Allegorizings Read online

  Allegorizings

  Jan Morris

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A division of W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  This book is dedicated in love and amusement to

  Y MORYSIAD

  My life’s friend

  ELIZABETH

  Our children

  MARK, HENRY, SUKI, TWM and VIRGINIA

  Our grandchildren

  ANGHARAD, BEGW, DYDDG, GWION, JESS, MEILYR, RUBEN, SAM and TUDWAL

  also IBSEN the Norsk Skogkatt

  CONTENTS

  EDITOR’S FOREWORD

  PRE-MORTEM

  One

  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE?

  IN THE MIDST OF REALITY

  LOVE AMONG THE PROVERBS

  TRANSCENDENTAL TOWN

  HYPOCHONDRIA

  THE TRAVELLER

  MESSAGES OF BLOOMSDAY

  A PATRON SINNER

  Two

  SHIPS OF YOUTH

  US AGAINST THEM

  THE FURRIER

  STYLE IN ADVERSITY

  THE SOIL OR THE SOUL?

  A MAN IN A WINE BAR

  THE NIJINSKI OF GRAMMAR

  SCOTS IN A TRAIN

  PARADISE SOMEWHERE

  Three

  ON TO MATURITY!

  STEAMBOAT PLEASURES

  INVISIBLE LOYALTY

  DREAMING DREAMS?

  O MANHATTAN!

  TRAVELS WITH AN OLD DOG

  THE HERO

  SNEEZING

  A NIGHT AT THE SEASIDE

  Four

  THE CRUISE OF THE GERIATRICA

  HERE’S YOUR JERSEY, BOY!

  AMERICANS ON A TRAIN

  MARMALADENESS

  THE POET

  BOUILLOTTISME

  CONCEPTUAL TRAVEL

  A BAG OF TRICKS

  Five

  GROWING OLD RELUCTANTLY

  FALLING OVER

  THE MANAGING DIRECTOR

  KING OF THE BEASTS

  AH, CALIFORNIA!

  THE MOUNTAINEER

  RIDING THE ICON

  IN THE LAND OF THE LONG WHITE CLOUD

  A BRIDGE TO EVERYWHERE

  SEX AND ALL THAT

  ON WHISTLING

  ON KISSING

  A PLEA FOR BAD LANGUAGE

  ON KINDNESS

  ON GETTING OLD: AN AGNOSTIC SERMON

  POST-MORTEM

  Editor’s Foreword

  OUR INITIAL CONVERSATION began, coincidentally, on February 14, 2001. It was a fortuitous date, and its significance in retrospect would have pleased Jan Morris—although she would have no doubt frowned upon how commercialized Valentine’s Day had become in the United States, a country with which she seemed to have a love-hate relationship that endured to the very end of her life.

  “Dear Mr. Weil, I wonder if you remember me,” she began coyly. “I was reminded of you the other day because I was approached . . . about the idea of publishing a collection of my travel writing, and I remembered your own kind suggestion four or five years ago of a Selected Works (or something rather less grand!). I can’t remember what happened to the notion, but as I have now delivered . . . my final book, to be published in October on my 75th birthday, this might be a less impertinent moment than most to ask if by any chance you’re still interested, though in a new incarnation,” she wrote.

  And with whimsical understatement, she added, “Probably not, but perhaps you’d be kind enough to drop me an e-mail anyway. I hope you’re having fun in the 3rd Millennium,” then concluded with “All best from Wales and from JAN MORRIS,” the intentional capitalization of her name perhaps a reflection of her concern that I might no longer know who she was.

  As it turned out, I had approached Ms. Morris in the past, not just once but at least once annually, inquiring at the office of her then–literary agent, A. P. Watt, on my annual buying trip to London. Worried that this was not enough, I also wrote to her at home in Wales, as those were the days when emails were just starting to revolutionize the world and Morris somehow did not seem like the kind of person who favored electronic communication. If I heard back at all, it was always a polite decline from her agent. By 2001, though, she suddenly seemed keen to establish a relationship. In fact, as I would later learn, she had even called my previous employer, St. Martin’s Press, which I had departed in 1998, so determined was she to track me down.

