The Spectator - October 29, 2016

as only Morris can, nostalgia and elegiac

glee, and makes one confident, with Johns,

that Oxford is ‘surely the best book ever

written on the subject’.

But what Johns offers is much more

than a patchwork of extracts. His own prose

is elegant and his insights incisive, and

though he is affectionate he is not always

uncritical. Jan Morris can baffle readers

with an overabundance of facts; she has a

tendency to pass over unpleasantness; and

in retrospect her political views can make

you wince. On a visit to Johannesburg in

1957 she asks awkward questions about the

wisdom of ending apartheid.

‘I spent half my time travelling in for-

eign places,’ Morris writes in Conundrum

(1974), but Johns gives the impression

that it was much more than half — that,

ever since her mischievous and brilliant

reporting of the Everest expedition in

1952, Morris has scarcely stood still. There

seems almost no corner of the earth she

hasn’t written about, and South America

is the only place she’s failed to warm to. So

exhaustively travelled is she that she has

few minutes after 11 o’clock. She pressed an

electric button; an impulse was transmitted to

the Central Telegraph Office in St Martin’s

le Grand; in a matter of seconds her Jubilee

message was on its way to every corner of her

Empire.

From these few sentences alone, you can
begin to see why Rebecca West thought
Morris ‘the greatest descriptive writer
of her time’. She draws us immediately
and irresistibly into the story, and while
it’s clear that her canvas will eventually
reach as far and wide as the Queen’s Jubi-
lee message, she keeps us anchored and
alert through precise details: the panels of
pigeon grey, the exact time.
Derek Johns was Jan Morris’s agent for
several decades, and, while not authorised,
this ‘literary life’ has been written with
her blessing. In chapters that are themat-
ic rather than strictly chronological Johns
quotes liberally from Morris’s 40-plus
books — or what he reckons are three to
four million published words — and from
her journalism (which kicked off in 1950
with a piece for The Spectator). He has a
gift for selecting texts that drive you back
to read, or reread, the originals. As early as
page ten, in an opening chapter on Oxford,
he quotes a passage on the city observed
from the Fellows’ Garden in Exeter Col-
lege at dusk on a winter’s day. It combines,

Ever since her brilliant reporting of

the Everest expedition in 1952,

Jan Morris has scarcely stood still

had to invent a country, Hav, to delight and

bewilder her readers.

Behind this compulsive wandering

there is perhaps something more than

wanderlust. Aged three or four, sitting

under the piano while her mother played

Sibelius, James Morris decided he was real-

ly a girl. The conviction never left him, but

he was well into middle age — a husband

and father of four — before he embarked

on hormone treatment, preparatory to full

surgical gender reassignment in 1972. Jan

Morris emerged from this with ‘a mar-

vellous sense of calm’, but along the way,

Johns reckons, there had been ‘clear signs

of torment — torment sublimated in differ-

ent ways but never entirely resolved’. If it

was this, in part, that made it so difficult for

Morris to stay put, we should be selfishly

grateful. It has brought us some of the best

British writing since the end of the second

world war.

In person, Johns says, Jan Morris is

much less extrovert than in prose. Now 90,

she would probably hate the idea of a full-

blown biographer picking over her life. But

what Derek Johns has achieved is as satis-

fying as any biography. Slim, sympathetic,

and beautifully illustrated with Jan Mor-

ris’s own line drawings, Ariel has joined the

empire trilogy on my shelves, and won’t be

turfed out.

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