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Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere

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The only quibble I have with Jan Morris' lovely and lyrical homage to Trieste is that she has painted it in the colors of her own melancholy. I grew up in Trieste, and this is what I remember: the bluest sky one could imagine, the ever-changing colors of the Adriatic, the perfect crescent of the gulf. Certainly there was a beautiful melancholy in Trieste--in some ways it reminds me of Prague, or of Paris in late autumn--but there is also a joy I'd call particularly Triestine. I remember singing local ballads in the local trattorias, group hikes in the Carso, the summertime exodus to the city's wonderful beaches, the variegated populations of Eastern Europeans selling their wares in the Mercato Nuovo. I remember participating in avant-garde theatrical productions, hearing punk-rock bands before they became famous in the U.S., and attending Trieste's famous Science Fiction Film Festival...all these events drew laughing, happy, diverse, fashionable (oh, we Triestine women are chic...) crowds. And I beg to differ about the regional cuisine!! Anyone who has tasted my mother's jota (a dense, rich minestrone) or the city's wonderful "brodetto" (a light and spicy fish stew)or any of our Italo-Austro-Italian specialties could never assert a lack of culinary heritage for the city. Morris also claims that Triestini are not very sentimental about their own cultural heritage,and that (unlike our stereotypes of Italians)are not prone to lavish and very public displays of grief, joy, or anger. Perhaps she has not been around a group of Triestini singing or listening to our "Marinaresca", a local fisherman's ballad, or perhaps she has not been among our "esuli" ("displaced persons" in U.S. bureaucratic parlance) when they hear the "Va Pensiero" chorus from Verdi's "Nabucco". Certainly Triestini are much more courteous drivers than most of our countrymen, so if you want messy driving by all means avoid the city...

I understand that so much of this book is tinged with Morris' own melancholy--after all this is a work of literature, not a travelogue. But please, before you view Trieste as a glum, grey, bora infested (hey, it only blows about 20 days a year, tops!!), empire-obsessed backwater, take the time to take a most unusual detour from your next trip to Venice. You won't be disappointed. And order the brodetto!

Trieste is a city I knew nothing about, but always had a vague impression of. That impression, of faded grandeur, old-Europe cosmopolitanism gone to seed, and melancholy, is largely confirmed in this, the first of Morris' books I've read. The fishing village at the top of the Adriatic was a sleepy burg until the Austro-Hungarian empire transformed it into it's only seaport and HQ for its imperial navy in the early 1700s. It rapidly became one of the leading seaports of the world, and an international center of commerce. Following the defeat and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Trieste was handed over to Italy, which already had plenty of ports, and thus it quickly reverted to sleepy backwater. Over the last century it was occupied by the Nazis, Allied forces, was a UN free territory, and eventually reverted to Italian rule. Nowadays, as Morris writes, "It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar melody, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single native name that anyone knows."

And while Morris ably rambles through the city's history (which she first visited in 1946), the book is a bit of a metaphor for human aging and memory. She has vowed this is her final book in a prolific career, and the melancholy tone echoes the melancholy of a city whose glory days lie a century in the past. She writes, "Trieste makes one ask sad questions of oneself. What am I here for? Where am I going?" That's not to say the book is depressing or sad, because her love for the city is evident throughout, as she grapples with its place in her own psyche. While she clearly enjoys recreating in her mind's eye the hustle and bustle of the imperial era, she also finds, "For me, Trieste is an allegory of limbo, in the secular sense of an indefinable hiatus." So while the narrative is studded snippets of history, amusing and telling anecdotes from her own visits, and evocations of past residents such as Richard Burton and James Joyce, it's also rich in introspection. Above all, Morris' meandering prose is beautiful and has inspired me to delve into her past work. I do wish the publishers had included a few historical maps, some photos, and a bibliography of other works on Trieste.

Jan Morris has written a book that conveys both the spirit of a city she loves and maybe the melancholy she feels at the end of her long career. It can be read as an allegory for a life of change and travel. She describes Trieste as being a city of many pasts, being at the edge of various expanding and contracting powers throughout its history, particularly as the main port for the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire. Today it is a city of memories and she evokes this reality with a writing style that remains true to the tight prose needed of a newspaper correspondent of fifty years ago. I recommend Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere as highly as I recommend the body of work that Ms Morris leaves us with. Dig into some of her less well known books and you will be rewarded with rare jewels.

Largely bereft of landmarks that might attract a sightseer, and for much of the year buffeted by the icy bora sweeping down from the denuded limestone plateau of the Karst, Trieste is outwardly an unprepossessing place. But with deft strokes, septuagenarian Jan Morris, in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, depicts an exiled city in whose distinctive soul she has long seen reflections of herself.

