VENICE

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Archive clip of Michael Palin from Archive on 4 - Jan Morris: Writing a Life, originally recorded in January 2022. When the tour is over, Virginia and I meander to the other side of the Grand Canal, in the direction of Santa Margherita. It’s a trapezoidal campo with a fair number of tourists but almost as many Venetians—regular people with dogs, toolboxes, and walkers. Virginia and I take up residence at a restaurant recommended by Ilaria. We watch as a seagull swoops from behind a woman, snatching an entire pizza from her hand. A man takes a drag of a cigarette and spits on the flagstones as he walks by. I get her to remind me of the bones of it just to hear her tell it. When she was assigned by the Times, which sponsored the ascent, she had never climbed any mountain before. They had to work out a way of protecting their scoop and get it into the paper in time for the Queen’s coronation. Having hugged Hillary in congratulation, Morris scrambled down an ice field and sent a wire overnight with a pre-coded message. It read: “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.” This meant: “Summit of Everest reached on 29 May by Hillary and Tenzing.” Morris made a lot of friendships on the mountain and they all stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. She is now the last survivor from that last camp. If Morris’s gleefully subjective mode of reportage seems commonplace today, it wasn’t always so. As historian Peter Stead put it in a BBC profile about Morris, the genre was once divided into two rather tedious camps, at least in Britain: the scholars on the one hand and the complainers on the other. The scholars wrote for a highly educated audience that understood oblique references to art and history. The complainers, conversely, used their forays away from home to point out the failings of others: Those Italian waiters—really!

It is a hard book to categorise. It is not a history of Venice, though it does trace out much of its history. It is not a guide book, at least not in a practical sense as you could not use it to guide yourself around Venice. It might be more thought about as a reflection on Venice, or perhaps if you have never been, a preparation for it. It is organised into a whole host of themes, which I suppose make some sort of sense. There is, I think, an easy explanation for the vast difference in quality and style between the two books. Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere was written in 2002, one of her later works. The World of Venice, on the other hand, was written in 1960. I don't think she'd yet found her unique and lovely way of bringing together the eloquent travel essay, the quirks of history, and the expert tour guide into one unified whole. Adams, Tim (1 March 2020). "You're talking to someone at the very end of things". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 November 2020. Photographed in 1988, the year she published her acclaimed history of Hong Kong. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media via Getty Images Morris’s first book, Coast to Coast (1956), came out of a cross-US journey funded by a Commonwealth fellowship. After the 1956 Suez invasion, which the Times supported and Morris did not, he left for the Manchester Guardian, as it was then, alternating six months of researching books with six on the paper (hence one book dedicated to “philanthropists in Cross Street” – the paper’s Manchester HQ).Jan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture. Jan Morris: She sensed she was 'at the very end of things'. What a life it was …". The Guardian. 22 November 2020 . Retrieved 23 November 2021.

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. The operation was a success. Morris returned to England and divorced her wife Elizabeth, as was required by law, though the two would remain partners for life. (In 2011 they entered a civil union.) There are some fascinating bits about the Venetian language. The word 'Arsenal' which was the name for the Venetian shipyard which used assembly-line techniques (celebrated by Dante in the Inferno) to produce, at peak, a fighting galley every day, comes from the arabic 'dar es sinaa' which means 'house of art'. The Arabic word 'sikka' (a die) became 'zecca' (a mint) and thence 'zecchino' (a coin) which is the origin of the Venetian unot of currency, the sequin. (The City: 17) Italie, Hillel (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, author and transgender pioneer, dies at 94". Associated Press. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020.In the long, beamed sitting room of Trefan Morys, we talk first about the house itself. When they all lived down the road, the kids used to come and play here in the stables, overgrown with bramble. Later Jan and Elizabeth felt the big house was unmanageable so they found a buyer, cleared out the horse stalls here, brought the books and bookcases from the other place, along with the weather vane, renovated and moved in.

Johns, Derek (27 March 2016). "Jan Morris at 90: She has shown us the world". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 25 March 2018 . Retrieved 27 March 2018. The Press battle to report Everest climb". BBC News. 29 May 2013. Archived from the original on 26 July 2020 . Retrieved 27 March 2020. Morris has “Browning among the splendours of the Ca’Rezzonico (as it says in a plaque on the wall: “Open my heart and you will see, Graven inside of it, Italy”); Byron swimming home along the Grand Canal after a soiree, with a servant carrying his clothes in a gondola behind; Shelley watching the sun go down behind the Euganean Hills, Cobden feted at a banquet on Giudecca, with an ear of corn in every guest’s buttonhole; Ruskin, for 50 years the arbiter of taste on Venice, and still the author of the most splendid descriptions in the English language.” 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 … Many characterisations and generalisations are the of-their-time sort; there are commonplace references to housemaids and housekeepers that sound, in this voice, like a hangover from pre-war Britain; there's apparent romanticisation of Italian corruption as quaint; locals described "like figures from a Goldoni comedy". Indeed the Venetians in the book seem a little too much like a scene which Morris describes being filmed for TV:An air of home-spun guile and complacency, as of a man who has made a large fortune out of slightly shady dealings in artichokes." (The People: 2) The modern Venetian ... examines the world's delights analytically, as a hungry entomologist might dissect a rare but potentially edible spider." (The City: 17)

She gets up from the sofa, inviting me to come and see the rest of the house. On bookcases and on desks and tables there are wooden scale models of ships from all over the world – those on the bookshelves relate to the books behind them – a sampan for books about south-east Asia and so on. On either side of the doorway are two bardic chairs awarded to Twm at Eisteddfods. On the ceiling there is the painted “eye of a poet” looking down. 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.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. One bishop playing a double game with such conspicuous ineptitude that he was simultaneously excommunicated both by the Pope and by the Oecumenical Patriarch." (The People: 9) No – see above! I was enthralled in the first place by its sense of timeless melancholy – just my style, but no longer available. Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world | Jan Morris". The Guardian. 2 October 2016 . Retrieved 23 November 2021. Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2018 winners". Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. 1 February 2018. Archived from the original on 12 August 2018 . Retrieved 11 August 2018.