C8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020
obituaries
BY MATT SCHUDELAs a young reporter, Jan Morris
was on the mountainside, at
22,000 feet, when the first expedi-
tion in history reached the top of
Mount Everest. She reported on
wars and revolutions around the
globe, published dozens of el-
egant books exploring far-flung
places and times and was regard-
ed as perhaps the greatest travel
writer of her time.
Yet the most remarkable jour-
ney of her life was across a private
border, when she cast off her
earlier identity as James Morris
and became Jan Morris.
A writer of extraordinary range
and productivity, and one of the
world’s first well-known trans-
gender public figures, Ms. Morris
was 94 when she died Nov. 20 at a
hospital in the Welsh town of
Pwllheli. Her son Twm Morys
announced the death in a state-
ment but did not state the cause.
Jan Morris spent her first 45
years as James Morris, who had
been a British cavalry officer, a
World War II veteran and a dash-
ing reporter renowned for inter-
national adventures and evoca-
tive writing.
“On the face of things,” a one-
time colleague, David Holden,
wrote in 1974, “a less likely candi-
date for a sex change than James
Morris would have been hard to
imagine. His whole career and
reputation had created an aura of
glamorous and successful mascu-
linity.”
In the 1940s, James Morris
lived on the Nile on the houseboat
of British Field Marshal Bernard
Montgomery. In 1953, never hav-
ing climbed a mountain before,
James joined the expedition of Sir
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing
Norgay and came within 7,000
feet of the summit of Mount
Everest, the world’s highest peak.
Scrambling back down, James
delivered the news that Everest
had been conquered for the first
time in history. The Times of
London printed the story on the
eve of the coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II.
“I went up an unknown,” Ms.
Morris told the New York Times
in 1997, “and came down the most
famous journalist in the world.”
Constantly on the move, James
Morris reported from Israel, Alge-
ria, South Africa and Japan, pri-
marily for British newspapers
and magazines, published books
and was praised by New York
Times critic Orville Prescott as a
“poet and a phrase-maker with a
fine flair for the beauties of the
English language.”
James Morris covered the Mos-
cow show trial of U.S. spy plane
pilot Francis Gary Powers and the
trial in Jerusalem of unrepentant
Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann.
In Cuba, James interviewed the
charismatic revolutionary Che
Guevara and in a 1960 dispatch
published in the New York Times
offered a grim assessment of what
the future would hold for the
country under Fidel Castro.”
“It is a strikingly immature
regime — not just in age but in
style and judgment too. The rul-
ers of Havana reduce all things to
simple right or wrong, East or
West, in or out, yours or ours.
There still is good in many of their
notions, a surviving streak of
idealism, a genuine quality of
young inspiration. But there is
little subtlety, no experience, and
scarcely a jot of that prime politi-
cal commodity, irony.”
In 1960, James Morris pub-
lished the best-selling “Venice”
(called “The World of Venice” in
the United States), creating a dis-
tinctive style of travel writing, a
literary dreamscape evoking past
and present at once, as sensory
impressions and a poignant
awareness of what some called
the “psychology of place” were
threaded into an elegant, flowing
prose.
Venice — for centuries an inde-
pendent republic before it be-
came part of Italy — “was some-
thing unique among the nations,
half eastern, half western, half
land, half sea, poised between
Rome and Byzantium, between
Christianity and Islam, one foot
in Europe, the other paddling in
the pearls of Asia. She... even
had her own calendar, in which
the year began on March 1st, and
the days began in the evening.”
Other books followed, about
New York, Britain, South America
and Spain, as well as an ambitious
three-volume history of the Brit-
ish Empire that was so authorita-
tively written that critics were
reminded of Edward Gibbon’s
monumental 18th-century chron-
icle of ancient Rome.
James Morris had public ac-claim and a seemingly contented
family life as the married father of
four children — but there re-
mained a central, inescapable
fact: a misaligned gender identi-
ty, “a life distorted.”
“I was three or perhaps four
years old,” Jan Morris wrote in
her first book under that name,
the autobiographical “Conun-
drum” (1974), “when I realized
that I had been born into the
wrong body, and should really be
a girl. I remember the moment
well” — sitting under the piano,
while her mother played Sibelius
— “and it is the earliest memory
of my life.”
Before marrying Elizabeth
Tuckniss in 1949, James Morris
explained this sense of inner con-
flict, telling her that “each year
my every instinct seemed to be-
come more feminine, my entomb-
ment within the male physique
more terrible to me.”
James Morris began hormone
treatments in 1964 and consulted
with Harry Benjamin, an Ameri-
can physician and the author of
“The Transsexual Phenomenon”
(1966). In 1972, James went to
Casablanca for transition surgery,
choosing a doctor experienced inthe procedure.
Two weeks later, Jan Morris
flew back to England, where she
was greeted by Elizabeth. Under
British law at the time, they had
to obtain a divorce because same-
sex couples were not permitted to
marry. Still, they continued to live
together.