Isolated from mainstream Europe, Trieste lies on the coast of the tiny sliver of north-east Italy hooked over the top of the Adriatic. Hemmed in by the Giulian Alps to the north and the Balkans to the east, the city is nonetheless steeped in a past which, until the Great War, saw this one-time medieval fishing village flourish as a cosmopolitan seaport serving imperial Vienna.

Some readers may blanch at Morris's fond remembrance of empire. But the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, put an end to all that, and half a millennium of Austrian rule rapidly came to a close. Trieste was cast adrift, passing in turn through the hands of Il Duce, the Nazis and the squabbling Allied liberation armies (in which a young Morris arrived in Trieste as a British soldier). For a time it was even an independent free territory under the auspices of the United Nations. It returned to Italy in 1954, but a 1999 survey showed that the majority of Italians are unaware the city is one of their own. Trieste remains the capital of nowhere.

In absorbing the influence of different races, nationalities and faiths, this place of transience has become a melting pot in which such distinctions are at best irrelevant, at worst a nonsense. And so the author celebrates the civility of the metropolis, its laughing, gracious nature, its readiness to shun pernicious conformity, and above all its kindness. These are qualities she believes are shared by a special minority in every community around the globe, a diaspora she calls nowhere.

Like her enduring Venice, written more than forty years ago and one of the first of her many books and essays about cities, this is a masterful evocation of a city, rich in perspective, language and understanding, almost faultless in fact. But it is avowedly a more personal book, full of tenderness and nostalgia. Trieste engenders a tristesse in Morris which recalls the hiraeth she has felt for her native Wales during a lifetime of wandering the planet, an indistinct yearning, suffused with pathos and sensual desire, for family, for homecoming, for something beyond here and now. In pleading the case for this cherished city of limbo and longing, that its existential remit is simply to be itself, Morris seems to be asking, in this her final book, that we afford her the same privilege.

My family is from Trieste and the surrounding countryside and I spent much of my childhood trying to describe this city that was Italian but not, was Slovenian, but not, had pieces of Austrian culture, but not, and still was its own amalgam of all of those cultures and even more. Morris "gets" the in-between-ness of the city perfectly: the crossroads port of a landlocked empire that no longer exists. Trieste and the southern coast was also the honeymoon destination for landlocked Hungarians and Austrians as well -a glamourous seaside resort that maintained the Habsburg physical layout, architectural style, and business sense that provided comfort for the residents of Budapest and Vienna, and yet provided also the intrigue of a world shipping port and the meshing of various cultures. Morris provides a long term sensibility that ranges through Trieste's various adjustments to war and government and an obvious comfort with this city that is trying to find a new meaning for itself. The book becomes poignant as Morris describes those people who came of age -- also in worlds that no longer exist and she explores the various types of adaptations people make in that same circumstance. An interesting topic, and also an interesting allegory.

Before this I had never read any of Jan Morris's works. I think I missed a lot because reading this one brought me enormous enjoyment. I had seen her on C-SPAN a few months ago and found her charming even though I didn't get around to reading her till now. Her personal charm comes through in her writing. She goes about her work with large quantities of gentle wit, impressive erudition and wisdom, taking neither herself nor her subject too seriously. I am old enough to remember the day Trieste became part of Italy after the Second War ... for a while it was a toss-up as to whether it would go to Italy or to Yugoslavia. Being part of Italy is probably a good thing even though the city and its environs have great numbers of assorted Slavs, Hungarians and Germanic types, probably a wonderful mixture.
Let me start toward the end of the book, where Morris says "Here more than anywhere else I remember lost times." And what does that make us think of?? Right ... and like M Charlus declaiming and lamenting in the park she counts off people she has known in Trieste and announces each one's fate: in every case it is a rough equivalent of, "Dead and gone."
Also in these last pages Morris underscores decency and kindness as the reigning virtues in Trieste. For me that would be quite enough to recommend any city ... or country. Other features of the Triestino character: "When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean."
Like most parts of eastern and southern Europe unable to defend themselves Trieste became became part of the Habsburg Empire, which needed a seaport. Just down the coast lies Istria which brings to mind Modern Greece's first president John Capodistria, whose surname is a hellenized version of Capo d'Istria.
The very short chapter titled "Love and Lust," suggestive in a highly civilized way and extremely cerebral (I suspect Morris gets most of her jollies above the eyebrows) seems to adhere to Jungian thought even though Freud is the psycho-anthropologist who gets mentioned here -- along with James Joyce, who lived in Trieste for some years and expressed a clear preference for certain of the city's cat-houses as against others. In a chapter called "The Nonsense of Nationality" the author shows that Trieste, containing so many ethnicities, can be taken as a case-study or laboratory to give the lie to all the insane claims of nationalism. This ethnic mix may help explain why the typical Triestino is so civlized. There is a meditative, lovingly written chapter on the histoy of the Jews in Trieste in which the author suggests that during all the domination by Austrians, Nazis and Italians, the Jews have provided the spiritual and social energy to fuel the city's intellectual and artistic life through most of its history. Another section full of melancholy and tristesse treats of the ill-starred Castle of Miramar, which "stands on its promontory weeping." It was built by Maximilian and Carlotta, who lived in it before Napoleon III sent them to Mexico to oust Juarez and mess around with the Monroe Doctrine.
Interestingly planned and written, this book starts out by giving an almost negative, surely uninspiring vision of Trieste, a "nowhere" impression (as in the title) but as you keep reading you discover all the reasons why it is a place you really do want to see and know, perhaps for a few days, maybe for a lot longer. On the two-hundredth page of the book Jan Morris says, "Much of this little book, then, has been self-description." Actually, I didn't need to be told that. I sensed it shortly after starting to read. Both Jan Morris's inner life and this little book are delightful to know.

