by Derek Johns
When I was dining one night in the Restaurant de l’Europe, which opens out on to the main esplanade … an extraordinary girl burst into the dining-room and began dancing a kind of ferocious screeching rumba to the music of the radio. She wore an enormous straw tricorn hat and a red swimsuit, and when the management objected to her presence she instantly threw herself into a spectacular flamboyant tantrum … until at last, to crown a splendid entertainment, somebody dialled the wrong number and obtained, instead of the police, the fire brigade, whose clanking red engines skidded to a halt outside our windows and whose helmeted officers, trailing axes and hoses, stared in bewilderment through the open door at the hilarious chaos inside.
The sense of fun is infectious: a scene like this could hardly be better calculated to appeal to James’s taste for the absurd. A darker place, however, evokes a darker response. Moscow is:
… a graceless but obsessive city, the capital of an alien Asiatic world. Among its avenues of ugly buildings, stamped with the inexpressible emptiness of Stalinist taste, the muffled multitudes shove their way with hungry gusto; not indeed mindlessly, as myth would have it, but with a special technique of ill manners, a kind of self-induced trance in which the existence of anybody else on the pavement is erased from the consciousness, as a yogi dismisses the blistered crowd around him. Nobody can push more effectively than a Muscovite …
These words are not quite as damning as those on Sydney, and anyway were probably merited by the facts. James encountered cities on his own terms, not on theirs. In its extraordinary range, Cities takes in all the moods of its author as well as all the moods of its subjects. Published after the books on the Middle East, America, Everest, South Africa and Venice, it represented a different way of reading James, the magazine experience writ large.
The second collection was entitled Places. It was published nine years after Cities, in 1972, and, the Pax Britannica trilogy apart, it is the last book to bear the name James. In the foreword he writes that the pieces collected are ‘small examples of a fading genre: the travel essay. Now that nearly everyone who reads has been to nearly everywhere there is to read about, the travel writer finds his occupation gone, and turns to other literary forms – transmuting his experiences into fiction, perhaps, or perhaps like me projecting his view of today into an evocation of yesterday.’
This is not the only act of projection going on here: James’s assuming that ‘nearly everyone who reads has been nearly everywhere there is to read about’ is surely to mistake his own experience for that of others. Even now this statement is wide of the mark. What it is really saying is that James, having truly been nearly everywhere, must now alter his approach. And this he does in Places: instead of seventy-four short essays there are seventeen longer ones. And while the style has not changed very much, there is a new awareness of the perils of tourism. Having acknowledged in his essay on Capri that it is the most beautiful place on earth, he writes:
It was [earlier in the century] a proper little paradise: boats were infrequent, trippers were rare, the proletariat of Naples were subtly encouraged to go to Ischia instead, and probably nowhere in Europe felt cosier, warmer, more intimate and more fun than a table in the sun in that fortunate piazza. But it went the way of the dodo – by the pressures of historic evolution. Cast your eye to the right, now, and you will see something foaming and white scudding across the bay. It is the aliscafo from Naples, a hydrofoil that does the trip in half an hour with a truly magnificent panache.
Jan later wrote that ‘travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity’. The fifty years in which she travelled constantly around the world coincide with the years in which tourism became a vast industry and a mainstay of many economies. She may be allowed the occasional expression of disappointment that the world is so much more crowded now than it was.
One of the essays in Places is about Ceylon. This is where Elizabeth was born and brought up, the daughter of a tea-planter. It inspires the sensualist in James:
Ceylon is plump, genial, richly vegetated … Ceylon has always given pleasure: to the ancient Indians it was Lanka, the Resplendent Land, to the Moors, the Isle of Delight, to the Chinese the Jewelled Island, to the Victorians the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, and even the sensible Dutch thought the shape of the place reminiscent of a dressed ham hanging in the rafters. Spices, rubies, beautiful slaves, aromatic teas have been staples of Ceylon down the centuries. A gently festive air seems to linger over the island, whatever the excesses of its politicians, and leaves in almost every visitor’s mind an impression of balanced serenity.
The travel essay was not, as James had anxiously suggested in the foreword to Places, a ‘fading genre’, but it was certainly changing. Younger writers were putting themselves and their adventures in the forefront of their writings: Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban, Bruce Chatwin. In the next collection of essays, Travels, published in 1976, there are pieces on subjects other than cities. In her ‘Introductory’ Jan writes:
When I was small the only sermon I enjoyed, indeed the only one I really listened to, was the old familiar about Life as a Journey – the Mr Christian sermon, the stony upland sermon, the best foot forward, cross-roads, far horizon sermon. Its imagery appealed to me from the start, for I realized myself already to be the wandering kind.
And the first essay is about Ibn Batuta, ‘The Best Travelled Man in the World’. Ibn Batuta was an eighth-century Moroccan theologian who in the course of his lifetime journeyed everywhere in ‘civilisation’, in other words in the Muslim world. In his memoirs he described his travels, from Morocco to Java, from Granada to Samarkand. He was the most widely travelled man of his time, as Jan is surely the most widely travelled person of hers. The world of Islam was then ‘pre-eminent in philosophy, in astronomy, in mathematics, in poetry, in navigation … Islam held in trust for posterity the learning of the classical past,’ and Ibn Batuta was ‘an agent of fertility, passing ideas from one continent to another’. Jan has herself been an agent of fertility, and it is easy to sense her identification with her subject.
