Jan Morris: Last Letters from Hav
HAVING TAKEN NUMEROUS journeys across the world — one of the most widely traveled of living writers — Jan Morris invented a country, gave it a history, art, religion, and literature, and was so scrupulous in her details that people earnestly asked her afterward where exactly it was and how they might visit.
The imaginary country of Hav seems to be in the eastern Mediterranean, and has not only a highly diverse population of Muslims and Christians, but also an ancient indigenous population, of troglodytes possibly of Celtic origin, who named Hav, their word (and the Welsh word) for summer. The troglodytes are called the Kretev, "thought to be etymologically related to the Welsh crwydwyr, wanderers."
One of the annual festivals is the Roof Race, where contestants leap from roof to roof across Hav.
Many distinguished visitors to Hav recorded their impressions: Chekhov, Lady Hester Stanhope, Ibn Battuta, and Marco Polo — the greatest and most literate of travelers. But also we learn that later visitors included Noël Coward, Coco Chanel, Thomas Mann, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, and Sir Richard Burton. Marco Polo remarked on Hav as "a place of strange buildings and rites, not like other places." The elaborate architecture is described, with quotations from Alexander Kinglake, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, and others.
The narrator says, midway through the book, "The meaning of Hav is easy."
In terms of politics, art, war, and climate, Hav is the essence of the Mediterranean, a cultural confusion, layer upon layer, Greek, Turk, Italian, the great glittering talkative mass of conquerors and imperialists and evangelists — and writers: Edward Lear, James Joyce, Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence.
"But then the advantage of going native in Hav is that nobody knows what native is… you can take your choice!"
In this believable book, Jan Morris, the writer who has been everywhere, has created out of her travels and her reading a sunny, polyglot nation that is claimed by many nationalities, but in its very complexity is a fragility. It is, incidentally, also a way of showing how the somewhat despised Kretevs — those ancestors of the Welsh, of whose nation Jan Morris is a proud member — have been overwhelmed. Though the book is partly a satire on the multicultural Mediterranean, it is also a capriccio — one of the few successful ones I know in fiction — goodhearted, learned, and enlightening.
I asked Jan once what was going through her head as she was writing it. She said, "I wrote Last Letters from Hav because I had come to realize that I had never scratched more than the surface of any place or period I'd ever written about, and it was intended to be an allegory of civic and historical complexity — though nobody ever read it that way."
17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere
"YOU MUST HAVE EATEN SOME WEIRD STUFF," I am frequently told. I quite liked fufu (mashed yams) in Nigeria, and snake and turtle in China; I drew the line at owlet, because I felt sorry for those vexed-looking birds roosting in a cage, waiting to be chosen for a meal. One night I bought one at a restaurant, at the chef's suggestion. And I set it free, much to his consternation. Cow's tendon in soup, looking like shreds of Tupperware, was not tasty. ("If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an airplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it," Prince Philip once said, and was booed.) I ate some sparrows in Burma and reported on them in The Great Railway Bazaar. Alligator tail on the Zambezi was fairly common, served in stew or as steaks. "Carrion and garbage of every kind can be eaten without the stomach rejecting it," Francis Galton wrote in the chapter "Revolting Food That May Save the Lives of Starving Men" in The Art of Travel. "Life can certainly be maintained on a revolting diet."
I was prepared for a life of travel food by the cold lumpy oatmeal my mother served me on winter mornings. "You can't go to school until you finish it!" Tears of disgust sprang to my eyes as I sat, repelled by the sight, and I retched when I tried to swallow even a little bit. My Italian grandmother, who immigrated to America when she was a small girl, served us familiar-looking greens in salad, and when we asked about these slightly bitter leaves, she admitted that they were dandelions (soffione) she had dug up that morning. Many hard-up Italians in America foraged for dandelions.
"Objectively, nothing's more disgusting than eating milk or cheese," my son Marcel said to me one day when we were discussing this subject. Most Chinese agree, but nearly all are physically unable to digest the stuff, being lactose intolerant. (Many Chinese believe that the so-called white race has an odd cheesy smell.) The writer and traveler Ted Hoagland told me, "My exotic foods include bobcat, porcupine liver, and squirrel, but muskrat was the best." And my traveling friend Larry Mill-man has eaten dogs from Greenland to Micronesia, and remarked on the varieties of canine cuisine.
Sir John Mandeville's Travels is full of strange meals; the book was hugely popular for the culinary oddities it described. Given that Mandeville probably did not exist, and that his book was probably plagiarized, embellished with mostly outrageous lies and self-serving distortions, hardly mattered to a reading public eager for details of weird meals. Herman Melville must have been keenly aware of this fascination for exotic food when he included "The Whale as a Dish" as a chapter in Moby-Dick. In it, Ishmael discusses the cooking and eating of whale meat, as well as strips of fried blubber ("fritters") and the sperm whale's brains. As an aside, he adds that the whale is "a noble dish, were there not so much of him, but when you come to sit down before a meat pie one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite."
The Japanese have gone to enormous lengths to continue killing whales so that they can dine on whale sashimi. Kujira (whale) is thinly sliced and served raw. The meat is marbled, looks like beef, has a briny, somewhat fishy taste, and can be tough. In order to go on hunting whales the Japanese have bribed Third World countries with development aid, to get them on their side, and have hidden behind their own indigenous people, the Ainu, who are otherwise despised for being primitive. The slaughter and eating of bottle-nosed dolphins is another Japanese pleasure. When this was revealed in a prize-winning documentary, The Cove, released in 2009, the mayor of the fishing village of Taiji, offended by the way his village was portrayed in the dolphin massacre, issued a statement saying that it was "important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories."
Other travelers sing the praises of balut, duck embryo, eaten in the Philippines; Thai duck-tongue soup; and finanziera, cockscomb stew, of the Italian Piedmont. Lutefisk, mocked by W. H. Auden in his travels in Iceland, is beloved there, along with hakuri, the putrefied shark. In Sicily and Sardinia you might be offered "maggot cheese," known as casu marzu, which you could mistake for squirmy rice. The dusky big-assed ant of the Colombian Amazon (hormigas culonas de Santander) is harvested by the indigenous Guane people and toasted and served as a "nutty snack." Korea is full of culinary specialties, besides dog: dalk bal is deep-fried chicken anus, and at the raw bar saeng nakji are octopus tentacles, simply prepared: a small, live octopus is knifed apart, each tentacle chopped off and, still wiggling, eaten raw, with a special sauce. Bull's testicles (criadillas) are standard fare in Spain, and lark pâté (pâté d'alouettes) is a popular spread in France. Caterpillar fungus (yartsa gunbu), an inch-long larva with a two-inch fungoid growth on its head, is a gustatory marvel, with medicinal properties, found in Bhutan, Tibet, and Nepal. Black-ant larvae (escamoles) are a part of the combination plate in parts of Mexico. And last, bear paw, which I was offered in Harbin, in Heilungjiang province. From the Ming Dynasty onward, cooked bear paw has been on the menu all over China. A widely advertised specialty, it is an "imperial tonic food" that supposedly enhances virility, like rhino horn and tiger's penis, also eaten when poachers are successful.