Allegorizings Read online

  And as the taste for allegory grew upon me, so did a conviction about its ultimate importance. Like most of us as we grow old, I have tinkered with theories about the Meaning of Life, religion and all that, and have reached the conclusion that it is all entirely beyond our reach. We cannot, and never can, know the truth about the great imponderables of life and death. The centuries of theological debate have, alas, been wasted time, and it is futile to pretend that religious faith is anything more than useful discipline and consolation, sustained by wishful thinking.

  Except . . . Just as Christian scholars explain the Bible and its miracles as being purely metaphorical, and doubtless many pious churchmen similarly rationalize their own beliefs in the unbelievable, so perhaps the whole conundrum of existence, all the mysteries of creation, the Milky Way and the armadillo, art and mathematics, even love and hate, even the loss of a child—perhaps the whole damned caboodle is itself no more than some kind of majestically impenetrable allegory.

  ANYWAY, OVER THE years I put this book together. After a peripatetic life I roughly assembled it around a theme of travel; and since it was a book permanently in progress, as it were, to which I would be adding bits, pieces and afterthoughts for the rest of my life, I suggested to my publishers that they might like to publish it posthumously. So it is that, although I am writing this on a sunny spring day in Wales, with lambs outside my window and Elizabeth calling me at this very moment to lunch, by the time you read it I shall be gone!

  Jan Morris

  TREFAN MORYS

  2009

  Allegorizings

  One

  Except perhaps a cat . . .

  The Age of Innocence?

  PEOPLE OFTEN SAY childhood is the age of innocence. Don’t you believe it. There is nobody more cunning, more calculating, often more deceptive, than a human infant (except perhaps a cat, whose most companionable purr can mask a curse . . . ) Haven’t you seen that evil glare in babies’ eyes when, for the fifth time in a row, they throw their rattles out of their prams for the sheer devilish pleasure of making their mothers pick them up? That is the Rattle-Trick, the oldest in the game. Original sin originated in babies, and the seed of malice is innate in them.

  I WAS RECENTLY spending an afternoon doing nothing in particular at an outdoor café in the Piazza Unità in Trieste. This is one of the great children’s playgrounds of Europe, where they can kick their balls about, push their toy prams, make their first attempts at skate-boarding, all among the memorials and pompous architecture of the city.

  Two children particularly interested me that afternoon. One small boy of seven or eight had evidently acquired a new pair of Rollerblades, and was whizzing precariously but ostentatiously around the piazza pursued wherever he went by an adoring younger sister dying to play some part in the adventure. Wherever he whizzed, she tottered after. Whenever he fell over she was there to help. But did he appreciate her loyalty? Did he hell. He only wanted to humiliate her. He was seven or eight years old, and he only wanted to make her feel small. This is called the Squash-Device.

  The other child I had an eye on could only just walk, being I suppose less than two years old. He had grown out of the Rattle-Trick technique. He was too young for Squashery. But from every staggering trundle around the square on the hand of an indulgent parent he returned, I noted, with a mordantly calculating look in his eye. Hardly had he settled then in somebody’s lap, barely had they taken a sip of their cappuccino, hardly had he accepted a snack of a sweet biscuit or a lump of sugar, than he was wriggling and squirming and fidgeting all over again, depriving his unfortunate parents of their brief and hard-earned moment of relaxation. This was the Walk-Ploy, and with a sigh they succumbed to it every time. All through the long afternoon they walked him, on and off, here and there around the piazza, until the sun began to sink into the Adriatic and it was time at last for little Angelo, kicking and giggling and pushing his baseball cap askew, to be taken victorious off to bed. He had won again. They usually do.

  CHILDHOOD, LIKE THE past, is a foreign country. In China it is the sensible practice to lead parties of toddlers through public places tied together with string, and one of the fascinations of Chinese travel is to observe each little face, one after the other, looking up at you with a sweet smile as you pass. Sweet but oddly disturbing, for if you keep an eye on them, you will see that the simper of innocence vanishes instantly when you have passed— to be switched on, like an electric device, by the next child in line. It is as though they are one and all contributors to some collusive subversion—citizens of mischief from somewhere else, rather like goats.