“To me gender is not physical
at all, but is altogether insubstan-
tial,” Ms. Morris wrote in “Conun-
drum,” which became an interna-
tional bestseller. “It is the essen-
tialness of oneself, the psyche, the
fragment of unity. Male and fe-
male are sex, masculine and femi-
nine are gender, and though the
conceptions obviously overlap,
they are far from synonymous.”
Many readers admired Ms.
Morris’s revelatory candor, but
others were confused or hostile.
In Esquire magazine, Nora
Ephron disparaged “Conun-
drum” as “a mawkish and embar-
rassing book.... Jan Morris is
perfectly awful at being a woman;
what she has become instead is
exactly what James Morris want-
ed to become those many years
ago. A girl. And worse, a 47-year-
old girl.”
In any case, Ms. Morris contin-ued with her writing life much as
before, only wearing skirts, neck-
laces, a nimbus of graying hair
and a perpetual smile.
She completed the final vol-
ume of the British Empire trilogy
and continued to wander the
globe, writing for Rolling Stone
and other publications. The
books seem to pour out of her,
often with simple titles such as
“Travels,” “Journeys,” “Destina-
tions” and “Among the Cities.”
She became almost a revered
figure, considered a founder of
modern travel writing, even
though she resisted the title.
“The reason why I don’t regard
myself as a travel writer is that the
books have never tried to tell
somebody what a city is like,” she
told the Independent in 2001. “All
I do is say how I’ve felt about it,
how it impinged on my sensibili-
ty.”
Ms. Morris was often asked
which city in the world, out of the
hundreds she knew, was her fa-
vorite. She invariably named
Manhattan and Venice, both of
which she visited every year.
But she also had an abiding
attachment to Trieste, a some-
what eccentric port city in north-
eastern Italy. Ms. Morris first saw
Trieste in 1945, then returned
periodically over the years before
publishing in 2001 what she con-
sidered perhaps her finest travel
book, “Trieste and the Meaning of
Nowhere.”
“The nostalgia that I felt here
50 years ago was, I realize now,
nostalgia not for a lost Europe,
but for a Europe that never was,
and has yet to be,” she wrote. “But
we can still hope and try, and be
grateful that we are where we are,
in this ever-marvelous and fateful
corner of the world.”
James Humphry Morris was
born Oct. 2, 1926, in Clevedon,
England.
At 17, James Morris joined the
9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, a sto-
ried British cavalry unit, and
served in Italy and the Middle
East during World War II. James
later worked for a news agency in
Cairo, then returned to Britain to
study at the University of Oxford,
graduating in 1951.
After working for the Times of
London for several years, James
joined what was then the Man-
chester Guardian in 1956 as “wan-
dering correspondent,” winning aGeorge Polk Award for journal-
ism in 1960. A year later, James
became a freelance writer and
received a master’s degree in Eng-
lish literature from Oxford.
It was in Oxford where James
Morris made the first tentative
steps toward becoming Jan, going
out in public wearing dresses and
makeup, years before athletes
Renée Richards and Caitlyn
Jenner were heralded as trans-
gender pioneers.
In 2008, Ms. Morris and Eliza-
beth Tuckniss Morris were united
in a civil union.
“I made my marriage vows 59
years ago and still have them,”
Elizabeth Morris told Britain’s
Evening Standard. “We are back
together again officially. After Jan
had a sex change we had to
divorce. So there we were. It did
not make any difference to me.
We still had our family. We just
carried on.”
They settled in the Welsh vil-
lage of Llanystumdwy, with one of
their sons living next door. The
couple arranged for a headstone
with an inscription in Welsh and
English: “Here are two friends, at
the end of one life.”
In addition to Elizabeth Morris
and their son, Twm Morys, survi-
vors include three other children.
Another child, a daughter, died in
infancy.
I f anything, Jan Morris was a
more productive writer than
James had been. She often pub-
lished two or three books a year,
and more than 45 in all. Besides
her accounts of travel, history and
autobiography, she wrote two
novels and biographical studies
of Abraham Lincoln and British
admiral John Fisher.
In 2018, she published “Battle-
ship Yamato,” about an ill-fated
Japanese warship that was sunk
in 1945. It was believed to be one
of the last books about World War
II written by a veteran of the war.
She continued to publish essays
about her life in Wales, her mem-
ories and what she called the
“tangled web” of her life until
shortly before her death.
“I spent half my life traveling in
foreign places,” Ms. Morris wrote
in “Conundrum.” “I did it because
I liked it, and to earn a living, and
I have only lately recognized that
incessant wandering as an outer
expression of my inner journey.”
[email protected]JAN MORRIS, 94
Extraordinary travel writer broke many boundaries
SUSAN BIDDLE/THE WASHINGTON POST
A rtful author Jan Morris, pictured i n t he garden outside the
National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 2003, was one
of the world’s first well-known transgender public figures.“To me gender is not physical at all, but is
altogether insubstantial. It is the essentialness of
oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity.”
Ms. Morris, in the international bestseller “Conundrum”FUNERAL SERVICES
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