Another essay not about a particular place is ‘On Wateriness’:
Whatever its origin, for some of us that intimation of water is a necessary dimension of travel … It offers, perhaps, a reassurance of nature’s dignity. It reminds us that the seas, lakes and rivers have no parking meters still, that the fish are masters of their own migrations, and that somewhere beyond our credit-card conformities, somewhere out there at the end of the pier, grand, green or fragrant things are always happening.
In 1974, after Conundrum was published, Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone magazine, asked Jan if she would like to write for him. She recalls that she was:
… flattered and entertained by this unexpected approach. I was a middle-aged Anglo-Welsh writer of romantic instinct and distinctly traditionalist prose, based in a small seaside village in North Wales. Rolling Stone was the most thrilling phenomenon of contemporary American journalism, which had established its fortunes upon the economics of rock music, and found its readers among the lively, restless, affluent and stereophonic avant garde of young America.
But Wenner knew what he was doing, and this unlikely pairing was to work brilliantly well. Jan says now that she enjoyed writing in Rolling Stone as much as she did anywhere. As usual, she was able to choose her own assignments, and the ‘middle-aged’ (in fact only late forties) writer chose among others Panama, Rhodesia and Istanbul, as well as more familiar places like New York, Cairo and Trieste. For his part, Wenner thought extremely highly of Jan, as expressed in a letter he wrote to her in 1977. The BBC was filming a documentary on Rolling Stone, and Wenner had invited Jan and Tom Wolfe to say something about the magazine. ‘So between Tom and you,’ he wrote, ‘hands are joined across the Atlantic by the best journalist in each country … I realized that just as I wrote it down here, and the thought of it stopped me for a minute, because that is truly impressive. It’s making me blush
, even as I sit in front of the typewriter.’
In Delhi a government official lectured Jan on how the city is like the River Ganges, always twisting and turning. In response Jan reflected that ‘Indians, of course, love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic. It is part of their Timeless Wisdom. For several centuries the tendency has variously baffled, infuriated, amused and entranced travellers from the West …’ And in a nod to her new, younger readers, ‘India is full of pilgrims still, come from afar to worship at the shrines of insight.’
In Cairo Jan admitted to things that seem at odds with what she had written about the city earlier:
Egypt has habitually frightened me … [it] is the only country where I have been stoned, sworn at by vicious beggars or had my legs smeared with boot polish by disaffected urchins. Here I have been chased by rioters, shot at by terrorists, unnerved by the broken limbs of political prisoners. One of my acquaintances was imprisoned for years as a spy; one of my best friends [David Holden, James’s successor as Middle East correspondent of The Times] was shot dead in the back on his way into town from Cairo Airport. For half my life, Egypt and my own country were apparently irreconcilable, and innocent as I was of imperial prejudices, I could not escape the old antipathies.
There are hints of retrospective candour here, admissions of feelings not made at the time they were experienced.
By now Jan was deeply immersed in her three-volume history of the British Empire. She continued to travel widely, however (and to research the history while doing so). The travel essay was a form she had by now so completely mastered that perhaps it no longer satisfied her as it once did. But it satisfied her readers. Jonathan Raban wrote that ‘Her essays are … exquisite compositions of details … The place is transformed into a literary pattern as full of different coloured threads as Henry James’s carpet [a reference to the short story ‘The Figure in the Carpet’]. It is a process that comes very close to being pure magic.’
In 1963 James spent six months driving through Spain, and out of this experience came his only book about an entire country (with the exception of his homeland, Wales). Franco was still ruling the country with an iron hand. In The Presence of Spain James wrote that ‘the Spanish people seem almost ideal material for dictatorship – strong, diligent, courageous, proud, patriotic, obedient, unimaginative. Autocracy is an old habit in Spain, and in Franco’s day most Spaniards fell easily enough into its rhythms.’ The Escorial palace outside Madrid contains, ‘stuffed darkly into granite labyrinths, all the forces that have shaped this tremendous and sometimes frightening country’. The Moorish influence is everywhere, and James the Arabist is highly responsive to it:
The Moors, springing out of an arid background, were the waterers of Spain, the gardeners: they brought a new grace to the culture, they taught her people the techniques of irrigation, and as their own spirit degenerated into excess and sybaritic fancy, so they infused into the Spanish stream some embryo traces of its romanticism – early inklings of swirl, smoulder, quarter-tone and castanet.
