by Jan Morris
For writers, being habitually impecunious, have to make every use of their books they can. Rupert Hart-Davies the publisher, faced with the all-too-familiar question “Have you read all these books?” used to reply that he hadn’t read them all, but he had used them all. I have certainly used all of mine. I have used them for plain enjoyment, of course. I have plundered them for my own work. I have used them as reference books. As you see, I have used one or two of them, notably the enormous Death in Spanish Painting which is propping up the table in the corner, to support wobbly furniture. (The Gazetteer of Sikhim, though, which appears to be sustaining the end of one of the beams, and thus saving the entire ceiling from collapse, is doing nothing of the sort, but is an illusion I devised to give my visitors an entertaining frisson; just as that oil painting by James Holland of the Rialto Bridge, which seems to be magically suspended in space, is in fact held up there by hidden hooks and wires. Such are the idle fancies of a writer between paragraphs!)
I have also used my books as a record of my own travels. I have never kept a diary, but as a substitute I long ago took to writing inside books the place and dates of their acquisition. This habit has proved invaluable as an aide-mémoire. If I need to know, for example, when I was in Ethiopia, I have only to look along the line of relevant books to find that I bought Björn von Rosen’s Game Animals of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa in 1961. Det Store Norges-Atlas? Tromsø, in 1994. The Art and Architecture of Russia? Improbable though it seems, Darwin, Northern Territories, 1962. The Travels of Ibn Jubair? Juba, 1955. Let’s have a look at that little yellow selection of the works of James Joyce, edited by T. S. Eliot. Yes, here we are, in my minuscule script of the time I see I bought it at Bristol in 1942, out of my meagre salary as a cub reporter for the Western Daily Press. And if ever the Inland Revenue demands to know why I set my expenses against tax for a trip to Holland in 1958, why on earth would I have bought a book about drainage systems in the Dutch polders if I was in Amsterdam just for pleasure?
Talking of signatures, while you’re here, put yours in the Trefan Morys visitors’ book, would you? It’s volume three, not because we have heaps of visitors, but because I like to have just a single signature on each page, so that later on, when I have the time and the energy, I can draw pictures all around it, or stick in relevant photographs, or generally grangerize it. Just your name, that’s all, large as you like. You’d be amazed how hard it is to make people sign their names big and bold, so as to make a proper page of it, and it’s almost as hard to prevent them adding some fulsome phrase of gratitude or commendation. “Non, non, non, pas des pensées, M. Proust!” is how Parisian hostesses are said hastily to have stopped Marcel, unscrewing his fountain pen before getting into the full flight of his prose, and I too sometimes have to interject, as my departing guests prepare their ballpoints for action, “No, no, no, I beg you, no testimonials!”
I am fond of graffiti of every kind, from illiterate and obscene scrawls in railway stations to the exquisite carvings of poets on Grecian monuments. I like to think of them as the signatures of time. I would love to have people cut their initials on our tables and chairs, but Elizabeth is inexplicably of another opinion, so I have to make do with the visitors’ book. And our visitors, as you see, have been a curious bag. Some of them have been downright unpleasant—an imposter or two, intrusive interviewers, self-important know-alls—but I get them all to sign the book anyway. On the other hand I have insisted that nobody sign twice, however often they come, to avoid the embarrassing repetition of grateful friends and relatives (“Again!!! You must be sick to death of us!”) that one often sees in such contexts. The only exceptions are children, because I like to observe how their signatures mature over the years, from the incoherent scrawls of infancy to the self-consciously sophisticated signatures of adolescence. Sometimes they have drawn small pictures on the pages too, and to an elementary limner like me it can be salutary to see how swiftly people of real talent progress from endearing kiddy-stuff to exquisite draftsmanship.
