by Derek Johns
ARIEL
A Literary Life of Jan Morris
DEREK JOHNS
Drawings by Jan Morris
CONTENTS
Title Page
Foreword
Oxonian
Arabist
Journalist
American
Traveller
Historian
Romancer
Ariel
Afterword
Books by Jan Morris
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
FOREWORD
Jan Morris is one of the great British writers of the post-war era. Soldier, journalist, writer about places (rather than ‘travel writer’), elegist of the British Empire, novelist, she has fashioned a distinctive prose style that is elegant, fastidious, supple, and sometimes gloriously gaudy. Now in her ninety-first year, she has written more than forty full-length books, has contributed in one way or another to many others, and has written countless essays, articles and reviews. She writes in an unashamedly subjective way, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that she has imposed her personality on the entire world. Born in 1926, James Morris, as Jan was until 1972, was fortunate to reach maturity in a world of general stability and ease of movement. No one before or since has travelled and written in quite the same way. Jan Morris is sui generis.
I first met her in the offices of the publisher Random House in New York in the early 1980s. I was a junior editor there, and was invited to meet someone I considered to be one of the most intriguing writers I had read. This was nothing more than a handshake and an acknowledgement of our shared Britishness in New York. But I was immediately struck by Jan’s warmth and affability, qualities that are key to her genius for talking to people and drawing stories from them. (For while Jan is less of an extrovert in person than in her writings, and indeed in some ways is quite reserved, she nonetheless possesses a remarkable ability, surely learned in the world of journalism, to nose out a story.)
Ten years later I had the privilege of becoming Jan’s literary agent at A. P. Watt, taking over from someone 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 the idea of this book. Ariel is not a conventional biography. It is structured more thematically than chronologically, and my observations about Jan’s life proceed from the work, rather than the other way around. I have quoted extensively from Jan’s books, as a way both to tell the story of her life and to demonstrate the range and depth of her writing. (All the words in quotation marks, unless otherwise indicated, are Jan’s.) Taken together, Jan’s books run to somewhere between three and four million words. I hope that the quoting of a few thousand here will whet readers’ appetite for more.
This book is not ‘authorised’, though I have interviewed Jan on several occasions, and she has made available correspondence, press cuttings and other materials in her possession. Jan has never been a prolific private correspondent, however, and has not kept diaries. The essence of her thoughts and feelings seems to me to reside in the writings themselves. Nor is Ariel in any way a scholarly work, something which in any case I am not qualified to write. It is an appreciation of the life and work of one of the most remarkable people I have known.
Hardly less remarkable than Jan’s abilities as a writer is her ability as an artist, and the pages of this book are adorned by a number of her line drawings.
I should say that given my personal relationship with the subject, and given also her mid-life gender reassignment, I have referred to ‘Jan’ throughout, except when it makes more sense to refer to ‘James’, as when I am describing the actual experiences she had while she was a man.
OXONIAN
She is one of those few cities that are more than cities, that reflect the meaning of a civilization, and thus belong not to a nation, but to the world.
James Morris was born in 1926 in Clevedon, Somerset, the son of a Welsh father and an English mother. He ‘sprang from a long line of odd forbears and unusual unions, Welsh, Norman and Quaker’. His mother was a gifted pianist who had studied at the Leipzig Conservatory and in later life gave recitals in Wales and the West Country. It was while James was sitting under her piano, at the age of three or four, listening to her playing a piece by Sibelius, that he decided he was really a girl.
It is interesting to note how little Jan has written about a childhood that must have been overshadowed by this sense of physical oddness. In her book Pleasures of a Tangled Life she refers to being puzzled by this awareness but not unhappy. And in her memoir Conundrum she only begins to describe her life and feelings in details once she has reached her teens.
James’s two elder brothers both pursued successful careers in music, and while Jan claims to be wholly unmusical, her time as a chorister must have been formative. (Jan is of course in a sense very musical, in the cadences of her sentences; she reads her drafts aloud so as to test their rhythms.) Her father is almost entirely absent from Jan’s writings, and indeed from her memory. He died when she was twelve, having been badly gassed in the First World War, leaving his wife responsible for the family’s upbringing. His principal legacy would appear to have been his Welshness, which later came to be so important an element in Jan’s life.
James attended a local primary school, and he seems to have had a rather dreamy, solitary childhood, his brothers packed off early to boarding schools. Conundrum describes James’s wanderings in the hills above the Bristol Channel, and particularly his spying of ships through a telescope. Jan has ever since adored ships of all kinds.
James’s mother was apparently a somewhat chaotic reader. In Pleasures of a Tangled Life Jan describes her ‘prefer[ring] to read seven or eight books simultaneously, in two or three languages, left … propped above washbasins, recumbent on sofas, or unexpectedly on the piano music stand …’ The two books Jan can remember reading as a child are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is easy to see these two characters as exemplars of the free spirit she became. Alice is a shape-shifter, very proper in her manners but at the same time almost recklessly adventurous. Huck is a nonconformist whose rebellious impulses are moderated by a sense of what is right and an awareness of the feelings of others. These are all qualities Jan herself came to possess.
