A Writer's World by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Something about the detainees’ injuries, too, told me of the camp’s reformatory methods, but since I had to go on living and working in President Nasser’s Egypt I felt it wiser to let readers of The Times glimpse that between the lines.
Lebanon
    In the 1950s Beirut, the capital of the Lebanese Republic, was the delight of the Arab world, largely apolitical, still Frenchified after years of French mandatory rule, beautiful of setting and kindly of temperament – the very antithesis of the dangerous city of terrorism and religious bigotry that it was later to become. I went up there from Egypt whenever I could find a professional excuse.
    Beirut is the impossible city, in several senses of the adjective. It is impossible in the enchantment of its setting, where the Lebanese mountains meet the Mediterranean. It is impossible in its headiness of character, its irresponsible gaiety, its humid prevarications. It is impossible economically, incorrigibly prospering under a system condemned by many serious theorists as utterly unworkable. Just as the bumble bee is aerodynamically incapable of flying, so Beirut, by all the rules and precedents, has no right to exist.
    Yet there it stands, with a toss of curls and a flounce of skirts, a Carmen among the cities. It is the last of the Middle Eastern fleshpots, and lives its life with an intensity and a frivolity almost forgotten in our earnest generation. It is to Beirut that all the divinities of this haunted seaboard, the fauns and dryads and money-gods, orgiastically descend. It is a tireless pleasure-drome. It is a junction of intrigue and speculation. It is a university city of old distinction. It is a harbour, a brothel, an observatory on the edge of the Arab deserts. Its origins are ancient but it burgeons with brash modernity, and it lounges upon its delectable shore, half-way between the Israelis and the Syrians, in a posture that no such city, at such a latitude, at such a moment of history, has any reasonable excuse for assuming. To the stern student of affairs Beirut is a phenomenon beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
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    Beirut stands on no great river, commands no industrious hinterland, and all through the centuries it has been chiefly significant as a gateway and a conduit, the threshold of Damascus and the outlet of Syria. It has been ahalting place or transit camp, through which successive civilizations have briefly tramped, leaving a stele here, a carving there, a legend in a library or a pillbox on a beach.
    A stele, a pillbox – nothing more substantial has been left behind by the conquerors, for the texture of Beirut is flaky and unretentive. Earthquakes and fires have destroyed much of its heritage, but mostly it is the character of the place that makes this a city without a visible past. It is always contemporary, shifting and tacking to the winds of circumstance. It is the capital of a state that is half Christian, half Muslim, and it remains poised between the Eastern way and the Western, between the Francophile and the Afro-Asian, between the suave hotels that line the waterfront and the tumbled oriental villages spilled on the hillside above. It is not one of your schizophrenic cities, though: on the contrary, it has triumphantly exploited its own dichotomies, and become the smoothest and most seductive of entrepreneurs. Everything is grist to this mill: a crate of steel bolts, a letter of credit, a poem, a navigational system, a cocktail, a tone of voice, a power press, a soup – Beirut accepts them all, processes them if necessary, and passes them on at a profit.
    It lives by standing in the middle, and by the itchiest of itchy palms. There is almost nothing this city will not undertake. It will pass your wheat inland to Damascus, or ship your oil westward to Hamburg. It will paint your upperworks, translate your thesis, introduce you to the Sheikh of Araby, accommodate you in pampered splendour in an air-conditioned suite beside the