Ariel

by Derek Johns

  It is interesting to consider that the move from male to female and the move from Englishness to Welshness were roughly concurrent. In the 1960s James began hormone treatments, taking a quite terrifying number of pills. This continued until the gender reassignment operation in 1972. In 1965 James and Elizabeth sold their house near Oxford and bought a large plas in North Wales, where they have remained ever since (moving into the stable block once the big house became unmanageable). Within a period of roughly ten years James’s life changed profoundly. This chapter will consider these changes, beginning with that of nationality.

  In 1957 James wrote to Charles Monteith at Faber proposing a book on the English. It would ‘be about the English, none of your Welsh charlatans or Scottish hangers-on’. (This was never written, mutating later into Oxford.) However facetious this remark may have been intended to be, it contrasts starkly with the sentiments James was to express only a few years later. Jan did not in fact write very much about Wales until the 1980s, but there then came a stream of books: My Favourite Stories of Wales; The Small Oxford Book of Wales; Wales the First Place (containing a text by Jan accompanying photographs by Paul Wakefield); The Matter of Wales; A Machynlleth Triad (with a translation of the text into Welsh by Jan’s son Twm); A Writer’s House in Wales; and a jeu d’esprit, a novella entitled Our First Leader. There were also politically charged writings including a pamphlet on the princeship of Wales. In 1993 Jan was elected to the Gorsedd (Thrones) of Bards, assuming the bardic persona of Jan Trefan, and in 2016 was awarded the Medal of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion for distinguished service to Wales. These publications and activities represent a fulfilment of herself in Welshness that is deeply serious, even mystical.

  Jan’s major book on Wales was first published in 1984 under the title The Matter of Wales and revised in the 1990s under the title Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country. It is one of her most substantial books, almost five hundred pages long in its revised edition. It explores every aspect of Wales and Welshness, and is highly personal in its tone. This is a hymn to Wales, written by an acolyte. It opens in a lyrical way:

  Brooded over by mist, more often than swirled about by cloud, drizzled rather than storm-swept, on the western perimeter of Europe lies the damp, demanding and obsessively interesting country called by its own people Cymru, signifying it is thought a comradeship, and known to the rest of the world, if it is known at all, as Wales. It is a small country, in many ways the archetype of a small country, but its smallness is not petty: on the contrary, it is profound, and if its frontiers were ever extended, or its nature somehow eased, its personality would lose stature, not gain it.

  This proud but somewhat defensive tone continues throughout. In Europe Jan writes about minority nations generally, ‘peoples clamped within the frontiers of greater States’ that have been ‘mucked about by history’, and how their resentments ‘stir and grumble’: ‘I know the sensations well, because the very archetype of the half-suppressed nation is my own paternal people, the Welsh, and in some ways nobody is more characteristic of their anxieties, resentments and neuroses than I am myself.’

  In the years during which Jan was moving towards Welshness she was researching the Pax Britannica trilogy. She was immersed in British imperial history, and learning far more than she had hitherto known about the coercive actions of the British (for which we may read the English) throughout the world. Whether this was a factor in her embracing of Welshness is hard to say, but there are certainly hints, in Jan’s stout defence of all things Welsh, of a preference for the underdog. The balancing act she was to maintain throughout the writing of the trilogy must on one side have been weighted down by the matter of Wales.

  Owain Glyndwr is the great hero of these pages, the prince who briefly in the early fifteenth century became a king:

  At its head, indisputably, stood its hero. His image seems to have been consciously arcane. If he had started life as a cultured country gentleman of distinguished stock, he had become in his middle years one of those self-recognized men of destiny who appear now and then in the history of all nations … Owain was less a dynastic revivalist than a political revolutionary. He claimed a throne that had never really existed, the throne of a Welsh State.

  The numinous is never far away in Wales, and the cathedral at St David’s is the prime locus of this, the great shrine:

  … the most compelling element of the building is something much more ethereal, a tremulous combination of light, hush and colour. The light is the sea-light that comes through the windows, pale, watery and unclear; the colour is a purplish, drifting kind of colour, almost tangible, emanating perhaps from the stone of the walls; and the hush is the unmistakable pause of holiness, which catches the breath for a moment, and awes one suddenly with the power of conviction.

  Thus writes the heathen Jan who has for a moment been transported back to the atmosphere of the choir stalls at Christ Church in Oxford. If there is anywhere in the world which is by now likely to inspire such sentiments in Jan, it is her precious Wales.

  A more recent personification of Wales than Owain Glyndwr is Dylan Thomas:

  In his life and in his art, he represented the quandaries of Anglo-Welshism, a traumatic split of the emotions which can leave a sensitive man divided not only in his loyalties, but in his personality. The figure of Dylan Thomas, the world’s idea of the Welshman, growing more volubly Welsh with every whisky, wandering the West End bars or the cocktail parties of Manhattan, is a figure to tug the Welsh heart, so poignantly does it suggest old betrayals and injustices.

  The language of doubleness returns, the language that so much of Conundrum is written in. Jan is Owain Glyndwr in her imagination, and Dylan Thomas in fact.

