Jan Morris - An idiom of the impenetrable. An extraordinary place that never was, but could well be: its enigmas are part of its accuracy

Jan Morris, Hav, New York Review Books Classics, 2011.

"Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism and insanity. As Jan Morris guides us through the corridors and quarters of Hav, we hear the mingling of Italian, Russian, and Arabic in its markets, delight in its famous snow raspberries, and meet the denizens of its casinos and cafés.
When Morris published Last Letters from Hav in 1985, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Here it is joined by Hav of the Myrmidons, a sequel that brings the story up-to-date. Twenty-first-century Hav is nearly unrecognizable. Sanitized and monetized, it is ruled by a group of fanatics who have rewritten its history to reflect their own blinkered view of the past.
Morris’s only novel is dazzlingly sui-generis, part erudite travel memoir, part speculative fiction, part cautionary political tale. It transports the reader to an extraordinary place that never was, but could well be."

“After reading Last Letters from Hav, what travel writer would ever want to report from an actual place? . . . a vigorous literary hybrid; elegant fiction in its own right but also a respectfully witty homage to indomitable English travel writers like Lawrence, Burton and Blanch.”—Elaine Kendall

“Jan Morris has marshaled reportorial insight and literary flair to describe nearly every interesting place on the planet. Unique among them is Hav, which she revisits in her latest, perhaps most insightful book yet.” —Donald Morrison

“Taken for the real thing on its first publication in 1985, this faux-travel memoir prompted fruitless calls to confused travel agents. It's no wonder: Morris's imagination is a marvel, her spectral country fully realized and fascinating. Hav, an eastern Mediterranean peninsula, rises believably in the mind, with its city skyline of onion domes, minarets, and one incongruous pagoda along with its glorious and complex history. Hav's past is ingeniously, believably intertwined with real events; its present is realistically faded and isolated, adding to the eerie feeling one gets of spying on a lost world.” — Publishers Weekly

"When Last Letters from Hav was published (and shortlisted for the Booker prize) in 1985, Jan Morris's well-deserved fame as a travel writer, and the unfamiliarity of many modern readers with the nature of fiction, caused unexpected dismay among travel agents. Their clients demanded to know why they couldn't book a cheap flight to Hav. The problem, of course, was not the destination but the place of origin. You couldn't get there, in fact, from London or Moscow; but from Ruritania, or Orsinia, or the Invisible Cities, it was simply a matter of finding the right train.
Now, after 20 years, Morris has returned to Hav, and enhanced, deepened and marvellously perplexed her guidebook by the addition of a final section called "Hav of the Myrmidons". To say that the result isn't what the common reader expects of a novel is not to question its fictionality, which is absolute, or the author's imagination, which is vivid and exact.
The story is episodic, entirely lacking in "action" or "plot" of the usual sort; but these supposed narrative necessities are fully replaced by the powerful and gathering direction or intention of the book as a whole. It lacks another supposed necessity of the novel: characters who, while they may represent an abstraction, also take on a memorable existence of their own. Like any good travel writer, Morris talks to interesting people and reports the conversations. And people we met in the first part of the book turn up in the second part to take us about and exhibit in person what has happened to their country; but I confess I barely remembered their names when I met them again. Morris's gift is not portraiture, and her people are memorable not as individuals but as exemplary Havians.
This lack of plot and characters is common in the conventional Utopia, and I expect academics and other pigeonholers may stick Hav in with Thomas More and co. That is a respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying that Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The "sciences" or areas of expertise involved are social - ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. Hav exists as a mirror held up to several millennia of pan-Mediterranean history, customs and politics. It is a focusing mirror; its intensified reflection sharply concentrates both observation and speculation. Where have we been, where are we going? Those are the questions the book asks. It poses them through the invention of a place not recognised in the atlas or the histories, but which, introduced plausibly and without violence into the existing world, gives us a distanced, ironic and revelatory view of everything around it. The mode is not satiric fantasy, as in the islands Gulliver visited; it is exuberantly realistic, firmly observant, and genuinely knowledgeable about how things have been, and are now, in Saudi Arabia, or Turkey, or Downing Street. Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography. If, swayed by the silly snobbery of pundits as contemptuous of science fiction as they are ignorant of it, you should turn away from Hav, that would be a shame and a loss.
It is not an easy book to describe. Hav itself is not easy to describe, as the author frequently laments. As she takes us about with her in her travels of discovery, we grow familiar with the delightful if somewhat incoherent Hav of 1985. We climb up to its charming castle, from which the Armenian trumpeter plays at dawn the great lament of Katourian for the knights of the First Crusade, the "Chant de doleure pour li proz chevalers qui sunt morz". We visit the Venetian Fondaco, the Casino, the Caliph, the mysterious British Agency, the Kretevs who inhabit caves up on the great Escarpment through which the train, Hav's only land link to the rest of Europe, plunges daily down a zigzag tunnel. We see the Iron Dog, we watch the thrilling Roof Race. But the more we learn, the greater our need to learn more. A sense of things not understood, matters hidden under the surface, begins to loom; even, somehow, to menace. We have entered a maze, a labyrinth constructed through millennia, leading us back and back to the age of Achilles and the Spartans who built the canal and set up the Iron Dog at the harbour mouth, and before that to the measureless antiquity of the Kretevs, who are friends of the bear. And the maze stretches out and out, too, half around the world, for it seems that Havian poetry was deeply influenced by the Welsh; and just up the coast is the westernmost of all ancient Chinese settlements, which Marco Polo found uninteresting. "There is nothing to be said about Yuan Wen Kuo," he wrote. "Let us now move on to other places."
