Lincoln's Birthday

Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1809, of Abraham Lincoln.  My small collection of books specifically on his life include the first edition of the one-volume edition of Carl Sandburg’s monumental six-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years;  Stephen B. Oates With Malice Toward None – A Life of Abraham Lincoln; the Library of America’s two-volume Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings; James McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution; Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg; and Jan Morris’s Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest.  Some of these I’ve read fully, and some in part. 

Interestingly, the only one I’ve hardly touched is perhaps the most famous of all – Sandburg’s biography.  I have a general bias toward more recent scholarship, and I’ve always been suspicious, unfairly no doubt, that Sandburg was too close in time to the actual man, and did not have the benefit of more fulsome scholarship and basic research yet to come.  But it’s on my long get-to list!

Among his many qualities was his sometimes-droll great sense of humor.  One example I enjoy, from Anthony Gross’s The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: 

While walking along a dusty road in Illinois in his circuit days, Lincoln was overtaken by a stranger driving to town.  “Will you have the goodness to take my overcoat to town for me?” asked Lincoln.  “With pleasure, but how will you get it again?” came the response.  Lincoln promptly replied “Oh, very readily.  I intend to remain in it.”

R Balsamo

Jan Morris of the Pax Britannica Trilogy at 90

Today is author Jan Morris’s 90^th birthday.  What a treasure trove of writing she has given us.  She has been as prolific as she has been masterful, and I have read much of her work though far from all.  She mixes history and culture and travelogue into most interesting evocations, and of these I have especially enjoyed, many times over, her treatments of Venice, Trieste, and Hong Kong.  But I believe her masterpiece is her trilogy of the history of the British Empire – the Pax Britannica Trilogy.  History it is, but really a pointillist portrait of the sights and sounds, the ethos and the pathos, the glory and the tragedy, of that remarkable historical phenomenon. 

I have reread that work many times, and I always find something new to reflect on, to marvel at.  I often pick up a volume and begin reading on a randomly-opened page, it’s that good.  I can’t think of another book, three actually, that have enjoyed more, or learned more from.  Formally prose, so many passages reach the poetic that it is as pleasurable to read, for those who enjoy the English language, as it is informative and stimulative.

Jan Morris wrote these volumes as a young man, as James Morris before her gender change.  She writes in the Introduction to the last volume:

Mine is an aesthetic view of Empire, and there is no denying that as the flare of the imperial idea faded, so its beauty faded too.  It had not always been a pleasant kind of beauty, but it had been full of splendor and vitality, and when the Empire lost its overweening confidence and command, its forms became less striking and its outlines less distinct....  My book is therefore sad without being regretful.  It was time the Empire went, but it was sad to see it go; and these pages too, while I hope they are not blind to the imperial faults and weaknesses, are tinged nevertheless with an affectionate melancholy....  I hope my readers will discover in themselves ... at least some of the mingled sensations of admiration, dislike, amusement, pity, pride, envy and astonishment with which I have watched and pictured the passing of the British Empire.    

Morris is very witty, and I have captured a few examples of such in my two previous posts, the first seven years ago now.  One more:  The early British West African trading firm Swanzy’s, later to form a part of the conglomerate Unilever, at one point gave its historic, ceremonial staff, an important totem at one time, to the British Museum, “and thus [it] disappeared from human knowledge.”  Yet another (it’s hard to stop):  The appointed successor to Tennyson as Poet Laureate was one Alfred Austin, and enthusiast of Empire and of mixed reputation, who, writes Morris, “was apparently impervious to criticism, and this is lucky, for nobody has had a good word for him since his death in 1913.”

Morris visits cemeteries.  She reads the stones, she sits and soaks in the sights and sounds, she finds the stories that end there.  I’ve also walked among the stones, wondering about the stories untold, or half-told.  Near one of my family’s graves there is a four-grave plot, with a large monument.  The "darling beloved" James Jr. died in the early 1930s at the age of six.  One ponders for a moment the inestimable sorrow of the parents, and then one sees that a second grave is that of James Sr., who died just a few years later.  The other two plots are unfilled.  What became of the mother?  Were there other children?  Did she remarry and does she now lie a thousand miles away next to her second husband, leaving the first joys of her life lying together without her?   

