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Friday, March 26, 2004
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The Most Exciting Essay I've Ever Read, Word for Word...
...is Jan Morris's four-page description of La Paz in her 1963 book Cities. I found it in the old hardback Oxford Book of Essays that I used in my Essay in English course last year at the University of Toulouse. George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" runs a close second, but I've reread "Down and Out" so often that it's gotten a little old. I'd never come across "La Paz" before. I finished it all aflutter, and every time I go back to it I finish it all aflutter again. So what makes it a great essay? Pure stylistic viagra. "She is a city of the Andes, and it is the swarming Andean Indians who nowadays set her style. The men are sometimes striking enough, with their ear-flapped woollen hats and Inca faces; but the women are fascinating beyond description. With their rakishly cocked bowler hats, their blinding blouses and skirts, their foaming flounces of petticoats, the babies like infant potentates upon their backs and the sandals made of old tyres upon their feet - gorgeously accoutred and endlessly industrious, plumed often with a handsome dignity and assurance, they give to La Paz a flavour part gipsy, part coster, and all pungency. There are, I swear it, no more magnificent ladies in the world than the market-women of La Paz. Bowlers cockily atilt, like bookies', they sit high on trestle tables in the covered market, their bosoms grandly heaving beneath white overalls, their faces at once lofty, cunning, all-observant and condescending; and they are invested so closely by all their wares, so heaped about with pineapples and bananas, so wallowing in papayas, mandarins, nuts and flowers that they put old Marvell quite in the shade, in the luscious sensuality of the lives they lead." Or. "The scene is shadowy and cluttered, and you cannot always make out the details as you push through the crowd; but the impression it leaves is one of ceaseless, tireless energy, a blur of strange faces and sinewy limbs, a haze of ill-understood intentions, a laugh from a small Mongol in dungarees, a sudden stink from an open drain, a cavalcade of tilted bowlers in the candlelight - and above it all, so clear, so close that you confuse the galaxies with the street lamps, the wide blue bowl of the Bolivian sky and the brilliant, cloudless stars of the south." Life, life, and more life. One always sounds like an idiot, talking in generalities about the imperative to live intensely - like some damn fool vitalist or Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House. Emerson sounds like an idiot when he's on about active souls and intensified being. Yet we can stand it from Morris, because she's not talking about intense life - she's in the midst of it, describing what it actually feels like. It's much more than that, though - her language has somehow to convey all this charged existence. How does she do it? Same way James Joyce does. She's learned or intuited certain tricks ... like ... watch how Bolivia becomes bowl becomes bowler becomes bosom [with blinding blouses and babies thrown in] -- these curving sly alliterative turns... well, you can note them, but it ain't so easy doing them. Or notice how a sharp word will suddenly burst out of a soft sentence - "plumed" does this - or how she astonishes you with an unexpected word like "invested" which when you think about it (given that she's been talking about clothing, and also about how like capitalists the women are) makes perfect sense. "The wide blue bowl of the Bolivian sky and the brilliant cloudless stars of the South" sounds like ancient poetry translated by some genius.... And through it all there's the pulse-beat of Morris herself, plainly aroused by the geographic and social surreality she's found at twelve thousand feet. "MUST go to La Paz!" I said out loud when I finished my first reading of this essay. Must go to La Paz. postscript: The Vocabula Review [vocabula.com], December 2000, agrees - in a feature titled "Elegant English," they quote from various exemplary writers, and one of them is Morris, describing La Paz. |