  Original sin it may not really be, but original mischief is organic in children (as in goats), and distinguishes them from us. It is their glory and their privilege. The most uncompelling of Christian icons, to my mind, are those that present the Christ-child as a paragon of demure behaviour, looking back at us from the Madonna’s lap without a thought of bawling for sustenance from her generous breasts, let alone giving her hair a pudgy tug. A purely divine baby might indeed have no such impulses in his head, but the Christ-child, after all, was human too.

  Anyway, you may ask, why am I so conversant with these tricks and ploys of infancy? Because I have helped to bring up five sons and daughters, that’s why, and watched the manoeuvres of eight or nine grandchildren. Besides, I was once an infant myself.

  In the Midst of Reality

  I FOUND MYSELF late one night at a deserted spot ten miles outside Charleston, South Carolina. There a trio of angels, disguised as two sisters and a delightfully loquacious three-year-old called Graham, observed me morosely wondering how on earth I was going to find a taxi into town. Instantly they made room for me in their car and whisked me direct to my hotel. “Thanks for the ride, Graham,” said I when we parted. His reply was courteous, but not being fluent myself in three-year-old Carolinian American, for the life of me I couldn’t understand a word of it.

  When I told a local acquaintance of mine about the angelic intervention, he said: “Oh that’s nothing unusual, we’re all very nice in Charleston.” Actually they weren’t always, as I remember too well from my first visit to the place, back in the 1950s heyday of segregation and southern racism, but now it did seem to be true that the most classy of American cities had found, as it were, niceness.

  It was a Sunday morning, and its lovely streets were immaculate, its citizens all smiles, its very dogs fastidious, as I made my way to morning service at St. Michael’s Episcopalian Church. I should really have gone somewhere more extreme. I should have gone to a Catholic church and been told that it was a sin to vote for a pro-abortion politician. I should have joined an evangelical congregation and had a dose of right-wing fundamentalism. But I chose St. Michael’s sure that in that splendid eighteenth-century fane nobody would be very radical either way, and I was right. The service seemed to me a very exhibition of American restraint. There was a minimum of passion of any kind, politics were not mentioned, and the Reverend Richard Belser’s sermon was a model parable about marital relationships.

  The congregation was discreetly dressed, of course, conversant with the ritual and not at all effusive during the Welcoming. The music was fine, and I was delighted to find tucked into my hymn book the printed programme of a recent wedding at the church, listing in antique italics the names of the seven Groomsmen, the Flower Girl, the two Greeters, the Grandmothers of the Bride, and the Ring Bearer (Howard Wilson Glasgow IV, whose daddy Howard Wilson Glasgow III had been one of the Groomsmen). Could anything be more reassuring?

  When we emerged into the sunshine, too, Charleston seemed almost like a propaganda mock-up of an American city. The market brightly bustled, yachts raced off-shore, margaritas evidently flowed, and among the ambling crowds there were not a few inter-racial couples—imagine that, here in the greatest of the slave ports, within sight of Fort Sumter where the Civil War began! It was like a dream. I had an introduction to one of the most beautiful of the seashore houses, currently being r
estored, and found its owner and her mother awaiting me rather as in a Winslow Homer painting, all sunlit on their balcony above the glistening sea.

  They didn’t mention politics. They didn’t mention the state of the Union. They said how delightful their inter-ethnic workmen were, and told me how skilful and dedicated were the Charleston craftsmen. They weren’t in the least surprised to hear about my rescuing angels. They had a blind dog called Chloe. They gave me iced tea, and they sent me away not exactly rejoicing, as the Reverend Mr. Belser might have put it, but decidedly comforted to find this enclave of the ideal in the midst of reality.

