Our London correspondent

The title of Jan Morris’ latest book is Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (Faber & Faber). Nowhere, the state of non-being, and the city that more than any other recalls exile and extraneousness, solitude and diversity - therefore a city to which Morris can relate, perhaps more than others. The author has announced that this is her last book, and that from now on her writings will be private and personal. She is 75, and somewhat tired; it is understandable. Her age doesn’t show, mind you – with her glorious head of white hair and her springy figure she is more a respectable middle-aged lady that a distinguished elderly dame. In over fifty years of activity she has been awarded several honorary degrees, a number of literary prizes, and many of those titles of which Britain seems to hold the monopoly (G.CB, OBE, CMG), as well as writing some of the finest travel books in twentieth-century English-language literature. Two of her “city biographies” – the ones dedicated to Venice and to Hong Kong, remain unrivalled. Incomparable is also her trilogy on the British empire, Pax Britannica, which was published in the 1970s and marked a turning point for studies on that subject.
For British and American readers she remains a myth, and for British and American writers she is an established master. In Paul Theroux’s words, “No living writer has her serenity or her strength”. And yet, Jan Morris’s masterpiece is not on paper, but on flesh; it is not artistic, but human. It’s her own life, or rather her two lives. From James to Jan, from man to woman, from being the father of five children (three boys and two girls, one of which, unfortunately, died as a child) to being their “aunt”, from soldier and explorer to homemaker and sensitive traveller.
A crude taxi-driver, having taken her to the Army Museum in Chelsea, told her that she was a “nice girl”. He held the car-door open and stood at her side while observing the building, then kissed her on her lips and gave her a friendly pat on her bottom. Jan, no longer James, could do nothing but turn red. She was 45 years old. At the Traveller’s Club in Pall Mall, where voyagers and diplomats convene, older members still remember the day when James Morris resigned his membership.
Admission was granted to men only, and he had changed sex. “She has continued to show up at the club, but as a guest,” says a member. “You know how dinners are in these places: you tell stories, you exchange impressions on what you’ve seen and where you’ve been, and sometimes you get carried away. Well, what could any experience or any extraordinary episode be worth with him, I mean her, at the table? She had been one of us, now she was one of them, successful both before and after - not one but two lives... unbelievable”. The Club’s library is on the first floor. The wooden handrail on the staircase that leads up to it was presented by Prince Talleyrand.
The marble decorations that adorn the central ceiling reproduce (the originals are currently at the British Museum) the friezes of the temple of Apollo at Bassae. They were recovered during excavations conducted by C. Rockerell, a founder-member of the club. All of Jan Morris’ books are here. “I am too old to climb up the ladder to reach the top shelf,” says my host, “but if you go up you’ll find the book that you’re looking for”. Conundrum, the mystery, the enigma, dates back to 1974, and delves deeply into themes that are barely touched in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere: the sense of otherness with respect to the world, the search for a wholeness to belong to, which in turn envelops and completes the seeker, the challenge of becoming what one wants, knowing all the time that the goal will never be completely achieved. It is a courageous and tormented book, an autobiography that is at times cruel in its probing the hidden meanings of simple or ambiguous words and the retinue of exhibitionist happenings that are necessarily connected with such an issue as transsexualism. It is no easy book – not for the writer nor for the reader. It conveys a sense of uneasiness, and it could hardly be otherwise. James Morris realized that he was born in the wrong body when he was less than four years old. While his mother would play Sibelius on the piano, James would be absorbed in his children’s games, feeling that he should be a girl.
The youngest of three siblings, he was not effeminate and they did not dress him in girl’s clothing. As he grew up, he did not experience homosexual inclinations, but that feeling intensified. “I felt that by desiring so fervently and insistently to be transferred into a female body I was seeking a more divine condition, an inner reconciliation”.
