In My Mind's Eye Read online

  JAN MORRIS

  IN MY MIND’S EYE

  A Thought Diary

  For

  One and All

  Kindlily

  (and yes, there is such a word!)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  Day 4

  Day 5

  Day 6

  Day 7

  Day 8

  Day 9

  Day 10

  Day 11

  Day 12

  Day 13

  Day 14

  Day 15

  Day 16

  Day 17

  Day 18

  Day 19

  Day 20

  Day 21

  Day 22

  Day 23

  Day 24

  Day 25

  Day 26

  Day 27

  Day 28

  Day 29

  Day 30

  Day 31

  Day 32

  Day 33

  Day 34

  Day 35

  Day 36

  Day 37

  Day 38

  Day 39

  Day 40

  Day 41

  Day 42

  Day 43

  Day 44

  Day 45

  Day 46

  Day 47

  Day 48

  Day 49

  Day 50

  Day 51

  Day 51B

  Day 52

  Day 53

  Day 54

  Day 55

  Day 56

  Day 57

  Day 58

  Day 59

  Day 60

  Day 61

  Day 62

  Day 63

  Day 64

  Day 65

  Day 66

  Day 67

  Day 68

  Day 69

  Day 70

  Day 71 (24 November)

  Day 71B

  Day 72

  Day 73

  Day 74

  Day 75

  Day 76

  Day 77

  Day 78

  Day 79

  Day 80

  Day 81

  Day 82

  Day 83

  Day 84

  Day 85

  Day 86

  Day 87

  Day 88

  Day 89

  Day 90

  Day 91

  Day 92

  Day 93

  Day 94

  Day 95

  Day 96

  Day 97

  Day 98

  Day 99

  Day 100

  Day 101

  Day 102

  Day 103

  Day 104

  Day 105

  Day 106

  Day 107

  Day 108

  Day 109

  Day 110

  Day 111

  Day 112

  Day 113

  Day 114

  Day 115

  Day 116

  Day 117

  Day 118

  Day 119

  Day 120

  Day 121

  Day 122

  Day 123

  Day 124

  Day 125

  Day 126

  Day 127

  Day 128

  Day 129

  Day 130

  Day 131

  Day 132

  Day 133

  Day 134

  Day 135

  Day 136

  Day 137

  Day 138

  Day 139

  Day 140

  Day 141

  Day 142

  Day 143

  Day 144

  Day 145

  Day 146

  Day 147

  Day 148

  Day 149

  Day 150

  Day 151

  Day 152

  Day 153

  Day 154

  Day 155

  Day 156

  Day 157

  Day 158

  Day 159

  Day 160

  Day 161

  Day 162

  Day 163

  Day 164

  Day 165

  Day 166

  Day 167

  Day 168

  Day 169

  Day 170

  Day 171

  Day 172

  Day 173

  Day 174

  Day 175

  Day 176

  Day 177

  Day 178

  Day 179

  Day 180

  Day 181

  Day 182

  Day 183

  Day 184

  Day 185

  Day 186

  Day 187

  Day 188

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  DAY 1

  I have never before in my life kept a diary of my thoughts, and here at the start of my tenth decade, having for the moment nothing much else to write, I am having a go at it. Good luck to me. The first thought that strikes me as being worth memorializing entered my mind today as I drove my dear old Honda Civic Type R (an old friend) into Porthmadog, and on the radio somebody was playing a piano concerto. I sort of knew the tune, but only just, and perhaps what I was remembering came from some other composition altogether? Then it occurred to me how amazing it is that there are still enough unused groupings of musical notes for people to write yet more piano concertos! Won’t they ever run out?

  And isn’t it amazing that there are still all-too-familiar combinations of notes or harmonies, ones I know all too well, that can still bring the tears to my eyes, especially when I am alone driving my car? Nobody to break the spell, I suppose, and perhaps, since my first concentration is upon the driving, the music slides in unaware, like another old friend reminding me of half-forgotten emotions.

  DAY 2

  In our anguished world of the twenty-first century, when the United States of America I have long cherished is subsumed like everywhere else in squalor and disillusion, I often look back nostalgically to the America I first knew – essentially, in my memory, small-town America. I got to know scores of little towns then, scattered across the entire subcontinent. I had a home for a time in one of them, and I grew to think of them generically as examples of everything I most admired about the great republic.

  They were invariably welcoming, almost invariably frank, simple in their loyalties and, well, very nice! Yes, they were very nice places, I used to think, in a very nice country, and jejune though that sounds now, with better adjectives at my command, I remember their essential niceness still.

  In those days, of course, sixty or seventy years ago, the mystique of the American small town was more fashionable. Thornton Wilder had made it so, with his play Our Town, and popular songs often serenaded it. Like me, they preferred to ignore unhappier truths about Main Street – its likely racism, its probable greed and possible petty corruption – and remembered only its provincial virtues. I am older and more cynical now, but I still prefer to remember those old stereotypes, with the housewives nattering and the volunteers swapping tall tales at the fire station, and the friendly handful of black people, and the swanky young bloods showing off when the town pond froze at Christmas.

