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  The use of the word ‘patrician’ in such a positive sense, when it is so often employed negatively, is telling here. Jan was in her late thirties when she wrote these words, a successful (and of course then still male) writer living life exactly as she pleased. Some readers may find this tone a little de haut en bas. But Jan’s is not a snobbish view of the world, rather one informed by an understanding of what high endeavour may accomplish. She appreciates excellence in all its forms.

  Oxford is surely the best book ever written on its subject, a pure distillation of the essence of this great city. If it has a fault this would be an overabundance of facts and information generally. Jan’s curiosity about the city leads her to throw in everything she knows or can find out about it. The sheer volume of facts inevitably invited corrections from some critics and readers of errors both real and imagined. While Jan is able to illuminate the city with her prose, she is as it were on her best behaviour in this book, a little in awe of the place that moulded her to such an extent.

  Jan’s other book on Oxford is an anthology, The Oxford Book of Oxford. The Oxford referred to in the title is very much the university, not the city as a whole. Beginning with writings from the mediaeval period and ending in 1945, Jan selected extracts from books, letters, diaries, poetry and written material of all kinds to illustrate the life of the university, annotating them in her stylish way so as to introduce and link them. The Oxford Book of Oxford is the product not simply of prodigious reading, but also a prodigious gift for selection, the sources of its material being very diverse.

  Oxford did indeed make Jan Morris. It instilled a sensibility and a morality which, once acquired, remained for good. In Conundrum, Jan writes that:

  … the signs, values and traditions of Oxford dominated my early boyhood, and were my first intimations of a world away from home, beyond my telescope’s range. I have, I hope, no sentimental view of the place – I know its faults too well. It remains for me nevertheless, in its frayed and battered integrity, an image of what I admire most in the world: a presence so old and true that it absorbs time and change like light into a prism, only enriching itself by the process, and finding nothing alien except intolerance.

  Three other cities were to have a profound effect on Jan, Venice, Trieste and New York. But Oxford was the first.

  ARABIST

  The Arabs have a word, baraka, which they use to describe the elusive, indefinable quality of being at once blessed and benevolent.

  James’s first experience of the Arab world came about when in 1946 he was posted to Gaza as a young subaltern in the British Army. The large base there was intended to be the centre of all British operations in the Middle East for years to come. The history of British engagement with and meddling in the Middle East is a long one, beginning of course with the English in the Crusades. In the nineteenth century it was a vital part of the imperial project to secure influence over the region as a way of creating a bridgehead with the most important of the empire’s dominions, India. And then came the lure of oil. During the First World War General Allenby, leading the forces of the Arab Revolt (and T. E. Lawrence), drove out the Ottoman Turks. And in 1917 the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour declared that the British government supported the creation of a Jewish state. From 1920 onwards the British controlled Palestine under the terms of what became known as the British Mandate.

  By the end of the Second World War, and in light of the Holocaust, agitation for a Jewish state was creating turmoil in Palestine. The British governor, Lord Moyne, was assassinated in 1944 by Jewish resistance fighters, and the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed in 1946. The British were being told in no uncertain terms that their time was up. This was the background to James’s tour of duty. He was by now the Intelligence Officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, looking out for signs of Jewish resistance activity, by his own account more a boy scout than a spy. It is possible that James in fact witnessed violence he preferred not to speak of later. There is a pattern in all the writings of passing over unpleasantness.

  James’s affection for the army, and for the routines of military life, may seem contradictory given his delight in the femininity, as he saw it, of Oxford. But it was stylishness he responded to. ‘I have always admired the military virtues, courage, dash, loyalty, self-discipline, and I like the look of soldiering.’ During his time in Palestine he was able to visit Jerusalem many times, and to explore the historic city freely. He escorted generals on visits to the British High Commission, thus making useful contacts and learning much about the politics of the region. One day he found in a bookshop a copy of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, a book which was to influence both his later choice of literary subject matter and the writing style itself.

  The first book on the Arab world James read was Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, and the second T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, both of which he had discovered while at Lancing. These books, along with Doughty’s, came to have a strong influence over all of James’s writings, not just those about the Arab world. In Conundrum Jan refers to Kinglake as her literary exemplar. In her introduction to the Oxford University Press edition she writes that ‘Eothen is a thoroughly self-centred book, and that is half its charm’. A more succinct description of Jan’s own writing could hardly be imagined.

  Alexander Kinglake set out with a friend to travel in Arabia, and his story begins in 1834 in Constantinople and ends in Cairo. Eothen is a Greek word meaning ‘from the east’, and Kinglake borrowed it from Herodotus. His book represented an entirely new way of writing about foreign places, highly subjective, full of tall stories, and wholly unconcerned with anything that did not interest the writer (such as, in Kinglake’s case, buildings, crafts and many other matters). But it is candid, humorous and often joyful, and Jan wrote of it that it ‘cast a spell over the genre from that day to this’. Some of the writing is mannered, and often the reader comes across the sort of fancifulness that sometimes characterises Jan’s own writings. It is not hard to see how the rhythms of Kinglake’s sentences and the blitheness of his attitudes came to influence Jan’s. It is this book above all others that she considers the inspiration for her lifelong career of writing about places.

