Site Presented By
Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
This Welsh writer creates masterful, idiosyncratic illuminations of the world
Aug 18, 1999 | This week I am feeling triply blessed because three of my favorite travel writers -- Jan Morris, Pico Iyer and Tim Cahill -- are coming to town for the Book Passage Travel Writers Conference, an annual San Francisco-area gathering of veteran and aspiring writers, editors, agents and publishers.
In anticipation, I have been happily rereading snatches of my favorite works by all three -- starting with Cahill's "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh," "Pecked to Death by Ducks" and "Pass the Butterworms," then moving on to Iyer's "Video Night in Kathmandu" and "The Lady and the Monk."
Now, on this wild, windy, sun-splattered San Francisco day, I have been sitting in a cafe rereading Jan Morris' inimitable books.
An ever moving, ever curious connoisseur of places, Morris has written a shelf-ful of exceptional literature, from the magisterial "Pax Britannica Trilogy" to the exhaustive and exhilarating "Venice," the passionately patriotic "The Matter of Wales," "Oxford," "Spain," "Hong Kong" and some two dozen more. But today I have been perusing three of her collections of essays -- "Journeys," "Destinations" and "Pleasures of a Tangled Life" -- because I think that these provide the easiest and most illuminating introduction to her work.
Just now I opened up "Journeys" at random and read the first essay in the book, "Over the Bridge: An Australian Journey," her masterful evocation of Sydney, Australia, in the early 1980s. One of the qualities I love in Morris' work is how she plays with the conventions of travel writing, how she stands these conventions on their heads -- just as travel itself so often plays with our own preconceptions. She begins her Sydney piece startlingly enough this way:
"Kev. Kev! Time you got going.""Jeez, Sandra, it's raining out there."
"TV says it's fining up. You're not crook, are you Kev? It's all that booze, you know, Kev, you know what the doctor said, cut down on the booze, he said, no wonder you're crook in the mornings, the human body can only take so much ..."
What in the world does this have to do with Sydney, you're thinking -- but of course it has everything to do with Sydney, from Sandra's slang and inflections to the booze and the rain.
Still, this is no traditional travel story beginning, no measured account of the city's penal colony history, no soaring depiction of the Opera House at sunset. Morris starts us out "in medias res," in the middle of her own experience of the city, in the heart of the action.
"But Kev has slipped out by now," she continues, "and with his office gear slung in his backpack is away, and up the steps, and halfway along the approach to the great bridge." And so off we run, struggling to keep up with Kev.
Of course, the penal colony and the Opera House and all the other emblems of Sydney will eventually have their place in her tale, but Morris' art is to present us with an astonishingly fresh perspective on the city from the very beginning. Then she fleshes out that perspective with tidbits gleaned from her own idiosyncratic perambulations: the subterranean railway station beside the Town Hall ("a very museum of the Old Australia -- brass knobs, bakelite switches, Instructions to Employees in copper-plate script behind brass-framed glass, bare electric bulbs lighting up to announce the next train to Pymble or Hornby"); a performance of "La Traviata" inside the famed Opera House (the performers' "crinolines and Parisian whiskers delightfully failing to disguise physiques born out of Australian surf and sunshine"); a spectral Aboriginal Day celebration ("a small huddle of dark-skinned people around an open bonfire, surrounded by litter on the edge of the green"); the petty sessions court (where the magistrate "looks like a second-year law student" and the prosecuting attorney "might just have invested in his first motor-bike"); and the Stock Exchange (which "appears to be run by several hundred athletes, helped by a few go-go girls in miniskirts").
In this way, she presents an intensely personal portrait of Sydney that nevertheless manages to convey the essential qualities of the place -- its coarse edges, its comparative lack of history, its brash energy, youthfulness and optimism.
At one point she visits the Iceland skating rink and is fascinated by a young boy: "He could not, it seemed, actually skate, but he was adept at running about the rink on his blades, and his one purpose of the morning was to gather up the slush that fell off other peoples' boots, and throw it at passing skaters. This task he pursued with skillful and unflagging zeal."
Later in the essay she visits Sydney's Speakers' Corner and writes: "The arguments were bludgeonly, the humor was coarse, and all around the soapboxes there strode a horribly purposeful figure, wearing a beret tipped over his eyes, and holding a sheaf of newspaper, whose only purpose was to shout down every speaker in turn, whatever the subject or opinion, with a devastating loutishness of retort -- never silent, never still, hurling offensive gibes at speaker and audience alike with a flaming offensive energy. Now where, said I to myself, have I seen that fellow before? And with a pang I remembered: the indefatigable ice-slosher, up at the ice-rink."
Connections such as these do not just happen, of course. They are the product of diligent research -- hours and hours of wandering, of poking your nose in here and venturing eyes-wide-shut down there and wandering through that door into who-knows-what -- and of a keen and attentive eye, ear and mind. First the raw information -- the skater, the shouter -- must be gathered, then it must be processed into some overall analytical assessment of the place, then the connection between the two must be made and then that connection must be artfully inserted like a puzzle piece into the larger overall picture. Finally, all this must be conveyed in clean, vigorous, resonant prose. When all this happens, the result is travel writing at its best -- rendering two seemingly unrelated events in a way that brings them to vivid life and also brings to life their import, what they reveal about the place.
Get Salon in your mailbox!