Looking at a Land From the Outside --and Inside

In an empty office near the top of a skyscraper here, a dusty telephone rings. Jan Morris looks at the phone.

“Should we take it?” she asks with excitement. The office belongs to a radio station where she has just given an interview about her new book. “Yes,” she decides, after the second ring. “Let’s see what happens.”

Known by most as a travel essayist, Morris goes about her work in much the same way. She seizes the moment. She wanders through a foreign land, interacting with what she sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels. Morris offers herself as a prism through which she refracts the colors of a place and its history. The result is 30-odd books, which include studies of the British Empire, Venice, Oxford, Hong Kong, Manhattan and Wales, as well as collected essays, memoirs and a novel.

Now, at 71, Morris has just finished “Fifty Years of Europe,” a comprehensive yet personal view of how Europe has changed over the latter half of the century. With a reporter’s eye, a critic’s confidence and a novelist’s imagination, she has created a purely subjective and prismatic album of the continent. It is a collection of mini-essays, quotations, memories, historical jaunts, jottings and an occasional fictional scene traveling backward and forward in time. The book begins at the advent of the Cold War and ends with its dissolution. Morris not only looks back at the formative events that have shaped the European landscape, butalso peers ahead and speculates on how European unity under a single currency will change not just that region, but the world.

This is not a travel book, she insists. In fact, Morris believes that, despite what the critics say, none of her work falls under that category.

“I’ve hardly ever described a journey, which is the central idea of travel writing,” she says. “And I certainly have never said to anybody what they ought to see, or ought not to see. I don’t pretend to know what they would like. I’m just recording the effect of a place, as it happens, upon my own sensibility.”

And because of the way she has lived, Morris has a unique sensibility. She sees herself as both inside and outside of the mainstream. A former correspondent for the London Times and the Guardian and now a well-known author who has received honorary degrees from several universities, she considers herself part of the establishment--”But I’m one of the most obvious outsiders you can possibly think of!” she exclaims.

First, she comes from Wales, a small part of Great Britain where the Welsh have battled to protect their customs from British cultural domination.

Second, Morris, born male, had highly publicized sex change surgery at age 46. She has experienced the world as both a man and a woman. She does not know whether that change affected the point of view of her new book, rendering it more feminine than masculine. She wonders whether her perspective is a mixture of both. She hopes, however, that the change has allowed her to transcend such categories.

To Morris, this is an advantage. As an outsider, she sees more. For example, in her kaleidoscopic vision of Europe, she dwells on Gypsies who have no country, and Jews whose genocide in World War II, she says, changed the very nature of the continent. She claims that jazz was a determining factor in the fall of communism.

“Jazz was an expression of an oppressed people,” she explains. “Also, it was a symbol for the communist authorities of Americanism. And, therefore, it was a music of defiance.”

Casually dressed in an orange sweater and white jeans, she embraces each question. She is warm and animated. As if her body must work through the ideas that her mind is shaping into words, she picks up a pen and begins to twist it.

*

Despite its seemingly random structure, “Fifty Years of Europe” is carefully divided into five segments that deal with religion, frontiers, nations, communications and wars. In all of those areas, the European nations struggle for unity. Such quests, Morris says, are inevitable.

“I have more and more come to think that reconciliation is the world’s chief object,” she says. “The end of conflicts of every kind.”

The ideological beliefs that have separated Europeans are unnatural, Morris says.

“The obvious thing for [people living in such close proximity] is to help each other, to be friends with each other and not to fight each other. It has taken several millennia for us to even approach this idea. But it is happening. And to ignore that astonishing fact is to ignore one of the great progressive truths of history.”

Yet, cultural exchanges do not occur only among European nations. As Morris writes: “Far more persuasive, far more revolutionary in its effects than anything before it . . . there arrived in Europe in full blast . . . the engine of the American Way. . . . The fun, dazzle, violence, opportunism, energy, generosity, deception, idealism, swagger, push and inanity of American life would mark the peoples of the old continent for ever after.”

And one of America’s main cultural capitals is Los Angeles, Morris says.

“It is an awful mess. Nobody in their senses would choose to live in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, it is undeniably one of the great intellectual cities of the world. Every conceivable field of human creativity is happening in Los Angeles, and so its influence on the world must be profound,” she says, citing Hollywood. She also mentions Silicon Valley, the original home of the Internet. To this day, she notes, the Internet has a California flavor.

In fact, Morris wrote her new book to celebrate the possibility that Europe’s economic unity might change the world. The idea of nation-states will disappear in Europe, she says, even though deeper cultural differences between regions, such as religion and language, will remain unchanged. “I believe that there are certain matters which could be given to a central power,” she says about Europe, and eventually other regions. “Arms. Foreign affairs. Higher economics. All those things which effect the well-being of nations, but not the direct well-being of the individual.”

By using Trieste as a motif, Morris emphasizes her point. As an amalgam of various cultures, Morris says, this polyglot Italian city is the epitome of the new Europe.

Morris believes that this change already has put pressure on the U.S. to live up to its role as the West’s leading power.

“The Europe of the fin de siecle has at least achieved this,” she writes. “For the first time in the history of the continent, all its states share, at least in theory, a single ideology. Capitalist democracy.”

Through a window in the empty, Manhattan office, Jan Morris watches ships pass on the Hudson River.

“I love ships,” she says wistfully. “But you probably know that from my new book.”

In it, ships travel on bodies of water that flow into each other and connect all the continents. They are one of the forms of transportation that join all people.