  James read Seven Pillars of Wisdom at around the same age. Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1935, not long before James encountered his great book, and his fame by then stood very high. For a boy in his early teens Lawrence’s adventures in Arabia must have seemed thrilling. Jan recalls reading it voraciously, apparently unaware at that age of the ambivalences in Lawrence’s attitudes towards the Arabs, and the ambivalences too in his character. Lawrence and Morris have much in common. Lawrence was born in Wales, attended Oxford, and was slim, fastidious in dress and manner, and sexually indeterminate. If James identified with him in life, however, he did not adopt very much of his literary style, as he did Kinglake’s. The tone of portentousness that pervades much of Seven Pillars is wholly alien to the Morrisian style.

  Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta had an effect on James similar to that of Eothen. Published in 1888 and describing journeys that took place over a period of two years in the previous decade, it was hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as ‘the supreme book of travel’. Doughty was truly an explorer, not a charming dilettante like Kinglake. He experienced and recorded the Bedouin way of life in a way that prefigured Wilfrid Thesiger’s almost a century later. Lawrence said of Doughty that ‘he took all of Arabia as his province, and has left to his successors only the poor part of specialist’. His language is often archaic (more so than Kinglake’s, written several decades earlier), but again the reader can sense the charm it must have had for James. In an interview Jan gave a few years ago she said that ‘It called to me out of desert lands … but its meanings were less seductive to me than its sensually exciting rhythms … For years I used to sing its opening paragraph in the bath, to a melody of my own invention …’

  These three books
then were the inspiration for James’s own three on the Arab world. They opened up possibilities that were clearly tantalising to a young man. And the books they led him in turn to write exemplify their best virtues.

  Sultan in Oman, the first of these books set in the Arab world, might be described as the only travel book Jan ever wrote. Certainly it is the only one that describes a single journey from one place to another. If Jan resists the label of ‘travel writer’ it is partly because her writings generally involve going to a place (usually a city), checking into a hotel, and then simply staying put and observing the scene. In the book on Oman, however, James embarked on ‘the last classical journey of the Arabian peninsula’.

  Something of the spirit of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop hovers over this enterprise (not that James was as incompetent as William Boot). It begins with a chance meeting in the autumn of 1955 in Basra airport with Peter Fleming. Fleming was a distinguished travel writer, author of among others News from Tartary, an account of an overland journey from Peking to Kashmir. (He is also known for being Ian Fleming’s brother.) He had been commissioned by the editor of The Times to join an expedition, or, as he described it, a coup de main, in the mountainous territories of Muscat and Oman. The Sultan had decided he must prevent the Imam, the religious leader, from establishing (with the not very covert support of adjacent Saudi Arabia, religiously sympathetic Egypt and covetous American oil companies) a puppet state in the Muscat region. At Basra Fleming met for the first time the person who was properly the Middle East correspondent of The Times – James Morris. James was oddly unaware that Fleming had been given this commission, and promptly he arranged to join him. Thus two reporters from the same newspaper embarked (as ‘two halves of a pantomime horse’) on a journey in a remote part of the world which was of little apparent interest to anyone outside – except that it was very much of interest to the British, whose ally the Sultan was and whose oil companies were, like the Americans, anxious to establish what might lie beneath the desert’s surface.

  Fleming contributed the introduction to Sultan in Oman. He described quitting the expedition once the first (and only) shot was fired, and leaving the story in the hands of someone who had more stamina than he and who would write it up better. In the acknowledgements of the book James wrote,

  If there is a flavour of the 1920s to this, an aroma of open cockpits, Rolls-Royce armoured cars, pro-consuls and spheres of influence, it is because our adventure was one of the last of a line, a late flourish of Britain in Arabia. The flag that flew above us was the red flag of Muscat; but the ghosts of Curzon and Gertrude Bell rode with us approvingly.

  The frontier of Oman and Saudi Arabia was a debatable land, a dotted line on the map. Sultan Said bin Taimur could be sure of his authority in the south of the country, around his base at Salala, and that if he put down the incipient revolt of the Imam, this authority would be confirmed in Muscat, at the tip of the Persian Gulf. He had not, however, travelled overland between these two poles, and he now intended to do so, leading an expedition which would by virtue of its mere presence consolidate his rule throughout the country and shore up its frontiers. Given his reliance on the British for the arms and other support he required, it suited him very well to have as its chronicler a distinguished reporter of The Times of London.

  Sultan in Oman describes the colourful progress of this expedition. It begins with a thorough review of the political and economic background, and then describes the journey itself. The Sultan was an agreeable fellow, if somewhat mediaeval in many of his ideas. He had fitted out six large trucks, and the company included soldiers, slaves, dignitaries of uncertain function, and many goats.

