Conundrum

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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). Two of their sons wholeheartedly shared their mother’s admiration; their daughter, Suki, told Clements that the transition was never really discussed This is a beautiful book. I found it to be melancholic, courageous, and wise. That it's subject matter is Jan Morris's transsexual journey almost seems secondary to her incredible prose and the clarity of her honesty and introspection. Beyond the issue of gender, she searches for an answer to that most elusive of questions: who am I? Ten years later I had the privilege of becoming Jan’s literary agent at A. P. Watt, taking over from somebody who had left the firm. I remained in this role until I retired from full-time agenting in 2013. We stayed in touch, however, and our meetings led to my writing a short book about her, Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris. This feeling that James’s body was not just wrong but hateful is one that caused him utter despair in his thirties. He even contemplated suicide. And yet there is a remarkable context to these feelings, since James Morris was at the time the loving husband of his wife Elizabeth and the equally loving father of four children. (There was a fifth child, who died at the age of two weeks; this is movingly described in Conundrum.)

Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world | Jan Morris". The Guardian. 2 October 2016 . Retrieved 23 November 2021.

In recent years transgendering has become almost fashionable. There are stories about it in newspapers and magazines practically every day. Tom Hooper’s adaptation of David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne, was a great success (Hooper crediting Conundrum as an important source of inspiration and information, by the way). It is perhaps difficult for us now to appreciate just how momentous a decision this was for James in the 1960s and early 1970s. The sheer bravery of the act is easy to underestimate. James was about to change his ‘form and apparency – my status too, perhaps my place among my peers . . . my reputation, my manner of life, my prospects, my emotions, possibly my abilities’. What would the ultimate consequences be? He couldn’t then know. In the long, beamed sitting room of Trefan Morys, we talk first about the house itself. When they all lived down the road, the kids used to come and play here in the stables, overgrown with bramble. Later Jan and Elizabeth felt the big house was unmanageable so they found a buyer, cleared out the horse stalls here, brought the books and bookcases from the other place, along with the weather vane, renovated and moved in. Critics cavilled that his travelling was over-impressionistic, yet the intensity of the details still hooks readers: Istanbul’s mud, a gloop of civilisations; fingerholes poked in the paper screens of Kyoto. Morris could even create a collage of a location out of tiny facts retrieved only from archives, as in the exhilarating Manhattan ’45 (1987), a love letter to New York at its postwar apogee of neon and nylons; Morris did not arrive in the city until rather later. Pax opens at the imperial zenith of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee; Heaven’s Command, a prequel about the empire’s creation, understands the grand illusions in the projection of power, both of masculinity and imperialism. Morris’s knowledge of altered states, plus her memories of post-1948 nights when so many new presidents of former colonies, lately released from detention, danced with Princess Margaret after the union flag was hauled down, enriched Farewell the Trumpets. Artsnight: Michael Palin Meets Jan Morris". BBC two. BBC. 8 October 2016. Archived from the original on 17 April 2019 . Retrieved 21 December 2019.

I am sorry to be so indistinct,” she says. “The truth is, you are talking to someone at the very end of things. I felt that first about two years ago. I felt it creeping up, and now I know I am approaching the end.” She has written elsewhere about how her spirit will haunt two places in particular – the banks of the river Dwyfor and the seafront in Trieste. I wonder whether she still thinks that. “Death?” she says. “I think of it as a blank.” NEW YORK (AP) — Jan Morris, the celebrated journalist, historian, world traveler and fiction writer who in middle age became a pioneer of the transgender movement, has died at 94.Then, in 1972, James became Jan. It was a decision that, for most of us, could fairly be described as life changing, or perhaps earth shattering, but Morris insists that for her it represented not a change but a balancing, part of a lifelong continuum.

Morris as James in his Venice(1960) admitted a young man’s infatuation with Venice – ‘the loveliest city in the world, only asking to be admired’ by him, ‘a writer in the full powers of young maturity, strong in physique, eager in passion.’ Twenty years later, Morris, this time as Jan, returned to Venice to write The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage(1980). She draped it with an imperial mantle: ‘Rome apart, theirs was the first and the longest-lived of the European overseas empires.’ Her own memoir, Conundrum, had first been published in 1974, just two years after the gender reassignment operation that turned James Morris into Jan, and which had created a sensation. Such operations had been conducted before, but not on anyone whose profile stood as high as James Morris’s. Furthermore, he was in some ways a man’s man, one of the leading journalists of his day, the author of scoops on the Everest expedition of 1953 and the Suez débâcle of 1956. That such a man should choose to become a woman seemed extraordinary. Thousands of letters poured in, as well as invitations to appear on television and radio in Britain and elsewhere. As Jan observes in her memoir, ‘Half a lifetime of diligent craftsmanship had done far less for my reputation than a simple change of sex!’She was, in a sense, a foreign correspondent already, embedded in “an entirely male adult world.” Morris says that she was “pining for a man’s love,” though not in a directly sexual sense: Morris denied that her feelings were (her word) homosexual. Instead Conundrum insists on a more diffuse sensuality that Morris found in ritzy fast cars, in Venice, in a “caress” from a loved one of any gender, in other “tactile, olfactory, proximate delights,” prose style itself perhaps among them. Morris’s sense of “the British masculine ethos” emphasizes esprit de corps, shared devotion to a shared public goal, like statecraft or mountain climbing. Women, by contrast, keep on “doing real things, like bringing up children, painting pictures, or writing home.” While we talk, from time to time a small fluttering bird taps its beak on the window as if to gain entry. “Do you hear the bird tapping?” Morris asks. “It used to portend death didn’t it? We have it every day at different windows.” The first transgender operations were carried out in Germany in 1930. The word used then was ‘transsexualism’, not ‘transgender’, and it was only towards the end of the twentieth century that the word transgender came into common use. An early case was that of Lili Elbe, the ‘Danish girl’ of the book and film. By the 1960s such operations were if not commonplace then at least carried out routinely. For people in Britain the most famous instance was that of April Ashley. But people who were willing to adopt such an extreme remedy were nonetheless still considered freaks. Were their problems physiological or psychological? To this day there appears to be no firm consensus on this. In an introduction to the 2001 edition of Conundrum Jan wrote of research which suggested that a region of the hypothalamus, at the floor of the brain, was abnormally small in transsexuals. But there is no widely agreed hypothesis on the subject. Jan takes little interest nowadays in the subject of transgendering, however. Her feeling is that it was all a very long time ago and that she has said all she wants to say about it in her book. I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels.”