Around the World in Eighty Years: Celebrating Travel Writer Jan Morris
For a long time, Jan Morris was known as the one who’d had the sex change, though as both James and Jan she was an historian and scholar who wrote some fifty books and traveled the world over. She has joked that when her roll is called up yonder, the papers will announce “Sex Change Author Dies.”
It was more than 35 years ago that Jan braved a transformation that is still little understood today. Modern medicine is discovering that gender is not quite as easy to define -or to occupy- as we have previously assumed. And films like TransAmerica and books like Pulitzer winning Middlesex mean society is beginning to come to terms with the fact that transgendered people are not “hopelessly confused,” but may well occupy the “wrong body” or belong to both genders, just as they have been telling us all along.
Jan Morris had sexual reassignment surgery in Morocco in 1972, one of the first to openly go from male to female. Now in her eighties, she has lived a remarkable life, refusing to compromise her identity, her work, or her amazing and unusual relationship with her one true love.
Recently, Jan’s peers celebrated her life and work with a book edited by Paul Clements, Around the World in Eighty Years: A Tribute. Her book Conundrum, about her journey of gender identity, remains one of the earliest and most intelligent and beautiful stories on the topic. But 35 years after it was written, she is known for so much more than changing sexes. The book contains essays and tributes by some of the brightest stars in nonfiction- Alan Whicker, Simon Winchester, Paul Theroux. The latter says the compilation is “an assortment of besotted valentines” and “a demonstration of the life of energy and passion Jan has led and how strongly she has influenced us through her example.”
Born in 1926, Jan’s childhood was relatively happy, though she recalls being as young as three and knowing she wasn’t really a boy. Her prayers ended, “Please let me be a girl.” As a young man, like most others, Jan as James joined the army. James trained for the military, and became a teenage intelligence officer with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers “Stranger and imposter though I was,” she writes in Conundrum, “I was kindly treated in the Army, and far from making a man out of me, it only made me feel more profoundly feminine at heart.”
Sixty years ago, Jan married her soul mate in what would become one of the most unusual and enduring relationships of all time. Its longevity is a testament to the fact that love does not always predictable borders. Elizabeth Tuckniss and James Morris walked down the aisle in 1949, while James was at Christ College, Oxford. Though Elizabeth knew that James believed he was a woman, it didn’t bother her. They had five children together, one who died in infancy. When James went to Casablanca to become a woman, the pair had to divorce because same sex couples were illegal. Last year, Jan revealed that the pair had never been apart. Their divorce was just a piece of paper. They were joined again in a civil union, this time as two elderly ladies, a testament to a lifetime of love. The pair has requested that, upon their demise, they wish to be buried together with a Welsh and English tombstone that reads, “Here are two friends at the end of one life.”
Few can expect to find the companion who truly understands them and accepts them no matter what, and fewer still can expect a happy six-decade union. Elizabeth certainly knew that her partner was unique, but she couldn’t have known that Jan would go onto become, according to The Times, the 15th greatest writer in Britain.
James worked for various papers, first, before beginning her world travels, and in 1953, the day before Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, James broke the story of the first climb up Mount Everest. James himself climbed 22 thousand feet up the mountain and waited there for the adventurers to retreat from the summit, then took the news back to England. This “scoop” gave him the notoriety to launch into a life long career of travel writing, a style that is famous for its beautiful prose, lively wit, reverent research of history, and irreverent adventures. Perhaps more than anything it was the experiential willingness. Ms. Morris is truly an explorer, and adventurer, in her own right.
For example, a 1957 book chronicled a journey across southeast Arabia as a guest of the Sultan of Oman! Fearlessly traveling Arabia and Africa, James went on to write books about The Hashemite Kings. James was only thirtysomething when he’d already been to and written major essays or books about fifty-plus cities. After publishing Venice and Oxford, he was lauded as one of Britain’s most important writers. Having experienced the world’s peoples and places so intimately firsthand who could better know the whole spectrum of psychology and culture? This vividly translated, along with the adventurous Morris spirit, into lively accounts that belong on every bookshelf. The author knew each city, each country, as if that destination were a person, a unique character with a living and breathing identity.
