in the middle of steep lanes, and here and there one may still see the fish stretched out to dry, as they have been stretched for 400 years, on the wooden flakes of tradition. Almost within sight of Peek-a-Boutique I met a hunter going off to the hills in search of partridge, buckling his cartridge belt around him, hoisting his gun on his shoulder, just like a pioneer in an old print. And immediately outside the windows of one of the city’s fancier restau
rants (‘Step Back in Tyme to Dine’) one may contemplate over one’s cods’ tongues the whole rickety, stilted, bobbing, seabooted, genial muddle that is the classic image of maritime Newfoundland.

  It is a community of cousins. It happened that while I was in town St John’s was celebrating its centenary as a municipality with what it called a Soiree. The festivities closed with a public party at the St John’s Memorial Stadium that powerfully reinforced the familial sensation, and suggested to me indeed an enormous country wedding – everyone someone else’s in-law, everyone ready to talk, with no pretence and no pretension either. Jigs and folk songs sounded from the stage, miscellaneous bigwigs sat stared-at in the middle like rich out-of-town relatives, and when people seemed slow to dance the jolly Mayor of St John’s took the floor alone, offering free booze coupons to any who would join him – ‘You have to get them half-tight,’ he remarked to me as he handed out these inducements, jigging the while himself.