  The notion that I might not remember her was, of course, preposterous. I had already discovered Jan’s books while still a teenager. Inexplicably attuned to good writing style when I was in high school, I had been magnetized by the melodious rhythms of her language. Although this was around the time when she came out with the autobiographical Conundrum, about her gender reassignment, I suppose I was that rare reader who was as much transfixed by the prose as by the contents. Honestly, I would study her writing sentence by sentence, and in doing so was mesmerized by the brilliance of her imagery and her seemingly effortless ability to interweave human history into her “reportage,” a word that feels inadequate to describe her essays that appeared in various magazines, especially Rolling Stone.

  It is not surprising, then, that I immediately responded to her Valentine’s Day entreaty—yet I recall feeling especially nervous, worried about how my own prosaic language might sound to the master, whose writing had beguiled me numberless times. Perhaps I should try to ventriloquize her written voice? I quickly realized that this thought was as absurd as my trying to climb Mt. Everest, a feat that she had accomplished and reported on as a young man in 1953. I then brought her one-paragraph email to my editorial board and was told that Morris would have to write up a proposal for, as she called it, “A Book About the Late 20th-Century World,” an anthology that would combine her finest travel pieces into a geographic portrait of the world she had visited.

  With characteristic alacrity, Jan put together a few pages and an outline a few days later. “During the second half of the 20th century I travelled almost constantly around the world, first as a reporter, then as an independent writer of books and essays,” she began. “I think it could be claimed that during that period I wrote about more places than anyone else, and I was in a position to witness, and to reflect in my writing, many of the great historical events of the time,” among which she listed the first ascent of Mt. Everest, the 1956 Sinai War, the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, the South African Treason Trial (involving Nelson Mandela), the construction—and later, destruction—of the Berlin Wall, and the British handover of Hong Kong to China. “As I experienced all this first as a man, then as a woman, it might also be said (although I wouldn’t want to make much of this) that my viewpoint was unique,” she noted while emphasizing that this was not to be a new autobiography.

  Presenting her outline to my colleagues, I said that The World: Life and Travel 1950–2000, as she chose to call it, would become a retrospective portrait of the late twentieth-century world that would be, as Jan put it, “filtered of course through my own particular vision,” since she was “more concerned with the feel of it than with what happened to it.” Her emphasis on style and sensibility pleased me greatly, as it did my editorial board. I was approved to offer a modest advance, which she and her agents immediately accepted, the result being our first collaboration.

  The notion, however, that this would be her last book turned out to be preposterous. Nothing could prevent Jan from returning to the proverbial inkwell, and although the volumes became slenderer, there would be five additional books that we would publish over a period of nearly two full decades—and that’s not including Allegorizings.

  You can appreciate my surprise when Jan confided to me one day in 2007 that she was writing a “posthumous book,” one that cou
ld only be published after her death, which she hoped would not be for many years. It was not, she emphasized, the sort that contained salacious revelations—nothing like, say, E. M. Forster’s posthumous autobiographical novel, Maurice. It may be an understatement to say that this was one of the strangest requests in my forty-year editing career, which now extends to well over 750 books. But after a contract was signed for Allegorizings, we went through several rounds of edits, followed by another round of copyediting, after which Jan reviewed both the copyedited manuscript and the first-pass galley pages, and then approved the book design and the jacket itself.