  The trucks leapt away like dogs from the leash, manoeuvring for position. Exhaust smoke billowed about the palace. We were off! At breakneck speed our convoy drove out of the yard. The slaves struck up a loud unison fatha, invoking blessings on our mission. The household retainers lining the several courtyards bowed low and very humbly, and some of the men prostrated themselves. The keepers of the portals swung open the gates with a crash.

  They drove the four hundred miles to Fahud, where the oil prospectors were working, a journey certainly never before undertaken by motor vehicle. In Nizwa the Imam quickly surrendered to the Sultan’s superior forces, after firing the one shot that Peter Fleming had hoped for. During their welcome by the now thoroughly converted inhabitants,

  … there billowed a deafening explosion as an ancient Portuguese gun, left behind by those conquerors three centuries before, roared a welcome. So powerful was the charge inserted by the gunners, in their excess of precautionary enthusiasm, that the cannon at once blew up, severely injuring an aged onlooker; but undaunted they turned to other artillery and throughout that morning our activities were punctuated by cataclysmic detonations from the fort …

  His ambitions now secured, the Sultan arranged a meeting with the Sheikh of what was then the Trucial States, now the United Arab Emirates. This country lay to the north of Oman, and the two leaders had always enjoyed a good relationship and an agreed frontier. Sheikh Suleiman bin Hamyar appeared in a ‘suitably individual manner’:

  Next day, at a convenient and gentlemanly mid-morning hour, we saw approaching us from the mountains a moving pillar of dust, quite unlike those surging clouds that had, in the past few days, heralded the arrival of so many camel trains. It was either a tribal band of unprecedented character, we thought, or something totally different, peculiar to the Green Mountains, like a camel-drawn dray or sledge, pulled by mules … But as the pillar grew nearer, and we were able to look into the middle of it, as you might look into the interior of a small tornado, we saw that it was something infinitely more astonishing: a perfectly good, well-kept, fairly modern American convertible.

  Such absurdities of men and manners, such clashes between ancient and modern, delight Jan throughout her work. Sultan in Oman is infused with a sort of glee. James was not yet thirty when he made this journey, and his book is clearly that of a young man, someone revelling in physical adventure as well as in the exotic. But the sharp eye of the mature writer is also evident:

  We stopped for ten minutes to watch a goldsmith at work in his dim-lit open-fronted shop. He appeared to be a Persian, for he was wearing a costume (high-crowned hat, tight-sleeved jerkin, sandals and odd appendages) that reminded me of some of the craftsmen in the bazaars of Isfahan and Teheran; and in his eye there was a look, like the look in the eye of a particularly experienced and humorous lizard, that seemed to show he had mastered the old Persian techniques of human relations. He paid no attention to me at all, except that when we left him, still hammering at tiny pieces of metal with infinitesimal implements, he raised one dark hooded eye and gave me the faintest insidious suspicion of a wink.

  It is with this book that James began to think seriously about the British Empire and his feelings towards it. Growing up as he did in the Britain of the 1930s, and serving later with the army, he had imbibed the attitudes of his kind, their assumptions about British superiority and benignity. These assumptions were later to be tested in the course of writing the Pax Britannica trilogy. But even in 1955 the tone seems unsure:

  It was a sad concomitant of fading Empire that such openings for soldierly adventures abroad were getting fewer every year; for by a happy paradox nothing had done more to increase amity among peoples. Gone now was the old Indian Army, and all those brave gallivantings in the Indian Hills. Gone were the African wars, and the gunboats on the Yangtze, and the forced marches in the Sudan. Gone, almost everywhere, were the long star-lit nights beneath Bedouin tents, in which the Englishman pleasantly deluded himself that his friendship with the Arab was something special, mutual and indestructible, and that there existed some affinity of spirit between the desert and the shires.

  The note of nostalgia is once again struck. But nostalgia for what, exactly? It is as though James were expressing the confusion felt by an entire nation, the Britain that in the 1950s was painfully coming to term
s with its loss of prestige. And yet he finishes in a confident manner: ‘Britain [was] still (in my view) the wisest and most trustworthy force in world affairs, and a Power beneath whose sometimes cantankerous exterior there beat a liberal heart.’ James’s adventure in Oman pre-dated the Suez crisis by only a year, a situation that caused him to reconsider such sentiments. But for now he was just delighted to have had a taste of the sort of adventures experienced by Kinglake, Lawrence and Doughty.

  The Market of Seleukia, the second book on an Arab subject, has on the face of it an odd title, since it takes as its province, like Doughty’s, the entire Arab world and beyond, to Sudan and what was then Persia, now Iran. As in Pax Britannica, James fixes on a particular moment – the Suez crisis in 1956 – as a pivot and then ranges back and forth in time and space to describe all of the Middle East during a fateful period. The title is taken from a poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, which describes the visit of one of the gods to the market-place in Seleukia for an evening of debauchery. ‘Nobility stalks among talkative by-standers towards depravity,’ James writes, ‘and that is what happens, all too often, in the tumultuous market-place of the Middle East.’