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In Search of H.V. Morton
Witty, elegant and engaging, H.V.Morton was the world's first great travel writer in the sense that we think of the term today. From the outset of his career as a Fleet Street journalist present at the opening of Tutenkhamun's tomb, to his death in South Africa in 1979, Morton criss-crossed the world and compressed his character and experience into dozens of hugely influential travel books, which sold in their millions during the 1920s, 30s and 40s and continue to delight readers and travellers throughout the world today.
But despite his success, Morton was a private man, determined to reveal to his readers only what was printed on the pages of the books. Written with full access to H.V. Morton's diaries and letters held at his estate in South Africa, Michael Bartholomew's comprehensive biography describes the life and personality of a uniquely charismatic man. Examining the dichotomy Morton felt between his personal and public personas, and his often dramatic relationships with members of the opposite sex, In Search of H.V.Morton coaxes into light a writer who was determined to stay in the shade.
But despite his success, Morton was a private man, determined to reveal to his readers only what was printed on the pages of the books. Written with full access to H.V. Morton's diaries and letters held at his estate in South Africa, Michael Bartholomew's comprehensive biography describes the life and personality of a uniquely charismatic man. Examining the dichotomy Morton felt between his personal and public personas, and his often dramatic relationships with members of the opposite sex, In Search of H.V.Morton coaxes into light a writer who was determined to stay in the shade.
- GenresBiography
244 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 20, 2013
Bartholomew's book is published by Morton's former publisher Methuen, who really should have sent him back to consider (not reconsider). There is little insight here, nothing significant about Morton's real influences or his wives and families. One gets the feeling that, gifted the trove of Mortoniana, in particular many diaries, letters and drafts of Morton's Memoir, that Bartholomew baulked at the extra legwork. Worse, because we cannot read the Memoir ourselves, we cannot judge the truth of Bartholomew's conclusions, which become more unconvincing the further along we read.
Still worse, Bartholomew, writing as the pc-mafia just as the English Blair government was getting into its stride, rather pompously judges Morton by 1990s standards, rather than considering the values, interests and circumstances surrounding Morton's own life. This flaw rather devalues the man's credibility as 'an academic historian', unless we take the term (Bartholomew's own) to mean 'a grown man who jams objects into wrongly shaped holes, thus deceiving the public, and is paid handsomely for his pains'. The little we see of Morton's unpublished Memoir clearly reveals plenty of cues for Bartholomew to extract the real story, yet he never really approaches it, spending most of the 250 pages critiquing Morton's books and his (apparent) politics, which is not what we came for. For example, the real origins of Morton's sexuality, and what kept him returning to it, is not readily or, I feel, honestly examined. Certainly it must be there, it's a significant part of the man, but we only see Morton in his time when Morton himself is quoted.
Personally, I would prefer Methuen to first, republish I, James Blunt, Cycling in Wartime, and What I Saw In the Slums in a single volume (there's certainly sufficient demand), and publish Morton's memoirs interspersed with significant diary extracts (and get someone more suitable to edit them). This would be far more honest than the finger-wagging Bartholomew. One can only hope that a dedicated Morton fan will emerge from his old two seater, gather his cape, pull out his silver-tipped cane and have another, more inquisitive and open-minded go. One also hopes that, upon being introduced to Bartholomew, Morton fans do not lose their composure and knee the 'academic historian' in the nuts.
This is the first bad review I've put up on Goodreads, and I'm writing this because I'm angry. I wanted to know more about the man, and I feel Bartholomew failed badly. The two stars I rate this are mostly for the (published and unpublished) quotes from Morton Bartholomew uses.
Still worse, Bartholomew, writing as the pc-mafia just as the English Blair government was getting into its stride, rather pompously judges Morton by 1990s standards, rather than considering the values, interests and circumstances surrounding Morton's own life. This flaw rather devalues the man's credibility as 'an academic historian', unless we take the term (Bartholomew's own) to mean 'a grown man who jams objects into wrongly shaped holes, thus deceiving the public, and is paid handsomely for his pains'. The little we see of Morton's unpublished Memoir clearly reveals plenty of cues for Bartholomew to extract the real story, yet he never really approaches it, spending most of the 250 pages critiquing Morton's books and his (apparent) politics, which is not what we came for. For example, the real origins of Morton's sexuality, and what kept him returning to it, is not readily or, I feel, honestly examined. Certainly it must be there, it's a significant part of the man, but we only see Morton in his time when Morton himself is quoted.
