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Conundrum

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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. Critics cavilled that his travelling was over-impressionistic, yet the intensity of the details still hooks readers: Istanbul’s mud, a gloop of civilisations; fingerholes poked in the paper screens of Kyoto. Morris could even create a collage of a location out of tiny facts retrieved only from archives, as in the exhilarating Manhattan ’45 (1987), a love letter to New York at its postwar apogee of neon and nylons; Morris did not arrive in the city until rather later. I 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.” Who I was for my first 20-or-so years was frightened, confused. I had no terminology, no ability to use rationality to heal myself, no notion of the trans movement or even the belief that anyone existed with my affliction other than poor me. I would not meet a person who self-identified as trans, or even hear the word "transgender," until I was in college. So in those bright brief moments where I was not hating myself and permitted my mind to envision my desires, what did I see? I saw a beautiful red-haired woman who held me from behind, eyes closed, her chin on my shoulder. She would tell me that it was okay, that she and I would meet one day. Sometimes, she had wings.

The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. 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. Morris’s first book, Coast to Coast (1956), came out of a cross-US journey funded by a Commonwealth fellowship. After the 1956 Suez invasion, which the Times supported and Morris did not, he left for the Manchester Guardian, as it was then, alternating six months of researching books with six on the paper (hence one book dedicated to “philanthropists in Cross Street” – the paper’s Manchester HQ).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. The last half of the memoir chronicles Morris’s journey from globe-trotting journalist, to Wales-based (and still traveling) parent and husband, to increasing unhappiness with her body and her movement through the world, until—first with hormones, then with changed social status, then with surgery—she becomes able to live as who she is. Reputable UK doctors, willing to perform Morris’s bottom surgery, insist that she first divorce her wife. Instead she chooses a surgeon in Morocco. Morris’s time in Casablanca “really was like a visit to a wizard,” and it left her “astonishingly happy” —as, to judge from her prose, she remained. Jan and Elizabeth would stay together, one way and another, for seventy years. For anyone who knows the Jan Morris of today and has read fairly widely in James/Jan’s oeuvre, these statements written in 1973 sound unconvincing. And Jan would appear now to accept this. I suspect there is no real difference between what Jan Morris in her later life has been as a person and a writer, and what James Morris would have been had he remained a man. As regards her competence, anyone who has had the experience of being a passenger in her car as she drives down the rutted road to her home will attest to her skills and enthusiasm. Her own memoir, Conundrum, had first been published in 1974, just two years after the gender reassignment operation that turned James Morris into Jan, and which had created a sensation. Such operations had been conducted before, but not on anyone whose profile stood as high as James Morris’s. Furthermore, he was in some ways a man’s man, one of the leading journalists of his day, the author of scoops on the Everest expedition of 1953 and the Suez débâcle of 1956. That such a man should choose to become a woman seemed extraordinary. Thousands of letters poured in, as well as invitations to appear on television and radio in Britain and elsewhere. As Jan observes in her memoir, ‘Half a lifetime of diligent craftsmanship had done far less for my reputation than a simple change of sex!’ All these things, however, she did as a man – a man, into the bargain, who epitomised the machismo and derring-do of the brightest and the best of British manhood in the early years of the 20th century. James became Jan James Humphrey Morris was born on October 2nd, 1926. At the age of nine he went to Christ Church, Oxford, as one of 16 choral scholars, all boys. He served in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers during the second World War. He embarked on a three-volume history of the British Empire. He

Orthodox Greeks, after a few generations of Venetian Catholic rule, frequently welcomed the arrival of the Muslim Turks – who, if they had unappealing weaknesses for mass slaughter, arson and disembowelment, at least did not despise their subjects as bumpkin schismatics.” It is an intimidating task to write a life of Jan Morris. Not only because Morris lived a very long time – she died in 2020 aged 94 – nor because she experienced so many lifetimes worth of adventure as writer, explorer, journalist, historian, traveller, not to mention the great pioneering journey of her gender transformation. Rather, it is daunting because, of all writers, Morris was a diehard defender of the ineffable mystery of the individual spirit, of her individual spirit, almost above all other virtues (apart, famously, from the lifelong necessity to “be kind”). 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. She was, in a sense, a foreign correspondent already, embedded in “an entirely male adult world.” Morris says that she was “pining for a man’s love,” though not in a directly sexual sense: Morris denied that her feelings were (her word) homosexual. Instead Conundrum insists on a more diffuse sensuality that Morris found in ritzy fast cars, in Venice, in a “caress” from a loved one of any gender, in other “tactile, olfactory, proximate delights,” prose style itself perhaps among them. Morris’s sense of “the British masculine ethos” emphasizes esprit de corps, shared devotion to a shared public goal, like statecraft or mountain climbing. Women, by contrast, keep on “doing real things, like bringing up children, painting pictures, or writing home.” We sit inside for a while at the long table that dominates the kitchen, eating some sandwiches for lunch that Twm has left under tinfoil. There is an Aga, and a Welsh dresser and a low shelf on which are arranged seven pots of homemade marmalade, a different one for each day of the week, which now represent Morris’s principal vice (up until two years ago she claimed to have drunk at least a glass of wine every day since the second world war, but has lapsed a little now).

Seriously...

sometimes there have been moments when I have perfectly understood the self-portrait called Man Screaming which Egon Schiele painted after his return from Trieste to Vienna, and it has dawned upon me what a nightmare hiatus we all pass through, on the way from birth to death. Surely the only logical response would be to stand on a bridge and scream? But no, self-deception sees us through.” That's an understandable response to the pressures Ms. Morris must have been under in her time and place, but her description of her life post-transition is by turns tedious and excruciating to read now, and it was poorly timed in its day — cisgender feminists spent the rest of the seventies quoting Ms. Morris's autobiography any time they needed to bludgeon trans women for existing, and the image of trans women as inherently reactionary and anti-feminist lives on long after the people who chose Ms. Morris as representative of every trans woman have died or faded from relevance.

Jan Morris wrote Conundrum very soon after the operation, and by now, nearly fifty years after the event, it seems clear that it is describing a transitional emotional state. Jan writes: When it comes to the middle act, the question of how to understand Morris’s decision – as devoted husband to Elizabeth and father of four – to go to Morocco, aged 46, to take the enormous risk of gender reassignment surgery, Clements changes tone somewhat. The cause and effect chronology of the early years give way to more textured description. The biographer splits the life and the work, detailing first the “highwater mark” of Morris’s literary career, the landmark Pax Britannica trilogy about the rise and fall of the British empire, begun in 1968 and completed in 1978, and then, separately, the concurrent drama of Morris’s “road to Casablanca”. He effectively avoids the blunt question that Sue Lawley sought the answer to. In introducing Morris’s decision to change gender, Clements refers in passing to “her deep private unhappiness” – but, nearly halfway through the book, that is pretty much the first the reader will have heard of it.

It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest....” Morris died on 20 November 2020 at Ysbyty Bryn Beryl (Bryn Beryl Hospital) in Pwllheli in North Wales, at the age of 94, survived by Elizabeth and their four children. Her death was announced by her son Twm. [2] [10] Awards [ edit ] 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.

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