  Upon one of her numerous visits to New York—in which she typically wore a slacks or a pair of blue jeans; a bulky, off-white sweater; and an obligatory string of pearls (which I suspected were not real, as I knew that Jan had virtually no interest in jewelry or the international vagaries of fashion)—she eagerly agreed to take part in an interview about Allegorizings, the proviso being that its contents could only be released upon publication. The interview, arranged by my colleagues Louise Brockett and Steve Colca, took place in our chairman’s office. Unfortunately, because of time considerations, we were unable to go to lunch at the fabled Four Seasons Restaurant, whose soaring modernist architecture appealed to Morris. A meal there could easily become a three-hour Lucullan event, one in which the owners, the chefs, and old-time waiters would dutifully queue up to greet Jan at her regular corner table in the Pool Room. They were, of course, grateful for the many times she had written about the establishment, but it was evident from their joy and the pile of lagniappes on our table that they regarded her as a beloved member of the Four Seasons family.

  While an air of joviality characterized all our meetings—evident as well in all of Jan’s encounters with waiters, desk clerks, office receptionists, bellhops, and regular folks on the streets of Manhattan—she turned more pensive and reflective during this “posthumous interview.” It quickly became clear that Jan was hardly unaware of the challenges and hardships that had shaped her life, be it her struggle with her gender or the death of her beloved daughter, yet she quipped right at the beginning of the interview that “one of the advantages of writing a posthumous book is that you’re never going to have to read the reviews.” She observed that she had “been contemplating death for a long time,” adding, “Don’t we all?” For more than thirty years, she noted, she had kept a carved gravestone under the stairs of her house, inscribed with these words: “Here are two friends, Jan and Elizabeth Morris, at the end of one life”—the implication being that she and her life partner “were so close that we live one life anyway.”

  The posthumous book that had initially begun as a series of letters to a child she and Elizabeth had lost was scrapped as too “pompous.” “It wasn’t entertaining, it was somber and gloomy,” so she felt she had to do “something totally different,” a book that would have to “express it all between the lines, so to speak.” Aware that Allegorizings contained no “hideous secrets,” Jan felt nonetheless that “it’s a very intimate book, it’s the most personal book I have ever written . . . and it contains aspects of myself that I don’t particularly want to share among my contemporaries . . . no revelations in it at all . . . except if you read between the lines.”

  Claiming that she had “been a superficial writer really . . . a flibbertigibbet kind of writer,” Jan commented that she had “had a great life” and that she had “gotten through life enjoying herself very much.” But in the case of her posthumous work, it was important to emphasize allegory because the “one thing about allegory is that often—if you explore it—you’ll find on the other side of almost any substance an altogether different kind of substance,” for if you “have turned the plate around a bit . . . you see more of what is behind and less of what’s in front.” Yet despite the theme of allegory, Jan maintained that the book’s chief message was to “keep smiling,” and that it was “a hopeful book in a way,” one in which she intended to show that “merriment comes through as a matter of fact in most situations in life,” that “if you keep smiling, you’ll get through to the other side.”

  Alas, Jan did not die as she hoped she would. She had expressed a wish to “take a bottle of burgundy on a winter day and go out on one of the mountains around the home and settle down” to drink the contents of the bottle “and perhaps have some music on a record player and freeze to death. And I’d have left notes at home to say exactly where to discover the corpse. That seems a very nice way of exiting,” and then she laughed. As to a belief in an afterlife, Morris was downright skeptical: “It’s inconceivable to me that these old medieval ideas of crime and punishment and virtue rewarded can conceivably be true. They’re perfect nonsense, aren’t they,” she asked rhetorically, adding “don’t believe a word of it. The only way to look at the afterlife is with a sense of wonder and a sense of mystery and a sense of this allegory,” posing a philosophical fillip that “maybe we are [already] in the afterlife now.”

  Over a period of more than an hour, Jan ranged widely on everything from Sir Edmund Hillary’s funeral to her regret at not having pursued a career as a novelist to the impossibility of redemption. Never far from her consciousness was the toponymic importance of Wales, a “powerfully centripetal force” in her own life and on “people who have experienced it all.” It was her wish that her entire corpus of books be considered her literary legacy, and that her Pax Britannica trilogy be remembered as her most substantial work—because, as only Morris could comment, “it concerns a period that is now as dead as a dodo.” In retrospect, it was a remarkable observation to make in 2009, more than a decade before Britain’s exit from the European Union.