But Christianity prevailed. The cathedral at Toledo is ‘a victory paean for the Christian culture’:
Soldiers, saints, heroes, and great churchmen seem to populate Toledo Cathedral, and when there is a service at the high altar, with all the swift formality of its ritual, the bowing priests, the genuflecting servers, the bewigged attentive vergers, the clink of the censers, the gorgeous shimmer of copes and jewelled monstrances, the exchange of plainchant between the altar, coro, and thundering organ – when the heart of the cathedral is filled with the sights and sounds of that tremendous spectacle, this really does feel like the nerve-centre of some formidable war-machine …
James, like all writers about Spain, must set aside his misgivings and watch a bullfight. But he is no Hemingway:
And yet, such is the contagion of Spain, if you sit it out for long enough you will probably succumb yourself to the savage magic of the corrida. As its ghastly parade continues, circus tinsel beside high tragedy, as death succeeds death and blood blood, as the young gods are cheered around the arena or hissed out of sight, as the silent old horses topple in and the tossing caparisoned mules drag the carcasses out – as the band thumps away at its music and the evening shadow creeps across the ring, so you will feel yourself, hour by hour, fight by fight, half united with the fierce multitude at your side. The nobility of death, so the experts assure us, is the point of the bull-fight – the ultimate Moment of Truth that comes, in the end, to us all; and before very long you too may feel that, through the blood lust and the intolerance, something of grandeur emerges.
In the introduction to a later edition Jan wrote that ‘this book is instilled with my own sensations of wondering alienation. Nobody could have been less Spanish than me …’ As a piece of literature, however, The Presence of Spain stands alongside her best work. There is so much in the buildings, the art, the landscape to inspire her. Gerald Brenan, one of the finest writers on the country, said that it was ‘perhaps the best general book ever written on Spain’. In the terms of her writings it is Venice on a larger canvas.
Jan’s gifts as a stylist are matched by her talents for observation and analysis, and her wonderful ability (despite being only a moderately endowed linguist) to engage people and draw them out. She is a watcher, usually alone, seldom lonely, alert to everything around her. In later life she wrote that she felt she had never mastered some of the deeper meanings of cities, had never penetrated their economic truths or grasped their profounder social implications. This self-criticism would seem to be redundant, since she did not set out to write about the economies or the ‘deeper meanings’ of cities. Jan’s writings express their own meanings, and if those meanings are to be found on the surface, rather than deep down, they are nonetheless valuable.
When in 1983 Jan first visited China, she felt she had brought something to a conclusion:
Years and years ago, observing that nobody in the history of man had ever seen and described the entire urban world, I resolved to do it myself, and in 1983, standing at last in the great square of Tiananmen in the city of Beijing, I felt this perhaps jejune ambition to have been fulfilled. I had visited and portrayed, during thirty years of more or less constant travel, all the chief cities of the earth.
This is a remarkable achievement. And as with many great achievements, it invites consideration of what underlies it. There is something compulsive about Jan’s travelling, something apparently not willed by her but driven by forces beyond her control. This is travel as a quest, and as ‘an outer expression of my inner journey’. This outer expression represents, across all of Jan’s writings, one of the most thorough and insightful assessments of our world that we have. The inner journey is one which will be explored in later pages.
HISTORIAN
I was born in 1926. I was thus just in time to see schoolroom maps emblazoned pole to pole in the imperial red.
Jan would never describe herself as a historian, shying away from the academic connotation of the word. But she certainly wrote histories of a sort. The Hashemite Kings was a history, and history is an element in much of her writing about places. Then there are three books that are unquestionably history, the volumes of the Pax Britannica trilogy, and related to these are books on Hong Kong and Sydney.
James began seriously to think of writing a book with an imperial theme after his stay in Venice, perhaps inspired by the similarities he saw between the Venetian and the British Empires. In late 1959 he wrote to Charles Monteith to propose a book on ‘India and us’. This evolved into the idea of a history of the First Afghan War, and then further into a book that would encompass all of the British Empire. James saw as his narrative mode taking an event in the late nineteenth century and then embarking on a tour d’horizon of all of the places of the empire at that time. The event he chose was Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, a high-water mark for everything the empire represented. As he was writing this, the book that would later assume the title Pax Britanni
ca, it occurred to him to extend the work to include two other volumes, one describing the rise of the empire and another the fall. These were later to be published as Heaven’s Command and Farewell the Trumpets. It seems clear from the way the project was gestated, however, that James was not at first consciously attempting anything more ambitious than the books he had written in the past.
In the event the writing of these three books extended from 1964 to 1978 – in other words they were started by James and finished by Jan (though for consistency they were all originally published under the name James). Jan has described the trilogy as ‘the intellectual and artistic centrepiece of my life’. In over 1,600 pages she roamed across the length and breadth of the empire, creating what was described by Charles Monteith as a historical entertainment of the highest order.
In Palestine James had met British civil servants who he felt were attempting honourably and considerately to arrange an orderly withdrawal, and he formed a high opinion of some of them. But this was the curtain call of the British Empire show; what about the first, second and third acts? James approached the task of chronicling the empire through an ‘aesthetic appreciation’ of it, of the structures, institutions and rituals it had created. All of his experience, certainly until the mid 1950s, strengthened James’s idea of Britain as a force for good in the world. (It is worth noting that only in recent years has the reality of less than noble British acts committed during the withdrawal from places like Kenya and Malaya come to light; no one, including James, knew of them then.) Pax Britannica was begun in a spirit if not quite of celebration, then certainly of appreciation. It was intended to be an evocation of empire, a picture painted by someone who was by now a master portraitist.