Morris - Contact!: a book of encounters

Contact is a noun of varied nuances, not all to my taste. Ambitious businessmen make useful contacts at golf clubs or race meetings. Diplomats and journalists are urged to cultivate their contacts. Spies have contacts and so do publicity executives, and people with poor eyesight. On the other hand contacts turn the lights on, start the engine, send the rocket off, launch the movie Spitfires into glory, and it is this meaning of the word that gives me the title of this album.

In a lifetime of travel and literature I have written relatively little about people. Places, atmospheres, histories have figured far more in my all too often purple prose. But people everywhere, nevertheless, have been sparks of my work, if often only in glimpsesa sighting through a window, a gentle snatch of sound, the touch of a handand it is mostly such fugitive moments and observations, scattered across half a century and forty-odd books, that I have here gratefully plucked out of their literary obscurity.

Often I have given them only a few lines, or a paragraph; occasionally the people have known me as James rather than Jan, because until 1972 I wrote in the persona of James Morris; but my fleeting contacts with them have fuelled my travels down the years, generated my motors, excited my laughter and summoned my sympathies. I write of them here more or less as I wrote of them at the time, and I recall them not in any chronological or geographical order, but jumbled. Their locations will generally be self-evident, and I have included dates only when they seem essential to the historical sense of the piece. Otherwise all these encounters simply occurred between Here and There, to Him or Her, after Then and before Now.

Rich and poor people are remembered here, young and old, grand and humble, primitive and exquisitely civilized, named and anonymous, in the particular and in the general. Every one of them, of course, deserves more than the handful of words I have resurrected in these pages: but there it is, they are seldom friends or even acquaintances, only contacts.

Trefan Morys, 2009

On my fourth day in the city

I looked through the window

and saw a dreamlike figure sauntering by.

He had a sack over his arm, and a stick over his

shoulder,

and he wore a high-crowned hat and a cloak, I think,

and he strolled past easy, insolent and amused.

My heart leapt to see him.

Who was that? I cried, rushing to the window,

that man with the stick, and the high-crowned hat,

and the sack on his arm?

My hostess returned me reprovingly to our

conversation.

I saw nobody, she sweetly and carefully said.

But tell me, have you had time to see our new Picasso

in the Fine Arts Museum?

And will you have an opportunity to meet with

Mrs Oveta Culp Hobby?

Manhattan dialogue

I chanced one day, off the joggers circuit in Central Park, to come across a young black man fast asleep upon a bench below the lake. His overcoat was thrown over him, his books were placed neatly side by side upon the ground. His head upon his clasped hands, as in kindergarten plays, he was breathing regularly and gently, as though bewitched. Even as I watched, a grey squirrel, skipping across the green, leapt across his legs to the back of the bench, where it sat tremulously chewing, and almost at the same time there arose a brisk gust of wind, tangy with salt.

A scatter of leaves and fallen blossoms came with it, flicked and eddied around the bench. The squirrel paused, twitched and vanished. The black man opened his eyes, as the breeze dusted his face, and, seeing me standing there bemused, smiled me a slow sleepy smile. Be not afeared, I said ridiculously, on the spur of the moment, the isle is full of noises.

Yeah, the man replied, stretching and scratching mightily in the morning. Bugs, too.

At the hotel door

I was going out through the door of the Albergo Savoia Excelsior in Trieste when a man simultaneously entered. We bumped into one another, our bags and luggage got mixed up, and we both apologized. He was a theatrical-looking character, with a camel coat slung over his shouldersperhaps one of the opera singers from the Teatro Verdi. When we had disentangled ourselves he stood there for a moment, motionless.

Where are you from? he said.

Wales.

Wales! How wonderful !

Oh you splendid liar, I said to myself, youve never heard of the place. There was a pause. I laughed, and so did he. He shook my hand in both of his. We lingered for a moment and parted. When I think of Trieste, lust and love I often think of him.

Self-discipline

At Kanpur, in India, I came across a man with whom I felt an instant affinity. That he was deeply unhappy was obvious, but he numbed his misery by touching things. Day and night he wandered the streets of the city, earnestly and methodically touching windows, doorposts, lamp standards, apparently to strict unwritten rules. Sometimes he appeared to feel that he had neglected his task, and did a street all over again, paying a still more diligent attention to the doorknobs. I spoke to him one morning, but he responded only with an engaging preoccupied smile, as if to say that, although some other time it would be delightful to have a chat, that day he simply hadnt a moment to spare.

Honesty

Sometimes Sydney seems to be inhabited chiefly by school-children, children kicking pebbles across bridges, children racing fig leaves down the channels of ornamental fountains, children clambering like invading armies all over the Opera House, or mustered in their thousands in the New South Wales Art Gallery. They seem to me a stalwart crew. Now this is a Picasso, I heard a teacher say in the gallery one day. Im sure you all know who Picasso was. I dont, piped up a solitary small Australian at the back, and I bowed to him as the only absolutely honest soul in sight.