Destinations

Oxford Press, Melbourne, 242 pages, $28.25.

Reviewed by Stewart MacKay.

Jan Morris has compiled a collection of her travel essays from "Rolling Stone" and put them in a fascinating travel book Destinations.

This selection of her essays from The Morning After, Washington DC, 1974 (just after Watergate), till the Islanders Manhattan, 1979, give her impressions of nine cities and two states (South Africa and Rhodesia 1977).

Destinations is a classic work in that it gives readers an insight into the political reality of the late 1970s whether or not they have been to the places Morris describes.

Morris has the unique gift of detached observation in her interpretation and judgement of contemporary events, in places, which gives this book a timeless reality much like A W Kingslake achieved last century with his brilliant Eothen (Winston Churchill, when asked by budding young writers who they should read so as to improve their skill, is widely quoted as responding "read Kingslake!")

This collective political impressionism moreover is a bonus and is seemingly coincidental to the book's (supposed) main purpose of straightforward travel writing.

Destinations is, therefore, an entertainment as well as being a historical judgement of the word, circa late 1970s; and as an entertainment alone this book is superb.

The Aftermath of Nightmare

She writes of Washington, visiting there just after Nixon's resignation:

"Today the city is in the aftermath of nightmare, and is still only half wakened from it... I had supposed that, with Nixon gone and his accomplices discredited, Washington would be settling down with relief into a more composed routine. I expected a contemplative, if shaken community: I found instead a nest of zealots.

"There was a venom still in the air, something more poisonous I thought than mere political reaction. I had experienced moments of political trauma before ... but I never felt quite so insidious a sense of bitterness and repulsion as I felt in Washington now ... 'I'd no sooner pardon that guy' someone told me, 'than I'd pardon a rattlesnake!'"

She writes of South Africa in 1977:

"Even here, though, up the winding dirt lanes, come rumours of riot, bloodshed and repression, for the inescapable reality of South Africa today, the truth around all else revolves, is the suppression of the huge black majority by the whites, and the inescapable slow movement of the blacks toward revolution."

Of Cairo in 1978. "Last time I was in Cairo it was a socialist capital, presided over by the autocrat Gamal Abdel Nasser, and sustained by the money, arms and advice of Soviet Russia. It was disciplined, drab and a bit scary. Now the very opposite is true. President Anwar el-Sadat is an eager advocate of free enterprise and competition. All the new energies of the Moslem world, the energies of political clout, of oil wealth, of growing sophistication and cosmopolitan awareness, are coming to a head in Cairo, hyped up by powerful injections of capitalist stimulant."

English-based, American born novelist and travel writer, Paul Theroux has written of Morris: "not everyone knows that she has climbed practically to the top of Mount Everest but all her readers know that, as a historian and travel writer she has scaled Parnassus." She has indeed.

The Author's Future

I would like to speculate that some giant figure on the world stage in the latter years of this century will be asked by an aspiring writer who he or she should read so as to improve their craft.

(I cannot think of who this might be in comparison, say, to Churchill. The only ones that immediately come to mind have been killed or murdered: John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Dag Hammarskj old and John Lennon. The best I can suggest is, say, Pierre Trudeau or Lee Kuan Yew in 10 years time, Jerry Brown after his Presidency, maybe a political Paul McCarthy or Robert Bedford - Mohammed Ali or Mrs Gandhi in the 1990s perhaps.)

Anyhow, when this hypothetical wise man or woman is asked this question I would like to think he or she might respond "read Morris."

Fireside Reality

That renowned traveller and story teller of yesteryear W S Maugham wrote that "the wise traveller travels only in imagination" he continued that the best journeys are: "the journeys that you take at your own fireside, for then you lose none of your illusions."

Morris has the ability to place us at our own fireside, at the same time we savour the delights and peculiarities pertaining to far away places but, unlike Maugham, Morris spares us no illusions.

Nevertheless, as entertainment her essays can perhaps be compared to Maugham's short stories, this especially so to those Maugham set in places east of Suez.

The Welsh Ms Morris, though, is an essayist and as such she is without peer. Her craftsmanship moreover is finely honed. Her prose is precise, but melodious. She writes of haunting images and surreal fantasies giving the overall effect of immense exhilaration. In her essay The Islanders she writes of Manhattan in a way that could only be equalled by, say, a hypothetical Welsh Norman Mailer.

Mailer wrote his Manhattan-inspired American Dream for 'Esquire', each chapter appearing while he was still at work on the next. This dynamic between author and the publisher mirrors, to some degree, Morris's collaboration with Rolling Stone.

Mailer writes that "sometimes I think there's a buried maniac who runs the mind of this city," Morris comments that "images of confinement haunt me in Manhattan but the first thing that always strikes me ... is its fearful and mysterious beauty."

Transferred Allegiances

To make a personal observation about Morris, it is perhaps germane to mention that Ms Morris is bisexual (some earlier books were written by Mr James Morris). One may be excused, therefore, to ask whether this is the reason for Ms Morris' more than fleeting preoccupation with genitalia, both male and female, viz "when Prime Ministers emerge from their celebrated threshold 10 Downing Street ... they do so, almost apologetically, or scuttle away into their waiting limousines as though they have just discovered their flies undone" and "at nine in the morning, on a smart street in the East Seventies a highly respectable middle-aged lady leans against the hood of a black Mercedes, meditatively scratching her crotch."

Also "he is on his way to a presentation on Pre-Lymnphadenectomy Staging of testicular Tumors, and his name, I see from his lapel card, is Dr Portnoy."

Destinations taken as a whole is a delight and this work will become a definitive textbook to the world of the 1970s. Morris has the ability to catch the mood, the spell and sparkle of places.