Morris visited the southern England grave of the enigmatic romantic T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) in 1976 on the anniversary of his 1935 death, and found the grave covered with flowers.  In South Africa she visited the graves of the British killed there in the Second Boer War, writing “when I was there in 1975 I thanked the gardener for tending the British graves with such care.  ‘So long as you’re satisfied,’ he gently replied.”  She found the grave in Bermuda of a young lieutenant who died in 1837, buried under the epitaph “Alas he is not lost / But is gone before.” 

One last clip, which I have quoted before, for me one of the most touching.  In the southeast tip of Europe, she visited a cemetery holding the bodies of the many young Australians and New Zealanders whose lives were thrown away there through the criminal incompetence of the British military leaders in an especially senseless and horrific war:   

"In one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so obscure a purpose: 'God Took Our Norman, It Was His Will, Forget Him, No, We Never Will' ... for all too often the sacrifices of the Great War, as its contemporaries called it, were given to a cause that was already receding into history, like those discredited grey battleships, their smoke-pall filling the sky, hull-down on the Aegean horizon."

The most beautifully evocative writer I have ever read. 

After supposedly retiring, two years ago she published “Ciao, Carpaccio! – An Infatuation,” a personal appreciation of the 15^th century Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio who populated his carefully detailed paintings with whimsical animals and objects.  Morris tells us that she is no scholar of art and that her “infatuation” with the painter is “largely affectionate fancy.”  One day while looking through a book with photographs of his work she saw in a small, curiously perched bird, overlooking a great scene, the spirit of the artist himself, writing “that before I went to bed I resolved to write, purely for my own pleasure, this self-indulgent caprice.”  Would that she will have more such caprices in the coming years.

R Balsamo

Writer Jan Morris Turns 85

Jan Morris, the great Welsh-English poetic storyteller of our age, celebrates her 85^th birthday today.  What a treasure trove she has given us, writings so capturing of time and place, so atmospheric, we can close our eyes and almost feel we’ve been there.

Her works are varied and many, but her masterpiece (writing as James Morris), in the true meaning of that now-trite word, is her trilogy on the history, ethos, and meaning of the British Empire, the “Pax Britannica” trilogy: Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (1973); Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire (1968); and Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (1978).  Run don’t walk, to get copies if you have not experienced them yet.

She writes of times and places that recede in memory, but the themes are eternal.  As I wrote before (link), “sensual and rhythmic, her narrative evokes the sounds and smells of empire about you as you drift through the pages”:

"In one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so obscure a purpose: 'God Took Our Norman, It Was His Will, Forget Him, No, We Never Will' ... for all too often the sacrifices of the Great War, as its contemporaries called it, were given to a cause that was already receding into history, like those discredited grey battleships, their smoke-pall filling the sky, hull-down on the Aegean horizon."

As I wrote before:  Her narrative has all the stories, the wars (some obscure, like the British invasion of Tibet), the adventures, and of course all the characters (Curzon, once Viceroy of India, "died in 1925 after a career full of irony and vicissitude."). And humour abounds, subtle and dry” -- Writing of the Fashoda Incident and the death of “Chinese” Gordon, the ‘noblest man who ever lived', and of the subsequent invasion of Sudan by Gen. Kitchener and the last cavalry charge of the British Empire (in which Churchill took part), as James Morris she wrote:

For years the Sudan had been in a state of rebellion under a fiery Sufi mystic who called himself the Mahdi, ‘the Leader’, and who formally announced the End of  Time, a conception particularly unwelcome to the British just then.”

And don’t by any means skip the footnotes; describing a salute to Kitchener:

With live shot, there being no blank: the gunners aimed high over the river into the desert beyond, where nobody who mattered was likely to be.”

In her last book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, she writes:

“I write of exiles in Trieste, but I have generally felt myself an exile too.  For years I felt myself an exile from normality, and now I feel myself one of those exiles from time.  The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading an unknown territory, leaving your own land behind….”

The immortal, in her native Welsh, Trefan Morys, born 85 years ago today.

R Balsamo 

Related Link:

Writer Jan Morris is 83 Years Old Today, Author of the Masterpiece Pax Britannica Trilogy

Wikipedia article - link. 

