Book review: Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler

Desmond Clifford

In her introduction, considering “the enigma of Jan Morris”, Sara Wheeler asks, “Why did she dress like a Walmart version of the Queen?”

Actually, Jan Morris and Queen Elizabeth were close contemporaries, and to her admirers, there was a regnant aspect to Jan’s long patronage of Welsh letters at Llanystumdwy. Like the Queen, subjects came to her door in homage.

Books flowed from her pen with a frequency not far short of the Queen’s annual Christmas message. Like Her Majesty (am I taking this too far?) Jan was inscrutable and unknowable, in spite of being “addicted to public attention as well as writing.”

Sara Wheeler proves an excellent biographer. She is empathetic without being soft. She is clear-sighted about Jan’s selfishness as, in fairness, was Jan herself (I’m struggling to think of major writers who did the housework?).

The real enigma is not Jan but her former wife and life-long companion Elizabeth. Finding Elizabeth – they were married in 1949 – was the luckiest break for Jan in a life blessed by ample good fortune.

Whether Elizabeth was so lucky is less clear, though she made her own decisions.

Someone bought me the three volumes of Pax Britannica for Christmas in 1982. They instantly joined my favourites list and, in the decades ahead, I read every Jan Morris book I could find.

My favourites are Venice, The Venetian Empire, A Writer’s World. I have soft spots for the lesser works, Spain (1964) and The Great Port: A Passage through New York (1969). I dislike Oxford (1965): cloying, inauthentic and playing to the huge gallery (and market!) of Oxford sentimentalists.

The Matter of Wales (1984) ought to be my favourite but – I agree with Sara Wheeler’s reading – it’s a good book which somehow misses the mark.

Morris is an outstanding prose stylist.  She draws readers to her window, and we see what she sees, “a kind of complicity”.

Her style is heroic, for that is how she saw the world. Critics frequently allege purple prose and they’re not wrong; just occasionally she descends into charming tosh.

Sometimes you can spot where she was losing interest or chasing the clock. Even where she’s off-form, however, you’re never far from a graceful sentence or a brilliantly shaped phrase, and always that “come-with-me” seduction.

Jan grew up in Bristol with amorphous social standing.  Her lineage stretched from lower middle class to upper class.

Morris was sent to Lancing College – Evelyn Waugh was among past pupils – and was at home in the world of English manners. The war changed Morris’s life. She (he, of course) joined the 9^th Queen’s Royal Lancers and loved it, “Style, swagger, martial consequences: these were the features that drew him in”, attributes very evident in the writing.

What luck young Morris had! Barely out of school he was posted to occupy Venice beginning an affair with the city which, more than any other, he will be forever associated.

Then to Trieste, agreeably provincial today but, at world war two’s conclusion, on a tense fault line between competing spheres of influence.

From there Morris went on to Palestine for the conclusion of the British Mandate.  Venice, Trieste, Palestine – all before he was 22!

He returned home to marry and attend Oxford University for a compressed two-year degree. Morris was a young man pumped with ambition and in great haste.

Talent

His talent stood out and he was despatched to Cairo as The Times correspondent. Through her career Jan “would hear the death rattle of Empire” as she traversed the globe to observe Britain fading; bases cut, flags lowered, sun setting – and, after Suez, a growing sense of humiliation and decay in place of swagger and imperial purpose.

Today Britain can barely organise a ship to Cyprus.

Jan’s good luck reached apotheosis when he was “embedded”, as we would now say, on Hillary and Tenzing’s Everest expedition.

Morris was no mountaineer but coped well and won the team’s confidence. The conquest of Everest was among the great scoops of post-war journalism.

The story surrounding Morris’s efforts to maintain exclusivity as he arranged for the copy to be transmitted to London would make a decent film. It worked and, famously, the cards fell for The Times on the day of the Queen’s coronation in 1953.

Morris came home the most celebrated young journalist in Britain, if not the world. He mostly wrote what he wanted but The Times was resistant to him publishing books on the side.

Frustrated

Morris grew frustrated – he was bursting to tell his stories of Oman and Everest – and eventually, still young, he resigned to follow his own path as a writer.

Articles, essays and books poured out. Jan was useless with money and had life-long financial problems.  Her travel was paid for by commissions, but she spent money on school fees, posh cars and maintaining the various properties they lived in.

As she moved towards gender reassignment, she acquired expensive medical bills.