Achilles and Marco Polo aren't the half of it. Ibn Batuta came to Hav, of course, all the great travellers did, and left their comments, diligently quoted by the Havians and Morris. TE Lawrence may have discovered a secret mission there; Ernest Hemingway came to fish and to carry off six-toed cats. Hav's glory days of tourism were before the first world war and again after it, when the train zigzagged through its tunnel laden with the cream of European society, millionaires and rightwing politicians; but whether or not Hitler was actually there for one night is still a matter of dispute. The politics of Hav itself in 1985 were extremely disputable. Its religions were various, since so many great powers of the east and west had governed it over the centuries; mosques and churches coexisted amicably; and indeed the spiritual scene was so innocuous as to appear feeble - a small group of hermits, reputed to spend their days in holy meditation, proved to be cheerfully selfish hedonists who simply enjoyed asceticism. And yet, and yet, there were the Cathars. Late in her first visit, Morris was taken in darkness and great secrecy to witness a sitting of the Cathars of Hav - a strange ritual conclave of veiled women and cowled men. In some of them Morris thought she recognised friends, guides, the trumpeter, the tunnel-pilot... but she could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything.
On her return 20 years later, some things appear to be all too certain. The old Hav is gone, destroyed in an obscure event called the Intervention. The train is gone, a huge airport is under construction. Ships come in to a destination resort called Lazaretto! (the punctuation is part of the name) of the most luxuriously banal kind, where, as a middle-aged lady tourist remarks, one feels so safe. The strange old House of the Chinese Master is a burnt ruin; the new landmark is a huge skyscraper called the Myrmidon Tower, "a virtuoso display of unashamed, unrestricted, technically unexampled vulgarity". The English Legate is at least as sinister and much slimier than his predecessor, the British Agent. Most of the city has been rebuilt in concrete. The troglodytic Kretev are housed in hygienic villas, and the bears are extinct. The age of postmodernism has arrived, with its characteristically brutal yet insidious architecture and propaganda, its reductionist culture of advertisement and imitation, its market capitalism, its factionalism and religiosity forever threatening terror. Yet we find pretty soon that Hav is still Hav: the maze, the labyrinth, is still there. Even the elevator of the Myrmidon Tower is indirect. Who in fact is running the country? The Cathars? But who are the Cathars? What does the M on the Myrmidon Tower really stand for?
Morris says in the epilogue that if Hav is an allegory, she's not sure what it is about. I don't take it as an allegory at all. I read it as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the west and east in two recent eras, viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us. Its enigmas are part of its accuracy. It is a very good guidebook, I think, to the early 21st century." - Ursula K Le Guin

"William Gibson writes of "a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors... It turns there, on the mind's horizon, exerting its own peculiar gravity... It is a literary singularity." This city seems to exist outside of time, yet moves within it. One can never be sure.
Gibson was writing about the fictional city of Bellona from Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, yet his words apply equally - if not more so - to another fictional city: that of Hav, the singular creation of the renowned and prolific Welsh travel writer, historian, and novelist Jan Morris.
Morris brought Hav into the world in 1985 as Last Letters From Hav, short-listed for that year's Man Booker Prize. She returned to Hav in 2006 with Hav of the Myrmidons, a single volume with a reprinting of the original Last Letters, which was a finalist for the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Now, the New York Review of Booksis bringing that combined volume to American readers under its Classics imprint.
Hav is a work of fiction unlike any other I've read. Narrated by the character Jan Morris, Hav unfolds entirely as a travel narrative, as seemingly veridical as anything Paul Theroux or Lawrence Durrell would pen. In fact, upon its publication, readers overwhelmed Morris inquiring where exactly Hav could be found, how to get there, whether a visa was necessary or not. Even the Royal Geographical Society wanted to know, according to Morris's epilogue.
Accordingly, the novel begins with Morris's arrival in Hav, itself hazily located somewhere on the eastern Mediterranean. She explores the city, a register of millennia of human history, founded by migratory Celtic tribes or ancient Ionians, perhaps by Achilles himself. Conquered in turn by Arabs, who held it until the Crusades intervened for a century, it served as the fulcrum of the Silk Road for four hundred years, at which point it passed into the hands of the Seljuk Turks, the British Empire for a short time, the Russian Empire until the Revolution, and a Tripartite Mandate of France, Italy, and Germany between the wars.
Its onetime visitors and residents represent a veritable who's who of world history and culture: Ibn Battuta, Hemingway, Diaghilev and Nijinsky, Mann, Freud, Cavafy, Churchill, Joyce, maybe Hitler, though that's far from certain. Every faith has a place here: from the Grand Mosque of Malik in the Medina, to the Greek Orthodox church on the small island of San Spiridon, to scattered Buddhist and Hindu temples, a synagogue, and churches of every Christian sect.