Personally, I would prefer Methuen to first, republish I, James Blunt, Cycling in Wartime, and What I Saw In the Slums in a single volume (there's certainly sufficient demand), and publish Morton's memoirs interspersed with significant diary extracts (and get someone more suitable to edit them). This would be far more honest than the finger-wagging Bartholomew. One can only hope that a dedicated Morton fan will emerge from his old two seater, gather his cape, pull out his silver-tipped cane and have another, more inquisitive and open-minded go. One also hopes that, upon being introduced to Bartholomew, Morton fans do not lose their composure and knee the 'academic historian' in the nuts.
This is the first bad review I've put up on Goodreads, and I'm writing this because I'm angry. I wanted to know more about the man, and I feel Bartholomew failed badly. The two stars I rate this are mostly for the (published and unpublished) quotes from Morton Bartholomew uses.
November 1, 2015
For years HV Morton was accepted as the man who had captured the very essence of Englishness. His 1927 In Search of England is all Bull-Nosed Morris, village greens, skilled artisans and amiable but incoherent yokels. Since Bartholomew published this book, in 2005, a different picture has emerged and lines have been drawn, sides established and the sound of entrenching tools fill the air. Morton struck a chord and people don't want the discordance that a little truth adds to the music. HV Morton, it transpires, is a persona. The amiable cove motoring through country lanes and offering his charming service to (usually lady) travellers in distress, is largely a fictional character. Harry Morton was the true author. A professional pen-pusher and a gifted one at that. Like many a successful writer, he'd struck on a formula that worked and stuck by it. I have no problem whatever with this. Every travel writer I've encountered faces the dilemma of choosing between the actual story or a slightly better one. He could never be seen as a brother to the Romantic poets of early nineteenth century England but he shared a pastoral ideal that was so successfully evoked in their work that the picture painted by Wordsworth Coleridge and Morton now seems more real and more desirable than the realities of their times. That this should be so is a tribute to their skills.
Bartholomew is not a writer of the first order but he brings a certain academic rigour to his work. He has an agenda (which undermines the book somewhat) but when he forgets it he becomes very readable. The best sections of the book deal with Morton's follow ups to his great success; his journeys around industrial England and his ventures into Scotland, Ireland and Wales. In reluctantly admitting Morton's ability with a pen and typewriter, Bartholomew himself becomes a better writer.
The first half of the book keeps dropping blots on all of Morton's achievements. Firstly by pointing out what a difficult man he was to work with and secondly to point out what a complete shit he was to be married to. There is little doubt that he succeeded in the perceived early twentieth century role of man of the house. He was an effective bread-winner who put more than one impressive roof over the family heads. He wasn't a good husband though, nor was he a particularly good father. I can imagine a number of readers spitting venom at him for this and a number forgiving him on the grounds that times were different then. Times weren't that different. Poor behaviour is poor behaviour.
And then, half-way through we get the great reveal (though it had been foreshadowed). Bartholomew suddenly begins to draw parallel texts from his source material. What Morton wrote for public consumption, and what he kept private. Publicly he enters the war as a commander of the local Home Guard, doing his bit for king and country and to defeat the hun. Privately he supports the aims of Hitler and Mussolini and wishes to see fascism established in England. He is no Lord Haw Haw fighting a secret battle to undermine the country of his birth. He is someone of unsavoury views though. He would happily see jews, blacks and trades unionists taken off to concentration camps. He leaves Britain in the post war years because he cannot abide its egalitarian, multi-cultural ambitions. He settles in newly apartheid South Africa with a big white house and lots of black servants. It suits him down to the ground.
What the author doesn't do. And this is odd because he actually supplies us (like a formulaic scientist or logician) with a "conclusion". He doesn't seek to draw the two threads together. Is not the bucolic picture he draws in his "In Search of" books just as reactionary as his private views? His England is a 'know your place, hierarchical country' with the rich man in his castle (or Bull-nosed Morris) and the poor man at his gate. It's all a lie. I've enjoyed reading Morton up to a point just as I enjoyed watching the Welsh Rugby Union team of the seventies. There are some glorious touches but the game being played is fake, reactionary and rather unpleasant.
Bartholomew is not a writer of the first order but he brings a certain academic rigour to his work. He has an agenda (which undermines the book somewhat) but when he forgets it he becomes very readable. The best sections of the book deal with Morton's follow ups to his great success; his journeys around industrial England and his ventures into Scotland, Ireland and Wales. In reluctantly admitting Morton's ability with a pen and typewriter, Bartholomew himself becomes a better writer.
