Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides

Paul Clements

Scribe, £25

Review by Susan Flockhart

 

One day in 2007, Jan Morris stood at the window of her Manhattan hotel bedroom, gazing at the skyline. It was half a century since she’d sailed into New York Harbour as a bright-eyed young journalist researching her first book, Coast To Coast. Now 81 and the celebrated author of more than 50 titles, Morris was back in the city, counting the buildings that had sprouted since her first visit. “Architecturally, many of them are handsome,” she remarked. “Allegorically they disturb me rather.”

“What a load of figurative garbage,” scoffed an earwigging bystander. Or so Morris wrote in the Financial Times. As becomes clear in Paul Clements’s biography, Morris was an unreliable narrator of her own life story and that sceptical New Yorker may simply have been a rhetorical flourish. What’s more, in puncturing that highfalutin description, she was, in a way, sabotaging her own esoteric habit of presenting herself as a kind of allegory.

The book is subtitled Life From Both Sides but in truth, its subject seems to have been multi-faceted. She was known as James Morris until her 40s (Clements uses her chosen pronoun, even retrospectively, so I'll do the same). Born in 1926, she married Elizabeth Tuckniss in her early 20s and fathered five children, one of whom died in infancy. The marriage was apparently happy. But in the early 1970s, the family were informed they should henceforth call Daddy “Jan”.

Then in 1974, Morris created a publishing sensation with her memoir, Conundrum. Still in print, it’s promoted as “a grippingly honest account of her transition from man to woman”, though at the time, some critics found it maddeningly evasive when it came to explaining her reasons for, or the psychological and physiological consequences of, the surgery. In interviews, Morris dismissed such questions as “boring”, preferring to describe the experience as “magical, allegorical, symbolical”.

If those commentators hoped for illumination in Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides, they will be disappointed. Morris, who died in 2020 aged 94, feared being remembered as “that writer who had a sex change” and Clements has clearly determined to honour her professional legacy. Over 500 pages, he presents an exhaustive account of an illustrious career which, for anyone interested in world history, makes absorbing reading. As the only journalist to accompany the 1953 Mount Everest expedition, she climbed to the 22,000ft base camp and ingeniously sent a coded report recording Norgay and Hillary’s triumph, to be published on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

From Venice to Sydney and from the Suez Crisis to the Hong Kong handover, Morris was driven by investigative tenacity and an astonishing work ethic but it was her ability to capture mood and personality that made her writing stand out. During the 1961 trial of Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann, her description of the man in the glass box was haunting: “In his small gestures … I thought I recognised the symptoms: somewhere inside him, behind the new dark suit and the faint suggestions of defiance, Adolf Eichmann was trembling.”

What we don’t get is much insight into the psychological turmoil that was apparently going on beneath the surface as the person who’d realised as a toddler that they’d been “born into the wrong body and should really be a girl” began exploring ways to make that happen. We’re told that at school, she experienced “increasing emotional pain and uncertainty” and a conviction that “the machine [her body] was wrong”. We learn that while working in South Africa, she consulted a witch doctor, who assured her she would one day be a woman. Yet these mentions are brief and when, on page 217, we learn that Morris had, for years, been reading books on transsexualism and taking hormones, it comes almost as a surprise.

We next discover another aspect of Morris’s preoccupation with identity. Born in Somerset to a Welsh father and English mother, she began increasingly to identify with her “Welsh side”, moving the family to Llanystumdwy, learning the Welsh language and becoming a passionate advocate for independence. Paradoxically, she was also fascinated by the British Empire and had begun work on her magnum opus, Pax Britannica – an ambitious three-volume study of the imperial project.

Then it transpires that, far from the family’s Welsh pile, Morris had bought another home in a bohemian suburb of Oxford and would spend weekdays there, experimenting with make-up, “dressing as a woman” and watching her breasts grow thanks to thrice-daily oestrogen tablets. And in 1972, aged 46, she travelled to Casablanca for the surgery she hoped would “match my sex to my gender at last and make a whole of me”.

It certainly seems to have made her happy. But after reading the book, I felt no closer to understanding what led Morris along the extraordinary – and, in the 1970s, risky and expensive – path to transitioning. Apart from some boarding school fumblings and a bizarre infatuation with a long-dead war hero called Lord “Jacky” Fisher, there’s little hint of a sexual motive and although she and Elizabeth had to divorce following the surgery, they remained close and would later remarry. Nor do we gain much insight into the impact the Conundrum furore had on the family.

Anyway, their lives had never been conventional. As a globetrotting journalist who was absent for long periods (sometimes receiving the announcement of a child’s birth by telegram), Morris would later admit she was “anything but a father figure” though the family did sometimes travel together, living in several countries and thus becoming a transient but “close-knit and self-reliant family”, according to elder son Mark. His sister Suki paints a less harmonious picture. “One of the hardest things was working out what to tell people,” she said of Morris’s transition, adding: “There was a drip, drip, drip of unkindness with her, undermining everything, making me look and feel inferior and worthless”.

In flawless prose, Life From Both Sides confirms Suki’s assessment of Morris as a complex individual whose persona shifted with the company she kept. And Clements is surely right to resist reducing his subject to a sex change. All the same, I’m left wondering – what exactly was the young James Morris yearning for when she threw pennies into wishing wells? Did the surgery resolve her issues? And would her choices have been different in today’s supposedly more accepting, sexuality and gender-fluid world?

I doubt we’ll ever know.