Barely a Book Club #3: Lost in the Maze of Hav
Dirleddy,
We find ourselves now at the conclusion of our first Barely a Book Club selection: Jan Morris’s Hav.
(Newcomers can read the introductory post here.)
So? What did you think?
Confession: when I re-opened Hav for this book club, I didn’t find myself sinking as effortlessly as I had imagined into the old place. I worried: had I built this book up in my my memory? Was it as fascinating as I had thought? But thankfully, by chapter 4 (opening line: “Less than a month in Hav, and I feel myself a citizen already”) I had gotten well into the rhythm of the imaginary place, and by the time the snow raspberries, the 125th Caliph, and of course, the Roof-Race made their appearances, I was as engrossed as I had ever been. I felt, and still feel, sure of myself: this book, this unique object, will always fascinate me.
Re-reading it, I kept coming back to Ursula K. LeGuin’s remark in the introduction to the New York Review of Books edition that Jan Morris introduced Hav “plausibly and without violence into the existing world.” The without violence bit is a brilliant observation, and I think the source of much of my fascination with the book. Gathered from Morris’s some 40 years of travelling, reading and writing (at the time of the first volume), the strands of Mediterranean and Levantine history are so tightly woven with the fiction of Hav that they are almost indistinguishable. But if fabric works as a metaphor for the unreal city, so equally does the maze—the symbol of Hav. A labyrinth of minor historical events, upheavals, once-famous leaders, artists and spies.
Morris casually mentions countless names throughout the book, usually with a nonchalance that suggests the reader ought to know them already. There are the historical figures who are said to have passed through Hav in moments that vary widely in significance. Famous names, sure: James Joyce, Trotsky, Wagner, Freud, Mark Twain (name me a place where he hasn’t been said to have visited and uttered some pithy remark1).
But more interesting (to me, at least) are the names obscure enough to be fictional but specific enough to be real. I took to pulling out Wikipedia on my phone to check which ones were authentic—and most of them were. An incomplete list of notables said to have passed through :
Alfred Domett, premier of New Zealand and author of the epic poem Ranolf and Amohia, a South Sea Day Dream
Nicholas I, first, last, and only fing of Montenegro
Pierre Loti, French novelist
Nicander Nucius, a Greek traveller to 16th-Century England, who wrote an obscure book about his voyage
Pero Tafur, a 15th-Century Castilian who also wrote about his voyages, these across three continents
Peter Behrens, German industrial designer
CJ Napier, “conquerer of Baluchistan”
Sir Edmund Backhouse, Qing dynasty chronicler, fascist collaborator and “confidence man with few equals”
“Count Kolchok,” reigning resident during the Russian period, who may or may not be admiral Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak
(This process of baking obscure history into the fictional cake reminds me of another book I love, Tim Powers’ Declare, which reconfigures our known reality from another angle. A “secret history” of the Great Game and, equally, the life of British spy Kim Philby, it weaves an entirely imagined supernatural story into verifiable world events without ever outright contradicting them.)
Is Hav a romantic place? A Casablanca of sorts, an arms’-length-from-the-action staging ground for espionage, revolution, and amorous entanglements?
Sort of? Maybe? No?
I was touched this time by the account of the coming of “the first train of the season” by the old Russian, Anna Novochka.
[W]hen it came at last, the excitement! All the grand ladies in the latest fashions, fashions we'd never seen before, and the gentlemen in their tall hats, with carnation buttonholes, and Kolchok would be there to greet whatever princess or Grand Duke was on board, and then he'd go around welcoming old friends and kissing cousins and so forth, and everybody else would be embracing their friends and laughing, and we children would be hopping up and down with the fun of it. And then all the servants jumping off from the coaches behind, and the bustle and fuss of getting the luggage together, and out we'd clop from Pendeh Square like a kind of army. It was so colourful, you have no idea. When we got home, before we children were packed off to bed, we were allowed to have a cup of cocoa with the grown-ups.
My father said to me once, “Whatever you forget in life, don't forget the pleasure of this evening with our friends." I never have, as you see. I can hear him saying it now! And now all those friends are gone, only one old woman living on and remembering them.
