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| How these four recent charity shop finds led to yet another post on the awfulness of contemporary automobile design |
Who can fail to like Jan Morris, the travel writer and novelist? Jan - James before a sex change in the 1970s - Morris was a charming and witty writer who maintained a prolific literary career up to her death, aged 94, in 2020.
Some of us came to her a bit late and with trepidation. Recently, after enjoying a book about Trieste by resident sage Claudio Magris, I stumbled across Jan's late work on the same city, The Meaning of Nowhere, in a local charity shop.
This (by the way) was just one of many recent examples of charity shop synchronicity which this blog has been covering - in myriad unpublished posts - ever since it started.
This book is a breeze, a delight. Morris's relaxed style draws you in, and before long you've read the book, enjoyed her literary hospitality. She shares interesting locations and historical anecdote, serves up plenty of salty gossip, and then you're sated and the book's finished. It's a great read, as much about Morris as the city: an "allegory of limbo".
As she aged the style became more chatty and less sharp. I found one of her last published titles, Thinking Again, a collection of daily musings covering the year 2018, in another charity shop.
The first dozen entries are funny and interesting. I particularly liked day 5 - "...when I re-read it the entry turned out to be so footling that I have expunged it with a muttered curse". I like that: most of my writing is far too footling to share, as I keep telling you.
Getting the balance between frothy and serious is hard, and Morris generally gets it right. She's great on the frustrations of old age, and her confessions are endearing. As on Day 12, when she admits a fondness for BMW cars and that she likes to drive like a boy-racer.
No surprise there: Morris always had a gung-ho side, as in that first great scoop on the climbing of Everest, when an ambitious young journalist on The Times.
It's good to have expectations overturned. But when Jan, still on Day 12, parks alongside a lot of daytripper vehicles on her local Welsh seafront, she looks around and says: "This, I think, is a good period for external automobile design. Most of these machines look elegant and discreet".
Well, I almost choked on my muesli.
Can she really be saying this? What sort of cars do they have in North Wales? New cars that are "elegant and discreet"? Surely not the bloated, gurning chariots of toxic masculinity that are so popular in London's wannabe posh suburbs (SW4 in particular).
OK, I am obsessed with the current state of car design. Believe manufacturers have been fanning the flames of toxic car culture by making their products look ever more aggressive, pugnacious.
Look at their pumped-up bodies. Muscle-buggies who spend too long in the car-gym. The crude grilles that leer at pedestrians and cyclists and other drivers, as if to say:"I could crush you, little worm".
Most have absurdly loud horns, tuned to frequencies seemingly chosen by experts in auditory torture.
All these things have been repeated ad nauseam in this blog. Unfortunately, the trend continues, and the cases of death by dangerous driving, often involving these over-powered monsters, carry on rising.
Well, I can't blame Jan Morris, but it does seem an odd statement, and it also reminded me of another sychronous connection. I recenty found a beautiful 1960s Penguin edition of Aldous Huxeley's Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell - two essays on the writer's experiences of psychedelic drugs, the first of which is famous beyond the literary circles for suggesting the name of Jim Morrison's band.
Huxley's smart highbrow intelligence and wicked playfulness seduced me when I was about 15, and it was great to find almost exactly the same paperback I read over half a century ago.
Writing about the effects of mescalin on human (his own) perception, Huxley also crystallised some truths about automobiles in a way no-one else has managed.
He is sent off on a mescalin trip by a researcher in California, who gives him "four tenths of a gramme" of the hallucinogen dissolved in a glass of water.
For the first 90 minutes he stays indoors, looking at reproductions of paintings by Cézanne, Vermeer and others. He's deeply moved, but then realises he's just as thrilled by the furniture, by the folds in his own trousers .... seeing them now as Van Gogh or Vermeer always saw them.
Then they go out of the building, and Huxley was "suddenly overcome by merriment".
"We walked out onto the street. A large pale blue automobile was standing at the kerb."
Huxley finds himself incapable of resisting a tidal wave of hilarity. I share his amusement every time I read these lines: "What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel", he wrote.
"Man had created the thing in his own image – or rather the image of his favourite character in fiction."
Which character that could be, he annoyingly fails to let on. I would've said someone from Ayn Rand, but maybe she was a bit later?
It's lucky that Huxley was taking his trip in the late 1950s, when US car design was at its baroque peak of absurdity. If he'd had the same experience today, it might have been a very bad trip: the cars are not so much a source of "merriment" as of dread, or leaden thuggery.
Of course they do have a comic side: if they are being created in the image of anyone, it is of a gym-fit muscle man, pumped up with steroids and testosterone to the point of bursting. They even move with that awkward gait of guy whose thighs are just a bit too big.
I'm a total hypocrite, in so many ways. I do not hate all cars. They can be beautiful, wonderful things. I think Citroens of the early 1960s, Ferraris, Jags and Porsches of the same vintage, can be extremely attractive sculpturally. Even those huge old US autos expressed the cheerful optimism of that nation's golden years.
They burned up so much gas, and fouled up the atmosphere, but they contributed to a culture that is oh, so beguiling. Could anyone find a Range Rover Evoque beguiling in that way? Give me a break.
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