The reader follows Morris as she tries to navigate this unreal city, with its multifarious architectural styles, Babel of languages, mélange of smells and sounds. She familiarizes herself with its cafes, its music, its trademark urchin soup and snow raspberries. She attends the Roof Race (which is exactly what it sounds like), and her descriptions of the frenzy of the crowd tearing through the city to follow the athletes running and jumping across alleyways above is among the more riveting parts of the novel.
One could go on for some length and is tempted to, for Morris's prose is so resplendent and exacting in its erudition and craftsmanship. Her knowledge of Mediterranean history and culture shines through on every page, and her attention to seemingly minor details, such as witnessing two elderly Buddhist monks alone in a crowd of merchants purchasing saffron, for instance, preserve the veneer of an "official" travel narrative.
Ultimately, though, Hav is a place utterly fluid, where identity is consistent only in its Heraclitean flux. History swirls around Hav, yet always inchoate, subject to the whims, distortions, and sedimented agendas of countless peoples of countless factions over countless years. And like that other fictional city Bellona, Hav is a mystery in which nothing is as it seems - or maybe everything is exactly as it seems until it changes into something else, until over time everything possible in human history has already happened, is still happening, and will happen again. Last Letters from Hav, indeed, ends with a cataclysm known as the Intervention, the details of which the reader is never entirely informed.
One is reminded of Borges's "The Library of Babel," and Borges's ghost clearly walks through the streets of Hav. This is mostly implicit in Last Letters From Hav, though Morris does inform the reader that "The maze is so universal a token of Hav, appears so often in legends and artistic references of all kinds, that one comes to take it for granted." According to Morris, "It certainly seems true that if there is one constant factor binding the artistic and creative centuries together, it is an idiom of the impenetrable... [The artists of Hav] have loved the opaque more than the specific, the intuitive more than the rational."
The connection to the concept of the labyrinth, both physical and metaphysical, is made far more explicit in Hav of the Myrmidons, in which Morris returns to a post-Intervention Hav that has been forever altered. Gone are the domes, spires, meandering streets, and chaotic din of old Hav, which have been replaced by a Chinese-financed "brand-new metropolis of mirror-glass, steel and concrete, metallic, regimented." The old city has been cut off from its garden island of Lazaretto, which has become a sort of contemporary Dubai -- a glittering playground of luxury designed for foreign nouveaux riches aptly renamed Lazaretto! Morris soon finds, however, that the seeming regimentation and rationalization of the city she knew has in no way reduced its vertiginous complexity.
The entropic despotism of old Hav has been replaced by a nightmare surveillance state styling itself the Holy Myrmidonic Republic, the symbol of which is a two-thousand-foot tower soaring above the resort of Lazaretto! and adorned at its spire by a giant illuminated M, which continually changes color. The new Hav, as is clear to Morris, is a complete simulacrum of a farce. The HMR prevents tourists from entering the old city (Morris has a two-week visa with an exemption, thanks to some old acquaintances), monitors every conversation, produces genetically-modified snow raspberries (in an Atwoodian touch, renamed "Havberries") with imported labor from Uzbekistan and Afghanistan to can and export, and has rewritten and whitewashed its jumbled history to present the most sanitary face to potential foreign investors.
While Hav of the Myrmidons feels a little too obviously polemic -- and perhaps that's because the current dystopian moment has witnessed Atwood's two most recent novels, The Hunger Games trilogy, and Super Sad True Love Story, not to mention the events of the six years intervening -- Morris's prose remains crisp and effusive as in the earlier work. If the allegory of Hav is that identity and history are just as malleable and in flux as topography, the two halves complement each other quite effectively.
Of course, Morris herself says in the epilogue that even she doesn't know whether an essential allegory of Hav exists, which is most likely the point. At any rate, this volume contains a lifetime worth of sensual experience, and some of the most luminous and unforgettable writing I have ever encountered." - Benjamin Taylor

"In 1985, Jan Morris created a fictional city-state in the Mediterranean. Hav confounded readers and critics: where was this place that was part-European, part-Asian, part-Arabic? According to Morris, only one person, an octogenarian from Iowa, guessed the true nature of Hav: that it was an allegory of the 20th century. Now, 20 years later, Morris returns to her beloved Hav to find its diversity muffled, its traditions glossed and fictionalised for the benefit of the tourists.
The original Hav, depicted in Last Letters From Hav, reprinted here along with a sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons, is brought vividly to life. Places are described with such detail that they must surely be real: Marco Polo, Lawrence of Arabia, Freud, Cavafy and le Carre have all, we are told, visited. You desperately want the place to exist, with all its idiosyncrasies - the snowberries that ripen only 'when the early spring suns melt the last of the escarpment's winter snows'; the lethal Roof-Race which is to the people of Hav 'as the bull-running is to Pamplona'; the troglodyte Kretevs, caretakers of the bears of Hav, whose caves are redolent of 'a thick, warm, furry, licked smell'. Morris's style is as easy as her Havians' way of life: relaxed, yet ever-flowing.