The book includes some esoteric surprises. Kilroy was never here, but the author of the standard history of the British cavalry was, and so was the author of the standard work of British naval history at the turn of the twentieth century, and the first Welsh nationalist member of Parliament at Westminster, and the oldest practicing lawyer in Britain (he was a hundred years old at the time). Five Sherpas have signed one page (and I have drawn a picture of their village), a physician from the Yukon another. A sheep rancher from Queensland hugely signed, and simultaneously presented me with an opal from his vast Outback estate. A composer from Scotland wrote my name in musical notation, from the 1-25 chromatic alphabetical scale; it seems to make a curious tune, but he has generously marked it Allegro Maestoso, and it rises in crescendo to a final fortissimo. The brothers who first adapted Trefan Morys to my use are in the book, the men who made my weather vane, the plumber who put the taps on back to front, the VAT inspectors who come to inspect our accounts now and then, all our neighbors of course, a few visiting writers, several television crews, some total strangers who have been lured into the house by the offer of a glass of wine, lots of Americans, a few Indians, a variety of Europeans, the Welsh Islamic wife of the Omani Defense Minister, an Australian who came to offer me a job, at least two Chaired Bards of the Welsh National Eisteddfod, sundry Everest climbers, a Bishop of Hereford, an actor or two, a couple of cops (investigating anonymous letters), a designer of Welsh postage stamps (who has drawn a rough of one in the book), somebody who wrote a long message in Breton, my old colonel in the Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers, members of the North Wales Association of Assistant Librarians, cats who have contributed their paw prints to Christmas gatherings—all are remembered in my visitors’ book, and eventually commemorated with more or less apposite illustrations. These books are another way of recording the effects of the years, because I save an annual page, free of signatures, to draw pictures of the places I have visited during the year: It is sad to see how, down the decades, my drawing skills have faded, my application too, until in recent years I have been reduced to sticking in scribbles from my sketchbooks, really hardly worth preserving…
The very first visitor to sign my book was Clough Williams-Ellis the architect, a dear friend who lived a few miles away along the coast. Clough (as everyone in Wales called him) often liked to consult my Dictionary of National Biography, then in its old sixteen-volume form, and we made a pact one day that when he died and entered the afterlife, if he needed to use the D.N.B. again he would deliberately disarrange its volumes when he was through with them. Whenever I came home, for years after his death, I went straight to the reference shelves to see if he had been; but perhaps they have another copy in Paradise, for the books were never disarranged. On one of his visits to the house Clough stumbled on the stone staircase outside. Soon afterward he died, and since he was in his nineties at the time, his name on the opening page of the visitors’ book always gives me a pang, in case that last visit contributed to his demise. I did visit him later on his deathbed, before he left for Paradise, and he made no complaint; and perhaps I made some amends anyway by writing his particularly laudatory and affectionate obituary for the London Times.
And of course in any writer’s library there is no more telling memento mori than the shelf of one’s own books. I have completed some thirty books at Trefan, about Wales, about the British Empire, about Manhattan and Oxford and Spain and Venice and Canada and Sydney and Hong Kong and Europe, books of fiction, books of essays, two autobiographical books, a couple of biographies, and now a little book about Trefan Morys itself. Whether they are good or bad, flops or successes, I have had them all expensively bound for the benefit of my great-great-grandchildren; but the ones that mean most to me are the original editions, still in the paper jackets of long ago. They make a long line now, because I have childishly kept copies of every single version of every single book, even down to a pirated and politically bowdlerized edition, in Arabic, of an account I
wrote in 1956 about a journey across Arabia. How old-fashioned the early ones are beginning to look! Their very typefaces, as often as not, date both them and me, and some of the American ones are by now so old that they smell of that fragrant printer’s ink of long ago. Often their papers, too, are faintly reminiscent of the Utility Paper that reflected the embattled austerity of World War II, and so each successive book, in its design as in its subject matter, stands there as an inescapable reminder of the passing of the years.