As James/Jan traveled the world, he was seeking to understand his identity. Learning about the past, and about other people, brought to light a whole history and mythology of sexuality or gender identity that never d fit into the prevailing norms. James discovered that many ancient cultures allowed men to live as women, and many remote or tribal cultures saw gender dysphoria as a blessing, not a curse. “If to modern Westerners the idea of changing sex has seemed…monstrous, absurd, or ungodly, among simpler peoples it has more often been regarded as a process of divine omniscience, a mark of specialness,” Jan wrote later in Conundrum. She observed that in myth, history, poetry and religion, androgyny, homosexuality and other variations sexual identity were plentiful. “There is no norm of sexual constitution, and almost nobody has ever conformed absolutely to the conventional criteria of male and female,” she wrote.
James began taking female hormones and experimenting with other ways of expressing femininity in the early ‘60s. In 197, the deal was sealed, so to speak, and James became Jan in body at last.
In the mid 1960s, Jan had begun as James the masterpiece of her career, a trilogy called Pax Britannica. “This magnum opus is not simply a chronology of empire, it is also an attempt to understand the grip that empire has had on the British psyche. In this, as in his major works of travel writing, Morris shows particular skill in evoking, and bringing life to, the history of places, and in sketching national and regional character,” wrote Paul Smethurst in Jennifer Speake’s Literature of Travel and Exploration. By the third volume of this labour, Conundrum had come out and caused shock waves all over the literate and scholarly world.
Criticisms of James/Jan’s work, while rare, tended to be about the liberal use of adjectives and lengthy details of description, where one phrase tumbles over another, separated only by comma after comma. Jan freely admits to too many “flowery passages” or “purple prose.” She confesses that both the secret charm and the flaw in her work has always been her own sentimental presence. Even her more historically based works occasionally burst into passionate experiential narrative.
Interestingly, some critics perceive the flaws in Jan’s work as appearing upon becoming Jan, as if becoming a female writer automatically reduces one’s ability to be a good writer. That Jan was female all along is lost on these clods.
“His flights of fancy can be tiresome and even faintly ridiculous,” one Times critic wrote. David Holden wrote in the NY Times, in 1974, “The now-famous style did not deteriorate, but it did begin to cloy. The adjectives were too many, some felt, the attitudes too romantic. Psychologists might, perhaps, have made something of the impression that words like “fabulous,” “fantasy,” “alchemy” and “wizardry” cropped up with suspicious frequency, but fastidious ordinary readers simply complained after a few chapters of a gagging sensation…”
It’s been 37 years since Jan’s surgical transformation, 60 years with one beloved partner, fifty-something books and hundred of essays, and research of and travel to Spain, Fiji, Venice, Egypt, Palestine, India, Malta, Ireland, Hong Kong, Sydney, Canada, South Africa, Manhattan, and more. In 2001, Jan’s last book was about one of her favourite cities, Trieste in Italy. This city is possessed with a “sweet melancholy.”
But what now? Jan answered the question a long time ago, in 1979’s Destinations. “If ever you hear them saying, ‘What’s become of Morris?’ tell them to come to Trieste and look for me, loitering with my adjectives along the waterfront.”
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Lorette C. Luzajic is a Toronto writer and artist, the girl behind thegirlcanwrite.net. A journalism grad, she has published hundreds of poems, and her reviews, profiles, columns, and features have appeared everywhere from Adbusters to Dog Fancy. Her favourite thing in the world is getting to know interesting people, so she started a project called Fascinating People: gossip for smart people at www.fascinatingpeople.wordpress.com. She writes Fascinating Writers for Bookslut.com. She is also The Spice Girl at Gremolata.com, a foodie’s paradise. Lorette’s first book was The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Her second, Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life, is also available, and her third, Dendrite Pandemonium will be released later this year. Lorette lives in her library with her cats.
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I haven’t read other books but ‘Sultan in Oman’ is a wonderful short travel book, unjudgmental , insightful and readable . Paired with Arabian Sands (you might want to review that and its author) – two unique books on the same destination.