A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  *

  The trams all but killed me once. In some parts of the Ringstrasse they alone run against the flow of the traffic, and looking to the right to make sure I was not run down by an archduke in an Alfa, I was all but squashed by a trolley-car coming up from the left. ‘Achtung! Achtung!’ screamed several ladies in brown tweed suits, but they forgave me my stupidity – had not Dr Waldheim, they reminded each other, Secretary-General of the United Nations, almost met his end in the very same way, on that very same street?

  Inevitably people have seen Freud’s Death-Wish exemplified in this city, so preoccupied with the past, the tomb, and how the mighty fall. It seems to me though that Vienna is adept at transferring that Wish to others. It is fateful not so much to itself as to the rest of us. It prospers well enough in its neuroses – it is we who suffer the traumas! Viennese Modernism hardly touched the surface of Vienna with its shapes, but everywhere else it was to cause a tragic alienation between architecture and public taste. Viennese Atonalism may seldom be heard in Vienna’s own Musikverein, but everywhere else it long ago made life’s hard pleasures harder still. Viennese Communalism, expressed in the vast housing estates so dear to sociologists of the 1930s, turns out to have been a step towards the universal miseries of the Social Security tower block. The anti-Semitism of Vienna pushed us all towards the Final Solution, the Zionism that was born there has left many a young body, Jewish and Gentile too, dead along the path to Israel. Freud himself, though until twenty years ago, I am told, his name was scarcely mentioned at psychiatry seminars in Vienna, long ago left the rest of the world irrevocably addled by his genius.

  Is there any city more seminally disturbing? It is as though Vienna has been a laboratory of all our inhibitions, experimenting down the generations in new ways of confusing us. Perhaps rather than all our Death-Wishes it expresses all our schizophrenias? I rather think it may, you know, for as I stepped back from the track that day just in time to avoid extinction – ‘Achtung! Stop! Comes the tram!’ – I looked up at the passing streetcar and distinctly saw there, just for a moment, my own face in its slightly steamed-up window. We exchanged distant smiles, between Id and Ego, or dream and wake.

  27

  Y Wladfa: Another Wales

  Every Welsh patriot wants, at least once in a lifetime, to visit the most resiliently Welsh of the Welsh communities overseas, in the Argentinian province of Patagonia. It is the only place on earth, now that everyone in Wales itself speaks English too, where the traveller may actually be obliged to speak yr hen iaith – Welsh, or as others put it, the language of God.

  A most unlikely statue greets the seafarer at the small port of Puerto Madryn, on Golfo Nuevo in Argentinian Patagonia – if you can call it greeting, because actually the figure stands with its rump to the sea, on a big concrete plinth like a launching ramp. This being Latin America, you might expect the statue to honour Libertad, or Fidelidad, or at least Simon Bolívar. In fact, it honours Welsh Womanhood.

  Welsh Womanhood? If you have any doubts, look round that ramp. There, on the front, is a small plaque in that ancient and magically resilient language, Cymraeg – Welsh to the world at large. I come from Wales, and at our great annual festival, the National Eisteddfod, I am always enthralled to see people wandering around who are patently Welsh, but somehow more so, with an extra verve to everything they do. These are the Welsh of Patagonia, whose 163 forebears first went ashore on the site of Puerto Madryn in 1865, and who are commemorated by that image on the waterfront.

  They were the original European settlers of Argentinian Patagonia, and they are recognized as the founders of the province of Chubut, which stretches clean across Patagonia from the Atlantic to the Andes. They were not looking for an easy life, or even for profit. They were escaping the oppressive English at home, and hoping to establish here a New Wales of their own, where they could worship as they pleased, order their affairs as they wished and speak their own language. They had chosen a virtually uninhabited destination, ungoverned, no more than technically part of Argentina, and they called it simply Y Wladfa, The Colony.