Studying at Oxford he learned that “there are no rules. We are all different. None of us is completely wrong. To understand is to pardon”. When he was 17 he volunteered for His Majesty’s 9th Lancers Regiment. World War II was drawing to an end, and he travelled to Italy and later to Egypt. In some way he was protected: “The entire life of Britain’s upper classes is marked by bisexuality. The school system, the restraint imposed by good form, the fortunate tolerance extended to all sorts of original fellows, these elements made relations among men full of emotional and vague nuances”. Although his social life was acceptable, his physical, or sexual life remained impracticable. He was not a seducer nor was he seducible, yet he remained seductive, and that was a complication for a person who did not feel like a man and yet was not a woman, isolated by his own sex and unable to be of the other. His body did not belong to him and any pleasure that it might have provided was not particularly appealing to him. There was some kind of atrophy inside him that obstructed and prevented him from going all the way, and from attaining fulfilment. This incapacity was also reflecting in his professional activities. Just over twenty years old, Morris was employed by the Arab News Agency in Cairo, where he later worked as a correspondent for the Guardian and then for the Times.
For ten years he lead a rewarding life as a journalist, visiting places and meeting people. He was in demand, and there was little he couldn’t do. Then, in 1961, at 35, he dropped everything, for his own sake. That decision was not a proud statement of his literary capacities, but a refusal of the canonical aspects of a man’s life: success and the struggle to attain it, life seen as a continuing battle for self-assertion – it was yet another break with the surrounding world, his returning vocation for solitude, for impotence. Which was impotence of a psychological nature, not physical. He was not attracted by the physical act because he found it inconsistent with his feelings, a mechanical performance by the wrong sort of engine. Yet the body he had was perfectly functional: his relation with Elisabeth, who would be his wife for over twenty years, was blessed with the birth of five children. It was not an attempt to compromise with himself, to repress the female nature he felt he possessed.
Elisabeth knew that James was seeking another identity, and James knew that a typical husband-and-wife relation with her would not be possible. But on the one hand there was the power of the mind, and on the other the idea of being the author of an artistic creation. As the children grew, Morris became more and more impatient with being what he was, and the desire of attaining his missing part became irresistible. There is something grand and tremendous in this voyage from the male to the female world. Over a period of ten years James swallowed something like 12,000 hormone pills, and absorbed into his system “50,000 milligrams of female matter”.
As in The Picture of Dorian Gray, at first his age appeared to be suspended, so that he was sometimes mistaken for his children’s older brother, or his wife’s son, until he finally became a person of indefinite sex, a chimera, a mythological monster, a hermaphrodite divinity. Once, in the street, he found that he was being stared at. Tom, his first-born, squeezed his hand and whispered, “That man’s staring at me”. The final step was Casablanca, for the definitive and irreversible operation that would change his sex. Her new name, Jan, seems to hint at something androgynous, as if attempting to hold on to that “middle kingdom” of hormonal changes, trying to come to terms with oneself. But in that hospital James Morris was gone forever, and a new person took his place. Since 1971, Jan Morris is a different person from the James Morris she previously was, and not only externally and physically.
The man who confronted Mount Everest, who drove tanks through the desert and motorboats in the Venetian lagoon is now a woman who finds it difficult parking her car, who has trouble uncorking a bottle and carrying weights. The author of Pax Britannica, that wonderful evocation of a lost world, the writer capable of exalting passages and sweeping perspectives has been replaced by a narrator who is more careful of details, of small stories, and of people, than she is of ideas. But, just as James’ books possessed a delicacy, a passion and a profundity that were not typically male, Jan’s books show a curtness, a virile lyricism that never slips into mawkishness, and an understanding of the shadier aspects of life that come from another gender.
Born in Wales, Jan Morris owns a dacha in a Welsh town that has an unpronounceable name. After Conundrum she has never again written of her double life. She is willing, although moderately, considering her age and the annoyance that these tedious rituals bring, to talk about her books, but not about herself. And she is probably right. Coming, as she does, from a country of bards, magicians, legends and premonitions has probably proved helpful in seeking her true identity. It has underlined the sacral aspects of her adventure, the mystery and the courage, we might say, allowing her to sublimate a subject that is often hazy and at times tragically ludicrous.
She has developed it into something spiritual and intensely human as for will, intensely divine as for desire. She has managed to live fully and fallibly, as is in the nature of things for all of us, but happily, and for two times - as two separate persons. She can be proud.
Traslation by Interpres sas