Worst of all are the intimations of mortality that I discover if ever I start to read one of the books of my youth: For not all the advantages of experience, neither range of knowledge nor maturity of expression, can make up for the fresh exuberance and chutzpah that all writers recognize with a pang, I feel sure, when they read their work of half a century before. Trefan Morys is a house of deep resilience, but life comes and goes through it, as through everything else. The owls have played their part, and left; the stablemen have gone; the bees that used to swarm here seem to have assembled somewhere else. On an outside wall of the house there is an inscribed stone which it amuses me to think may puzzle archaeologists of a thousand years hence. Twm and I collaborated on a book, some years ago, which imagined the condition of a Welsh town in the past, the present and the future. For its jacket the publishers had lettering carved in a sandstone slab, and then photographed, and when it was done they gave the slab to me. I had it fixed to the wall, and there it stands enigmatically now, with the words A MACHYNLLETH TRIAD and our two names upon it. It has a faintly sacerdotal look. What rite was this? those scholars of another millennium may ask. Who were these priests, and what signified this lettering from the primitive past?
Has death ever visited Trefan Morys? Mice, rats, bats and multitudinous insects have certainly died here, and perhaps now and then a horse cheated the knacker’s yard by collapsing in its stall. But did ever a stableman breathe his last on a straw pallet above my library? Perhaps, long ago, and no doubt one day death will come calling here again, to leave his invisible thumbprint in my visitors’ book. When years ago we were changing the purpose of the house, from a place to house animals to a place to house us, we found among the loose-boxes a slab of wood with a very distinct impression of a hoof mark on it—the imprint of some sturdy Welsh cob long gone to his honorable rest. We used it as a windowsill upstairs, and the hoof mark was for years a reminder to me of the constancy of things. Lately, though, it has inexplicably faded and disappeared, and now I think of it instead as a sign of universal transience.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Writer’s House in Wales
For a sense of the transcendental is, to my mind, always present at Trefan Morys—as it is in Wales itself. This is an evasive, mercurial slab of the Earth’s surface, now buoyant, now despondent, as though some mood-changing wind is constantly blowing through it. Sometimes when I look out of my window it seems to me that all must be lost, that life is fading, time itself running short, so bleak and loveless does the country seem out there, so enervated do the very sheep appear, listlessly nibbling the grass. But then the cloud passes or the sun comes out, and instantly it is a very prospect of hope outside my window—life can never be subdued!—time is ours to command!—and now that I look more closely, those sheep are not disheartened at all, but are humming with happiness as they eat!
Trefan Morys itself is not a place of moods—it is solid of structure and apparently steady of character—but it is attended by a powerful numen. Many people feel it, and its presence is older than even the Welshness of the house, older than the mountains, as old perhaps as nature itself. It would be pleasant to suppose it the result of some perfect balance to the building, a structural equivalent of the human equilibrium that philosophers used to talk about. Many of them thought that the four bodily humors, sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, must be combined in equal measure to fulfill man’s true potential, and I suppose the same criteria might be applied to a house.
Some dissenters used to argue, though, that if all four were equally represented in a man’s character it would make for a dull fellow, and that one or other should be supreme. I am inclined to agree with them, but I cannot say that any particular trait is predominant in the metabolism of Trefan Morys, which is generally cheerful, intermittently sad, bad-tempered occasionally and patient with most of my absurdities. Since it seems to me to be anything but a dullard house, I look for some other humor in it, something less visceral, less definite, and I find it in that indefinable numen of the place. But it is more than a humor really. It is a mixture of wish, idea, memory, illusion and aspiration. The old Polynesians, those most visionary of pagans, would have called it mana.
I am a pagan myself, of agnostic pantheist preferences, and if I had to choose one god to preside over this house, of all the endless divinities that men have devised for their allegiance, it would be the horned and goat-footed Pan, the Great God of the ancient world, patron of fertility and a mischievous synthesis of everything mysterious, merry and fecund in animal and human life. Anything goatish suits the mythology of Wales, and I myself have long been convinced that gafr the goat will one day take over the world, in alliance with left-handed humans; so I particularly honor the combination of the prankish and the formidable, the peculiar and the entertaining, that the Great God represents.
The world stood still, we are told, when Pan died in the haunted days of antiquity, branches drooped in mourning over wine-dark seas and the very oracles ceased their prophecies. But he still lives in the atmosphere of Trefan Morys, and I hear his pipes plaintive on summer evenings, jolly with the plygain singers at Christmastime.