  These were not the boozy, bawdy, lyrical Welsh. These were nineteenth-century chapel Welsh, God-fearing and Bible-loving, and it so happened that almost the moment I arrived I found myself at a full-blown Welsh chapel function – a vestry tea-party for a Welsh preacher returning to Wales. This was jumping into Y Wladfa at the deep end. It was Welshness in excelsis. The welcome was fervent – ‘A visitor from Wales! Come in, come in, have some tea, sit down meet Mrs Williams, meet Mrs Jones!’ Not a word was spoken but in Cymraeg, not a face was anything but recognizably Welsh, and among the celebrants was a granddaughter of Lewis Jones, the founding patriarch of The Colony.

  *

  Next day a violent wind blew up. Everything banged, everything whistled, dust, paper, bits of trees and tin cans rushed about the streets. Through it all, if I looked through my window, huddled against the blast and half-veiled in dust, I could see Dyffryn Camwy, the valley of the lower Chubut which was the original Y Wladfa. Nowadays the Welsh generally call it just Y Dyffryn, the Valley.

  It was not at all what the settlers had been led to expect. It was not a bit like Wales. It was not in the least a land of milk and honey. It was dead flat, it was covered in scrub, it had virtually no trees and the river ran through it muddily, now and then erupting into catastrophic floods. Some of the Welsh understandably returned home again, or went up to Canada, but most of them stuck it out. New migrants arrived from Wales, and in time they made a thriving agricultural colony, forty-odd miles long, irrigated by a complex system of canals, systematically divided among the settler families, and equipped with fourteen thoroughly Welsh chapels. It was a tight-knit, ethnically cohesive society.

  By now the original farms of the Valley have mostly been broken up, and its community is largely scattered. The dykes the Welsh built are still at work, but the men you see scything or digging or ploughing by hand are likely to be Bolivian migrants, and in the occasional grocery store, out among the farms, you may find yourself served by wild-looking semi-Indian people.

  Here and there, though, all unexpected in little green enclosures, you will come across one of those fourteen chapels. It is probably built of red brick, extremely plain and four-square, but it retains an air of contemplative serenity. Nine chapels are still active in the Valley on and off – when there is a preacher available, or when there is a song festival – and to a Welsh sentimentalist they are almost excruciatingly evocative. Some of them have graveyards, and these are touching too. Whole families of Joneses, Evanses, Williamses and Morgans lie here, sometimes beneath stones of real Welsh slate, carved by masons far away in Wales with the traditional motifs of Welsh mourning.

  There are Welsh people in the Valley, still alive, still very Welsh. The first few doors you knock on will bring only regretful responses in Spanish. Then you strike lucky. ‘D’you speak Welsh, señor?’ you ask for the tenth time, and into a weathered brown face there will come a gleam of welcome. The house will almost certainly be simple. You will be seated at once on a hard-backed chair by the kitchen table, and the kettle will be on the boil for tea. Your conversation will probably be about Roots. Even Patagonian Welsh people who have never been to Wales know its geography well, know which villages their grandparents came from, and very probably know where your own home is on the map. Their Welsh is likely to be slightly rusty and slow, very convenient to somebody like me whose command of the language is at best rough and ready.

  It may well be, as legend in Wales habitually has it, that your hosts are living almost exactly as they might be living in Wales today, or at least the day before yesterday: with the same sort of furniture, the same inherited knick-knacks, an upright piano perhaps, a case of books, home-made butter in the refrigerator and a border collie at the door. On the table is likely to be a copy of Y Drafod, the Welsh-language journal which has been published in Patagonia for more than a century, and is now less a newspaper than a kind of family ci
rcular. Everything is spick-and-span in such a house, very fresh, very clean, very taclus –a Welsh word which, meaning ‘tidy’ in an almost abstract sense, is very popular in Y Wladfa.

  But it may be that you hit upon extremely poor Welsh farmers, living in a house of crude brick whose roof may be of mud and wattle, like the houses of medieval Europe. Beneath their bare electric light bulbs these people are living far closer to the soil than ever they would be if their forebears had never left Wales in the first place. The chances are that the family is now half-Hispanic, and that only the father or mother speaks Welsh at all. Another generation, and the language will be lost to this house.

  *

  The Valley is hardly an eldorado, anyway, and there were some among the original Welsh who looked further west, into the wide desert plateau that lies beyond. This was the province of the wild beasts and the Tehuelche Indians, and Welshmen from the Dyffryn Camwy were among the first foreigners to cross it. It is some 450 miles from the Valley to the foothills of the Andes, and in every mile of it I felt the mounting exhilaration that must have animated the young men and women of Y Wladfa, striking west out of the valley into the unknown.

