by Jan Morris
They had evidently had enough silly quarrelling for the time being, so I suggested there was room enough in the garden for both of them, wished them good luck anyway and returned to my own footling preoccupations.
DAY 37
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The literary people at the New York Times, who have been good to me for many years, last week invited me to review for them what sounded like a real blockbuster of historical scholarship. I could not face the task of reading it, let alone adequately reviewing it, and so gratefully declined the commission.
As I did so, though, it occurred to me that I have a book of my own coming out at just about the same time as that monumental work, so utterly its opposite in scale, scholarship and purpose as to be almost comical. If I am patently not of the calibre to review the one, I am certainly qualified, thought I, to review the other, so I wrote to the dear people at the NYT to suggest I review my own book instead.
They apparently thought not, although I assured them my self-critique would not merely be scrupulously fair, but might even be rather bitchily hostile to my own style – I do know my faults, you know. And the more I considered the matter, the more interesting I thought it would be if authors regularly wrote their own reviews – in tandem, perhaps, with independent critics, side by side on the book pages.
My own forthcoming volume, as it happens, is the first collection of the very same diary thoughts that you are reading now, and believe me, I am all too aware of its failings, besides being pleased with its successes. My amateur self-review would not necessarily be in riposte to the professional critique on the same page, and anyway, it might be fun for one and all to compare the two and spurn or buy the book in consequence.
But yes, it’s true, I have to admit that when it comes to literary self-assessment my moral standards might sometimes slip. Like most writers (not all), I’m only human. That’s evidently what the New York people thought, anyway, and they are no fools.
DAY 38
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There was a programme on TV yesterday about the early years of the American space programme, when NASA had no commercial competitors and its heroes were nearly all military men. Tom Wolfe, in 1979, wrote a book about them called The Right Stuff, and for me the chief pleasure of yesterday’s programme was meeting a few of them as they are now, when rocket flights to an international space station are commonplace and private capitalists plan tourism in space and colonial settlements on Mars.
Those first American space pioneers, though, really had to be heroes, and as one of their contemporaries, more or less, it was a delight to find them recognizably decent heroes still. It’s nearly seventy years since I first stepped ashore in the United States, and one of the sadnesses of our times, to my mind, is the progressive disintegration of the American reputation since then.
There are reasons for it, God knows, but still I like to think that at the core of America – which is to my mind more than a mere nation, but a philosophical and artistic conception – the grandeur prevails. The idea of the Special Relationship between America and Britain, now in tatters, still means a lot to me, and as the poor old world stumbles on in chaos, it is a comfort to me to know that over there the right stuff is still around.
DAY 39
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Being of simple tastes, I love a good tune, especially when it comes from the genius of a Bach, a Beethoven, a Mozart, a Wagner or a Puccini, and so carries with it the suggestion of immortality. But I enjoy a good contemporary show tune too, and one in particular has lately been in my head. It’s called ‘I Dips Me Lid’, and I love it partly because it’s very catchy and whistleable, but chiefly because it’s overwhelmingly Australian.
I first heard it when I was working on a book about Sydney in the 1960s, and a hit show of the day down there was a musical called The Sentimental Bloke, with music by the Australian composer Albert Arlen and lyrics based upon a violently popular collection of poems by C. J. Dennis, who had died in 1938. My feelings about Australia were ambiguous – I had been singularly unpleasant about Sydney when I first got there, years before – but I did always enjoy the elemental side of Australian society, the raucousness and the merriment of it.
It has mostly been smoothed over now, as Australia becomes a mature and influential Power. It was still rampant then, though, and its old spirit is revived for me whenever I find myself whistling or humming a theme song of that old musical – ‘I dips me lid to ya, sweet Doreen. I’ll be your bloke if you want, Doreen.’ It is hardly a subtle composition, but I like to think that it might easily please Mozart, Puccini or even old Wagner.
But by the 1990s, all the same, when I published my book at last, with the Bloke still in my mind, I often felt something more insidious about the Australian presence, more haunting, more subtle; and not having read my own words lately, I have just been looking them up, while Messrs Dennis and Arlen, out of the Australian past, still boisterously entertain me on the record player. These are the words I have found at the very end of my book, published in 1992 to a mixed reception, especially in Sydney:
In the velvet sensual darkness on the harbour shore in Sydney, I sometimes feel myself haunted by a sense of loss, as though time is passing too fast, and frail black people are watching me out of the night somewhere, leaning on their spears …
O good on you, dear Australia, whatever you think of me. I dips me lid to ya out of your crude but lovable past, your complex presence and your surely noble future.
DAY 40
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Of course I bow before talents and intuitions grander than my own – of course I do. If Shakespeare had written a soap opera, I would watch it awestruck by the range of his genius. I am, nevertheless, totally unconvinced by the purposes of the Bulgarian American artist Christo, whose latest offering, I gather, is a construction of 7,506 barrels to float horizontally upon the Serpentine in London throughout the summer, and to be named The London Mastaba, after an ancient Egyptian category of tomb.
