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”).
In 2017 she allowed her friend and agent, Derek Johns, to write a concise “literary life” (called Ariel after the shape-shifting Shakespearean faerie), but she always resisted the idea of full-scale biography like this one, not least because she was allergic to containment, especially within the covers of a hardback book. Her half dozen volumes of “memoir” after Conundrum, the indelible 1974 account of her personal metamorphosis, were all concerned with place as much as person, flights of fancy and anecdote, that favoured observation and lightness over confession and psychology. As she told Sue Lawley, on her second appearance on Desert Island Discs in 2002, when Lawley tried to dig down into the motivation for her “sex change”: “People try to define something that is indefinable. I accepted it as it came and to pin down exactly why I did it jars with me. It’s like trying to define a piece of music by Debussy.”
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).
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.
What followed when Jan returned to the family home in Llanystumdwy, at the north-west tip of Wales, was, as Clements empathetically details, both the most natural and the most curious of personal half-centuries. When Morris was criticised by Germaine Greer, among others, for not giving his wife a look-in, Elizabeth wrote to the Sunday Times to defend “a bold and courageous person who has united the family by love and happiness”. Two of their sons wholeheartedly shared their mother’s admiration; their daughter, Suki, told Clements that the transition was never really discussed: “Jan was a complex and multifaceted person… there was a drip, drip, drip of unkindness with her, undermining everything [between us]”, she said. A third son, Henry, meanwhile, suggested of Jan: “We were introduced but we never got to know each other.” There is an abiding sense, even after reading these 600 pages, that finally that was exactly as Morris always wanted it.
I think I was probably the last journalist to ask a version of what became known as the “Jan Morris Memorial Question”, when I interviewed her a few months before she died. Did she have a sense of a before and after, I wondered, writing as a man and a woman?
She answered in part by reaching for a scrapbook that she had come across a few days earlier, in which she had set out her original plans for Pax Britannica, a painstaking handwritten catalogue of dates and events, cross-referenced to every nation under British rule. “I look at something like this and think, Can that really have been me?” she said, which was about the closest she came to describing the conundrum at the heart of her life and of Clements’s judicious, richly researched book. “I don’t think my writing changed that much,” she suggested. “Except that perhaps I became a little more relaxed about it.”
Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides by Paul Clements is published by Scribe (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