‘Oxford made me,’ Jan writes in Conundrum. At the age of nine James was sent to the Cathedral Choir School at Christ Church in Oxford, and so began a long association with and love of the city. Founded by Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII, this was and remains a prep school with a distinctly Christian ethos. It is housed in beautiful buildings close to Christ Church, and its choristers sing in the cathedral chapel. Buildings have inspired Jan throughout her life, and this immersion in surroundings of such beauty, so steeped in English tradition, had a profound and lasting effect on her life and work. As a chorister boarder James’s daily routine involved prayer and singing, combined with the sort of lessons any school would have provided. It is tempting to say that being a chorister, dressed in a ‘fluttering’ white gown, was the next best thing to being a girl. ‘A virginal idea was fostered in me by my years at Christ Church,’ she writes in Conundrum, ‘a sense of sacrament and fragility, and this I came slowly to identify as femaleness …’ She goes on to say, ‘In our family … nobody would have dreamt of supposing that a taste for music, colours or textiles was effeminate: but it is true that my own notion of the female principle was one of greatness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping more than leading. Oxford seemed to express this distinction …’
Jan avers that she has never been a Christian. She wishes the great churches of Europe were devoted to something ‘less preposterous’ than
prayer. But her prose style is imbued with Christian rhetoric and ideas, her tastes in architecture, music and literature so influenced by Christianity as to render her a gentle agnostic, rather than the pagan or pantheist she often describes herself as. Jan’s writings about the British Empire, for instance, would have been utterly different without this early introduction to High Anglican Christianity, its aesthetic as much as its beliefs. Indeed all of her writings have been similarly permeated.
From the Cathedral School James moved on to Lancing College. Lancing was, like Christ Church, something of an English institution, if not yet a hundred years old. In 1940, given the threat of German bombing raids, the school was moved from its fine home in Sussex to ‘a congeries’ of buildings in the Teme Valley in Shropshire. Here James completed his schooling, and not very happily. Nothing about Lancing appealed to him: the prefectorial system was cruel, the square-bashing of the Officers’ Training Corps terrifying, and there were few compensating pleasures, either intellectual or architectural, as there had been at Christ Church. He left at the age of sixteen and a half, and spent six months as a cub reporter on the Western Daily Press in Bristol while waiting to be old enough to join the army. As soon as he reached his seventeenth birthday he joined the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers. Having later obtained a commission at Sandhurst, he was posted to Palestine. He came to be fascinated by the Arab world, and on his return to Britain he took an Arabic language course in London. (It was during this brief time in London that he first met his future wife, Elizabeth Tuckniss. James’s and Elizabeth’s enduring and remarkable relationship will be described in later chapters.) Once again he was marking time, not yet able to go to Oxford as an undergraduate. He spent the subsequent period, a little more than a year, in Cairo on the staff of the Arab News Agency.
While James’s stay in Cairo was highly stimulating, and while he was intent on a career in journalism, he knew he must go to university if he were properly to complete his education. In the autumn of 1949 he returned to Christ Church. He was twenty-three, was married, had experienced foreign lands, and had learned the essentials of a trade. He was a mature student, far more worldly than most of his fellows. Thus he began the second stage of his love affair with Oxford.
James studied English Literature, gaining a Second Class Honours degree after two years. His principal tutor was J. I. M. Stewart, who under the pseudonym Michael Innes wrote detective stories in his spare time. James edited the student magazine Cherwell, by his own account not very well. One of his editorial initiatives was to ask famous alumni of Oxford colleges to write about their student days. George Bernard Shaw obliged. Evelyn Waugh did not, telling James that he should spend more time on his studies and less on trying to be a literary entrepreneur. General Archibald Wavell wrote about the pleasures and privileges of spending his boyhood among beautiful buildings, an observation that accorded with James’s own. James also wrote articles for Cherwell, and in 1950 had his first piece published in a national magazine, the Spectator. All of James’s activities as an undergraduate demonstrate the high ambition that would later lead him to great achievements as a journalist and writer. During this time there seems to have been an uncertainty in his mind about whether to pursue a journalistic career, as he had for some time intended, or a literary one. In the event he was able to combine the two, and to great effect. His degree studies had granted him entry into the halls of English literature, and Alice and Huck now had company in James’s imagination.
Jan’s first piece of writing about Oxford after the undergraduate forays was written for the American magazine Horizon. It is an example of a form she came to master, the short to medium-length essay. Jan came to develop a signature technique, one in which she involved the reader while remaining unobtrusively present herself, used the particular to illustrate the general in a telling way, and scattered grace notes here and there like small benefactions. Her Oxford essay begins in this way:
Suddenly you see Oxford, a grey blur in the valley, as you drive over the hill from Newbury and the south. A haze of smoke, age and legend veils her, a locomotive snorts in her railway sidings, and all around her lie the moist green hills of the English Midlands, like open lettuce leaves. Visionary and beckoning stand her spires and domes, as Jude the Obscure glimpsed them long ago, for Oxford possesses always the quality of an idea. She is more than a city, more than a railway station, more than a road junction, more even than a university. She epitomizes a remarkable kingdom, here in the belly of England; she is a kind of shrine, where many a lofty soul has worshipped; she is a paradigm of the human conflict, between the right and the wrong, the spiritual and the material, the ugly and the beautiful; and most of all she is an aspiration, a sad reminder of what the world might be … Her comprehension transcends classes and races, and grasps the whole range of human experience, from the sublime to the rock-bottom. She has been fouled by time and degradation. She has been fortified by centuries of controversy, rivalry and anguish. She stands beyond everyday logic, crooked, deep and contradictory … she is one of those few cities that are more than cities, that reflect the meaning of a civilization, and thus belong not to a nation, but to the world.