Christo worked in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne-Claude – they were born on the same day in 1935 – until her death in 2009, and their joint output was colossal. I experienced some of it myself, and have never wavered in my judgement that much of it was perfectly nonsensical. It consisted chiefly of vast temporary transformations, sometimes in transparent wrappings, of entire existing constructions or landscapes, notably the Reichstag in Berlin, a twenty-four-mile-long strip of land in California, Central Park in New York, an even larger stack of oil barrels in the United Arab Emirates and a vast inflatable object in Germany which was lifted by two of the largest cranes in Europe, was visible from 25 kilometres away, lasted for ten hours and had, so far as I can make out, no discernible purpose whatsoever.
Well, the world disagreed with me. There was much, much more to marvel at. In Australia the couple were invited to wrap the entire shoreline of a bay at Sydney in synthetic fabric, and in Colorado $400,000 was spent on manufacturing 14,000 square metres of cloth to be hung on steel scales and supported by 29,000 tons of concrete across a valley in the Rocky Mountains (it lasted less than two days, before a gale blew it down …). The mayor of New York called the 7,000-odd saffron fabric ‘gates’ the couple erected all over Central Park ‘one of the most exciting public art projects ever put on anywhere in the world’, and everywhere administrations clamoured to be honoured by the possession of a work of art by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Their wrapping jobs were, one eminent critic declared, ‘revelation through concealment’.
The creators themselves were blameless. If they became rich by their creations, it was only, so to speak, indirectly – they generally financed their own projects and they never demanded entry fees. Their various purposes, they said, had no hidden meanings, but were simply intended to be beautiful in themselves, and to make people see familiar things in a new way.
Well and good. I believe them
. I like the sound of them too, and I admire the colossal chutzpah of it all. But it still cuts no aesthetic ice with me. I believe the immense works of what their connoisseurs call Environmental Art to be virtuoso baloney and, having glimpsed it already for myself in New York and in Berlin, shall not be boarding a train from Wales to marvel at those floating barrels in the Serpentine.
As if they would care!
DAY 41
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Last night before I went to sleep I finished my reading of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, 960 pages of it, in the English translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude.
Long ago, in another copy, in a bar in Trieste and in an evidently tipsy scrawl, I scribbled the opinion that this was the best book I had ever read, and on the whole I think it still. Mind you, I strongly suspect that when I expressed that youthful and evidently inebriated critique, I had not actually read the book all the way through. I fear that like many another reader of Anna Karenina, the young Jan Morris had only got as far as Anna’s heart-rending suicide (page 905 in my present edition). And in my opinion now, the best of the masterpiece was yet to come.
You will no doubt remember the young gentleman farmer Nicholas Levin, who has been a gentle, questioning presence throughout the book, but who in the end comes into his own as a symbolic master of final ceremonies. He it is who, alone beneath the stars of a Russian night sky, finds in the firmament some solution to the mass of problems, contradictions, mysteries and ironies which have challenged us during the long journey that is the reading of this marvellous work.
The simple power of goodness, Nicholas realizes, is the answer to those mighty conundrums – just that, however it is expressed or interpreted. And on the last page of my present copy of Anna Karenina I have signed off with no more than a grateful tick and the single word ‘Kindness’, which is how I myself prefer to interpret that message from the stars.
PS By the way, I see I wrote in that same volume, in 1999, that it’s the last I could ever buy at James Armistead’s famous Tillman Place Bookshop in San Francisco, because Mr Armistead was closing the store. He had written a farewell signature for me in the book too, together with a receipt for $22.79.
DAY 42
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Rooting around the junk of my library this morning I came across a piece I wrote in 1973 for the London magazine Encounter (which was, as a matter of fact, though I didn’t know it then, secretly subsidized by the CIA). It was a long essay about the British Royal Navy, which was for me a subject of profound romantic loyalty.
Reading the piece today, a generation later, has strangely moved me. The Navy means little to the British people now, and its very particular allure has long been forgotten, but perhaps you will allow me to quote the very ending of that old essay, for a glimpse of its meaning then.
It seems I had been loitering about the naval memorial on the Hoe at Plymouth, marvelling at its immense roster of fleets and far-flung battles, and its long, long lists of the dead down the generations. A group of chattering schoolchildren, with their teachers, then arrived in the little courtyard before the monument. At once (so I wrote) a silence fell upon them, and this is how I ended the piece:
They stood there not so much aghast as incredulous. The grandeur, the pathos, the scale, the sacrifice of it all seemed beyond their conception, as though they were memorials of another civilization that stood before them, commemorating the sailors of some foreign, half-forgotten country. Whose were those names? they seemed to be asking, as they stared silently at the slabs; and in my heightened mood of pity and exaltation I thought I heard a voice answer them out of the sea: ‘They are your own, my children …’
Forty-five years on and I have questions of my own. What were those battles for? Who were the enemies? Why were they fighting? Why did they die? And whose voice was it, I wonder now, that called out of the sea that day?
