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Jan Morris
‘She imposed her personality on the entire world’ … Jan Morris. Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images
‘She imposed her personality on the entire world’ … Jan Morris. Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images

Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world

This article is more than 7 years old
To mark her birthday, Morris’s biographer and agent writes in praise of an extraordinary journalist, historian, traveller and free spirit

Jan Morris is one of the great British writers of the postwar era. Soldier, journalist, writer about places (rather than “travel writer”), elegist of the British empire and novelist, she fashioned a prose style that is elegant, fastidious, supple and sometimes gloriously gaudy. Rebecca West described her as the greatest descriptive writer of her time. Now turning 90, she has written more than 40 books and countless essays, articles and reviews.

I first met her in the offices of the publisher Random House in New York in the early 1980s. I was a junior editor, and this enounter with someone I considered one of the most intriguing writers I had read was nothing more than a handshake and an acknowledgement of our shared Britishness in New York. But I was immediately struck by Jan’s warmth and affability – qualities that are key to her genius for talking to people and drawing things out of them. For while Jan is less of an extrovert in person than in her writing, she nonetheless possesses a remarkable ability to nose out a story.

She was born James Morris in Clevedon, Somerset, to a Welsh father and English mother. James’s mother was a gifted pianist who had studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, and in later life gave recitals in Wales and the West Country. It was while James was sitting under her piano, aged three or four, that he decided he was really a girl. His father died when James was 12, having been badly gassed in the first world war, leaving his wife responsible for the family’s upbringing. His principal legacy would appear to have been his Welshness, which later came to be so important an element in Jan’s life.

For many people, the best-known fact about Jan is that she spent the first half of her life as a man and the second as a woman. She has joked that when she dies, her obituaries will be headlined “Sex-change author dies”. Her 1974 memoir Conundrum movingly describes how a dawning realisation hardened into a firm resolve to change her gender, despite having married and had four children.

That this fact should be all that some readers know about her is a great shame. She was fortunate to reach maturity in the jet age: a time of general stability and ease of movement. No one before or since has travelled and written in quite the same way. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that she has imposed her personality on the entire world.

After the hills of Somerset, the first place to influence James was Oxford, where he was sent at age nine to the cathedral choir school at Christ Church. “Oxford made me,” Jan wrote in Conundrum, recalling lessons attended in a “fluttering” white gown. The atmosphere of High Anglican Christianity, dwelling within beautiful buildings and courtyards, deeply imbued her sensibility both as a person and as a writer (even though it did not make her a Christian).

At 17, James joined the army and in 1946 was posted to Palestine, via Venice and Trieste. These came to be two of Jan’s favourite cities, and she later wrote wonderful books about them both. In Palestine, James was an intelligence officer, and conceived a fascination with the Arab world. After returning to Oxford to take his degree, he secured a job at the Arab News Agency in Cairo.

A career in journalism followed, first at the Times and later at what was still then the Manchester Guardian. He accompanied the British Mount Everest expedition of 1953, securing one of the great journalistic coups of the 20th century. Although the Times had exclusive rights to cover the expedition, James was concerned that other newspapers might steal his story, and devised a code that would make news of success appear to be news of failure. Once Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the peak, James scrambled down the mountain, at great risk, to delivered his despatch at a radio station in the nearest town. It read: “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.” Which actually meant: “Summit of Everest reached on 29th May by Hillary and Tenzing.” This news arrived in London on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, enabling the Times to run its story on a day when the nation was celebrating the dawn of a new Elizabethan Age.

Morris in 2001. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

James parted company with the Times over its line on the Suez crisis of 1956, and went over to the Guardian. Suez led to his other major journalistic scoop: the report that the French and the British were engaged in a covert attempt to invade Egypt under the guise of a mission to maintain peace between Egypt and Israel. Having seen first-hand the fighting in the Negev desert and the Suez Canal Zone, James flew to Cyprus to escape Israeli censorship and file his story. There he got into conversation with French pilots who admitted that they and the British were flying missions against Egyptian forces. The new editor of the Guardian, Alastair Hetherington, bravely decided to print this incendiary story. The British and French were shamed into withdrawing their forces, and Anthony Eden was later obliged to resign as prime minister.

At the beginning of the 1960s, James began his book-writing career in earnest, writing on America, the Arab world, Everest, Venice, Spain, Oxford, Sydney and Hong Kong. In 1964, he embarked on what Jan subsequently described as “the intellectual and artistic centrepiece of my life”: the Pax Britannica trilogy, which traced the history of the British empire.

What is it that renders Jan’s style so distinctive? She is a supremely skilled writer who involves the reader while she remains unobtrusively present herself; who uses the particular to illustrate the general, and scatters grace notes here and there like benefactions. These skills are matched by her talents for observation and analysis, and her wonderful ability (despite being only a moderately endowed linguist) to engage people and draw them out. She is a watcher, usually alone, seldom lonely, alert to everything around her.

By the early 80s, Jan Morris had been pretty much everywhere, and she must have a claim to being the most widely travelled person alive today. Standing in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1983, she felt that she had fulfilled a “perhaps jejune” ambition to visit and portray all the chief cities of the world. This remarkable achievement invites consideration of what underlies it. There was something compulsive about Jan’s travelling, something apparently not willed by her but driven by forces beyond her control. This was travel as a quest, as “an outer expression of my inner journey”.

Conundrum, which was a worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1974, describes the process that led to a clinic in Casablanca, and the adjustment to life as a woman. It is a powerful and beautifully written document, from which Jan and her lifelong partner Elizabeth emerge as heroines of a sort. While gender reassignment operations had been conducted on many people before, none of them had Jan’s public profile. There were great stresses, for Jan, Elizabeth and their four children, but they have remained a close-knit and loyal family.

At home in north Wales in 2007. Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images

At the same time that Jan was transitioning from male to female, she was also moving from being thoroughly English (Oxford, the army, the Times) to thoroughly Welsh. Jan and Elizabeth bought a big house in the far north-west of Wales, where they still live, and Jan began to embrace a Welsh republicanism that has become one of the great passions of her life. When Jan and Elizabeth die, they will be buried together on an island in a stream near their home, beneath a stone bearing an inscription in both English and Welsh that says: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

During the course of that life, Jan has gone wherever she pleased, and reported back on what the world is like for those of us who have not taken the trouble to explore it fully or with such an open mind. For this we should be very grateful.

Artsnight: Michael Palin Meets Jan Morris is on BBC2 on 8 October. Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris by Derek Johns is published by Faber. To order a copy for £12.29 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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