Jan Morris, "Manhattan"

ecstatic attention & secret-concealing landscape descriptions

“He affects me profoundly whenever I see him, and when I put my binoculars down and only the suggestion of him remains, apparently inanimate among the trees, all around him in my mind’s eye the marvelous and terrible island of Manhattan concentrically extends, ring after ring of cage, ditch or rampart, precinct limit and electoral boundary, Hudson, East River and Atlantic itself — the greatest of all the zoos, whose inhabitants prowl up and down, like victims of some terrific spell, for ever and ever within it.”

The sidewalks of Brooklyn are, among other things (scaffolding-shadowed, trash-bedecked, flung about by tree roots), the world’s greatest used bookstore.

Quite often I’ll come home from a walk around the block with a new (read: old) police procedural by Ed McBain, a memoir about a presidential election I wasn’t alive for, a vigorously underlined collection of Greek tragedies. Or at the very least — because books from this series are as common on Brooklyn stoops as sparrows — some semi-distant year’s The Best American Short Stories. In my sidewalk-perusing I am as undiscriminating as a dog.

But what I never bring home, despite regular opportunity, is a collection of The Best American Travel Writing. For a long time I’d have said unashamedly that I hated travel writing. If asked to justify this prejudice I’d have said that I nearly always found books about travel (a) precious, poetic, and self-regarding (one man’s meditations while backpacking through the Himalayas in the company of a sagacious sherpa), or (b) “funny” in the way of Dave Barry columns (every incident cartoonified, every joke telegraphed). Let some other sap try extracting pleasure from these waterlogged pages.

Then I discovered Jan Morris. That I only “discovered” her recently is an embarrassment. She is, according to Rebecca West (!), “perhaps the best descriptive writer of our time.” New York Review Books (source of a good thirty percent of the books I love) has had her in their catalogue for years. But let my ignorance serve you; her brilliant, companionable books belong on your shelf and in your suitcase.

Morris is one of those writers (West happens to be another) whose prose styles are so lively and frank and astute that, in order to RSVP yes to a book’s invitation, all you need to know is that she will be there. A memoir about gender transition? (Jan was born James Morris.) Absolutely. A novel in the form of a guide to a fictional Mediterranean peninsula? Of course.

My favorite of Morris’s books (so far) is The World, a collection of the best of five decades of her travel essays. In it you will get to know the peculiar charms of La Paz  (“tumultuous, feverish, often maddening”) and sit in on the Eichmann trial (“‘There he is,’ I heard a voice somewhere behind my shoulder, rather as you sometimes hear mourners pointing out rich relatives at a funeral”) — and you will get to know Morris. Watch what she does with Manhattan.

The best of her essays about the city comes from the 1970s  — when Manhattan was, as Dr. Becky would say, a good city having a hard time. But Morris approaches the city forgivingly, humorously, with her characteristic ecstasy of attention.

She begins with the Central Park Zoo’s famous polar bear, which she can just make out through binoculars from the windows of the Rolling Stone offices.

The bear lives alone in his compound down there, and I am told that he is a character of weird and forceful originality — sadly neurotic, some informants suggested, genuinely imaginative, others thought.

Already we’re enjoying Morris’s company — that conversational word weird within the casual sophistication of her prose, the fact that she has informants, plural, regarding the psyche of a bear. But then she writes this:

Destiny has deposited the animal plumb in the middle of Manhattan: you might say he is the central New Yorker. He affects me profoundly whenever I see him, and when I put my binoculars down and only the suggestion of him remains, apparently inanimate among the trees, all around him in my mind’s eye the marvelous and terrible island of Manhattan concentrically extends, ring after ring of cage, ditch or rampart, precinct limit and electoral boundary, Hudson, East River and Atlantic itself — the greatest of all the zoos, whose inhabitants prowl up and down, like victims of some terrific spell, for ever and ever within it.

After steadying us with the pleasing simplicity of that first sentence (the little treat of hearing destiny and deposited in such proximity, the verbal and conceptual solidity of that central New Yorker) she whirls us, Mary Poppins-like, over the building-tops.

I love so much about this sentence — the palpable affection that animates it (affects me profoundly); the subtle but clear stage directions (she puts her binoculars down, and then savors this elaborate thought); the classical use of terrific in terrific spell (horrible : horrific :: terrible: terrific). Has New Yorkers’ tormented relationship to their city — their simultaneous feelings of enchantment and entrapment — ever been better described?

But what I love best about it is how much Morris there is in it. My gripe about travel writing, at its most basic, is that I don’t especially care about places; I care about people. If you have a secret you want to keep from me, hide it in a page-long landscape description. But Morris’s vision of Manhattan is, like everything she writes, so imbued with her personality — her intelligence, her wit, her playfulness — that we would just as happily be standing beside her at the window of a Moroccan palace or a South Korean skyscraper. The proximity to her is the point.   

The foolishness of my prejudice regarding travel writing is most clearly demonstrated by Morris, but its fundamental wrongheadedness is best explained by Borges:

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.