  Finally, like them, I saw the land of milk and honey. First, distant snow-ridges of the Andes, then rolling foothills, and lakes, and verdant valleys, and thickets of green trees, and wide farmlands, and horses, and on that brilliant summer day, the sort of glow of fulfilment that allegorical artists used to apply to pictures of theological reassurance. It is a marvellous, spectacular country.

  The Welsh were the first Europeans to settle it, and they called it Cwm Hyfryd, Lovely Valley. I felt no tristesse here. The culture of the Welsh is slowly fading here too, but I felt it was going out in style. Here the Welsh farms are scattered in space and liberty against the backdrop of the high mountains, and the little metropolis of the Welsh, Trevelin, seemed full of fun and sunshine. I drove from farm to farm in high spirits, buying cheeses here, discussing the future of the Welsh language there, listening to tales of hard winters and economic hazard – for even in a Promised Land, life is seldom easy. There were horses everywhere, and lovely dogs. A young Welsh farmer called up his dad for me in Welsh on his VHF radio. An old Welsh farmer showed me the house he had built himself with the stone he had quarried, the bricks he had baked, the machinery he had made from old Chevrolet parts – ‘everything home-made, everything my own!’

  And in a farm on the outskirts of Trevelin I found my last archetype of Y Wladfa. He was like the smile, as it were, on the face of the Cheshire Cat. My final Patagonian Welshman cheerfully spoke for history. Not a soul in his household understood a word of Welsh beside himself, but they all clustered eagerly around us as we talked – a jolly Argentinian wife, diverse unidentified children and grandchildren, dogs and chickens and a horse tied to the fence; and with his cloth cap tilted on his head, his hands in his pockets, that Welshman of South America touched my heart not with melancholy at all, but with grateful pride to be Welsh myself.

  28

  Berlin 1989

  The decade ended to universal rejoicing with the abandonment of the Berlin Wall, marking not only a symbolical end to the Cold War, but also the re-uniting of the long-divided city.

  I sat over my victuals in the Kurfürstendamm, in a Berlin now all but undivided by its wretched Wall, and to the strains of ‘Down By The Riverside’ from a street musician with a monotonous guitar. I looked into my mind – and my heart, too, since I am of a certain age – to see what images already loitered there of this infamously ambivalent city.

  I found emblems of iconoclastic fun, and comfortable hausfrau emblems of flower boxes and sticky cakes, and Le Carré suggestions of the sinister mingled with the seedy, and above all symbols of terrifying power wrestling with tragedy. Berlin has many reputations, but few of them are straightforward. I have been visiting this city intermittently since soon after the Second World War and, realizing that my own perceptions of the place were blurred by time and myth and old emotion, I reluctantly tipped that lugubrious troubadour and set out to wander the city districts, east and west of the crumbling ideological border, to discover which of my mental images were still recognizable on the ground.

  *

  I did not have to look far for the fun. The top end of the Kurfürstendamm, the showiest boulevard of West Berlin, offers the liveliest and least inhibited streets scenes in Europe. Beneath the glare of the neon signs, past the crowded pavement cafés, flooding through the tumultuous traffic, an endlessly vivacious young populace laughs, struts, sits around, eats, plays music, kisses, and shows off from the break of afternoon until the end of dawn. It is like a perpetual fair, or perhaps a bazaar, the genteel with the rapscallion, the indigent with the well-heeled: gypsy beggars with babies, bourgeois ladies with dogs on leads, lovers embracing at restaurant tables, unshaven money-changers in dark doorways, an elegant wind trio playing Scarlatti outside a brightly lit shoe shop, a not very skilful acrobat treading a rope between two trees, tireless drummers, tedious mimes, unpredictable skateboarders, portrait sketchers, hang-dog youths with ghetto blasters squatting among their own rubbish, smells of coffee and fresh rolls, double-decker buses sliding by, fountains splashing, sidewalk showcases of leathers and jewels – and presiding over it all, incongruously preserved there as a reminder of old horrors, the ugly tombed hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm I Memorial Church, defiantly floodlit.