Jan Morris says Trieste is the natural capital of a Fourth World, whose citizens are never chauvinists. Among them, you will not be mockedbecause they will not care about your nationality. They are never mean. Her Trieste is as near to a decent city that you can find at the start of the twenty-first century. She does admit that a lot of what [she] has written comes from [her] own mind, still what a curious view of Trieste, arguably the most hate-filled city in Italy. Much of the book is beautiful, because she writes from libidinous love. That may explain how wrong she is. Can the besotted be trusted?
For antidotes to her beautiful lie, read Bernard Meares or A. J. P. Taylor. Heres a piece of corrective evidence about her "decent city." Today an alliance of Berlusconis Forza Italia and the neo-fascist Alleanza Nazionale rules Trieste. The new mayors very first official act was to restore to its place in the civic gallery the portrait of Cesare Pagnini, the podesta of Trieste under the Nazis. Pagnini founded the Guardia Civica, which guarded the trains taking Jews and others to even more efficient extermination camps than the one operating in Pagninis Trieste. Said Eugenio Montale to a Triestine friend years ago, You in Trieste, do you still hate as much as you used to? The answer in Trieste will, alas, always be Yes.
The book is beautiful, but at its center lies a lie.

Morris' perspective on Trieste is unique on several counts: a seasoned and sensitive traveler, she has a deep affection for a city that doesn't rank high on most people's lists of favorite places; she's experienced the city as both a young man and a middle-aged woman; and she's well-read about the city's history and literary associations, but she uses her learning as the backdrop for direct experience of life in Trieste, rather than as an end in itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, both as an appreciative visitor's impressions of the city and as an account of Morris' elegiac musings late in an eventful life. On the other hand, having recently read Claudio Magris' "Microcosms," I was forcibly reminded that this book is Trieste from an outsider's perspective. It's a beautiful book and well worth reading, but, for the Triestine mind in action, read Magris.

We can only hope this is not Jan Morris's last book, as she has stated it will be; her intelligence and acumen make it too painful she has finished writing. Her study of Trieste--one of her most treasured--starts perhaps too slowly and cautiously: it gets a bit tedious hearing her repeat how seemingly unremarkable Trieste seems at first glance (it also might sway readers new to Trieste or to Morris's work away from them). but as she continues her evident love and fascination for this city on the Adriatic become more evident, and you begin to see why so many different writers besides Morris, including James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and John Berger, have found Trieste such a remarkable place. Morris recounts much of the city's intriuguing cultural history, and also gives a brief topographical sense of the place. You do miss accompanying photographs--greatly--but that's a small quibble.

If a certain city is one of your favorite places, it presumably means that you feel something about it that -- if you are a writer -- you wish to convey to others. That passion is missing from this book, which is an oddly muted tribute to a city I've always wished to visit. In addition, Jan Morris claims this will be her last book. Why should a good writer like her want to go out with such a whimper?

TRIESTE AND THE MEANING OF NOWHERE is, to be sure, a competently written work. All the major themes are present, but the guts just aren't there. What about Sir Richard F. Burton squirming through his last years far from the scenes of his triumphs? What about James Joyce creating great literature while trying to earn beer money teaching? Then there is the withering irony of Hungary's leader Admiral Horthy, at a time when his country had had no port for decades, yielding his country to the Nazis out of craven fear. There is material here for a book that yet remains to be written.

Trieste still sits there at the head of the Adriatic waiting for THE book to be written about it. Until such time, this is an adequate book, well written, but even below the author's standard.