Morris's narrator is a visitor to and an observer of this city-state, yet little of her own character is apparent, other than in her painstaking attention to detail and a fondness for the imaginary. In her conclusion to Last Letters ... , Morris sets about destroying her creation. She is a writer bold enough not to feel the need to explain everything into banality, so we are not told why and you feel only an enormous sense of loss.
Hav of the Myrmidons is an essay on the vulgarity and ambition of modernity. Twenty years on, Morris is persona non grata and must obtain a pass to travel Hav's roads, most of which are unrecognisable since 'the Intervention'. Hav has become a futuristic, soulless capsule. Morris's disappointment with 21st-century 'progress' in Hav is tangible from the first page: the snowberries, once almost unobtainable and phenomenally expensive, are now genetically modified and available in cans in every supermarket; the Roof-Race has been simplified, rigged with safety nets to conform to health and safety directives, while the bears are dead (the last two on show in the museum) and the Kretevs have been moved from their caves to sanitised accommodation blocks with central heating.
Again, Morris is careful not to over-explain Hav's transformation and you share with her a feeling of shock, loss and nostalgia for an older, more dignified way of life. The narrator's character tiptoes to the forefront and you are reminded of a tale in Last Letters ... about the House of the Chinese Master, about which Sigmund Freud writes: 'It is as though I have lived within the inmost cavity of a man's mind.' Every artwork betrays something of its creator, but Morris's Hav, in which her fiction is sustained with such conviction, is more vividly a map of a creator's mind, in which she is a benevolent, concerned god mourning the wilful destruction of beauty, idiosyncrasy and tradition." - Zoe S Green

"In the nonfictional epilogue to her fictional travelogue Hav, Jan Morris ends with words from the German Romantic writer Novalis: "Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history."
History's shortcomings are the impetus, material, and theme of Hav, a remarkably subtle book, a novel of indirections that presents an imaginary (and richly imagined) geography and history for a Mediterranean nation called Hav, a country that incorporates the potentials and mysteries of various real societies and cultures. Morris takes the details of recorded histories and visitable places and turns them into the stuff of a vivid dream, then uses the dream to meditate on the currents of history that shape the world we perceive as real, the present moments that get abstracted and represented by historians.
Hav is an alternate world, a possible place, a nation found only on lost maps and in imprecise memories. Morris first introduced it in 1985 in a book, Last Letters from Hav, that now makes up the first two-thirds of this one. Until that time she was known as a writer of nonfiction, and some readers, she notes in the epilogue to Hav,
thought it described a real place, incomprehensibly little-known. They asked me how to get there. They wanted to know if one needed a visa. Even somebody at the Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society asked me to put him straight about Hav's location. (p. 298)
Any reader could wonder if Hav might actually be a place one should put on a vacation itinerary. The entire presentation is matter-of-fact: Morris uses a narrator named Jan Morris, there are references to numerous historical figures and events, and the utterly straightforward tone reveals not a whisper of irony. The book is not a parody or a satire, and for much of the first part of Hav, it seems as if the words do nothing more than guide us through the details of a place that does not exist. (As I was reading the first hundred pages or so, there were many moments when I thought Hav felt like a worldbook for a roleplaying game nobody has yet created.)
But Hav is more than just a hoax-like gazeteer, and it is in this more that the genius lies. Hav builds up in our minds through an agglutination of details—details of buildings and people, of foods and clothes, of traditions and histories. We learn about the trumpeter Katourian, stabbed at the finish of a failed siege by Crusaders; we see the various buildings and institutions of government; we visit homes and cafés, a market and a draper's shop; we stroll through streets, learning their shapes and sounds and smells; we talk with people from all the various nationalities and ethnicities housed by Hav—the Muslims and the Christians, the Chinese and the Turks, the atheist monks, the indigenous Kretevs who live in splendid caves and are known by all as "the troglodytes," and the Cathars who hold secret, mysterious, myth-laden gatherings.
"I know of nowhere in the world where the purpose of life seems so ill-defined," Morris's fictional self says in the third chapter, summing up a feeling most readers will have gotten from her peregrinations up to that point. The emphasis, though, belongs on the seems. We are given the surface of Hav, the naïve first impression of a place, and then that surface is complexified, and the first impressions, the fancies and fantasies, are unravelled, until what falls apart is not only narrator-Morris's own perception of Hav's truth, but the place itself. The imagined reality of Hav is a precariously balanced utopia, a place where the fault lines of cultures can exist without quite quaking—but then they do quake, and things fall apart, and Morris presents us with a narrator-Morris who cannot understand what has happened, who is left with only the option to leave, because such a society as she had construed cannot hold itself together, a fragment of impressions, a lost world that loses itself.
All of the details, it turns out, were not the real story. The real story lies beneath and beside. An alert reader will remember details that now spring open like booby traps, revealing alternate readings, so that the book becomes a palimpsest of itself, a snake eating the textual skin it sheds. The last pages of the original Last Letters from Hav are unsettling in every sense of the word, and Morris was a bold and visionary enough writer then to let all ambiguities stand, to tie nothing up, to pretend no knowledge.