Writer Jan Morris is 83 Years Old Today, Author of the Masterpiece Pax Britannica Trilogy

Jan Morris, the remarkably talented and prolific writer of history and travel narratives, is 83 years old today. She is the writer I enjoy reading the most -- her powers of observation, analysis, and description are unparalleled. I have very much enjoyed her historical travelogues such as Hong Kong, The World of Venice, The Venetian Empire, and Trieste; but her masterpiece, though, and a true one it is, is her trilogy on the history, ethos, and meaning of the British Empire, the Pax Britannica trilogy: Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (1973); Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire (1968); and Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (1978).

In Pax Britannica, writing as James Morris at the time, hers is history written as it should be, through the sensitive eye of a travel writer with the wordcraft of a poet, often through excerpts of apposite lines of poetry or etchings from gravestones in forgotten far-away cemeteries; sensual and rhythmic, her narrative evokes the sounds and smells of empire about you as you drift through the pages: "In one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so obscure a purpose: 'God Took Our Norman, It Was His Will, Forget Him, No, We Never Will' ... for all too often the sacrifices of the Great War, as its contemporaries called it, were given to a cause that was already receding into history, like those discredited grey battleships, their smoke-pall filling the sky, hull-down on the Aegean horizon."

Her narrative has all the stories, the wars (some obscure, like the British invasion of Tibet), the adventures, and of course all the characters (Curzon, once Viceroy of India, "died in 1925 after a career full of irony and vicissitude."). And humour abounds, subtle and dry: she writes of the last of the Moghul monarchs, who “believed himself to possess magic powers; for instance, he thought, wrongly as it proved, that in time of necessity he could turn himself into a house-fly.” Remarking on the work of Christian missionaries: “Not that such catechism training was always successful. The Hau Hau cult of New Zealand, though partially biblical in its beliefs, included among its rituals the sacrifice of Anglican clergymen.” Or: “Though mostly deserted [now], Mbau [in Fiji] is still a peculiar place to visit.... approaching it from the mainland by boat, the silence broken only by the swish of the paddles, the squawks of recondite water-fowl, and perhaps the chop of an axe from the hidden recesses of the island, is an experience partly Venetian but mostly Stygian.”

One's understanding of the world today is immeasurably nourished by her telling of the Imperial story. And as for the British themselves, she writes: "if Britain [is] to be prosperous and influential in the future it must be as an island Power off the coast of Europe. Now as always, it had not been the British Empire that the world really respected. It had not even been, as a matter of fact, Great Britain. It had been England, the heart of it all, England of Shakespeare and the Common Law, England of the poets and the liberators, Churchill's England of the white cliffs and the Cockney courage."

From her introduction to Pax Britannica: “I have fondly imagined my book orchestrated by the young Elgar, and illustrated by Frith; its pages are perfumed for me with saddle-oil, joss-stick and railway steam; I hope my readers will feel, as they close its pages, that they have spent a few hours looking through a big sash window at a scene of immense variety and some splendour, across whose landscapes there swarms a remarkable people at the height of its vigour, in an outburst of creativity, pride, greed and command that has affected all our lives ever since.”

She writes in the Prologue to Heaven’s Command: “I am, though, chiefly attracted to the aesthetic of empire: its feel, its look, its human passions, the metaphysics of its power, the sense of it, the intuition – its ships too, and its horsemen, and the dust of its high veld, and its distant trains streaming across the Punjab plain: and paramount for me in this jumble of suggestions is a sense of alter ego – as though the British had another people inside themselves, very different from the people that Dickens or Cobden portrayed, who yearned to break out of their sad or prosaic realities, and live brilliant lives in Xanadu…. I resolved to write a big, ornate, frank but affectionate work about Victoria’s empire, start to finish: an imperial trilogy, a pointillist portrait less of an age than of a conviction, in whose colours I would try to illustrate not only the extraordinary energies of the imperial generations, but also, suggested here and there in the shade or brush-stroke, some retrospective emotions of my own.”

Jan Morris, with a sensitive melancholy perhaps from her Welsh heritage, is a wonderful writer leading a remarkable life, and what treasures she has crafted.


Richard Balsamo

Related Post:  Writer Jan Morris Turns 85