Ariel: A Literary Life Of Jan Morris

by Derek Johns (Faber & Faber, £14.99)

Review by Richard Strachan

IN both her life and her work, Jan Morris resists easy definition. As a travel writer she combines a form of pre-war, Grand Tour certainty with the more self-conscious and reflexive approach of later writers like Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux. As a historian, her Pax Britannica trilogy, a superb account of the rise and fall of the British Empire, manages to blend breezy anecdote, postcolonial criticism and a sepia-toned romanticism into one highly readable package. Her life, of course, has walked a line of equal ambiguity. Born James Morris in 1926, she was one of the earliest and most high-profile people to undertake gender reassignment surgery, becoming Jan in the 1970s. In the run-up to this pivotal moment in her life, Jan would live as a woman in Oxford during the week and return to her Welsh farmhouse at the weekend to live as a family man with his wife and four children.

During the war, the teenage Morris managed to talk his way into a job as a cub reporter for the Bristol-based Western Daily Press, interviewing American celebrities like James Cagney, Carey Grant and Irving Berlin on their way to entertain the troops. This early brush with American glamour had a profound effect, raising Morris’s gaze from the drab surroundings of wartime Britain and turning it towards the wider world. As a young man, Morris went on to serve in the army in Palestine during the last months of the British Mandate, where a chance encounter with Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta and TE Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom kindled an abiding love of the Arab world and the impetus to see as much of it as possible for himself. After national service, Morris worked for the Arab News Agency in Cairo, and then carved a space for himself at the Times as a foreign correspondent, a position in which he garnered one of the last old-fashioned scoops of Fleet Street by accompanying the Mallory expedition to the foothills of Everest and reporting that the mountain was at last conquered. The story made Morris almost as famous as the mountaineers, and after a further stint at the Guardian he embarked on a long and highly successful career as a "writer about places", in Derek Johns’s phrase, who early on defined his ambition as being to visit every major location in "the urban world", and who largely succeeded.

Derek Johns worked as Morris’s literary agent for 20 years, until his own recent retirement, and Ariel occupies a sometimes uneasy niche between personal memoir, biography and literary study. Designed as "an appreciation of the life and work", this slender volume acts instead as a compact primer of Morris’s works, an introductory text that quotes liberally from the full range of her writings, from the early American travelogue Coast To Coast to the memoir about her sex change, Conundrum, with particular attention paid to her excellent urban studies of Venice and Trieste. If Johns doesn’t quite offer a rigorous critical reading of the work, he’s still capable of moments of real insight into the way Morris’s style reflects and was influenced by the often tumultuous events of her personal development, and although clearly a great friend and admirer, he isn’t reticent about picking her up for her occasional moments of throwaway snobbery. Organising the material thematically as much as chronologically, with chapters on Morris the "Oxonian", the "Traveller" and the "Romancer" among others, Johns allows a sense of Morris’s interlocking interests and obsessions to slowly emerge; a perhaps old-fashioned idea of the world as a springboard for adventure combined with the clear-eyed and unsentimental perspective of a writer who served an apprenticeship in the hard school of print journalism.

For Johns, Jan Morris is sui generis. Her work may have few precedents, but it certainly helped mould a whole form of literature into a more interesting shape. While Ariel is a useful summary of her achievements, charmingly illustrated with Morris’s own sketches and drawings, perhaps its true value is to whet the appetite for the fuller biography that is surely still to come.