Unlike readers in 1985, though, we can now move on into a new section of the book, "Hav of the Myrmidons," where Morris imagines traveling to Hav twenty years later. Much has happened, both in Hav and in the world beyond it. The tensions narrator-Morris was late to notice in Last Letters from Hav led, we learn, to tremendous destruction, followed by reconstruction (and re-creation) by the Cathars, who came to power, memorialized their myths, and instituted bureaucratic despotism and capitalist kitsch:
It looked very different from the Hav I remembered. Gone was the esoteric skyline of turrets, minarets, and gilded domes. Only the castle still stood on its crag high above. For the rest, all was a grey flattish blur of new buildings, low and flat, with a minaret protruding here and there, and a distant jumble of masts and riggings at the waterfront, but none of the gaudy eclecticism that made the old city so compelling. (p. 198)
Most of what was once unique about Hav has been either wiped out or commodified, and in the empty spaces left by destruction appear grandiose buildings and ridiculous resorts, the architecture of global capital, the concrete aspirations of an aesthetically blind and culturally tone-deaf regime determined to mold Hav into the shape of its own hubris. This brings the book close to satire, but satire needs some embellishment, and how embellished, really, is a society numbed by the gravitational forces of its orthodoxies? The Hav of "Hav of the Myrmidons" is recognizable to anybody who has stepped outside this morning. Nonetheless, there are still mysteries to Hav, and still wonders. The wonders now are hidden in the margins, and Morris glimpses them before, once again, leaving the place abruptly, with most questions still unanswered, most mysteries still intact.
"Hav of the Myrmidons" works, then, not only as an extension of the story in Lost Letters from Hav, but as a reinterpretation. It reconstructs the foreground of the story from its background, giving us a similar structure and different emphases. Time has affected not only the place, but the narrator's reading of the place, and thus it affects our own re-reading. The book as a whole expands and expands again our understanding of the place described, and reminds us how limited this understanding is. The new section of the book gives Hav a newly vivid reality by preserving and extending the immensity of all that can't be known.
The magnificence of Hav lies not only in the magnificence of Hav, which Morris has imagined with extraordinary care, but in the way the unreal place is used as a tool for perception. There is, first, the perception of the narrator, and most of the surface story lies there: we watch narrator-Morris observing, experiencing, and interpreting what author-Morris has dreamed up. The satisfaction of the book, though, comes with a perception of all that is below the surface, the mysteries and enigmas, the shadows behind the words. Much great fiction explores perception, and Hav is both an exploration and an exploration of that exploration—its depth and richness derive from all the nested implications, the endless possibilities. There is no "story" in the traditional sense of the word, though there are many events; the events are linked together, though, not so much by a sequence of actions as by a continuous perception. The main character of Hav is, indeed, Hav itself, and what we watch is the ways it changes, and the ways those changes are noticed and discussed by the characters who flit in and out of the book, and by the narrator, who is the only character to remain consistently with us. The narrative strategies mix elements from various sorts of memoir with those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "imaginary voyage" stories and utopian novels, plus some sleight-of-hand tricks learned from Modernist masters and Latin American magical realists, creating a book that could be described as the novel Borges might have written if he'd been inclined to write a novel (and been more politically astute).
Except such a statement, though it perhaps conveys a certain sense of Hav, is too reductive for what Morris has accomplished here in a book that is quietly but consistently true to its own internal logic, and to the vision it presents. The proof of Hav's excellence lies in its inability to be summarized in any satisfactory way. The book, then, is like the place it describes: impossible to pin down, an evocative enigma, a dream construction that spreads itself beyond the borders of a dream." - Matthew Cheney

"The famous land of Hav borders on Levantine Turkey. Despite puzzling cultural elements owed to the neighbouring Caucasus, the word itself derives remotely from the Welsh word for "summer". Much about the country is similarly maze-like and strange, from its flora (which includes the endangered snow-raspberry), its fauna (bears, mongeese) to its geography, history, cuisine, trading relations and religious sects. These last encompass cave-dwellers, and secret Cathars reverencing the dread Powers of Evil and Good. Once a British protectorate, Hav was later attached to Tsarist Russia, followed by Ottoman Turkey. Greeks, Venetians and Arabs each played a vital role; so did the Ming Chinese. The unexpectedness and beauty of their pagoda-tower has been known to make tourists to Hav laugh out loud with pleasure.
Famous visitors start with Achilles, who exported its salt. Cavafy, Freud and Princess Anastasia all stayed. DH Lawrence called Hav "restless, unsatisfied; and yet one could not help smiling". Thanks to Jan Morris, we now know exactly what St Paul, Saladin, Marco Polo, Wagner, Mark Twain, Diaghilev, Noel Coward, Hemingway, Trotsky, Hitler and others said about Hav, and what they did there. Foreign women are addressed in English as "Dirleddy". Words such as "Serenissima", "shuttered", "aquarium" and "their" are misprinted, adding to readerly disorientation.
What is Jan Morris up to? Having fun, mostly. Her pastiches are delightful. When the first part of this book - Last Letters from Hav - was shortlisted for the Booker in 1985, fan-letters, one from the Royal Geographic Society, requested information about how to get to Hav. But the place is invented and the book an ingenious, magnificent joke.