I am speaking figuratively, of course—aren’t I? But I really do sense the effect of some imperturbably independent spirit playing around my house. The mana is present even in the yard outside. The most prominent objects there are generally our two cars, parked on the moss-strewn, mud-puddled slate-and-gravel mixture which is the nearest we have got to the grace of a country-house approach. You may think that automobiles have little to do with Pan, numen or transcendence, but there I disagree with you.
I often tell solemn academics or earnest progressive artists that the only things I read are car magazines, and although I do this really just to épater les bourgeois, there is some truth in it. As I go on to tell them, I am intensely interested in cars, because almost every aspect of modern human existence is reflected in them—the state of design, social progress, national confidence, sexual aspiration, human psychology, economic conditions, ecological awareness, engineering ingenuity—all is there, I cry, in those two machines standing in my yard, as expressive of their particular age as any art or architecture. This fluent spiel usually floors the intelligentsia, and I am sure gets the approval of the listening Great God, who has seen a vivid selection of motors come and go from Trefan Morys. We have run the gamut of the marques and nationalities, English, German, Italian, and lately a succession of Japanese. I prefer my cars to be fast and flashy, and so does Pan.
Nor is a love of cars incongruous to the neighborhood, although the general preference is for the simpler makes, without too many electronic gizmos. A century ago most of the men of these parts were, when they not were sailors at sea, vocationally concerned with horses in one way or another, and for many of their descendants the internal combustion engine seems to have replaced the ceffyl as their speciality. In innumerable sheds behind houses men are tinkering with old cars, repainting old motorbikes, cannibalizing them, bartering them or buying them for a song. The automobile sits easily within the Welsh culture. The most prominent playwright of Eifionydd pays an annual visit to the TT motorcycle races in the Isle of Man, and when Twm’s Morris Minor recently needed some attention to its bodywork, he was able to pay for the job with a poem in honor of the mechanic’s wife.
So the cars of Trefan Morys are perfectly at home. Our yard is not large and not at all grand, but it is hedged by tall trees—a sycamore, some ash trees and infant oaks, hollies, hazels, hors
e chestnuts, a pine or two—and the garden beds around it are themselves meant to suggest the bottom of a wood. Honeysuckle, the Welsh symbol of fidelity, clambers here and there, the ivy traditionally stands for permanence, and I hope there is a rowan somewhere about, to guard us against demons. There is certainly a white quartz stone set in a wall, essential for warding off the Evil Eye. All is deliberately haphazard, in keeping with my taste for mock simplicity—the kind of innocence that masks extreme sophistication. In the spring snowdrops, primroses and daffodils sprout all over the place, among scrambled rhododendrons and azaleas. Here and there blackberry brambles show signs of aggression. Ferns proliferate not in the domesticated way the Victorians loved, but with an almost drunken abundance. Ivy and Virginia creeper threaten to smother the house. There is so much vibrant life here, of plants and insects and small animals, that if I were a poet or philosopher exiled here for my convictions, like Virgil at Constantia, I would be happy enough for the rest of my life contemplating a few square feet of Trefan yard.
It is an untidy yard. Formal gardeners would hate it, and one lady, inquiring with interest the name of a plant I was nurturing in an earthen pot, went quite pale when I told her it was an anonymous weed I happened to like. There are flowerpots on the doorstep, and peat sacks, and there is a clothes dryer and a white iron bench with Ibsen often asleep on it—Ibsen the terror of the local fauna, taking time off from his murderous prowls around the bushes in search of shrews and field mice. A couple of stone sheds in one corner were once dog kennels. In the other corner the disintegrating stone heads of a lion and a unicorn are refugees from the former offices of the Times in the City of London. An acquaintance of mine, passing up Blackfriars Street one day, saw the royal crest, which stood above its doors just about to be demolished by navvies with electric drills, and rescued its supporters for this gentle Welsh retirement: Now above their heads a stunted hawthorn, having seeded itself on a narrow stone shelf, stands in tribute like a flowering bonsai. Two stone plaques are affixed to the house—winged lions of St. Mark, one from Split in Dalmatia, the other from Venice itself. They are modern replicas, but in order to attract a lichenous sense of age to them, for months I regularly doused them in yogurt, and now they look quite venerable.