  Berliners have always been famous for their irrepressible disrespect and hedonism, maintained through all oppressions and apparent even when I first came here to find a city half in ruins. Even on the east side, where the equivalent of Kurfürstendamm is the loveless Stalinist Alexanderplatz, even there, now that the dictatorship has gone, flashes of high spirit often show through the authoritarian grumps (fostered not only by forty years of communism, but by a decade of National Socialism before that). A waiter winks and bypasses the management ruling that we are too late for a cup of coffee. A young man dashingly V-turns his car, with a glorious screeching of brakes and skidding of tyres, across Karl-Marx Allee to pick up his laughing girl. A stretch of the hitherto sacrosanct Wall – the wrong side of the Wall – has been covered with murals and called the East Side Gallery.

  Liberty is in the very air of Berlin now. It is good to be alive here, and to be young must be heaven. Everything is in flux, everything is changing, new horizons open, and nothing demands unqualified respect or allegiance. Although half of Berlin is the theoretical headquarters of the about-to-be-disbanded and thoroughly discredited People’s Republic of East Germany, the city is not really the headquarters of anything much, and this gives it a stimulating sense of irresponsibility. Tokens of fun abound, indeed, and none are more endearing than the preposterous little Trabant cars, like goblin cars, that swarm out of East Berlin for a night out or some shopping in the West, with hilarious clankings and wheezings of their primitive engines, and faces smiling from every window.

  *

  Walking in the woods beside the Muggelsee, in a corner of East Berlin that would have seemed inexpressibly alarming a year or two ago, I heard through the trees a strain of jovial German music, ho-ho, thump-thump music, with a hearty baritone solo punctuated by jolly choruses. I followed it through the quiet paths, along the reedy edges of the lake (overlooked on its distant eastern shore by the grim black factory chimneys of the former Workers’ Paradise), and although by the time I reached its source the tune had changed to the old Tom Jones favourite ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, still the scene I found there was an epitome of gemütlichkeit – the snug spirit of domesticity, laced with the sentimental, that was my second Berlin image.

  ‘I’m The Boss’ was the first T-shirt slogan I saw, on the ample bosom of a housewife dancing a vigorous disco-jig with her decidedly un-henpecked husband. East Berlin was having a public holiday, and at the hotel beside the lake several thousand citizens, great-grandmothers to babes in arms, were enjoying a family feast in the sunshine. How perfectly they fulfilled my conceptions! How g
enially they laughed, sang, danced, drank their beer, and ate their pickled pork knuckles! With what indefatigable smiles the two bands alternated, one with the old oom-pah-pah, the other exploring the less raucous fringes of rock! As I watched them there, so hearty, so comradely, I recognized how limitless was the strength of Berlin’s gemütlichkeit, sustained over tankards and ice-cream cones through war and peace, dictatorship and revolution, hope and disaster, down the generations.

  It knows no borders, recognizes no ideologies (Hitler encouraged it in the name of Strength Through Joy, and even the communists were obliged to allow family reunions across the Wall), and for myself I find a faintly disturbing quality to it, so absolutely is it able to disregard history. I distrust its latent tendency to prejudice – against immigrant Turks, for instance, who are ubiquitous in West Berlin. I dislike its silly aspects, evident all over the city in jokey statuary, gimmicky fountains. and fairly ponderous humour.

  The Berlin cosiness is an ethos in itself, for better or for worse, and it is inescapable. Here we see it at a modest wedding in Spandau, where the bride in her long white dress, the groom in his high white stock, the priest and amiable altar boys, the intermittently squabbling choir girls, the solitary bespectacled bridesmaid (pink glasses to match her pink dress), the wildly over-accoutred family guests, the casual passers-by and even we ourselves are all embraced within its bonhomie. Here we observe it at an alfresco restaurant in the Grünewald woods in the persons of two middle-aged ladies giggling over their asparagus, smiling and nodding encouragingly at us and balancing their purses carefully on the rims of their glasses to stop the chestnut blossoms falling into their wine.