Jan Morris is one of a rare species, a writer whose long life was every bit as interesting as her writing. Born in 1926 — the same year as Britain’s late Queen Elizabeth — Morris died in 2020, depriving the contemporary British literary scene of one of its great prose writers, one of its shining stars. Now, just two years later, Belfast-born author Paul Clements has published her first biography. It is a work worthy of its complex and much-admired subject, and one that is unlikely to be surpassed.
The book skates along for 600 pages and it would have to; rarely has any one human being crammed so much into 90-odd years. Born James Humphry Morris in Clevedon in Somerset, she was the youngest of three children born into a lower-middle-class family “without pretensions” but with a good store of books and maps. She spent a reasonably happy childhood (including a period at boarding school during the war) before serving in the army (in Italy and the Middle East), graduating in English at Oxford, and then entering into a long and distinguished career as an internationally celebrated foreign correspondent.
Aged just 27, Morris became the only journalist to join the first ascent of Everest in 1953 (pulling off a minor miracle in managing, in record time, to break the story on the day of the queen’s coronation) and went on to cover many of the 20th century’s defining moments. She had an unusual knack for invariably being in the right place at the right time, a quality that must have caused envy among fellow journalists who watched from their desks in the argumentative newsrooms of The Times and, later, the Manchester Guardian.
Morris was indefatigable traveller, “buzzing with superabundant energy”. Each trip enabled this “correspondent be everywhere”, inevitably return with a bunch of articles published and a collection of bulging notebooks that would be distilled into yet another new book.
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Clements mixes warm appreciation with candid, critical insight. His biography admits to many flaws, describing Morris’s selfish determination, and pointing to the price paid by her wife, Elizabeth, and her children, because of her many absences and her later sexual transition. In Morris’s own words: “I was anything but a father figure” and after the transition, her children had to make do with what she herself described as “an adoring if interfering aunt”.
At times, Morris comes across as insensitive to her children. Commenting, years later, on the tragic death of her four-week-old daughter Virginia, she would write in Allegorizing: “My own grief was soon half assuaged by the arrival of a substitute, as it were, in the person of her young sister, Suki.” That said, one of the extraordinary gifts of her life was her relationship with Elizabeth. Together they somehow lasted through seven decades that began with a very early marriage, Morris’s relentless and mostly solo travelling, a divorce, a sex change, remarriage, illness and old age. Their bond of friendship was without precedent.
I was fortunate enough to meet Jan Morris several times in Trieste and fully recognise her in this complex and painstakingly assembled portrait that brings her vividly to life. Although she did not hold back from revealing herself in her writings — most famously in Conundrum, a courageous act of self-analysis — she remained a shy, sensitive and reserved. She was also incredibly knowledgeable, sharp, and great fun. All these elements are brilliantly conveyed in this biography.
Interestingly, as the author who wrote one of the great contemporary texts in the transgender canon and was in many ways ahead of her time, there was something oddly old-fashioned and even Victorian about Morris. She was Victorian in the copiousness of her output. Trollope-like, she hammered out 12 pages a day, every day, at home or abroad, producing some 5 million words in her books alone. She also held an insatiable interest in the British empire even as it dissolved in the middle decades of the 20th century.
Her trilogy, Pax Brittanica, at times guilty of romanticising imperialism, is also a wonderful elegy for what was, by any standards, an extraordinary era in British and indeed in world history. Morris chose to conclude the trilogy on Jubilee Day, June 22nd, 1897, realising, as she put it, that “the grand illusion had collapsed, and England was a European island once more”. Never has that affirmation rung more true than over the past couple of years, though now the European is a merely geographic epithet.
The epilogue to Life from Both Sides achieves a touching, elegiac note. For all her travelling, Morris felt at home in just two places, in Llanystumdwy, near the river Dwyfor in Wales, her beloved Wales, but also in Trieste, where she had been stationed after the second World War and to which she often returned with Elizabeth.
Clements concludes by quoting Morris herself from Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, a work that was as much a melancholic self-portrait as a lyrical study of Trieste itself:
“I shall happily haunt the two places that have most happily haunted me. Most of the aftertime I shall be wandering with my beloved along the banks of Dwyfor; but now and then you may find me in a boat below the walls of the Miramar, watching the nightingales swarm.”
It is a fitting note on which to end a worthy biography of a truly epic life.
- John McCourt is rector of the University of Macerata and author of Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2022)