Thus speaks the mature, authoritative voice of Jan Morris. If this essay had ended there, it would still have given the reader a sense of Oxford that few writers could equal. It beckons readers in – ‘Suddenly you see …’ – invites them to share the author’s discernment and love, and delights them with the elegance of its turns of phrase. By now Jan had travelled throughout the world, and could view Oxford through a lens she did not in her university days possess. It is a typically Morrisian opening.
Jan’s major book Oxford, which was originally published in 1965, represents, after Venice, her second full-length book about an individual city. By the time of its composition Jan and Elizabeth were living in Oxford with their (then) three children, and Jan’s experience of the city was fully rounded. Oxford contains a depiction that is likewise fully rounded. In chapters describing its history, architecture, literature, art, music, flora and fauna it is sternly loving in its descriptions and astute in its observations. Jan’s reverence for the structures and institutions of Oxford does not necessarily extend to its inhabitants. She has some strong words on university life in general:
Oxford is archaic in many ways, but only intermittently moribund. ‘Beautiful city!’ Matthew Arnold could sigh a century ago, ‘so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!’ It is no such Arcady now, and its University no longer whispers those last enchantments. It is a turmoil, always dissatisfied, always in disagreement. There is a brash element to its affairs, exemplified by opinionated dons in public controversies, and radical students picketing unwelcome visitors, and there is sometimes a touch of petulance. During its periodic moments of reform there is also a pervading air of uncertainty … The progress of the University is no disciplined march of intellectual legionaries, but more the groping, quarrelsome, skirmishing and sometimes comical advance of a posse of irregulars, blowing trumpets and jostling their way across a soggy sort of battlefield.
The pleasures of Oxford prevail, however. Whenever Jan’s writing assumes a judicious tone, the reader may be certain that the mood will soon be lightened:
Happiest of all is the surprise that awaits you in the Fellows’ Garden at Exeter College (closed to the public, so a notice says, at four o’clock each day). This is best seen in winter, and preferably – for Oxford prohibitions are meant to be ignored – somewhere around five, when the dusk is closing in and the lights coming on … Below you lies Radcliffe Square, the focus of the University, like the stage of a theatre. It is dramatically alive. The street lights glint on the shiny cobblestones and the handle-bars of the bicycles in their racks. Everywhere there is movement: undergraduates hastening towards the Bodleian, porters looking out of Brasenose gate, the vicar of St Mary’s, cassocked and belted, talking to a parishioner in his porch. The great dome of the Radcliffe Ca
mera almost fills the stage; the balcony of St Mary’s looks down like a royal box; and even as you watch from your position in the wings, the lights go up in the Bodleian and the Codrington Library across the way, and gilded crests spring into brilliance on the ceiling of Duke Humfrey’s, and the whole scene is diffused in a glow of theatrically sumptuous learning.
The great pleasure Jan’s writing gives its readers stems from the pleasure she has derived from the experiences that inform the writing, which in turn derives from an openness to those experiences in the first place. Jan’s pleasures often seem to have been somehow stolen, and are all the more precious for that. This extract demonstrates Jan’s emotional and aesthetic responses to places, and her ability to evoke them vividly for the reader. (It also demonstrates her taste for transgression, a taste that has served Jan well throughout all of the travelling and writing.)
Nostalgia imbues Jan’s writings about Oxford, as it does all of her writings. This is not nostalgia for the Oxford known to the chorister or the undergraduate, but rather nostalgia for a world that the buildings themselves speak of, nostalgia for the mysteries of the mediaeval period, the glories of the Renaissance, the certitudes of the Victorian era. This sense haunts all of the writings, to the extent that the reader sometimes supposes that Jan must prefer the past to the present. And it opens her to the charge of elitism, a charge that has often been made by critics and readers. Jan’s concluding thoughts in the pages of Oxford are these:
And what you cannot see, you now remember – all the accumulated experience of this famous city, all the wisdom, nonsense and complexity, the sound of old pianos in college quadrangles and the smell of the paint in the Morris paint-shop. It is as though a separate little world exists over there, with its own private time-scale, and in a way this is true: for the Oxford we have been inspecting represents a civilization that is almost gone. Try though you may to see this city as a whole, still the factories and the housing estates feel like intruders upon some ancient preserve. All that is now remarkable about Oxford, setting her apart from other towns, or often from other universities, comes from the lost order of the English – essentially a patrician society, stable, tolerant, amateur, confident enough to embrace an infinite variety within a rigid framework. The English gentleman dominates Oxford, not in the flesh, for he has almost vanished from the scene, but in the lingering spirit of the place.
