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Jan Morris: The Art of the Essay (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Jan Morris

Jan Morris writes about place.  She's also got Style and an incredible Voice.  Her interview overshadows even Capote's.

Morris's work explores Empire and the rise and decline of cities and states.  She resists being called a "travel writer." The label "travel literature" is somewhat better, if awkward.  Her preferred word: "belletrist, an old-fashioned word."  Born in 1926 as James Humphrey Morris, Morris entered the 9th Queen's Lancers, one of Britain's best cavalry regiments and toured the Empire.  Journalism (he reported on the first conquest of Mount Everest), then books followed.  The books include: The World of Venice (1960), The Road to Hundersfield: A Journey to Five Continents (1963), the Pax Britannica trilogy, Manhattan '45 (1987), Last Letter from Hav (1985), Fisher's Face (1995), Contact! A Book of Glimpses (2009), and Conundrum ('70s) and Pleasures of a Tangled Life (1989), the last two chronicling examining the sex change she undertook in the 1960's and '70s.

In Morris's work, "place" is built out of geography, smells, foods, history, people, and herself.  Viewing her point of view as "escapist" (since she has never wanted to exhibit a moral stance, even with her work on the British Empire), she sets out to evoke, not analyze.  Speaking of the Pax Britannica trilogy, she defines what she wants to capture: "The looks and smells and sensations of it."  That is what interests her, and such details enliven the interview.  Throughout it, you witness her getting carried away (with the wish -- my wish, at least -- of being carted off by her):

Of course, there is one small distortion in my kind of history in that it aims to entertain.  So it does in effect ignore little matters like economics.  But I have a story, too.  In Pleasures, I have a piece about first enjoying food and drink.  Until I was in y mid-twenties, I didn't take much interest in them.  But when I lunched in Australia at the famous cartoonist George Molnar's house on the lawn overlooking Sydney Harbor, the meal was something quite simple but delicious: pâté, crusty rolls, a bottle of wine, an apple, this sort of thing.  There was something about the way this man presented and served the food.  He crunched the bread in sort of a lascivious way.  He spread the pâté kind of unguently.  He almost slurped the wine.  I thought it was so marvelous.  When I came to describe it, I could see it all again so clearly: the dancing sea, the clear Australian sky, the green lawn; above us were the wings of the Sydney opera house, like a benediction over this experience.  It was only when I finished the chapter that I remembered that the Sydney opera house hadn't been built yet!

As with much nonfiction,  the writing of place depends on a strong memory and grasp of details.

Morris emphasizes also the power of one's perspective.  The author must be taken into account.  Given's Morris's history, the interviewer pushes this issue of author perspective a few times, wanting to know if and how Morris's writing has changed as a result of her sex change.  Morris's answer offers a lesson that skims over gender differences and illuminates a working method :

I used to think that as Jan I tend to concentrate more on the smaller things, the details, rather than on the grand sweep of things.  But as I've got older, I've come to think that the grand sweep and the details are exactly the same; the macrocosm and the microcosm are identical.

The macrocosm and the microcosm are identical.  The power of a detail to capture the sweeping historical moment.  Let me give two examples of this from the interview.  What strikes me most about them is how rooted these details are in Morris's life experiences -- just as much as they are rooted in the larger world Morris questions and engages.  Moreover, Morris never flinches from acknowledging how innocence or experience inflects her perspective.  This is something I find in all strong writing about travel and place -- the writer's innocence and experience is part of the story, no matter how grand the story seems.

First, the decline of an empire:

I'm old enough to remember the empire when it still was the empire.  I was brought up in a world whose map was painted very largely red, and I went out into the world when I was young in a spirit of imperial arrogance.  I felt, like most British people my age, that I was born to a birthright of supremacy; out I went to exert that supremacy.  But gradually in the course of my later adolescence and youth my views about this changed.

I was living in what was then Palestine, and I had the occasion to call upon the district commissioner of Gaza.  He was an Englishman.  It was a British mandate in those days, and he was the British official in charge of that part of Palestine.  I knocked on his door and out he came.  Something about this guy's hat made me think twice about him.  It was kind of a bohemian hat.  Rather a floppy, slightly rakish or raffish hat; a very, very civilian hat -- a sort of fawn color, but because it was bleached by imperial suns and made limp by tropical rainstorms all of the empire was in that hat.  He seemed to be rather a nice man.  I admired him.  He had none of my foolish, cocky arrogance at all.  He was a gentleman in the old sense of the word.  And through him, and through meeting some of his colleagues, I began to see that my imperial cockiness was nonsense and that the empire, in its last years at least, wasn't a bit arrogant, it wasn't a bit cocky.  People like that were simply trying to withdraw from an immense historical process and hand it over honorably to its successors.  Because of this, my view of the empire changed.

Second, the decline of a city (that had already declined from a city-state):

I fall in and out of love with Venice very frequently as a matter of fact.  I've known Venice since the end of the Second World War.  For most of that time, Venice has been trying to find a role for itself, to be a creative, living city, or to be a kind of museum city that we all go and look at.  At one time it was intended to be a dormitory town for the big industrial complex around the lagoon and Mestre.  That fell through because of pollution, so Venice was out on a limb again.  The attempt to bring it into the modern world had failed.  Then one day I saw that the golden horses of Saint Mark's were no longer on the facade of the basilica.  They'd taken the statues down and put them inside.  Outside they'd placed some dummies . . . good replicas, but without the sheen and the scratches, the age and the magic of the old ones.  I thought, This is the moment when Venice has decided.  It won't be a great diplomatic, mercantile, or political city, nor will it be a great seaport of the East.  Instead it will be a museum that we can all visit.  Maybe that's the right thing for it, anyway.  Age has crept up on it.  It can't do it anymore.  Perhaps that's the answer.  For a time I went along with that, but in the last five or ten years mass tourism has taken such a turn, especially in Europe and particularly in Venice.  It seems to me that the poor old place is too swamped with tourism to survive as even a viable museum unless it takes really drastic steps to keep people out.

It is the mark of a person very intimate with place to notice the restoration and preservation that most awe over for a few seconds before progressing to the next artifact.  I want Morris as my next tour guide.