Now Morris revisits Hav after unexplained revolutionary changes, to find her first book banned. The country is today given to genetic engineering and surveillance. In the second part, Hav of the Myrmidons, the Chinese tower has been replaced by a 2000-foot skyscraper whose lifts detonate the passenger up inside a vast cylindrical aquarium-sheath. Sighting the fish is designed to calm the ascent.
Here she laments the passing of an older world of internationalist experiment, of rich cultural confusion, of cities both provincial and tolerant, like Morris's beloved Trieste and Venice. Morris is in her 80th year and modestly describes her distinguished career as "blundering about the world, trying to make sense of it". But she has always had the rare qualities necessary for travel-writing: a journalist's patient worldliness, intellectual greed, intuitive sympathy; the ability to settle on one shorthand physical image that can distil a whole history.
Everything seems to interest her; nothing to bore her. She can bring to life what is quaint or threatening and make it seem familiar and comprehensible.
Such qualities rescue Hav from weightlessness and whimsy. On the "slatternly, makeshift" Chinese quarter, for example, she notes the tireless crowds, cooking smells, piles of medicinal roots and powders, "the shining varnished dead ducks hanging from their hooks, the burbling bewildered live ones jammed in their market pens, the men in shirt-sleeves leaning over the balconies of upstairs restaurants, the children tied together with string like puppets ... the nasal clanging of radio music, the clic-clac of the abacus, the men playing draughts beneath the trees". This passage continues for another joyous page of intimately observed actuality. She makes us share and understand the pleasures of perception.
The Chinese Tower once made travellers laugh: Morris wants her readers to smile too. In Old Hav were monks whose doctrine was having a sense of humour, who worshipped life. Jan Morris is a secret acolyte and Hav her touching love-letter, not to an Invisible City of the kind that Calvino or Borges might portentously imagine, but to life itself, with its mysteries and pleasures. Like Samuel Johnson in Rasselas, Morris has penned a fable about an imaginary abroad to teach us about the here and now." - Peter J Conradi

"A few years ago I let it be known that I would publish no more books. Everyone scoffed - ha, ha, you know what writers are, they said - but I meant it, and I have kept my word. Well, sort of. I had been writing almost without taking breath for half a century and more, and without a book in progress life seemed flaccid. I felt like Othello when he found his occupation gone. I recognised in myself the symptoms I had described in others - elderly businessmen no longer interested in the stock market, ageing musicians who didn't bother to go to concerts, clergymen emeritus developing doubts or multitudinous pensioners who preferred, on the whole, not to read the obituaries.
I was perhaps being economical with the truth when a book of mine about my house in Wales came out in America, and I was obliged limply to explain that I had actually written most of it before I took my oath of retirement. And I did cheat rather by publishing the odd essay, partly to supplement my fast-declining book royalties, partly for the plain pleasure of tinkering with ideas and pursuing allegories - for the older I get, the more the matter of allegory engages me.
But now I have circumvented my resolution in a different, and sneakier, way. Twenty-odd years ago I wrote a fantasy describing my own entirely fictional residence in an altogether imaginary city, somewhere on the Levantine fringes of Europe. It was my only novel, and I wrote it off the top of my head. As I have often heard novelists say, I really did not know what it was all about, or what was going to happen next. The book ended with the brutal decimation of Hav by some unnamed hostile power, and both the reader and (believe me) the author were left wondering what it had all meant.
I had intended it to be part entertainment, but chiefly allegory. I felt that in all my years of writing about places, especially cities, I had never really mastered their deeper meanings - had not penetrated their economic truths, or grasped their profounder social implications -and I was hoping to express these complex uncertainties in the text of my faux travel book. Only one reader, so far as I know, recognised it as allegory at all. Nearly everybody else thought it really was a travel book, and wrote to ask me if they needed visas to go there.
I re-read it a couple of years ago, and found it unexpectedly ambiguous. Its allegory was plain enough to me, but its allusions and mock quotations, which I had intended chiefly as entertainment, now seemed to me strangely subtler… And I was oddly disturbed to realise that there was also an element of the prophetic to it, for the sudden, savage, ill-understood assault upon Hav, which evidently occurred in 1985, seemed to me to have pre-figured Al-Qaeda's destruction of the World Trade Centre, 16 years later.
Idly at first, it occurred to me to wonder then what had happened to my chimerical city in the years since the 1985 catastrophe - known in Hav, I gather, as the Intervention: and gradually, shamefacedly, I resolved to make another book of it. Oh, how people would scoff! Another book after all! Didn't they always say so? A little American book about my house might be overlooked, but a brand new novel, published in London under the Faber imprint, was another thing. I imagined catty little paragraphs at the bottom of literary columns, and snide jokes at literary parties apropos the multiple retirements of Frank Sinatra.
So what I have done is this: I have not written a new book at all. I have written a long addendum to an old one, and my obliging publishers have bound the two parts in one and called it simply Hav. And the allegory I conceived for the first part, Last Letters from Hav, is extended to include the second part, Hav of the Myrmidons: 20 years on, the mysteries that infused the one have been transmuted by the tragedy of the Intervention to infect the second one, too.