  With those fond, if fanciful, memories, too, went a related patriotism, bold but genial, to which I happily subscribed. As a national heritage I am devoted to my own British past, because I like the colour and eccentricity of it, the effrontery, the mixture of greed and benevolence, the admirable, the unforgivable, the bombast and the humour – all of which is still best expressed, I think, by the ambiguous epic of the late British Empire, to which I have devoted much of my life.


  But the Pax Britannica was, of course, famously nationalistic, and when it comes to a profounder kind of patriotism, it strikes me that the old American sort was far grander and truer, based as it was not upon triumphs, but upon the original generous values of the republic. If I were to choose a new national anthem for the USA, I would choose the words by Emma Lazarus that are inscribed upon the plinth of the Statue of Liberty. They welcome the world’s masses, tired, hungry and oppressed, through the Golden Gates to freedom, and I would sing them to the setting written in 1949 by a refugee from Russian Siberia.

  And I would have it sung, if possible, by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of Salt Lake City, who originally modelled themselves – wait for it – upon the male voice choirs of my own dear Wales.

  DAY 3

  Conscience doth make cowards of us all, the man said, but my conscience simply makes me ashamed of myself, and is often not quite powerful enough to curb my inner devil. A person I very much dislike lives quite near me, and when I drove home in today’s heavy rainstorm I noticed that four or five items of her washing were flapping on her line in the rain. She is away on holiday, and Conscience prodded me. Shouldn’t I stop and take the things in out of the wet? Nobody else will.

  ‘So what?’ said my personal Beelzebub. ‘There’s nothing on that line but a few old socks, dusters and stuff. Why should she care if they got wet?’

  Conscience disagreed. ‘They may not look much to you,’ it said, ‘but perhaps they are precious to her.’

  Beelzebub: ‘More fool her for leaving them there.’

  Conscience: ‘I thought your life’s motto was “Be Kind”?’

  Beelzebub: ‘Believe me, if it was your things that were getting wet, she most certainly wouldn’t bother about them.’

  Conscience: ‘Well, I’m not her, am I?’

  Beelzebub: ‘No, thank goodness, you don’t go around being goody-goody and thinking you’re better than anyone else. Besides, you know very well that she is a person you very much dislike. Remember?’

  ‘By God, you’re right,’ I told him, and hurried straight home out of the rain.

  DAY 4

  In the middle of the night I awoke with the need to have a shit (a marvellously expressive word, you must agree, and first recorded in English, so my OED tells me, in 1308; Tom Wolfe once recorded thirty-two distinct usages of it).

  This was a new annoyance for me, and leads me to record now all the symptoms of senility, or worse, that afflict me in my tenth decade: (1) loss of physical balance; (2) forgetfulness; (3) excessive urination; (4) a sort of freezing sensation in my toes at night; (5) more or less permanent catarrh; (6) miscellanious pains in my abdomen, back, spine, heart region and stomach; (7) inability to spell perfectly familiar words like ‘miscellaneous’; (8) bubbles in my ears; (9) irritability; (10) envy; (11) fading pleasures of wine (I used to claim that I had drunk a glass of wine every day since the Second World War; now I sometimes go a week without one!); (12) embarrassing forgetfulness of names, faces or acquaintanceships (is there such a word?); (13) excessive literary reliance upon the exclamation mark.

  And now, to cap it all, the nocturnal need to defecate. But, anyway, it all adds up to that most maddening of all afflictions: old age, or senility. To my mind the Bible was sensible to suggest seventy as a proper span of human life. John Donne was perhaps a little pessimistic to suggest that we ‘love nobly, and live, till we arrive to write three-score’, but Shakespeare was dead right, as always, to warn us that our seventh age would be unquestionably the worst of them all.

  ‘What’s your recipe for a happy old age?’ somebody asked me the other day, rashly assuming that I was enjoying one, and I could only answer enigmatically, as I always do, ‘Be kind!’

  DAY 5

  Some novels, I fear, are just too clever for me or, rather, I am not clever enough for them. Sometimes, though, it seems to me that they are just too clever for their own good. Of course, I relish the challenge of a superior artistic intellect, even if I need help to understand it. For eighteen years I failed to get through Joyce’s Ulysses, until I was delightfully converted to its genius by Harry Blamires’s key to it all, and since then I have never looked back. I am still of the impertinent opinion, though, that such a great masterpiece would be even greater if it could be scoured of unnecessary obscurities, while its successor, Finnegans Wake, since nobody I know has ever succeeded in reading it all the way through, seems to me a perfect waste of the master’s time.

  All this is because I have now reached, with muddled feelings, page 38 of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). I am reading it, a bit late in the day, because I feel I ought to. The New York Times, I see, says it should be required reading for the whole human race. I shall soon know whether all of it is going to be required reading for me.

