Conundrum

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Morris as James in his Venice(1960) admitted a young man’s infatuation with Venice – ‘the loveliest city in the world, only asking to be admired’ by him, ‘a writer in the full powers of young maturity, strong in physique, eager in passion.’ Twenty years later, Morris, this time as Jan, returned to Venice to write The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage(1980). She draped it with an imperial mantle: ‘Rome apart, theirs was the first and the longest-lived of the European overseas empires.’ Both books now read as unintended valedictions for a long interlude of optimism, for, as Trieste was at the printers, Morris circled the globe in search of the zeitgeist; “everywhere people were fed up with being bullied by other cultures, or of other cultures coming in”. She returned to Wales on 11 September 2001 just as that “zeitgeist manifested itself”. The daily writing continued, though, producing, among other volumes, In My Mind’s Eye (2018), serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, and, earlier this year, Thinking Again. Lively, Penelope (23 February 2014). "A Writer's House in Wales". The Independent . Retrieved 22 November 2020. Kandell, Jonathan (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, Celebrated Writer of Place and History, Is Dead at 94". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 21 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. Mostly from people who go to Trieste or Venice and read my books, and say ‘What did you mean by that’? To be honest I’m not always sure.”

Pax opens at the imperial zenith of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee; Heaven’s Command, a prequel about the empire’s creation, understands the grand illusions in the projection of power, both of masculinity and imperialism. Morris’s knowledge of altered states, plus her memories of post-1948 nights when so many new presidents of former colonies, lately released from detention, danced with Princess Margaret after the union flag was hauled down, enriched Farewell the Trumpets. Michael Palin talks about the Jan Morris he met - witty, generous and inspirational, but also a challenging interviewee who used a variety of techniques to deflect difficult questions about her private life. Paul Clements suggests she 'played hide and seek with the facts'. Archive on Four considers how much she constructed and presented her whole life, with determination, guile and skill. Paul Clements knew Morris for 30 years, edited a collection of tributes to her on her 80th birthday and wrote a critical study of her work in 1998. He begins this book with understandable, almost lawyerly care, piling up the grounded facts of an existence that aspired above all to airiness. This method suits the first half of Morris’s life well: the childhood at Clevedon in Somerset, third child of a hearse-driving father and a church-organ playing mother; the adolescence at Lancing College “[thrilling] to the touch of a prefect’s strong hand”; the years as a young intelligence officer in Venice and Trieste and Cairo (all places to which Morris the writer would return); and a celebrated stint as a reporter for the Times, breaking the scoop of all scoops, the news of Hillary’s conquest of Everest (Morris made it to 22,000 feet). Two of their sons wholeheartedly shared their mother’s admiration; their daughter, Suki, told Clements that the transition was never really discussedI put it down to kindness,” she says. “Just that. Everything good in the world is kindness. Though the only person who ever uses that word in politics is the prime minister of New Zealand [Jacinda Ardern]. She is tremendous isn’t she? I’d like to meet her.” If O'Rourke's film – aided by a new biography of Morris by Derek Johns, to be published this week by Faber & Faber – sends people scurrying to reread Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Among the Cities and The Great Port: A Passage Through New York, a new generation of readers have a lot of joy in store.

He slipped into journalism at 16 on the Western Daily Press in Bristol. Colour blindness prevented him from joining the navy during the second world war, so he signed for the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers and a commission as intelligence officer, celebrating his 21st birthday onboard a troop train from Egypt to Palestine. “I knew life was going to be OK. At last, in the army of all places, I felt I was free.” After demob, he worked in Cairo for a news agency, read English at Christ Church, Oxford, and edited Cherwell magazine. The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire. He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man’s man. Morris's 1974 best-selling memoir Conundrum documented her transition and was compared to that of transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen ( A Personal Autobiography). Later memoirs included Herstory and Pleasures of a Tangled Life. She also wrote many essays on travel and her life, and published a collection of her diary entries as In My Mind's Eye in 2019. [36] I suggest that there must be a part of her restless soul that misses the travel. Can she revisit those worlds by reading her own books? In the long, beamed sitting room of Trefan Morys, we talk first about the house itself. When they all lived down the road, the kids used to come and play here in the stables, overgrown with bramble. Later Jan and Elizabeth felt the big house was unmanageable so they found a buyer, cleared out the horse stalls here, brought the books and bookcases from the other place, along with the weather vane, renovated and moved in.

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Morris was “emotionally in thrall to Welshness” and wrote of it, notably in The Matter of Wales (1984); she had steadied from “a wandering swank”, she said, into a matron who came home to a sure core of warmth.

She and Elizabeth – who also features in the documentary – stayed together and, although they had to “divorce” thanks to the UK’s ban on same-sex marriage, recently marked their 60-year partnership with a civil union.Morris went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her “Pax Britannica” histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris. In 1985, she was a Booker Prize finalist for an imagined travelogue and political thriller, “Last Letters from Hav,” about a Mediterranean city-state that was a stopping point for the author’s globe-spanning knowledge and adventures, where visitors ranged from Saint Paul and Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud. In recent years transgendering has become almost fashionable. There are stories about it in newspapers and magazines practically every day. Tom Hooper’s adaptation of David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne, was a great success (Hooper crediting Conundrum as an important source of inspiration and information, by the way). It is perhaps difficult for us now to appreciate just how momentous a decision this was for James in the 1960s and early 1970s. The sheer bravery of the act is easy to underestimate. James was about to change his ‘form and apparency – my status too, perhaps my place among my peers . . . my reputation, my manner of life, my prospects, my emotions, possibly my abilities’. What would the ultimate consequences be? He couldn’t then know. In 1995, Morris completed a biography of First Sea Lord John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, entitled Fisher's Face. [40] She began researching the life of the Admiral in the 1950s, describing the several-decades-long project as a "jeu d’amour" (love game). [41]