What am I talking about? Search me. I don't know what it all means. I see the whole Hav invention as through a glass, darkly, and even the fact that the new book is only half a new book seems allegorically proper to its themes - which are themes of historical confusion, themes of contradiction, dressed up in the garments of travel writing by an octogenarian writer… At the very end, the German novelist Novalis (1772-1801) gives me an epilogue for my riddles: novels arise, he wrote, out of the shortcomings of history.
It really will be my last book. Well, sort of. You remember those belles-lettres that I have been amusing myself with, since the time of my renunciation? Well, dear old Faber has agreed to make a book of them, to be published, I hope, the day after my death. It will be a posthumous work, which surely doesn't count, and I have called it Allegorisings." - Jan Morris

"Notes on Hiraeth: The Work of Jan Morris
In an essay about the ancient Greek concept of the daimon (which the Romans would rename the genius), Guy Davenport balks at the notion of “writing as self-expression” and writes, “The business of a writer is to show others how you see the world so that they will then have two views of it, theirs and yours.”
For sixty years now, Jan Morris has been following her daimon from city to city and giving us her highly individual view of the world. She has been an evocative historian and the keenest observer of the present; a chronicler of cities in their springtime and in their decline, and of cities both real and imaginary; a Welsh nationalist and an elegist of the British Empire; and, of course, a man and a woman.
Morris began her career as James Morris, a discharged soldier and a foreign correspondent for the Times and the Guardian (and, needless to say, a man). He scored some stunning scoops, from the first report on Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reaching the summit of Mount Everest to the first proof of Anglo-French-Israeli collusion during the Suez Crisis of 1956. Most importantly, though, these years as a newspaper staffer gave Morris the space and setting to hone his real talent: evoking places, especially cities.
Here he is describing 1950s Beirut:
…there it stands, with a toss of curls and a flounce of skirts, a Carmen among the cities. It is the last of the Middle Eastern fleshpots, and lives its life with an intensity and a frivolity almost forgotten in our earnest generation. It is to Beirut that the divinities of this haunted seaboard, the fauns and dryads and money-gods, orgiastically descend…
It feels a transitory place, like an exceedingly corrupt and sophisticated girls’ school. Such a way of life, you feel, cannot be permanent: it is too fickle, too fast, too make-believe and never-never. It is Alexandria without the philosophers, without the Pharaohs, perhaps even without Cleopatra (for age does distinctly wither the grand dames of Beirut, waddling with poodles and sunglasses from salon to couturier)…
This is not an earnest city. Proper Victorians would have hated it. Harvard economists or British civil servants, examining its improbable methods, its flibbery-gibbet charm, its blatancy and its blarney -- men of somber purpose, deposited one scented evening in Beirut, would probably pronounce it irredeemable.
But who would redeem such a place, in a world of false redemptions?
Even in an early essay like this, it is evident that Morris isn’t a “travel writer” in the ordinary travel magazine sense. Morris does give the reader a wide-awake description of the sights, sounds, and smells of Beirut -- and with much more life and verve than the common “my stay in some place” hack -- but he also goes deeper, into Beirut’s distinct character, the identity that sets it apart from all other cities, its genius loci.
The genius loci of each place is Morris’s true subject, and most of the places she visits are cities. Her method has always been simply to be a lone individual (interestingly, she likes to travel alone) in an unfamiliar city.
Morris never pretends her view is anything other than subjective and provisional. Her writing is a single sharp person’s impressions of a place; it never strives to be definitive or (that garlanded idol of American reporters) “objective.” And her impressions of a single city like New York, Sydney, Trieste, or Venice necessarily change over time.
Like the all the best travel writers (Byron, West, Bedford, Leigh Fermor, Kapuscinski, Chatwin), Morris is always happy to deploy her fictionist powers to capture certain truths about a place. As she writes in her introduction to The World (a career-spanning selection of her writing), “I was writing about the world, certainly, but it was my world - as I put it myself in another context: ‘Is that the truth? Is that how it was? It is my truth. If it is not invariably true in the fact, it is true in the imagination.’”
Surely it’s worthwhile to take a tour of some of Morris’ imaginative truths.
The uncomfortable contradictions of Weimar (the city itself, not the Republic), which hosted successive flowerings of German literature and music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and hosted Hitler in the twentieth:
In the late eighteenth century the young Duke Carl August turned his city into a kind of aesthetocracy, an alliance between the aristocratic and the creative…
For generations Weimar was the dream of Germany. Madam de Stael reported that it was not so much a small city as one large, liberal and wonderfully enlightened palace.
To this day it is bathed in the light of those great times, when artists and monarchs were equals. Carl August lies in his mausoleum flanked not by his generals, but by his two great poets, Goethe and Schiller…
However:
In the market square stands the Elephant Hotel, and all the waters of the Ilm canot wash the taint from this unfortunate hostelry. It is a handsome thirties building, but unfortunately redecorated inside in a glittery, chromy style that suggests the imminent arrival of swaggering Gauleiters with blonde floozies out of big black Mercedes. This impression is all too true. Hitler and his crew were particularly fond of the hotel, and more than once the Führer spoke form its balcony to enthusiastic crowds in the square outside.