In 1972 Morris went to Casablanca to undergo sex-change surgery. Jan’s transition sparked huge debate at the time; Jan gave an account in her memoir “Conundrum”, and then mostly kept out of it.

Her Criccieth neighbours, I’m pleased to learn, took it all in their stride. Jan was convinced she had followed the right path and never regretted it. Transition was, for her, a matter of life or death.

Even so, Wheeler expresses doubts about Jan’s real understanding of womanhood; her “idea of being a woman remains unsettling”. Wheeler handles all this skilfully and with insight.

Jan had five children, of whom one died in infancy. Her daughter, especially, found Jan capricious and even cruel; her eldest sons found her distant.

Wheeler cites examples of egotistical and difficult behaviour in her dealings with publishers, though she had a redeeming propensity, it seems, to apologise shortly afterwards.

Welsh nationalism

Jan’s real association with Wales began in middle age. She embraced Welsh nationalism as a choice, partly in disgust at Britain’s conspicuous decline.

Wheeler proclaims, “She was not Welsh” and implies that Jan’s father, being from English-speaking Monmouth, had only a diluted Welsh provenance.

Well!  There’s no hierarchy of being Welsh; you’re as Welsh as you want to be.  It’s a slightly off note from an author generally skilled at navigating tricky slaloms.

The Morris household in Llanystumdwy provided temporary refuge for Dafydd Iwan after his release from prison for language activism, an association I hadn’t previously heard.

The elder children were too old for the Llanystumdwy experience but the youngest, Twm, grew up with Welsh and became a well-known poet and musician. Jan cites Twm’s victory in the Chair at the 2003 National Eisteddfod as one of her happiest days.

Jan is a paradox rather than an enigma. She was the republican who loved, in a way, the British Empire; the Welsh nationalist reared in the institutions of England’s establishment – Lancing College, Oxford, the Queen’s Royal Lancers, The Times, Faber & Faber; the Everest action man who became a woman; the advocate for kindness who didn’t always show it to her nearest.

Her relationship with Elizabeth – now there WAS an enigma. You see what was in it for Jan, but for Elizabeth?  Love, I suppose, is the only plausible answer.

Wheeler records that Jan was listed by The Times as the “fifteenth greatest British writer since the war”; not quite faint praise, but “Pythonesque”.

I reckon Pax Britannica and half a dozen other books will be read for years to come: Venice, Trieste, Conundrum, Matter of Wales and perhaps a few more.

The travel essay genre, Jan’s early bedrock, has declined.  At the start of her career, few people left Britain; now motivated tourists can go almost anywhere.

Empire revisionism hadn’t set in when Morris wrote Pax Britannica, and I doubt they would be published as new books today.

New orthodoxy demands a more censorious or at least ambiguous approach to Empire and publishers, I reckon, would baulk at Jan’s heroic style. Nevertheless, they have acquired classic status and will be read for a long time; at least in this literary sense, the Empire’s sun will never set.

It is reported that readers’ appetite for long-form non-fiction, including full-length biography, is waning.  If so, make an exception for this one.

Care

Wheeler handles a difficult, elusive subject with care and craft. She is sensitive but declines to take Jan on her own terms, as people tended to do during her lifetime.

Jan’s own story fascinates as much as anything she wrote herself and she has found the biographer she deserves in this exceptional book.

Since that Pax Britannica Christmas present, I bought every new book by Jan and scoured second-hand shelves for old ones.

Pilgrims travelled to Llanystumdwy to seek her out and touch her hem. More than once, I thought to make the trip myself but drew back, largely through personal reticence (what could I tell her about – my holidays in Ireland?).

And then I bumped into her, literally, on a night of some significance for us both.  It was around 3am at the Park Hotel, Cardiff at the “Yes for Wales” after-party following Wales’ devolution referendum, so 19 September 1997.

If you were there, you cared about Wales; a No vote would have been devastating. She greeted me with a radiant smile, and we spoke, I suppose, for five minutes. She wore pearls, I remember  We shared our joy at the result, I told her I was a big fan (how cool am I?) and mentioned I was friends with her son at college.

I met Jan Morris on the night Wales chose to be Wales and declined to abandon itself.  It was an auspicious encounter, perfect in its way, and I intuited that a second could only disappoint in comparison.

Jan Morris a life is published by Faber & Faber and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops