Travel Blog

I was driving to St. Petersburg when I heard about the death of Jan Morris (appropriately on the BBC) so I wasn’t able to write here about her brilliance – known to anyone who has read her – or her kindness – known to everyone who met her.

I had the unforgettable latter privilege in 1991, when I attended the Key West Literary Seminar as a still green newspaper travel editor. The topic that year was travel writing and at one of the panels a distinguished group of writers all asserted that the best travel writing results from traveling alone. Jan, who was sitting at the end of the dais, echoed this sentiment, saying wistfully: “Sad but true.”

Immediately after the session she was surrounded by a small scrum of admirers. I stood patiently to the side – I had scheduled an interview with her – and on seeing me she broke away to apologize that she would be a bit delayed. I was astonished and touched that someone so famous would show such consideration to someone who wasn’t.

The next morning I ran into her doing her daily power walk down Duval Street and she happily stopped to chat. We were standing in front of St. Paul’s Church and I told her – because I thought it would impress a connoisseur of the British Empire – that I often attended Anglican services when traveling abroad, as I met an interesting mix of people at the coffee hours. She looked bemused, and said she preferred the company of pagans.

One Saturday afternoon a few years later she called me from Wales – I have no idea how she got my home number – to tell me that she had just reread my book about Poland and found it more impressive than the first time she had read it. She apologized for not helping to promote it when it came out (in 1991, that stellar year). I told her that I was preparing for a trip to Vietnam, my first foray into Asia, and she said that she’d never been there. The idea that I would be visiting a place that had escaped one of the world’s most prodigious travel writers increased my excitement.

In 2003 my second book appeared, a collection of stories I’d written for my newspaper. It carried a blurb from Jan and, as its epigraph, a passage from Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere:

“There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. 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. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.”