The torpor and melancholy of Trieste after World War II:
Its talented young people are leaving, its old liberal tradition is neglected, its brave commercial instincts are blunted and frustrated. Depressed and half-hearted, it meanders on in disillusionment: not drunk, indeed, or crippled by war, or oppressed, even destitute: just bored, that’s all, just bored.
The peculiar mix of Hapsburg ceremoniousness and Magyar hedonism in Budapest:
The joy of Hungary is its heroic convention, the combination of formality and high jinks. Budapest always suggests to me a Vienna with fizz, its heritage of Hapsburg hierarchy spiked with sudden flashes of wit or defiance, touches of exaggeration, suggestions of excess.
Hungarians themselves, of course, like to say that this is the Magyar element -- the wild originality the first Kings of Hungary brought galloping out of the Great Plains -- and I am myself a sucker for the epic explanation. In the Heroes’ Square in Budapest… there is a group of equestrian statuary that represents the arrival of King Arpad, the first of all the kings, in the year 896. Arpad himself rides in front, his head high, his eyes firmly fixed down Andrassy Avenue towards the city centre. Around him his bodyguard of chieftains, mounted on splendidly caparisoned horses, look this way and that beneath their feathered helmets with expressions marvelously haughty and sneering -- terrifically alarming men, predatory as all hell, the sort you would very much rather have on your side than on the other.
She “never enjoyed a city more” than Budapest. Switzerland is an unfairly maligned land of “master craftsmen” and sensible politics (not to mention lakes, mountains, and engineering marvels). Chicago is the “perfect” American city; New York is no longer the dynamo of the world but has learned the secret of subtle charm. The brash Bauhaus of Tel Aviv is creating an entirely new culture, “unmistakably Israeli” but strangely un-Jewish. Sydney is a vision of real civilization, Asiatic and British at once but also something utterly unique, a city whose macho swagger conceals a certain lightness and grace and devotion to the good life.
Her journeys are not just geographic but historical as well. Her Pax Brittanica trilogy -- a history of the British Empire -- is a masterpiece of historical writing, a work to sit alongside Gibbon, Macaulay, Burckhardt, Prescott, and Trevelyan. She writes about the grand themes of imperialism and colonialism, retreat and independence, but the focus of the trilogy is on the eccentric men and women who built the Empire: soldiers, merchants, explorers, buccaneers, and sometimes simply bored young people who wanted to see the world. To Welsh republican Morris, the Empire was an epic attempt by the island-dwelling British to engage with the outside world. It was often violent, sometimes tragic, and full of bizarre and comical details, but to her it was a historical phenomenon of endless curiosity that left behind benefits and honorable legacies as well as the crimes, blunders, and partitions whose effects still occupy most of our daily headlines.
To the ancient Greeks, history was the realm of the muse Clio, and throughout literary history most readers have thought of history as a branch of literature like the play or the poem. Morris’s histories are literature, and reading them is a startling experience in an age when “history” means either cutesy bestsellers or tedious academic cinder blocks.
A small sample of Morris’ historical writing, the setting Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee:
Victoria returned to her palace in the evening, exhausted but marvelously pleased, through the blackened buildings of her ancient capital, whose smoke swirled and hovered over the grey river, and whose gas-lamps flickered into tribute with the dusk.
Morris has written that her work is suffused with what the Welsh call hiraeth, an untranslatable word that evokes a melancholy yearning for something or someone, a wistful homesickness. Hiraeth seems like an obvious cousin to Portuguese saudade or Turkish huzun. All of these words hint at distance, homesickness, wistfulness, nostalgia, and longing, but hiraeth, saudade, and huzun are more than emotions or moods that afflict an individual at certain moments. They are different ways of naming an atmosphere in which life unfolds, sometimes even an aura that surrounds a particular place.
Hiraeth, saudade, and huzun all have their bards and chroniclers. Fernando Pessoa is the great poet of saudade, and his Lisbon is unimaginable without it. Orhan Pamuk describes Istanbul as wrapped in a collective mood of huzun, quietly longing for a shimmering, possibly imaginary, past. Jan Morris doesn’t write very often about her native Wales, but her daimon seems to have drawn her to cities afflicted with hiraeth.
The cities that most fascinate Morris, the ones that never seem to exhaust her interest, are peripheral cities, often peripheral in place and sometimes peripheral in time. The city of faded glamor, the city full of ghosts, the city that doesn’t even know what country it’s in - these are the places where Morris is at her deepest. Trieste, the fictional Hav, even Venice: the cities where the genius loci has grown old, or confused, or simply sailed away mysteriously.
Pessoa’s Lisbon and Pamuk’s post-imperial Istanbul are also peripheral cities; perhaps marginal places are particularly susceptible to longing. These cities - sad Trieste or exuberant Sydney, randy Beirut or mythic and demonic Weimar - were lucky to find as perceptive a companion as Jan Morris." - Greer Mansfield

Jan Morris web page