  The revised edition of Wales was published after the British Parliament voted in 1997 to devolve significant powers to a Welsh national assembly. This was of course something Jan welcomed warmly. She had been active on its behalf, and it is interesting to note how Wales encouraged political activism in her in a way that England never did. In a pamphlet entitled The Princeship of Wales, published in 1995, she wrote that for a member of the British royal family to be styled ‘Prince of Wales’ was an absurdity. The current prince had no house in Wales, seldom visited, and was unable to speak Welsh except when carefully groomed on formal occasions. Jan had no personal grudge against Charles – it was the institution she objected to. (In 1981 she had written a letter to The Times expressing ‘one citizen’s sense of revulsion and foreboding at the ostentation, the extravagance and the sycophancy surrounding today’s wedding of the heir to the British throne’.) The Princeship of Wales contains a thorough history of the office, from the thirteenth-century conquest of Wales by the English onwards, and an equally thorough justification for its annulment. It is perhaps the most overtly polemical piece of writing Jan ever engaged in:

  The institution of an English Prince of Wales, son to the English monarch, is (to be frank at last) a dead loss. It is meaningless, silly and insulting. The sooner Prince Charles himself accepts the fact – and he must surely be aware of it already – the better for everyone. Most of us would perhaps be sorry, though, to see the end of the ancient title, inherited from Gwynedd and Dyfed, Deheubarth and Dynefor. Adopt it for the Welsh Republic that is sure to come one day, make our head of state uniquely a Prince-President, and the pubs can keep their inn-signs without a blush, the world will recognize a sign of grace and individuality, and even the most passionately anti-monarchist among us will be able to sing (bilingually, of course) a triumphant ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales!’

  Two books which express Jan’s Welsh republicanism are A Machynlleth Triad and Our First Leader. One is serious, the other an entertainment. In Machynlleth Jan describes the town of this name, which is almost exactly in the middle of the country. In three chapters, on the past, the present and the future, she uses Machynlleth as a focal point for observations about Wales in general. In the past it was Glendwr’s stronghold, in the present it is
a medium-sized market town, and in the future (in Jan’s Utopian future at any rate) it is the capital of an independent Wales. In Our First Leader it is also the capital, but of a country occupied by the Germans after they have won the Second World War in Europe. Our First Leader is a fine satire, and it does perhaps have a point – Jan’s Nazis may have an ulterior motive, but at least they are willing to consider Wales on its own terms, not simply as Western England.

  Jan’s final book on Wales was her most personal, A Writer’s House in Wales. She was invited to write it by the National Geographic Society as part of a series called ‘Directions’. In its pages she uses the familiar technique of focusing on a place – in this case her own house – as both a subject and a starting point for digressions taking in landscape, history and culture. ‘Trefan’ is the plas, the big house Jan and Elizabeth bought in 1965, and ‘Trefan Morys’ is the stable-block where they now live. It is:

  … a summation, a metaphor, a paradigm, a microcosm, an exemplar, a multum in parvo, a demonstration, a solidification, an essence, a regular epitome of all that I love about my country. Whatever becomes of Wales, however its character is whittled away down the generations, I hope my small house will always stand in tribute to what has been best in it.

  Home is where the heart is for everyone, but it takes someone like Jan to express quite this depth of emotion about the place where she lives.

  And a beautiful place it is. Full of books (eight thousand, on two floors), paintings and drawings, model ships and memorabilia of a long life of travel and adventure, it is a treasure trove in the wilds of North Wales:

  Only I can really assess the true beauty of these rooms. Like red wines, they need warming. They need the caress of long affection to bring out their bouquet, and a cat to sit curled up on the sofa there [Jan has had many cats], woodsmoke and crackle from the stove and the self-indulgent, sensual satisfaction of knowing that here down the years, watched by that Chinese wicker goat on the table by the stairs, I have given my best to the writing of books.

  Wherever Jan has travelled in the world, and however solitary she may sometimes have been, she was always able to summon thoughts of this house and of Elizabeth in it. Given the existence of this safe haven, could she, perhaps when into her sixties, have said to herself, ‘That’s enough’? It seems very unlikely. Something was always urging her on.

  The other great change in Jan’s life is the one we are familiar with, and it is described in the book that is the closest thing to an autobiography she wrote, Conundrum. Written very soon after the operation that turned Jan from a man into a woman, it is a wise, witty and profoundly moving account of an experience which is surely ultimately incommunicable to those who have not themselves gone through it. Conundrum begins with the simple but extraordinary statement that Jan ‘was three or four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl’. As his conviction of this grew, he was ‘not unhappy’ but ‘habitually puzzled’. He went to Christ Church and Lancing, having ‘fumbling’ homosexual experiences along the way, but his wish to be female was not about sex, rather about spirit. In the army, as James and his best friend Otto rode in the back of a truck on a starlit night in the Suez Canal Zone, Otto turned to him and stammered, ‘G-G-God … I w-wish you were a woman.’ This wish, James’s own fervent wish, became increasingly hard to bear, and despite meeting Elizabeth (and telling her of his feelings from the start), eventually he had to do something about it. A doctor in New York prescribed hormone treatments, which James tried and then abandoned. But the conundrum was unavoidable, and eventually (but not before James and Elizabeth had produced four children), he took up the treatments again:

  My work was well known on both sides of the Atlantic, and the opportunities I was offered were almost unbounded … But I wanted none of it. It was repugnant to me. I thought of public success itself, I suppose, as part of maleness, and I deliberately turned my back on it, as I set my face against manhood … I was cultivating impotence.

