Jan Morris’s retrospective collection of vignettes opens with an encounter with a man on a bench in New York which perfectly distils the tenor of her writing. It embodies an eye for the beauty in apparently unremarkable scenes, a warm sympathy for others, tempered with just a touch of the old-school anthropologist’s detachment: the stranger is consistently ‘the black man’. Morris has a predilection for verbal grandeur, offset by a self-consciousness which punctures any threat of pretension; she enlivens the prosaic with literary allusion and, most characteristically of all, good humour – ‘Be not afeared’, she says, ‘the isle is full of noises’. ‘Bugs, too’, responds the man.
This scene launches a series of ‘brief encounters’, animating the human beings who populate the places she has visited. Taking its name from the cry ‘Contact!’ which launches a spitfire, or the image of electrical contacts, this collection expresses the energising and ‘inspiriting’ effects of human contact. It consists mostly of short independent passages, each with a title ranging from the faintly cryptic – ‘Breath of the woods’ – to the more matter-of-fact – ‘Costa del Sol, 1960s’ – sometimes lifted verbatim from previous publications, otherwise re-remembered and shaped to fit the format. Its subjects are by turns demotic and elite, from Aborigine activists to Yves Saint Laurent and Harry Truman. She leads us from Istanbul to Slovenia by way of a Manhattan McDonalds or a flasher in Athens, taking in portraits at times funny, at others haunting, like the unhappy man in Kanpur who touches objects in the street without a word, ‘apparently to strict unwritten rules’.
Morris has always had an eye for people and a tendency to pepper her accounts of places with insights into those who inhabit them. Her descriptions often have the slight air of a social taxonomist or ethnographer, and her anthropocentric approach brings this aspect of her writing to the fore. The term ‘Negro’ stands out, as does the description of Ethiopians as ‘beautiful lithe-limbed animals’.
There is nothing objectionable in her sentiments, but the reader may occasionally feel a little uncomfortable, as one might with an awkward great-aunt. At times her prose reads like the field notes for Frazer’s The Golden Bough, recording the curious characteristics of the world’s tribes, national, ethnic and social, and their rituals. Morris has seen more of humanity than most, though, and has taken more time to experience its variety. The warmth of her regard for her subjects often comes through.
The fragmented nature of the recollections, and the absence of any narrative cohesion, suggest that this is a book best experienced a little at a time. When read in sustained bursts it can feel like sitting at dinner with a well-read and well-travelled raconteuse: the sheer flurry of anecdotal variety can leave you with diegetic indigestion. The book moves between portraits of individuals with well-chosen details – like a playwright’s spare notes on his characters – suggestive snapshots, and overheard conversations.
Like memories which come unbidden, there is something at once sentimentally satisfying and frustratingly hollow about these portraits: each is a witness to something that is past, its wider context apparently irrecoverable; detached, staccato. Eichmann appears in the dock, but so incidentally that he is immersed in the pool of common humanity, such is the brevity of these vignettes. The collection ends with moments of human intimacy: a shared complicity in winking at a cab driver in Alexandria, and a personal memory of holding hands with her partner as their child dies. The reader, too, feels incomplete: there’s no closure here. All the images it gives us resonate, yet few other portraits are as intimate as this last one. Ironically, this recollection is set at home, and as a counterpoint it reminds us of the transience innate in any human contact.
