Today’s the day we discuss Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Reading the book for me now is like having an ongoing conversation with Morris: I agree, and disagree. I’d like to discuss it with her. And in writing about it now, even just trying to quote her, I find I must replicate the dialogue that’s in my head.
She begins:
I cannot always see Trieste in my mind’s eye. Who can?
[Yes, yes, she’s right there I think now, as I thought then. Except that, if you’ve been, you do see it, unmistakably, I think, the view from the train as it curls around the cliffs]
It is not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination.
[not the general, no, but the personal specific imagination – my own imagination – teems with icons…] .
It offers no unforgettable landmark
[maybe so, but lined along the coast so you can always pinpoint exactly where you are: here is il faro (the lighthouse), always there in the distance is il castello di miramare looming white on its own personal premonitary like a 3-D Mona Lisa), Monte Grise the chopped-off pyramid that pays homage to the forgotten concentration camp and shines like a massive brieze block across the bay at night); the red and white striped chimney of Monfalcone (‘Mon-fal-cone, Mon-fal-cone, Mon-fal-cone’, we always say, in a sing-song voice, imitating the driver’s announcement as we pull into the train station)
no universally familiar melody
but for me the African drums pound on the pier beneath the concrete escalator, as I dance and dance barefoot in the sunset, illustrating ancient African methods of sowing seeds and reaping crops, glistening with delicious sweat, healthy and shining and happy.
no umistakable cuisine,
except the disappointing mix of crauti and German sausage, the ambitious (and foul-sounding) stincho (pronounced stinko) di maiale in trattorias on the carso, the simple but abundant plates of cheese, salami and olives chased down with home-brewed wine from the osmizzes, the reward of the sfogliatina at the end of the Napoleonica ( layers and layers of thin pastry cemented together with a kind of sweet cream custard)
hardly a single native name that everyone knows.
What does that mean??
It is a middle-sized, essentially middle-aged Italian seaport, ethnically ambivalent, historically confused, only intermittently prosperous, tucked away at the top right-hand corner of the Adriatic Sea, and so lacking the customary characteristics of Italy that in 1999 some 70 per cent of Italians, so a poll claimed to discover, did not know it was in Italy at all.
Apart from admiring Morris’s erudition and skill here (I love the rhythms of her commas, the accuracy of her adjectives) and mostly agreeing with her observations, I sill want to disagree. Trieste does have an ethnic identity: a strong one that has persisted through all these changes. Slovenian is spoken throughout the city; many of the signs are in Slovenian (TRST, they say,impossibly), much of the food is Slovene, and the scenery of the carso is replicated all the way down to Croatia. It’s an ethnic identity that seems to be denied by the powers-that-be. At the International School , for example, where our daughters will go to school , they offer French, German and Spanish as the third language to English and Italian. Why not Slovene – a language they could instantly put into practice?)
But the final paragraph of her introduction I can definitely relate to, one hundred per cent, stette.
The allure of lost consequence and faded power is seducing me, the passing of time, the passing of friends, the scrapping of great ships! In sum, I feel that this opaque seaport of my vision, so full of sweet melancholy, illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations too. The Trieste effect, I call it. It is as though I have been taken, for a brief sententious glimpse, out of time to nowhere.
While for Morris Trieste is a metaphor for the inevitable slide into old age, the regrets and evaluations a review of one’s life journey inevitably entails, but for me, at this point in my life, Trieste represents a return, a starting over. The Trieste effect, as I relate to it personally, is that overwhelming sense of longing, of dissatisfaction, a kind of permanent mid-life crisis if you like (what have I achieved? why haven’t I done more?) but that experiencing this crisis in a city that embodies that same sense of listless despair is ultimately comforting (even as Bowie screams, You’re not alone!), and lifts you out of it all, determined to relish the quirks and surprises that the city has to offer. Because more than anything, this city has personality. You have to find your own Trieste. It doesn’t exist otherwise. In that sense, yes, it’s ‘Nowhere’ – but it is, too, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. It offers its own form of liberation and transformation. Which is why it makes total sense to me that Jan Morris began her acquaintance with Trieste as a man (and not just any man, but that most manly of men, a soldier) , and returned, many years later, as a woman, the memory of the city must have kept her company through all those years of doubt. She changed sides, like the Italians, and, like the European image of the Italians, has found ultimate acceptance, if not near mythical adulation (Morris has apparently been called ‘the Flaubert of the jet age ‘ by none less than Alastair Cooke, and as ‘perhaps the best descriptive writer of our time’ by one who might know – Rebecca West.)
Trieste is the city where lost souls can find themselves – again and again.
I wonder what the Book Club members (none of whom have been to Trieste) – will make of it?
Letters from Trieste 