  Finally James’s conviction embraced the idea of a surgical change of gender:

  To myself I had been woman all along, and I was not going to change the truth of me, only discard the falsity. But I was about to change my form and apparency – my status too, perhaps my place among my peers, my attitudes no doubt, the reactions I would evoke, my reputation, my manner of life, my prospects, my emotions, possibly my abilities. I was about to adapt my body from a male conformation to a female, and I would shift my public role altogether, from the role of a man to the role of a woman. It is one of the most drastic of all human changes, unknown until our own times, and even now experienced by very few: but it seemed only natural to me, and I embarked upon it only with a sense of thankfulness, like a lost traveller finding the right road at last.

  In a time when transgendering is openly discussed and accepted, it is perhaps difficult for us to appreciate just how momentous a decision this was for James at the beginning of the 1970s. Operations of this kind had been conducted on many people, but not on anyone whose public profile stood as high as James’s. The sheer bravery of this act is easy to underestimate. And the years leading up to the operation were rife with complications and embarrassments. James took a house in the Jericho district of Oxford, and for a while he lived there as a woman, driving to Wales at weekends to become once again the family man. And it is the family that many readers think of in Conundrum, as much as James:

  How to tell the children what was happening was the hardest of all our problems. That something was happening was very apparent, for though I never appeared before them in women’s clothes, more often than not I was treated as a woman in their company … the more feminine I became, the closer to my own reality, the closer I felt to them too. There was not a moment of instant trauma in our relationship, no moment when, standing before them as a man one day, I reappeared suddenly as a woman. The process was infinitely slow and subtle, and through it all anyway, as I hope they sensed, I remained the same affectionate self.

  Many critics of Conundrum have commented on what they see as emotional evasiveness in its pages, not evasiveness about Jan’s own feelings but about the feelings of Elizabeth and the children. For some readers Jan’s insistence that love conquers all won’t do. In reply to a particularly unpleasant review of the book by Germaine Greer, Elizabeth was uncharacteristically moved to write, ‘I am not very silent, and certainly not anguished. The children and I not only love Jan dearly but are also very proud of her.’

  Jan describes the experience of the operation, at least the before-and-after experience, in some detail. British law forbade her to have it without divorcing Elizabeth, and while she knew this must eventually come about, she didn’t wish it to condition her choice. She decided to go to a surgeon in Casablanca, ‘Dr B.’, in fact Georges Burou. Dr Burou had established a fine reputation for conducting gender reassignment operations, and while the idea of going to Casablanca is redolent of the exotic, possibly to be construed as yet another of Jan’s flights from the moment, in fact her decision was eminently practical. Dr Burou did his alchemical work, and James emerged as Jan:

  I knew for certain that I had done the right thing. It was inevitable and it was deeply satisfying – like a sentence which, defying its own subordinate clauses, reaches a classical conclusion in the end. It gave me a marvellous sense of calm, as though some enormous but ill-defined physical burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and when I woke each morning I felt resplendent in my liberation. I shone! I was Ariel!

  The processes of adjustment began, adjustments in Jan’s behaviour but also in the way other people, friends as well as strangers, saw her:

  The more I was treated as a woman, the more a woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming … Men treated me more and more as a junior … and so, addressed every day of my life as an inferior, involuntarily, month by month, I accepted the
condition. I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative and certainly less self-centred than they are themselves: so I generally obliged them.

  Many women readers of Conundrum objected strongly to this characterisation. It was as though, having been a chivalrous man, Jan now wanted to be a damsel in distress. Some critics stated flatly that while she might have undergone a physical transformation, she had no idea what it was actually like to be a woman. For her own part, Jan claimed to have become more emotional. ‘I cried very easily, and was ludicrously susceptible to sadness or flattery. Finding myself rather less interested in great affairs … I acquired a new concern for small ones. My scale of vision seemed to contract, and I looked less for the grand sweep than the telling detail.’ In fact, a reading of her subsequent work suggests that this was simply not the case. The evidence in the writings is that Jan was no less interested in the world of affairs as a woman than she had been as a man. And this would seem to be a view that Jan herself has many years later now arrived at.

  In the end, Jan concludes that her experience has been a mystical one: ‘if I consider my story in detachment I sometimes seem, even to myself, a figure of fable or allegory … I see myself not as a man or woman, self or other, fragment or whole, but only as that wondering child with a cat beneath the Blüthner [piano] …’ When she considers it now, ‘sometimes I think I understand it, but then a cloud passes the sun and I am in mystery once again’.