I’ll keep this introduction short, because I don’t want to get in the way of the main event. Here one of our finest writers answers a long series of questions about her extraordinary life and work.
The questions are made up from a combination of the themes that arose during discussions of Venice on this month’s Reading group, and some questions taken more directly from points raised by Reading group contributors.
I sent Jan Morris more than two dozen questions, thinking that she could pick and choose among those that most interested her – but she actually answered each and every one, including my opening:
On Venice
Can you remember your first sight of Venice?
No, I really can’t remember it, but I’ve since introduced innumerable people to their first sights of the city, and have greatly enjoyed their almost invariable ecstasies!
How did you come to write Venice?
The British Army took me to Venice at the end of the second world war, and for two months I had the duty of helping to run all the requisitioned motorboats of the city, before I went on with my regiment to Egypt and Palestine. It was the best present I ever had, a marvellous introduction to the city, and I have been attached to Venice ever since, writing four books about it plus a couple of million articles.
Where and how did you live when you wrote it - I believe you were on a year’s sabbatical?
I worked for the Manchester Guardian then, and its editor generously allowed me to divide my time between working as a roving correspondent for them, and writing books for myself. Some of Venice I wrote at the village of Samoëns in Haute-Savoie, until summoned by the paper to go and cover the miserable Suez intervention of 1956. Thereafter, as I remember, I just wrote it wherever I could until I had finished it.
Are you aware of the influence of the book? Have you read The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, for instance, which seems to me to have taken all sorts of inspiration from Venice?
No, I have not been aware of such influence, except perhaps as an encouragement to journalists to aim at literature.
Can you clear up our confusion about “nero” wine? I’ve mislabelled it in an article as “vino nero” which has caused trouble on the boards. What do the Venetians usually call the local red wine?
I know nothing about vino nero, and have always vaguely thought it a tipple from Sicily. I have never associated it with Venice.
And on the subject of Venetian food and drink, do you have any theories about why so much of it is so bad?
I am not much good on food, which has never greatly interested me. I assume Venetian run-of-the mill restaurant food nowadays is often poor because of the demands of mass tourism: but I like to think it has always been boring because the citizenry had more interesting things to think of (besides living in the middle of the sea, which presumably limited their choice of victuals …)
So as not to dwell on the negative, I wonder if you could also tell us about a good meal you’ve enjoyed in Venice?
The best meals I’ve enjoyed in Venice have almost always been at Harry’s Bar, which some people suppose nowadays to have become a mere tourists’ joint, but which is still a chosen haunt of urbane Venetians (I dedicated my last book to it!). My favourite meal there, which I enjoyed with my son only the other day, has always been Scampi Thermidor alla Cipriani, followed by warm zabaglione and washed down with a flask of the house white.
Writing
I believe you aren’t fond of the term “travel writer” - what do you prefer? Are you more of a historian of place in books like Venice?
Yes, I hate being called a travel writer. I have written only one book about travel, concerning a journey across the Oman desert. I have written many books about place, which are nothing to do with movement, but many more about people and about history. In fact, though, they are one and all about the effects of everything upon me – my books amount to one enormously self-centred autobiographical exposure! So I prefer to be described as simply – a writer …
You first travelled with the British army in the second world war. Did that change the way you see the world?
Oh yes, but I think it dictated, rather than changed, the way I saw the world (I’d never been abroad before), if only because it distilled in me my fascination with the phenomenon called the British empire, then in its requiem years, and perhaps led to my life-long preferences for things poignant and transient.
Do you think the internet has changed the way we travel and think about travel? (Both in terms of the amount of information you can pick up about a place, and the world being somehow smaller, as it’s all connected.)
Well yes, I suppose it has, partly because one can so easily become familiar with a place before one even goes there, and partly because it has reduced the exoticism and plain excitement of travel.
Can you tell us something about how you came to be involved with the Hillary and Tenzing Everest expedition - and how you managed to get the news of the successful ascent back to The Times without others getting hold of it first?
I was embedded (as the Americans would say) in the 1953 Everest Expedition as correspondent of the Times, because that newspaper had traditionally supported attempts upon the mountain, and because I was young and fit. My task was to get news from the expedition exclusively home to London despite worldwide and sometimes dirty competition. It was nearly 200 miles from the mountain to the nearest cable station in Kathmandu, and we weren’t allowed long-distance radios, so I sent most of my dispatches by Nepali runners, whom I paid on a sliding scale according to the time they took to get there. However, I discovered that the Indian Army maintained a small radio unit some 40 miles from the mountain, keeping an eye on the nearby Tibetan frontier, and when the expedition succeeded they agreed to send a single message to Kathmandu for me. I could not tell them what it said, because, helpful though they were, it would in no time reach every newsroom in the world, so I devised a message which would seem to be clear but was really in code – to wit: SNOW CONDITIONS BAD ADVANCED BASE ABANDONED YESTERDAY AWAITING IMPROVEMENT – which in fact told the Times, and none of our competitors, that the summit of Everest had been reached on 29 May by the New Zealander Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing. It was published in London on the very morning of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation – to my mind a last hurrah of the British empire.
If someone else were looking out for a subject like Venice today, where would you recommend they start?
I can only speak from my own experience. I believe in serendipity, and sure enough, my subjects have always found me.
What is it that attracts you to your subjects in general?