The first half of the book keeps dropping blots on all of Morton's achievements. Firstly by pointing out what a difficult man he was to work with and secondly to point out what a complete shit he was to be married to. There is little doubt that he succeeded in the perceived early twentieth century role of man of the house. He was an effective bread-winner who put more than one impressive roof over the family heads. He wasn't a good husband though, nor was he a particularly good father. I can imagine a number of readers spitting venom at him for this and a number forgiving him on the grounds that times were different then. Times weren't that different. Poor behaviour is poor behaviour.
And then, half-way through we get the great reveal (though it had been foreshadowed). Bartholomew suddenly begins to draw parallel texts from his source material. What Morton wrote for public consumption, and what he kept private. Publicly he enters the war as a commander of the local Home Guard, doing his bit for king and country and to defeat the hun. Privately he supports the aims of Hitler and Mussolini and wishes to see fascism established in England. He is no Lord Haw Haw fighting a secret battle to undermine the country of his birth. He is someone of unsavoury views though. He would happily see jews, blacks and trades unionists taken off to concentration camps. He leaves Britain in the post war years because he cannot abide its egalitarian, multi-cultural ambitions. He settles in newly apartheid South Africa with a big white house and lots of black servants. It suits him down to the ground.
What the author doesn't do. And this is odd because he actually supplies us (like a formulaic scientist or logician) with a "conclusion". He doesn't seek to draw the two threads together. Is not the bucolic picture he draws in his "In Search of" books just as reactionary as his private views? His England is a 'know your place, hierarchical country' with the rich man in his castle (or Bull-nosed Morris) and the poor man at his gate. It's all a lie. I've enjoyed reading Morton up to a point just as I enjoyed watching the Welsh Rugby Union team of the seventies. There are some glorious touches but the game being played is fake, reactionary and rather unpleasant.
September 11, 2020
A very interesting biography of one of my favourite travel writers.
H.V. Morton was hugely popular during the middle of the 20th century, for his travel books round Britain and the Middle East. Later, he visited Italy and Spain, but these were undertaken at the behest of the tourism industry in those countries and therefore he wrote what he was expected to write.
Bartholomew makes it very clear that the jolly fellow who is such a delightful travelling companion in these books, is a persona which the real Harry Morton was only partially like. That traveller would not have been a white supremacist, nor anti-Semitic, nor (although he admits to liking pretty girls) such a very serial womaniser.
What both the author and the traveller in his books share is a passion for history. Morton really did do all the research that comes out in his books, and the genuine love for the past shows.
I have mixed feelings about this book, as shows in the 3 stars. Sometimes I feel Bartholomew delights in pulling the wool from our eyes and pointing out that this was a not-very-nice man, who you wouldn't trust near your wife, and who kept rudely referring to African and Caribbean people as "natives". At the same time, he doesn't particularly highlight the good bits about Morton.
A fan of Morton's writing for many years, I'm glad I read this book but it won't stop me going "In Search of Britain" with the delightful traveller in his bull-nose Morris who I prefer to think of as H.V. Morton.
H.V. Morton was hugely popular during the middle of the 20th century, for his travel books round Britain and the Middle East. Later, he visited Italy and Spain, but these were undertaken at the behest of the tourism industry in those countries and therefore he wrote what he was expected to write.
Bartholomew makes it very clear that the jolly fellow who is such a delightful travelling companion in these books, is a persona which the real Harry Morton was only partially like. That traveller would not have been a white supremacist, nor anti-Semitic, nor (although he admits to liking pretty girls) such a very serial womaniser.
What both the author and the traveller in his books share is a passion for history. Morton really did do all the research that comes out in his books, and the genuine love for the past shows.
I have mixed feelings about this book, as shows in the 3 stars. Sometimes I feel Bartholomew delights in pulling the wool from our eyes and pointing out that this was a not-very-nice man, who you wouldn't trust near your wife, and who kept rudely referring to African and Caribbean people as "natives". At the same time, he doesn't particularly highlight the good bits about Morton.
A fan of Morton's writing for many years, I'm glad I read this book but it won't stop me going "In Search of Britain" with the delightful traveller in his bull-nose Morris who I prefer to think of as H.V. Morton.
March 7, 2024
Well, no one could accuse Michael Bartholomew of being a romantic. I have to wonder why Meuthen chose him of all people to synthesize the diaries of Morton.
First, it is written more like an academic paper than a popular biography. Bartholomew relentlessly drills home his thesis--that travel writers are often not the people they portray themselves as in the writing (original, I know)--rather than constructing a portrait of Morton. It's not hard to read, but I get the feeling that Bartholomew simply does not understand people. Like an extraterrestrial trying to deduce how people work, he relentlessly analyses every detail of Morton's diaries, without ever approaching the point: who was Morton?
