82 The EconomistNovember 28th 2020
C
onsideringher life, as she most liked to, from the sprawling
stone stables of Trefan Morys in north Wales among trees, owls
and waters, Jan Morris divided it into three parts. For the first 35
years she had been James Morris, a soldier and an intrepid report-
er. For a decade after that, as she took the hormone pills that gradu-
ally lightened and rejuvenated her, she was an androgynous crea-
ture, untethered and strange. Then, from 1972 and the procedure in
Casablanca that permanently altered her body, she was herself.
James, however, had not gone anywhere. He was still about: the
little lad with his precious telescope already trained on the blue
mountains of Wales, the Christ Church choirboy piping in his
white and scarlet, the intelligence officer rattling in jeeps through
the deserts of Arabia, the craver for fire, salt and laughter as a writer
for the Manchester Guardian. He was a handsome man, tall, lean
and sinewy, exulting as young men could in the full, controlled
power of his body. In 1953, when he was working for the Times, he
accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary’s Everest expedition (though he
had never climbed a mountain before) and brought back the world
scoop that the peak had been conquered. That slithering, bound-
ing descent to the telegraph office, forcing his way down a glacier
as if sparks flew from him, and the sending of the message in
“skulldug” code to London in time for the queen’s coronation, was
the best memory of his life, and hers.
Of the androgynous years there was less to report. Commis-
sions flooded in, incessant travelling went on, books were written
and much praised. But the work was now freelance, not for any em-
ployer, and despite marriage and children a sense of tormented
solitude descended. Fame seemed repugnant, as part of maleness.
In Africa or India people inquired whether this visitor was a man, a
woman, or some holy hermaphrodite. The body became disturb-
ing and could not be shown, except to a small deserted lake high in
the Welsh hills that embraced it with no questions.And then, at last, came the triumphant liberation of being a
woman, as she had known she should be since toddlerhood. The
“Why?” was unimportant, though it struck her as only common
sense or, at least, good taste: gentleness against force, give more
than take, yielding and accepting rather than pushing and initiat-
ing. The subtle subjection, the condescension and assumed inferi-
ority, were a small price to pay. The prurient curiosity of her le-
gions of readers could be satisfied with a book about it all, called
“Conundrum”, in 1974. Then she could resume her life.
For what had really changed? Almost nothing. Her dispositions
were as they had always been: a liking for cats and smart cars,
moulesand white wine, for speed, wind and great spaces, for the
role of the loner and onlooker, and romanticism in the bones. The
army still attracted her for its dash, courage, self-discipline and
swagger. When she took a walk for exercise, she marched like a sol-
dier. She remained married (though, between 1972 and 2008, for-
mally divorced because illegal), to Elizabeth, with an intensity of
love different from all others. They lived surrounded by the inti-
mate presence of thousands of books, to which she chatted as
friends.
The writing went on seamlessly, every day and with any imple-
ment available, navigating the wonderful, inexhaustible, shim-
mering sea of words. Through the 1970s she continued and com-
pleted a wistful three-volume history of the decline of the British
Empire, “Pax Britannica”, her best work she thought, which had
been started in the spirit of a Roman centurion witnessing the de-
cline of Rome. She kept up the irresistible habit of visiting every
city greater than Bucharest, barging in uninvited and ignorant
with the same voracious cheek to wander and record impressions:
sparkling Manhattan, where Fred Astaire might dance at any mo-
ment down Fifth Avenue; Sydney, vacuous and frigid at the soul;
Beirut, a Carmen among cities, tossing its curls and flouncing its
skirts; Cairo, with its smell of unrefined petrol, dust, jasmine and
new concrete. She retained the old love of shifting places, not quite
fixed, such as name-changing Trieste and St Petersburg, crossed by
both snow-light and sea-light. Above all, she kept Venice. To drift
on inky waters in a gondola at night, slightly drunk, watching the
pale buildings pass, was a sublimation as good as sexual. In those
years of sexual misery, it was compensation.
But far too much was made of organs. Gender was distinct from
sex, a more fundamental reality, based not in the loins so much as
in head and heart. It was an inner music, a light and shade. For her
“the conundrum thing” was less a matter of science than a divine
allegory, a union of selves. One had absorbed the other, and noth-
ing was discarded. As with writing about a place, which was also a
search for unity of a sort, hard facts were less important than feel-
ing, mood and even imagination. These produced a subtler, perso-
nal truth. Even the British Empire was evoked in looks, smells and
sensations, the dates left vague. Her first drafts were usually
stream-of-consciousness, letting it all go through; her second in-
serted the more sober, conscious self, often, she thought, wrongly.
She attributed her mystical feelings largely to Wales, the land of
her fathers, damp, demanding and bemusing as she knew it to be,
but also worked through with allusions, lore and magic and under-
pinned by kindness. In “The Matter of Wales” she declared herself a
firm nationalist, though the softness and humour of England
pleased her. Something of Wales, she wrote, lurked and smiled be-
hind all her writings, for she owned it, every lichened boulder, ev-
ery spin of the pit wheel, like all her places. She was one with the
peasants, the miners, the mythmakers and the shape-changers.
There at Trefan Morys, on the banks of the river Dwyfor that ran,
loudly through weed and moss, round a tiny island where her
ashes would be scattered, she planned to spend most of the after-
life wandering with Elizabeth. She foresaw the odd excursion,
though, to the seafront at Trieste, the city that always looked over
its shoulder at the tangled illusions and yearnings of the past, to
toast its sweet melancholy with a glass of sparkling wine. 7Jan Morris, journalist, essayist and historian, died on
November 20th, aged 94Unaltered states
Obituary Jan Morris