DISCOVERIES

TRIESTE AND THE MEANING OF NOWHERE

By Jan Morris

Simon & Schuster:

204 pp., $23

Is it naive to think that dignity is one of those literary qualities that rises above politics and economics and education and birthright? What, then, is its source? Is it self-confidence? Does it have something to do with one’s relationship to time, a sense of inevitability that contributes to the calm personalities dignified people seem to possess? Does it come from closeness to nature or from a sense of place? Is it the absence of shame? Is it a sense of place not only in the world but in history, imparted by the buildings and boulevards we live among? Or is it the absence of place, the ability to be comfortable in any setting?

“Melancholy is Trieste’s chief rapture,” Jan Morris says of the city history forgot. It is, for Morris, “an allegory of limbo.... My acquaintance with the city spans the whole of my adult life, but like my life it still gives me a waiting feeling, as if something big but unspecified is always about to happen.” Morris is the dignified stranger at the cafe in late afternoon. Life is not over for her by any means, but enough of it has passed, enough decisions have been made, that there is that critical degree of dispassion which those of us on the buffeted side of experience cannot yet imagine. The city is nowhere, and it is everywhere, a melting pot of Europe, east and west, the calm at the center of that storm. “The Trieste effect,” Morris calls it, “out of time to nowhere.” Morris was there at the end of World War II, when she was a man and a soldier (Morris had a midlife sex-change operation). Perhaps this is why it draws her: “In Trieste, more than anywhere, the idea of nationality seems alien. The city was given its character by people from a dozen countries.... It is by definition a city of the world.”

*

A WOMAN’S EDUCATION

By Jill Ker Conway

Alfred A. Knopf: 144 pp., $22

“What are you going to do about all those lesbians at Smith?” Jill Ker Conway was frequently asked in the 10 years she spent as president of Smith College from 1975 to 1985. Conway grew up on a sheep farm in New South Wales, Australia. Other books, such as “The Road from Coorain,” have told the story of her exodus from isolation and her brilliant career. Last we heard, Conway was vice president at the University of Toronto. At Smith, she likens her job to that of an abbess in a medieval nunnery. My favorite scene is the night a group of several hundred Smith students (a notoriously fractious lot) storm the president’s house in the wee hours in their nightgowns singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” It is not until Conway and her historian husband agree to have a nightcap at each house in the quad that the revelers leave. The president and her husband stumble home at 2:30 in the morning.

She raises lots of money. She starts a program for welfare mothers and older women. She puts a new emphasis on technology in the curriculum. She notices, with great humor, that the feet of the revelers are blue and that these women really ought to get some sleep before they are lectured on the evils of drink and the importance of dignity.

*

THE SHEEP QUEEN

By Thomas Savage

Back Bay Books: 256 pp., $13.95

Thomas Savage has Wallace Stegner’s kind of dignity: a sense of family, a sense of place and the clarity of priorities. He has a great deal of nostalgia as well. A water pump is never installed in the house the narrator’s grandmother built with her first sizable earnings from raising sheep in Idaho. Why? Because: “To abandon the hand pump out front was a radical break with a past that had been kind.” That is why the tub, the toilet, the hand basin and the sink in the kitchen remained dry. Because of a “past that had been kind.” The narrator, Tom Burton, remembers his mother and grandmother, the sheep queen, when he receives a letter at his house on the Maine coast from a woman claiming to be his sister. Everything he believed about his mother is called into question as he tries to piece together a new and unfamiliar past with a scenario in which a mother, his mother, could have abandoned her baby. He must question all the sources of his respect and love for his family: the father that left when he was 2, the imperious grandmother, the uninspiring stepfather. “The Sheep Queen” is called a novel, but the story very closely follows Savage’s life. Now there are two reasons to call your autobiography a novel: 1) because you want a degree of license with the facts (which must be interpreted, for peace of mind and reader satisfaction, both) and 2) because you are not comfortable with your own explanations for other people’s behavior. A son reveres his mother and her memory. His mother was a living breathing fallible human being. Only an adult accepts with dignity those things he cannot change.