He seems baffled by Morton's alternating frustration with and pride in his reporting job. He is appalled by Morton's constant infatuations with women. He chastises Morton for not including political analysis in his writing. All of these actions and feelings I understand and sympathize with. Why doesn't Bartholomew?
Second, much of the commentary is devoted to pointing out Morton's inconsistencies. One of the first he points out is his claim that he knew wanted to be a writer at ten, but then (shock of all shocks!) for a while he actually wanted to be an actor. He is not grateful enough for his privilege apparently either: "'I am getting sick of the office work. I feel I could do good work here I am stuck on police courts without end. It's disgusting.' (10 July 1911.) What did he want then? There he was, in a job conveniently supply by his father, ungratefully complaining about the routines of the reporter's life." (p. 23)
To be sure, some of the criticisms are valid (he did romanticize the "real" England, he cheated on his wife a lot). But ultimately Morton was a fascinating person with a lust for life, and that's what makes him interesting. I loved hearing about his acting phase, when he would dress up as a character and knock on his acquaintances' doors to see if they would recognize him. I even love the stories of his lusting after women. Some are adorable: "As for Irene, I don't care a twopenny d. If she is so inde-blooming-pendant I can be so as well" (p. 13).
So there is some interesting material here, but ultimately it's pretty unpleasant to have to wade through Bartholomew's whingeing, and I really wish Meuthen had chosen someone who didn't dislike his subject this much.
"I think that they are what Bernard Shaw calls 'silly-clever'" (p. 25).
"Morton wrote not for professional historians but for a huge popular readership. It was touches like these, that brought to life aspects of the passage of time that professionals take for granted, that made him successful" (p. 66).
"Even a travel writer as fresh and unclichéed as Bill Bryson" (p. 94). UM????
"The book relies on a number of well-worn conventions about England" (p. 109).
"Even in his introduction, coal and steel has deformed the green beauty of England. Why the word deformed?" (p. 113) Well, genius, maybe because there were gaping holes in the land?
First, it is written more like an academic paper than a popular biography. Bartholomew relentlessly drills home his thesis--that travel writers are often not the people they portray themselves as in the writing (original, I know)--rather than constructing a portrait of Morton. It's not hard to read, but I get the feeling that Bartholomew simply does not understand people. Like an extraterrestrial trying to deduce how people work, he relentlessly analyses every detail of Morton's diaries, without ever approaching the point: who was Morton?
He seems baffled by Morton's alternating frustration with and pride in his reporting job. He is appalled by Morton's constant infatuations with women. He chastises Morton for not including political analysis in his writing. All of these actions and feelings I understand and sympathize with. Why doesn't Bartholomew?
Second, much of the commentary is devoted to pointing out Morton's inconsistencies. One of the first he points out is his claim that he knew wanted to be a writer at ten, but then (shock of all shocks!) for a while he actually wanted to be an actor. He is not grateful enough for his privilege apparently either: "'I am getting sick of the office work. I feel I could do good work here I am stuck on police courts without end. It's disgusting.' (10 July 1911.) What did he want then? There he was, in a job conveniently supply by his father, ungratefully complaining about the routines of the reporter's life." (p. 23)
To be sure, some of the criticisms are valid (he did romanticize the "real" England, he cheated on his wife a lot). But ultimately Morton was a fascinating person with a lust for life, and that's what makes him interesting. I loved hearing about his acting phase, when he would dress up as a character and knock on his acquaintances' doors to see if they would recognize him. I even love the stories of his lusting after women. Some are adorable: "As for Irene, I don't care a twopenny d. If she is so inde-blooming-pendant I can be so as well" (p. 13).
So there is some interesting material here, but ultimately it's pretty unpleasant to have to wade through Bartholomew's whingeing, and I really wish Meuthen had chosen someone who didn't dislike his subject this much.
"I think that they are what Bernard Shaw calls 'silly-clever'" (p. 25).
"Morton wrote not for professional historians but for a huge popular readership. It was touches like these, that brought to life aspects of the passage of time that professionals take for granted, that made him successful" (p. 66).
"Even a travel writer as fresh and unclichéed as Bill Bryson" (p. 94). UM????
"The book relies on a number of well-worn conventions about England" (p. 109).
"Even in his introduction, coal and steel has deformed the green beauty of England. Why the word deformed?" (p. 113) Well, genius, maybe because there were gaping holes in the land?
January 6, 2016
Interesting life of the once-popular travel writer. Good selection of photos. Would have liked a chronological list of all Morton's books.
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