  Later: No.

  DAY 6

  Am I superstitious? I suppose I am. Agnosticism is a long way from atheism, and I honour some old folk-beliefs, fads and taboos partly out of habit and partly – well, why not? Touching wood, throwing salt, walking under ladders, using the number thirteen are all things I prefer to do or not to do, according to ancient pagan or religious references, and one might as well honour them, don’t you think?

  Talking to things is a rather different sort of illogicality, though, and here I offer no excuse. No Druidical seer has obliged me to talk aloud to my books or thank a good omelette. There is no immemorial precedent, so far as I know, for my morning conversations with my toothbrush or my night-time expressions of gratitude to the furniture. The TV doesn’t in the least care whether I enjoy its programmes, and that constantly dripping tap clearly doesn’t listen to me anyway. There is no logic, I well know, to the habit of talking to inanimate objects, and I do it only, I suppose, because it gives me some sense of fellowship or camaraderie.

  If you are a believer, of course, talking to your chosen omnipotent deity is a different matter, and lifelong incredulist that I am, in the terrible times we inhabit, with new horrors erupting every day across the world, I do sometimes offer a sympathetic message to whatever almighty power there may or may not be out there.

  ‘Goodnight, God!’ I say, as I turn my bedside light off (if the wretched thing works, that is). ‘Goodnight, and good luck to you!’

  DAY 7

  On a gloomy afternoon I pluck from my discs a collection of songs with words and music by Irving Berlin, and the first phrase that I hear is something very sentimental to do with the moon. I would quote it for you were it not for astronomic copyright charges.

  Dear God, I ask myself, is that really the sort of thing you like? Well, I admit to a particular bias. Irving Berlin was the very first American I ever met, and when I was invited to take part in the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, every one of my chosen records was by him. But forget the moon bit. I admire Berlin for his lyrical genius, his grand, simple tunes and his universal appeal, and this is also what I admire most in the music of the grandest classical composers of them all.

  It is, I know, a populist preference, the love of tunes and melody, but I am prepared to bet that from Bach to Mahler, Mozart to Wagner to Prokofiev, the masters would forgive me and share my admiration for the Jerome Kerns and Richard Rodgerses of our own centuries. Would Chopin have appreciated ‘All the Things You Are’? Of course he would, and would probably have hummed it to George Sand in the Majorcan twilight. ‘I’ve written a marvellous tune!’ exulted Edward Elgar (he of the Cello Concerto): it was ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. He who made the Lamb made the Tyger, too!

  Heaven knows I am not alone, anyway. How many of us have not found our attention wandering as we await the next delicious aria at the opera, or our patience challenged as we sit through some interminable medieval anthem, dying for the final festivity of a Victorian hymn? But mind you, it is true that a Berlin melody feels rather less ethereal when it is not sung by Fred Astaire – subliminally dancing to it as he sings, so to speak. Only the very greatest of all the tunes,
I suspect, do not depend upon their interpretations, even in our own minds, but like the greatest of poems are always hovering out there in the ether, whether we are paying attention or not.

  DAY 8

  On the subject of talking to things, talking to animals is, of course, another matter. We all talk to our dogs, cats and horses, do we not, and assume that they have at least a glimmer of understanding in response. The dog smiles, in a way. Addicts assure me that the horse (not one of my favourites) shows genuine gratitude for its fodder. And the cat undoubtedly purrs.

  Ay, and there’s the rub. Your cat purrs when it is comfortable, but it also purrs to show extreme hostility. Perhaps it purrs when it is all alone? Perhaps its purr means nothing really, and is in no way intended to please you? Cat-lovers will excoriate me for expressing such heresies, and dear old ladies, fondling their dear pussies, will send me angry letters of reprimand.

  They need not bother, though, for of course my own cat, Ibsen, is an exception to the rule – or was, for he died some time ago, and I shall never have another. Naturally, he was grateful to me. Naturally, he purred to express his friendship. Naturally, he was true. He was a Norwegian Forest cat, which is why he was named Ibsen, and so sure am I of his integrity, and of our mutual understanding down the years, that I think of him as an equal. All other cats may just be cats, but my cat Ibsen was a friend and a colleague.

  My cat Ibsen was different … like all the rest of them. Ask your Aunt Agatha.

  DAY 9

  Is there such a person as an incredulist, which I claimed myself to be the other day? Of course there is. It is a person who is by nature or practice an unbeliever in the first instance, and suspects that on the whole, all being equal, notwithstanding, nevertheless, most of life is more likely to be false than true – when all is said and done, that is, and all things considered. It seems to me that the existence of such a person is self-evident (I am one myself, am I not?), yet the Oxford English Dictionary does not recognize the word. I can be an incredule, it seems, or at least I could have been in 1590, when a fierce hymnist cried, ‘Increduils hence ga hide you hie!’, but never so far an incredulist.