Serendipity again, but when I think about it now, most of my subjects have offered grandeur, poignancy, fun and a sense of transience – an out-of-time suggestion, which means that with luck they need never be outdated.
Following on, you often evoke decline, sadness, lost glory … Why?
Sentimentality – I’m sorry for history! There was always so much good half-obscured by the bad, not least in the British empire.
And are there places you haven’t written about that you’d like to?
Yes, Lhasa , but I long ago vowed that I would never go there until the Dalai Lama was back at the Potala.
You came to novels after writing quite a few other kinds of books … Had you always intended to write novels and had you being building up to them? Or was it more of a natural progression?
Yes, my first adolescent intention was to write novels, and in entering journalism after the war I was consciously following the example of Americans like Hemingway or Steinbeck, for whom newspapers had been portals into literature. I presently realised, though, that I had no gift for fiction, and the novels I have written later in life have not really been fiction at all, but extrapolations of fact. (If you follow me. I don’t, altogether.)
Do you have a favourite among the books you’ve written? (And why?)
Well, I have several favourites. I am fondest of my book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, because I pretentiously think of it as the nearest to pure art, and the truest to my own self. On the other hand I cannot help being proud of my big imperial trilogy, Pax Britannica, because I suspect (well, hope anyway) that it will always be read as historical evidence – one citizen’s personal responses to the end of an epoch. And, yes, I rather like my book Fisher’s Face, about an Edwardian admiral with whom I propose to have an affair in the afterlife. ButI like most of them, really, faults and all … They are friends, like my late cat Ibsen.
Can you tell us anything about the book I believe you’ve written which will be published posthumously?
My posthumous book Allegorizings, which will go to press in London and New York the minute I kick the bucket, is loosely governed by my growing conviction that almost nothing in life is only what it seems. It contains nothing revelatory at all.
Reader-led questions
Do you draw any distinctions between mass tourism and other kinds of travel? Do large numbers of people descending on places you love trouble you?
Well, nobody likes crowds, do they, but we all start out as tourists – and Venice is one place, as a matter of fact, where you can easily avoid them, however jam-packed the city centre. Which leads me on to the next question …
Has Venice withstood the poison of time? Has Venice escaped the onslaught of the deafening machinery?
The poison of time? Time is certainly not entirely poisonous, to my mind, and I think Venice has embraced it, all in all, rather successfully. Of course the heart sinks a bit when one steps off the vaporetto into the seething multitudes of the piazza. But the old place has once again adapted itself, in a long sequence of historical adaptations, to embrace the hard facts of history. It is certainly no longer the real working and indigenous sea-city of my own youth, but it is unique in a different way. Its 21st-century industry is, of course, tourism, supplemented by lively institutions of culture and the arts, and by its docks. It is the most marvellous of museums and still, one might claim, the most physically beautiful of all the cities of the world: and in my experience, anyway, it remains a place of unpoisoned and un-mechanised welcome. But there, it’s all in the mind.
Do you see your novel Hav as a fictionalisation of your experiences in Venice?
No, unless subconsciously. I think places like Trieste, Beirut or Danzig were probably more in my mind when I threw myself into that fantasy, but most of it was, as far as I know, pure invention – ooh, but now I do distinctly remember plucking an electric ferry-boat directly and shamelessly from the harbour of Bergen, in Norway, and depositing it in Hav … Forgive me!
What is a travel writer?
A person who writes about travels.
What do you hope for from a travel writer?
All I want is information about a place, with luck skilfully and artistically written, but chiefly informative. A noble example is EM Forster’s Guide to Alexandria, in which he himself says that the best way to look at the city is to “wander aimlessly about”.
Is Venice the way it is because of the place, or because of the inhabitants? Or perhaps, did the place make its inhabitants the way they are? Would we all become Venetians if we lived there long enough, or would we always be outsiders?
A bit of each, perhaps. Nowadays probably most of the citizens of Venice are relatively recent incomers. Fewer and fewer are Venetian by birth or inheritance, but as the English know by their own experience, immigrants do acquire new national characteristics: in the case of Venice, the pride of islanders, the sense of specialness, the knowledge of a grand inheritance. One can hardly help being affected, in temperament and outlook, by residence in a place of such resonant character. It takes time, though: several centuries would have to pass, for example, for me to become a Venetian!
Do you think that Venice today would have inspired you to write about it with the feeling you had then?
No – see above! I was enthralled in the first place by its sense of timeless melancholy – just my style, but no longer available.
World tourism since the 70s has increased from 200 million people to 1,500 million people and I think cities like Venice or Paris have probably individually seen a similar quantitative increase. Do you think there is a “new” Venice, made up of tourists and tourist services, superimposed on what Venice was, say 50 years ago - that it is a kind of double place where it used to be a single entity? For example I have seen places that double/triple their population due to some event like a festival for a few days, what a change for the town! But in the case of Venice the change might be permanent …
Well, yes and no – see the answer about the poison of time above. I don’t think mass tourism has made it a “double place”. I believe it has, if anything, further unified the city by the overwhelming presence of a single industry, to one degree or another absorbing all others – even the seaport..
And finally …
Is there a question you haven’t had before that you’d like to be asked?
Yes, I would like to have been asked if there was any moral purpose emerging from my 40-odd books, and I would answer yes, my gradually growing conviction that simple kindness should be the governing factor of human conduct.
Thank you all, very much, for your interest in my Venice book. I do hope it hasn’t disappointed you. My own feeling is that it’s good, but too long!