It’s lovely, but there’s something not quite real about it. Can we trust Novochka’s memory—can we trust any of the characters we meet? Morris hints strongly at the thinness of the facade; the strange island of Greeks who are perhaps not actually Greek, the international quarter of New Hav that seems almost like an EPCOT Center of early-20th-Century Europe. And that’s before the massive changes of the Intervention…
There is also, notably, almost no indication, besides the mention of a mistress of Kolchok’s, that sex ever took place in Hav. Whatever it is, it is not a city of erotic rendezvous.
So what is it?
Havian culinary interlude:
You could eat sea-urchins grilled, meunière, baked, stewed, in batter, with ginger garnish, as a pâté, in an omelette, in a soup or raw. You could eat roast kid in the escarpment style, which meant cold with a herb-flavoured mayonnaise, or barbecued over catalpa charcoal from the western hills. You could eat the legs of frogs from the salt-marshes, which are claimed to have a flavour like no others, or Hav eels, which are pickled in rosemary brine, or the pink-coloured mullet which is said to be unique to these waters, and which the Casino likes to serve smoked with dill sauce, or the tall sweet celery which grows on the island of the Greeks, or a salad made entirely, in the inexplicable absence of lettuce anywhere on the peninsula, of wild grasses and young leaves gathered every morning in the hills above Yuan Wen Kuo. You could even eat a dish, otherwise undefined, listed as ours hav faux.
This was only a joke, said Biancheri, though in the 1920s Hav bear really was eaten sometimes at the Casino. Now the false bear was no more than a bear-shaped duck terrine. But then, he added, ‘it is all a joke. For myself I prefer scrambled eggs.’
In 2005, 20 years after her first visit, Morris returned to her creation in Hav of the Myrmidons, finding it a vastly changed place—Hav’s own scouring of the Shire. Whereas the Hav of Last Letters was a tangled dead-end of history, war, and culture, the city has now been remade as an avatar of early 2000s Eurocentric capitalism and smart branding, where British tourists are entertained at a sparkling resort, Lazaretto! (punctuation included), and any visit to the city itself requires a “blue pass” and is closely observed.
The secretive Cathars of old Hav have claimed the city of their own, and more than that, have claimed a historical link to the Myrmidons, the warrior clan Achilles led to the walls of Troy. This is a city that has claimed various threads of history and rewoven an identity for itself—a project not unlike Morris’s own.
Side note on the Cathars: The Cathar heresy was a Christian heresy that emerged in Europe in the 12th and 13th Centuries. Somewhat gnostic in character, they abnegated the flesh, and indeed the physical world, with the aim of freeing the human spirit and uniting it with the divine. (In other words: no sex.) The clergy, as such, were known as “perfects”—a title which you may recognize. A threat to Church hierarchy, they were eventually routed in the very bloody Albigensian Crusade. They have been celebrated and commemorated in various forms ever since, inspiring stuff like The Da Vinci Code. The Eastern connotations of their theology, which verges on Buddhist if you are so inclined to see it that way, and the idea of a mystical cult suppressed but perhaps still existent, appealing to late-20th-Century sensibilities. Recent scholars have cast a more skeptical eye on the legend of the Cathars.
Interestingly, Morris makes them a central element of the Havian mystery, without ever actually touching on their beliefs.
Back to modern Hav. A grim commercialism, which is almost a little too on-the-nose, permeates the city. The precious, ephemeral snow raspberries are now genetically-modified, canned Havberries. There is a Havair and even Havflakes. The Roof-Race has been rebuilt to modern safety codes (although just as many people seem to get injured running it), and an effort is underway to certify it as an Olympic sport. But Morris never lets it veer too far into satire. The city is still mysterious, but the mysteries have 21st-Century trappings. It all feels very post-9/11 in its anxieties about the future of the cosmopolitan, multicultural European city.
Is is the same Hav there under the surface? Was there ever a there there to be understood? These are questions I’d like to pose to you.
So I ask of you: what did you make of your stay in Hav? Did you finish it? Would you go back? Where did this journey transport you, and how have you been changed by it?
I would love if you would reply in the comments, where other readers can see them and where I can interact with them as well, and where I can judge the success or otherwise of this little project.
(And once everyone has had time to collect themselves, we can start on the next book, which will be Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, if you want to get a head start. No pressure, it won’t be for another few weeks.)
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“This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn't throw a brick without breaking a church window.” — Twain on Montreal, 1881.