March 31, 2023

Barely a Book Club #1: Hav, by Jan Morris

When I chose the topic of this club’s first season, travel writing about places real and imaginary, there was only one book I could I imagine as its first selection, and that was Jan Morris’s Hav. This is a book that lodged itself into my imagination when I first read it and, years later, still has a home there. I love it so much that I have wasted many, many hours considering how it might be adapted into a film or series, each time concluding that the project is impossible. But its influence lingers. Something Good probably would not exist without Hav.

But what is it—and who was Jan Morris? The first question is easy enough to answer: it is a masterpiece of travel writing by one of the great practitioners of the form, perfect in its details, its understanding of the place’s history, its fine observations about its culture and people, about a city, Hav, that does not exist.

Published first in 1985 as Last Letters From Hav, then followed 20 years later with a sort-of sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons, it was Morris’s only work of fiction in a career that spanned more than eight decades. The story goes that when the first book was published, travel agents were deluged with calls from clients demanding to know how they could book a trip to this previously unheard-of European city.

Understandable: Morris had, at that point, established herself as pre-eminent travel writer and historian. It is hard to sum up her accomplishments, so I’ll let Tim Adams, who conducted one of the final interviews with Morris before she died in 2020 at the age of 94, do it for me:

Morris, at 26, was the only journalist to accompany Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their 1953 ascent of Everest. At other times she wrote about living on Field Marshal Montgomery’s family houseboat on the Nile, and in a palazzo on the Grand Canal. She met Che Guevara in Cuba, she visited Hiroshima after the bomb and she reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In her dreamy books about cities – most memorably Venice and Trieste – the world can seem a permanent Xanadu.

Indeed, she was the second-last surviving member of the Everest expedition, next to only Kanchha Sherpa (who, according to his website, is still very much alive and happy!)

And then, after a very eventful life that included travelling to Morocco for gender-affirming surgery in 1972 and very publicly discussing it in her book Conundrum, after decades of producing highly-observant, deeply personal articles and books about the places, people and times that fascinated her (Venice being a favourite of mine), Morris produced Last Letters From Hav.

As friend-of-the-newsletter1 Ursula K. LeGuin explains in her wonderful introduction to the NYRB edition, Hav is a very difficult book to explain: “It is not an easy book to describe. Hav itself is not easy to describe, as the author frequently laments.”

In short, though, the book describes a trip Morris takes to the isolated city of the title in 1985, described with such detail and alacrity, braided so deftly with “real” history that Morris tethers the made-up city to our world unshakably.

It is all described so carefully, its history so reasonable and matter-of-fact. Morris:

It is said to have been the Greeks who first discovered that salt extracted from the Hav marshes had aphrodisiac qualities: shiploads of it, they say, were sent to Attica, and according to Schliemann it was the salt that led Achilles to set up his base on Hav's western shore. By the Middle Ages the power of Hav salt was so well-attested that some scholars think it the first reason for the Arab seizure of the peninsula.

In Hav you’ll find a city that manages to be Turkish and Russian and Swiss and Venetian and Greek and Alexandrian at the same time; a Mediterranean peninsula where there somehow still exists a Chinese trading outpost from the middle ages: “The westernmost of all the major buildings of Chinese architecture, and some say the finest Chinese construction west of the Gobi.”

How could it not exist?

LeGuin:

Hav exists as a mirror held up to several millennia of pan-Mediterranean history, customs and politics. It is a focusing mirror; its intensified reflection sharply concentrates both observation and speculation. Where have we been, where are we going? Those are the questions the book asks. It poses them through the invention of a place not recognized in the atlas or the histories, but which, introduced plausibly and without violence into the existing world, gives a distanced, ironic and revelatory view of everything around it.

If you have been reading closely, you may see how and why this book is so important to me, and why I chose it as our first selection. If Hav isn’t travel writing, nothing is.

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This first issue’s #nojacketsrequired comes from, well, me. Confession: I like this dust jacket design a lot and I will be keeping it, although I do also like the vivid purple cloth cover I discovered underneath. Send me your copies of Hav, or other books by Jan Morris, or anything else you think I might like, at [email protected].

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Reading music: Here’s Jan Morris’s all-Irving-Berlin episode of Desert Island Discs.

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I am very excited to hear your thoughts on this extra-special favourite book of mine. It’s March 31; why don’t we give ourselves until May 1 to obtain and read Hav? I highly recommend the New York Review Books edition, with its introduction by Ursula K. LeGuin. We’ll discuss it all in a post then, but feel free to comment or conversate in the comments below or in our chat.

I take no payment for this newsletter, affiliate or otherwise; all I ask is that you make your best effort to purchase the book from an independent bookseller, or directly from the publisher.

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I wish. 😢