  Love among the Proverbs

  PROVERBS ARE, SO to speak, the catch-phrases of allegory. A favourite of Admiral of the Fleet Lord “Jacky” Fisher, an early twentith-century virtuoso of the catch-phrase, was “The British Navy always travels first class,” regularly quoted to himself as he checked into yet another fashionable spa. I was similarly conditioned during my adolescent years as an officer with the Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers of the British Army. At the end of World War II, when we were not getting messy in our dirty old tanks we were making sure that we ate at the best restaurants and stayed at the poshest hotels.

  Nowhere did we honour Lord Fisher’s proverb more loyally than in Venice, where we happily made the most of our status as members of a victorious occupying army. Many of the best hotels became our officers’ clubs, the most expensive restaurants were pleased to accept our vastly inflated currency (which we had very likely acquired by selling cigarettes in the black market). And in particular, since all the motor-boats of the city had been requisitioned by the military, we rode up and down the Grand Canal, under the Rialto Bridge, over to the Lido, like so many lucky young princes.

  That was long ago, and I have been back to Venice at least a hundred times since. I have never forgotten Fisher’s dictum, and until one day in 2004 I had never once in my life so far neglected it as to take a vaporetto, a public water bus, from the railway station into the centre of the city. There no longer being commandeered motor-boats available, I had invariably summoned one of the comfortably insulated and impeccably varnished water-taxis which, for a notorious fee, would whisk me without hassle to the quayside of my hotel.

  My partner Elizabeth had not been subjected to the same influences of adolescence. She spent her wartime years as a rating in the women’s naval service, decoding signals in an underground war-room, subsisting on baked beans and vile sweet tea from the canteen. But she had been to Venice with me dozens of times, and I thought that by now I had initiated her into my own Fisherian style of travel. However last time we were there she proved unexpectedly retrogressive. “O Jan,” she said as I hastened her towards the line of waiting taxis, ignoring the throbbing vaporetto at its pier, “O Jan why must you always be so extravagant? What’s wrong with the vaporetto? Everyone else goes on it. It’s a fraction of the price. What’s the hurry anyway? What are you proving? We’re not made of money, you know. What’s the point?”

  “The British Navy always—,” I began to say, but she interrupted me with a proverb of her own. “Waste not, want not,” she primly retorted. Ah well, said I to myself, and to Lord Fisher too, anything for a quiet life: and humping our bags in the gathering dusk, tripping over ourselves, fumbling for the right change, dropping things all over the place, with our tickets between our teeth we stumbled up the gangplank on to the already jam-packed deck.

  There we stood for three or four days, edging into eternity, while the vessel pounded its way through the darkness up the Grand Canal, stopping at every available jetty with deafening engine reversals, throwing us about with judderings, clangings and bumps, while we stood there cheek by jowl with a ten thousand others on the cold and windy poop. When at last we debouched on the quayside below San Marco, looking as though we were stepping onto Omaha Beach, Elizabeth turned to me with an air of satisfaction. “There you are, you see. That wasn’t so bad was it? Think of the money we saved! After all these years, I bet you’ll never take one of those exorbitant taxis again. A penny saved is a penny gained.”

  But she spoke this meaningless maxim too late. Pride, I nearly told her, comes before a fall. Standing there upon the quayside slung about with bags and surrounded by suitcases, I had already discovered that on the vaporetto from the railway station somebody had stolen the wallet that contained all our worldly wealth, not to mention all our credit cards. Off we trudged to the police station to report the loss, and as we sat in the dim light among a melancholy little assembly of unfortunates and ne’er-do-wells, how I regretted ignoring that Fisherism! I bet Elizabeth did, too, although she was too proud to admit it.

  I didn’t actually say “Penny wise, pound foolish.” I did not even murmur under my breath the bit about travelling first class. Never hit a woman when she’s down, I told myself. Virtue is its own reward—and as it happened it was rewarded. We never got that wallet back, but the carabinieri were terribly solicitous, and said how sorry they were, and assured us that no Venetian could have done such a thing—it must have been one of those Albanians—and sent us off feeling perfectly comforted, and a little bit sorry for them, actually, so palpable was their sense of civic shame.

