Located on the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard, the city-state of Hav has been, at least till recently, all too little known to most Americans. A kind of Levantine crossroads thronged with multiple cultures and religions, Hav traces its origins to the heroic Achilles and his followers, the Myrmidons. Over the centuries, it has been a center of the salt trade with Asia, an outpost of the crusaders, a secret meeting place for the heretical Cathars, a playground for imperial Russia, and, since 1985, a wealthy and rather vulgar destination for tourists and a hub for international commerce.
Jan Morris — one of the most celebrated travel writers of our time — first visited Hav more than 25 years ago, when the city still maintained most of its ancient traditions and much of its faded elegance. In her new book, “Hav,” she brings together her early writings on the city, “Last Letters From Hav,” and the more recent “Hav of the Myrmidons.” From the opening pages of “Last Letters From Hav,” Morris depicts an almost other-worldly realm: “On the left, bathed in golden sunshine against a cobalt sea, was the city of Hav, with elaborately hatted ladies and marvelously patrician beaux sauntering, a little disjointedly where the tiles met, along a palm-shaded corniche.”
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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After checking into L’Auberge Imperiale du Chemin de Fer Hav, Morris gradually discovers that Hav is, in many ways, an amalgam of all the great and exotic places she has ever visited. Consider its morning market:
“Apparently unregulated, evidently immemorial, it seemed to me . . . partly like a Marseilles fish-wharf, and partly like the old Covent Garden, and partly like a flea-market, for there seemed to be almost nothing, at six in the morning, that was not there on sale. Everything was inextricably confused. One stall might be hung all over with umbrellas and plastic galoshes, the next piled high with celery and boxes of edible grass. There were mounds of apples, artistically arranged, there were stacks of boots and racks of sunglasses and rows of old radios. There were spare parts for cars, suitcases with images of the pyramids embossed upon them, rolls of silk, nylon underwear in yellows and sickly pinks, brass trays, Chinese medicines, hubble-bubbles, coffee beans in vast tin containers, souvenirs of Mecca or Istanbul, second-hand-bookstalls with grubby old volumes in many languages — I looked inside a copy of Moby Dick, and stamped within its covers were the words ‘Property of the American University, Beirut.’
“In a red-roofed shed near the water, shirtsleeved butchers were at work, chopping bloody limbs and carcasses, skinning sheep and goats before my eyes; and there were living sheep too, of a brownish tight-curled wool, and chickens in crude wicker baskets, and pigeons in coops. Women shawled and bundled against the cold sold cups of steaming soup. On the quay Greek fishermen offered direct from their boats fish still flapping in their boxes, mucous eels, writhing lobsters, prawns, urchins, sponges and buckets of what looked like phosphorescent plankton.”
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