Conundrum

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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?” The opening lines of Conundrum: "I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life." Except that appearances, as James Morris had known from early childhood, can be deeply misleading. James Morris had known all his conscious life that at heart he was a woman. Her sense of group effort as masculine and individuality as feminine speaks to a social stratum that had Empire while Americans had a frontier. “I was a child of the imperial times,” she admits, decrying “that distasteful ignominy, Suez.” She had already quit as a foreign correspondent, becoming instead a full-time freelance writer, before coming out, but she continued traveling for pleasure and for her many freelance assignments. The Arab world comes off well in her brief accounts: “In the heart of Muslim Cairo, women were more naturally accepted in the office than they would have been at the Guardian,” let alone the Times of London. Mexicans, South Asians, and Fijians are, on the other hand, “guileless peoples.” (She means it as a compliment—they accepted her gender—but it has not aged well.) Morris died in Wales on Friday morning, according to her literary representative, United Agents. Her agent Sophie Scard confirmed her death. Morris had been in failing health. Additional details were not immediately available.

I get her to remind me of the bones of it just to hear her tell it. When she was assigned by the Times, which sponsored the ascent, she had never climbed any mountain before. They had to work out a way of protecting their scoop and get it into the paper in time for the Queen’s coronation. Having hugged Hillary in congratulation, Morris scrambled down an ice field and sent a wire overnight with a pre-coded message. It read: “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.” This meant: “Summit of Everest reached on 29 May by Hillary and Tenzing.” Morris made a lot of friendships on the mountain and they all stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. She is now the last survivor from that last camp. This book is a very well-written account of some of the emotional factors which eventually led the author, by then in his forties, to submit to expensive surgery in Casablanca. The last half of the memoir chronicles Morris’s journey from globe-trotting journalist, to Wales-based (and still traveling) parent and husband, to increasing unhappiness with her body and her movement through the world, until—first with hormones, then with changed social status, then with surgery—she becomes able to live as who she is. Reputable UK doctors, willing to perform Morris’s bottom surgery, insist that she first divorce her wife. Instead she chooses a surgeon in Morocco. Morris’s time in Casablanca “really was like a visit to a wizard,” and it left her “astonishingly happy” —as, to judge from her prose, she remained. Jan and Elizabeth would stay together, one way and another, for seventy years. 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.’ Few conversations, at any time of life, are more stimulating, more spontaneous and more genuinely original than those long ridiculous talks we all have, when we are very young, late at night about the meaning of life.”People tend to be either big fans or else they've never heard of her," says John O'Rourke, a Dublin-born film-maker who has produced and directed a new documentary about the travel writer Jan Morris. For anyone who knows the Jan Morris of today and has read fairly widely in James/Jan’s oeuvre, these statements written in 1973 sound unconvincing. And Jan would appear now to accept this. I suspect there is no real difference between what Jan Morris in her later life has been as a person and a writer, and what James Morris would have been had he remained a man. As regards her competence, anyone who has had the experience of being a passenger in her car as she drives down the rutted road to her home will attest to her skills and enthusiasm.

Note that he had all the pleasures he wanted. He liked being a schoolboy; he liked being an undergraduate, a soldier, a writer, a husband and father; and he was that happy, happy man who does the things Walter Mitty wanted to do. He went up Mount Everest with the British Expedition, Innocent of any previous climbing experience, and with ingenuous equipment. But all that really mattered to him was that he should become a woman, and he paid a high price. He could have had diabetes, got his gall bladder out and tidied up any adhesions, by a like expenditure of pain, money and time. And at the end he does not seem to me to have got what he was trying to buy. He has become a woman, but a woman who has had the equivalent of a hysterectomy, one who cannot offer the same faclities for iove‐making as a woman who was born a woman. And having changed sex so late in life, she is unlikely to attract the men that, earlier, would have made good husbands or lovers. It was only when he was in his sixties that he set about turning his youthful walk across Europe into a book. The first volume of the consequent work, A Time of Gifts, was published in 1977 and instantly recognised as a classic. This second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, appeared in 1986, and by then Leigh Fermor was seventy-one years old. Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world | Jan Morris". The Guardian. 2 October 2016 . Retrieved 23 November 2021.

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?

One of t In Mr. Morris's case he caused none of the domestic pain present in other cases. He handled it all very decorously, by stages, and he managed his family situation well; his wife, who was and is united to him in a deeply affectionate though fairly passionless relationship and has borne him four children, understood him. She accepted that he was in a continuous state of misery because he felt his spirit should inhabit a female and not a male body. If there are any persons who objected to Mr. Morris's conducting this private matter, we must have strains of superstition running through our societies as insanitary as those that lead to the belief that women, deformed by exceptionally great age, were witches and therefore to be persecuted. Most people liked it best in the early spring, when the woods down to the river seemed to shift almost before one’s eyes from snowdrop white to daffodil yellow to the shimmer of bluebells—when the rooks cawed furiously in the beeches, the garden woke to life in a splurge of rhododendrons, and the young lambs caught their heads five times a day in the fencing down the drive. I shall always remember it with the profoundest gratitude, though, as it was that May, that last May, in the last of my old summers.” She and Elizabeth – who also features in the documentary – stayed together and, although they had to “divorce” thanks to the UK’s ban on same-sex marriage, recently marked their 60-year partnership with a civil union. It certainly does! I can’t fathom it. My tendency has been to jump in and tell stories. I had forgotten all of this.”James Morris, Nepal, 1953. Morris was the first reporter to break the news that Hillary and Tenzing had conquered Everest. Photograph: Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images I mean, you have to be a very good musician to be a choirboy at Oxford, to be in the intelligence service in the British army, to be the one journalist at the Times to go up Mount Everest." We sit inside for a while at the long table that dominates the kitchen, eating some sandwiches for lunch that Twm has left under tinfoil. There is an Aga, and a Welsh dresser and a low shelf on which are arranged seven pots of homemade marmalade, a different one for each day of the week, which now represent Morris’s principal vice (up until two years ago she claimed to have drunk at least a glass of wine every day since the second world war, but has lapsed a little now). By favor of hormone treatment and surgery Mr. James Morris, a wellknown Journalist, and perhaps the finest descriptive writer in our time, of the watercolor kind, has become Miss Jan Morris, and what surprises me about “Conundrum,” the antobiographical book in which she gives a blow by blow account of his change of sex is that whereas I used to understand every word he wrote while I was a woman and he was a man, now that we are both women he mystifies me. 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.

I read it (‘Hav’) as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the West and East … viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us,” Le Guin wrote. Morris, Jan (3 February 2011). "2". Conundrum. Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-26600-5. Archived from the original on 22 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. March 2015 • 6:03pm (2 March 2015). "Christopher Morris, musician – obituary". Telegraph.co.uk . Retrieved 23 November 2021. Horatio Clare examines how the pioneering writer Jan Morris authored her own life, from her nationality to her sexual identity, trying to get behind the myths and masks she created. Shopland, Norena 'A tangle in my life' from Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales, Seren Books, 2017And it is a triumph of this book that we, the readers, understand them both. We know what goes through both their minds, because the artistry of its author makes the boyish enthusiasm of the young man as immediate as the tempered experience of the old.”