DAY 43
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Dear me, I hate even to think it, but is democracy past its sell-by date? In the dis-United States, in Atatürk’s ex-libertarian Turkey, in Germany and Italy and Hungary and even dear France, nationalist bigots seem to be rampant. Above all in Britain, once the champion and standard-bearer of the ideology, the democratic ideal has apparently let us down. Faced with an ultimate challenge as serious in its kind as the Second World War itself, the British nation, in the early summer of 2018, flounders helpless and pathetic before the challenge not of a hostile power, but of democracy itself.
Not so long ago, its Government put before the people a simple democratic choice: did they or did they not wish to remain within the structure of kindred nations called the European Union? The people responded democratically. No, they declared, they did not, and so the retreat called Brexit plunged their once-splendid nation into ignominy.
I don’t think we can deny the fact that democracy was the cause. So far as I know, the referendum was honest and straightforward, but we voters really had no idea what immense political and economic tangles would be involved in the withdrawal from Europe. Of course we didn’t. We were simply invited to vote yes or no, and by a majority we voted no. It was a simple, genuinely democratic process, and it was disastrous.
Yesterday, I see from the news, thousands of people paraded through London demanding that whatever exit to the quagmire our democratically elected Government eventually proposes, it should be subject to –
To – to what? Why, to another referendum, that’s what, five years on, by the same electorate, in the good old democratic way.
DAY 44
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Alas, there is no denying that an unwelcome stranger has come to live with us at Trefan Morys. Dementia has latched on to my dear Elizabeth, and although much of the time she seems perfectly OK, in spasms it inevitably affects much of our daily lives – as it is plaguing the lives of countless ageing persons everywhere. It is horrible, but sometimes it has a laugh to it, and here’s an example:
I was on the radio yesterday morning, talking about the lost British Empire, as is all too often my wont. Though I say it myself, the programme seemed entertaining and rather touching, and since it was to be repeated yesterday evening I thought Elizabeth would like to hear it. After supper, then, we settled on a sofa, switched the radio on and heard me perform. There was a selection of music in the performance, and the whole thing seemed to me quite enjoyable, so at the end of the half-hour I asked my dear old friend what she thought of it.
Well, it was all right, she thought. Went on a bit. Could have been better. And anyway, she added, who was that person talking?
Ah well, bless her heart, one has to laugh – in dementia veritas!
DAY 45
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Snatches of Gossip
Yesterday our little town of Porthmadog, a couple of miles from our front door, was the hottest place in Britain! Can that be true? Of course it can – it was on the news – everyone is talking about it! It will make Porthmadog famous! Some people say it was the hottest place in Europe, if not the whole world!
And did you hear about poor Mrs B too? She’s very poorly with her arthritis.
DAY 46
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And talking of Porthmadog, I’ve been out in the sun leafing through an album of photographs of the town as it was in its heyday, between the 1820s and the 1920s. It is not one of your ancient Welsh towns, like Cricieth, still closer to us, whose history and style are dominated by the medieval castle above our bay. No, Porthmadog was a creation of the worldwide Industrial Revolution, when building materials were in universal demand and the simple slate quarries in the north Welsh mountains suddenly became big business. Railways were built to serve them, and a little coastal village nearby was transformed into a thriving Welsh port, with its own shipyards and business enterprises, its own particular Welsh society and its own fleet of sch
ooners to take high-class Welsh slate to the far corners of the globe.
It is still a thriving little town, though the last ships used its port in the 1980s and it is now dominated by supermarkets, tourism, charity shops and Englishness. Through the medium of those old pictures, though, I have been trying to imagine myself living here four or five generations ago.
It looks to me, for a start, as though it must have been a very assured little community. There is no suggestion of doubt in these pictures. If I imagine myself a citizen of Porthmadog in my great-grandfather’s time, say, I think I would have been full of zing. The faces of the boys and girls in the school photographs look at least as confident and cheerful as they do now, and the little town that awaited them in life was a hive of robust activity – very Welsh in style and language, but sturdily adapting to the demands of the time.
There was no unemployment, no cruel poverty, the chapels were full of believers, speculators and entrepreneurs thrived. Ambitious young seamen signed on at William Griffith’s navigation school by the harbour, and on the floor below Mr Casson’s bank had iron-barred windows, just in case. Mr Morris the chemist had two separate shops; a Pike family business ran Pike’s newsagent in the High Street (and still does, actually, as was confirmed for me by the present incumbent this very morning). There was a civic brass band, and a town orchestra of some fifty elegantly hatted and suited performers, and football and cricket teams, and of course an enthusiastic local eisteddfod. If the fourth little girl from the left on the second row of the Tremadog Board school photograph, 1905, seems to be giggling rather too impertinently, I’m sure she was forgiven.