Contact! Brief encounters in a lifetime of travel
by: Jan Morris
Faber and Faber (PRICE)
review: John Walsh
In the mangrove swamps of Fiji, where cannibals once lurked, Jan Morris encounters a modern version of eating people: consuming them with curiosity. The Fijian term for curiosity is via kila - "knowledge want" - and when meeting the great travel writer the local women bombard her: "Where are you going? What is your name? Are you married? Where do you live? Have you any children? How many people live in London? Do you sleep alone?"
Morris finds them a little frightening but concludes: "I would not mind being eaten in Fiji. The pot would be spiced, the cooking gentle, and the occasion in most ways merry."
There's the essence of Jan Morris, the most romantic and forgiving of travellers: she wouldn't mind being eaten, provided it were done with style.
Her long career has been an alchemising of her own via kila into prose that's rich, supple and full of precisely recalled details. But her travel books have focused more on place, atmosphere and history than on people. She remedies that in Contact!, quarrying from her 40 books a cornucopia of glimpses of people whose presence lit up a destination.
The result is less a jewellery box than a box of chocolates with some disappointing centres. We hop from Isfahan, where a pushy student of English demands to be enlightened about the gerund, to Zagreb, where Morris struggles to identify the tune being played on a home-made instrument of wine and mineral-water bottles. These are charming moments, somewhere between vignettes and epiphanies, but, plucked from their context, their impact is dulled. Many end on a downbeat note with an aborted conversation or a meaningful look.
Morris keeps an eye out for figures "typical" of their region ("He was the very model of a modern Montenegran") but alternates between being downcast or delighted if the "typical" ones don't conform to type.
She watches the great Vladimir Horowitz thumping out God Save the Queen at the British embassy in Washington.
She sees an elegant but hungover figure in a London cafe giving off "an air of unconcerned, if not actually oblivious, composure", decides he is an eccentric earl of the Irish peerage, and learns it's Peter O'Toole. She meets the spy, Guy Burgess, in Moscow and is moved by how much he misses England; then he vanishes before her eyes at the Bolshoi Theatre.
With some politicians she is clairvoyant. Meeting John F Kennedy, Morris has a spooky premonition that he is in his prime and will never get older.
During her conversation with Harry Truman, the president spins a globe on his desk, or points to sections of it, "in a way I can only describe as proprietorial". Singer Gracie Fields serves coffee by the pool at her retirement villa in Capri, as grand as a Hollywood actress at the height of her powers.
Yves St Laurent recommends that all she needs for elegance is one dress, a pair of jeans, some blouses and a raincoat. YSL was "the Frenchest person I ever met".
It's all slightly insubstantial, especially when Morris meets some historical villains. She watches Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the Final Solution, being tried in Jerusalem, and compares him to "some elderly pinched housewife in a flowered pinafore".
At evoking a city, a roadside local, a pretentious American, a uniformed grotesque, Morris is without peer. At offering halfway serious judgements on real people, she doesn't quite make contact.