  And half an hour later, emotionally drained one way and the other, we turned up on the doorstep of Harry’s Bar, a hostelry I have frequented ever since those glory days of victory, when I was young and easy, as the poet said, and Time let me hail and climb. With Jack Fisher metaphorically beside us—he would have loved Harry’s Bar—we pushed our way through the revolving door and told our sad story to the people inside.

  Lo! they gave us a free dinner (scampi and white wine, with a zabaglioni afterwards) just to cheer us up. For once our proverbs did not conflict. Every cloud, we agreed, as the three of us sat there in the warmth of our first-class corner, really does hide a silver lining.

  Transcendental Town

  COMPLEXITY, OF COURSE, is an aspect of allegory, which is why whenever I’m in France I try to stop off at Tournus. I like the name of it, for one thing—not one of your pinnacled place-names, but tough and stubby. I like the size of the town, with some 7,300 inhabitants. I like its position on the map, at the bottom end of Burgundy, half-way between Paris and Marseilles. But most of all I like the suggestive complexity of its Frenchness.

  On the face of things it has only what one asks of any small French town. It has the Saône River, with the statutory river bridge, pollarded plane trees and idle anglers conventionally catching nothing on its quays. It has an autoroute close by, a celebrated restaurant, a properly pompous Hôtel de Ville, and the double-towered, many-buttressed, austerely arrogant abbey church of St. Philibert. Like so many others in France, the town stands at a junction, where immemorial trade routes converge. The river traffic is mostly pleasure craft nowadays, but often enough a hefty barge churns its way under the bridge, captain’s car stowed on its poop, to recall the water commerce of a thousand years. Every morning a majestic swoosh proclaims the passage of the TGV express on its way to Lyon, and along the autoroute, a couple of miles out of town, the trucks and cars swarm as the legions did before them.

  But for me the fascination of this place is something more elemental than convergence—more a matter of metamorphosis, in fact. Tournus stands elongated along the west bank of the river, and when I contemplate it from the opposite shore at first it looks straightforward enough. At the top of the town, north of the bridge, the towering mass of the abbey quarter confronts me with its protective turrets, a self-confident enclave which once sheltered all the structures of a powerful Benedictine monastery, and still has a firm, privileged look, with ample villas and gardens down to the river. It is the scene one expects of Burgundy, fit to be embroidered by gentlewomen.

  To the left, though, below the bridge, the town unexpectedly runs away down the river-bank in a much less adamant or tapestrian way, and that bold silhouette decays into a fretted jumble of roofs and chimneys, almost anarchic, as though one town, or one culture, has
somehow been transformed into another.

  THIS SENSATION IS confirmed for me when I cross the river and take a walk through the streets. I start at the abbey quarter, which is indeed remarkably disciplined (except when straggly bus-loads of tourists, or coveys of schoolchildren, are shepherded towards the great church). The shops are craft shops, antique shops, galleries, basket-makers; scholarly-looking men are deep in converse; that famous restaurant is there, and my favourite hotel in all France. I may perhaps hear restrained folk music issuing from upstairs practice-rooms—or even gentlewomen’s madrigals?

  But south of the abbey, after the bridge, things are soon very different. Now rock music blares from cars at traffic lights. Women shake dusters out of windows. Prickly old codgers mutter to themselves in bars. Cafés abound, and kebab joints. In the middle of the Place Carnot a parked trailer serves crêpes all day long, and on Saturdays the whole length of the town is turned into a serpentine street market, the alleys smell of cheeses, sausages, curry and bunched flowers, and beyond the Hôtel de Ville a couple of costumed Peruvians play funereal Andean harmonies on their pipes.

  The very structures seem to me to change, as they themselves meander down the streets. Surely something is happening to the architecture? The skyline grows more raggety, red tiles predominate, glass-enclosed verandas appear, bright blue shutters, external staircases and projecting eaves. A few black people are about now, and Arabs, and like the rooftops, like the colours, little by little as I stroll I feel myself altering too—relaxing, unclenching, perhaps whistling a melody as I walk.