  There was one subject, however, heavily reflected in the writing of Allegorizings and in other late Morris books, that was never unambiguous: Jan’s adamantine belief in the power of kindness to help solve the immense problems of the world. Essentially challenging the Darwinian emphasis on warfare and “survival of the fittest,” Jan was certain that we had to usher in a fourth world of people “who believe in kindness as the ultimate virtue.” Hardly superficial or Panglossian in her thinking, she maintained that “the urge towards some new sort of humane, less politicized way of running societies is common to nearly all of us.” In fact, she believed in the power of old ladies to effect such a movement. “If they are anything like me,” they must “realize that when everything else is scarred, what is left is a yearning for goodness and kindness.”

  And so, the Valentine’s Day message to a potential editor that began so innocently twenty years ago became something far more significant and urgent over time, a resounding philosophical statement—from Wales, of course—for all of us to believe in the transformative power of compassion with the knowledge that kindness is “the ultimate virtue.”

  Robert Weil

  HUDSON, NEW YORK

  JANUARY 2021

  Pre-mortem

  LONG YEARS AGO my Elizabeth and I lost a daughter, only a few weeks old and named Virginia. My own grief was soon half-assuaged by the arrival of a substitute, as it were, in the person of her younger sister Suki, merry as a dancing star and a delight to me for ever after.

  Still, it remained a sadness for me that I had never got to know Virginia, and in my old age, feeling intimations of mortality, I resolved to write a series of high-minded letters to her, rather in the manner of Lord Chesterfield addressing his son. The more I thought about the project, though, the more sententious it sounded, and the less I doubted my qualifications for writing it. If I had any moral principles to declare, I came to realize, they were extremely simplistic. First, there was the supreme importance of kindness as a universal guide to life, by-passing all the mumbo-jumbo of organized religion: secondly, the conviction that almost nothing is only what it seems—everything, in fact, is allegory. This would have made a short, didactic work, so I abandoned it, and being about to become an octogenarian anyway, told everyone that I was not going to publish any more books. They mostly smil
ed indulgently, but I meant it. However over the years I went on writing articles and lectures and meditations and travel pieces and miscellaneous essays; and as I advanced further towards senility it seemed to me in retrospect that all this material possessed a sort of crepuscular unity.

  If only between the lines, I realized, it was bound together by a vague but pervasive literary usage. I was right in my second moral principle: all that time I had been allegorizing!

  SEEING ALLEGORIES IN things, or making allegories of them, has not always been admired. Medieval theologians, for instance, accused heretics of allegorizing Holy Scripture, just as modern scholars upset fundamentalists by seeing most of the Bible as allegory. For that matter allegory itself has its opponents, especially as a literary instrument. The Oxford Dictionary defines it dispassionately as “the description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance,” but it is easy to disguise half knowledge, or muddy thinking, or lack of inspiration, as expressions of allegory. Robert Musil once defined writers with a weakness for the form as people who “suppose everything to mean more than it has any honest claim to mean.”

  I am one of them. I long ago came to think that my life itself was one long allegory, and the older I get, the more my conviction grows. I did not, however, deliberately foster the device. It just crept up on me. Some of the literary subjects of my later decades have been half allegorical from the start—America, for example, and railway trains. Some are subtly tinged with allegory. Some reveal themselves as allegory as I think about them. Some, I admit, I have supposed to mean more than they have any honest claim to mean, and some are really more analogous than allegorical. But I see now that in almost all of them, allegory in one kind or another, the belief that most things in life possess multiple meanings, has subtly affected my perceptions and broadened my vision. Ortega y Gasset once suggested that we all carry upon our backs, like a curled-up roll of film (he was writing in pre-digital times), the legacy of our whole lives. My experience has been that, as I entered my eighties, I began to review that long exposure with new interest: and so I came to detect, especially in later years of the film, this preoccupation with the figurative.