by Derek Johns
In an epilogue to a revised edition published in the 1980s Jan wrote,
A decade has now passed since Conundrum was first published, and I am glad to report that Elizabeth, my children and I are all living happily ever after. The first appearance of the book created some stir, of course, as the tale reached a wider audience, and spread across the world under one title or another … Letters by the thousand poured in, TV invitations abounded, people I hardly knew asked me out to dinner … Half a lifetime of diligent craftsmanship had done far less for my reputation than a simple change of sex!
Diligent craftsmanship there is in abundance in the pages of Conundrum. The only question about it, the question that nags the reader throughout, is what effect this transformation might have had on the family. Jan’s editors at Faber felt that the first draft understated the anguish her conundrum must have caused her, and the confusion that must have been felt by Elizabeth and the children. In response she revised the book.
Perhaps the best evidence for the honesty of Conundrum is the fact that Jan and Elizabeth have stayed together. There were periods when, with two households, they spent much time apart, and Elizabeth did not share Jan’s travels in the way she had when they were younger. But in 2008 they were formally reunited in a civil partnership ceremony. As to the children, while the two eldest, Mark and Henry, live abroad, Twm and their daughter Suki both live in Wales (Twm next door to Trefan), and there are fond references to grandchildren in many of the dedications in the later books. While the lives of the children are private matters, there is no evidence of anything other than a close-knit and mutually supportive family. Jan is very proud of her four children, and proud too of the loyalty they have shown her throughout. And if Jan emerges as one heroine from the pages of Conundrum, Elizabeth is another. Her steadfast love has been the emotional bedrock on which the family has rested.
Jan by now takes little interest either in debates about the truth of Conundrum or in the subject of transgendering (though she was gratified to learn that the director of the film The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper, credited her book as a significant inspiration and resource). As far as she is concerned it was all a long time ago, and in her book she wrote everything she wished to say about it. In fact, a reading of all of Jan’s subsequent work, along with conversations with her, suggests that some at least of the changes she wrote about in Conundrum were only temporary. She wrote it very soon after the operation, and was essentially describing a transitional state of body and mind. Perhaps the Jan of today is not so unlike what the James of today might have been.
Jan has joked that her obituaries will be headlined ‘Sex-change author dies’. And indeed there are many people who are aware of her only in the context of Conundrum and are surprised to learn that she has written around fifty other books. But it is not the change of gender that is the true subject of Conundrum, rather the lifelong quest of a free spirit for unity and wholeness.
AFTERWORD
The objective facts of Jan’s life are remarkable. She has been almost everywhere, has had many genuine adventures, has been called ‘the greatest descriptive writer of her time’ (by Rebecca West), and when in 2008 The Times listed the top fifty post-war British writers, she was placed fifteenth. But more important than the life she has lived is the way she has lived it. Besides her qualities as a writer, Jan is generous, witty, irreverent and affectionate. Her religion is kindness, the one religion she feels everyone should observe. She is great fun. When in 2004 her publisher Faber & Faber celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary with an event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, featuring authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Seamus Heaney and Alan Bennett, she stole the show with her wit and self-deprecating egoism.
Now that she is embarking on her tenth decade, Jan inevitably feels some of the frailties of age. She is growing old very reluctantly. She has come to believe in the certainty of there being intelligent extraterrestrial life, and I am tempted to think of this as her final frontier. When she and Elizabeth die they will be buried together on an island in a stream near their house, beneath a stone bearing an inscription in both English and Welsh that says, ‘Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.’ During the course of that life Jan has gone wherever she pleased, in whatever guise, and has reported back what the world is like for those of us who have not like her taken the trouble to explore it fully and with an open mind.
The legacy Jan will leave will be substantial indeed. No one before had written about places quite as she has. She crossed literary borders and opened up territories in a way that came to inspire many writers who were to follow. The festschrift published on her eightieth birthday in 2006, Around the World in Eighty Years, edited by Paul Clements, included pieces by Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron, Simon Winchester and Pico Iyer attesting to her influence. Her books on Oxford and Venice in particular continue to be widely read, and the Pax Britannica trilogy remains among the best accounts of the history of the British Empire. Conundrum is a beacon whose light still reaches far and wide. The corpus of essays will never be rivalled. In the Foreword I wrote of her as being sui generis. I don’t believe there will ever be another writer like her.
BOOKS BY JAN MORRIS
Not all of these books are described in the pages of this one. I have chosen to refer to those I feel best exemplify Jan’s writing or that recount important events in her life. Some of them are currently out of print and available only second-hand. Faber & Faber has however kept the essential books in print.
Coast to Coast (1956)
Sultan in Oman (1957)
The Market of Seleukia (1957)
Coronation Everest (1958)
South African Winter (1958)
The Hashemite Kings (1959)
Venice (1960)
The Upstairs Donkey (stories for children) (1961)
Cities (1963)
The World Bank (1963)
The Outriders (1963)
The Presence of Spain (1964)
Oxford (1965)
Pax Britannica (1968)
The Great Port (1972)
Places (1972)
Heaven’s Command (1973)
Conundrum (1974)
Travels (1976)
The Oxford Book of Oxford (ed.) (1978)
Farewell the Trumpets (1978)
Destinations (1980)
The Venetian Empire (1980)
The Small Oxford Book of Wales (ed.) (1982)
A Venetian Bestiary (1982)
The Spectacle of Empire (1982)
Wales, The First Place (with Paul Wakefield) (1982)
Stones of Empire (with Simon Winchester) (1983)
My Favourite Stories of Wales (ed.) (1983)
The Matter of Wales (1984)
Journeys (1984)
Among the Cities (1985)
Last Letters from Hav (1985)
Scotland, The Place of Visions (with Paul Wakefield) (1986)
Manhattan ’45 (1987)
Hong Kong (1988)
Pleasures of a Tangled Life (1989)
Ireland, Your Only Place (with Paul Wakefield) (1990)
Sydney (1992)
O Canada! (1992)
Locations (1992)
Travels with Virginia Woolf (ed.) (1993)
A Machynlleth Triad (with Twm Morys) (1994)
Fisher’s Face (1995)
Fifty Years of Europe (1997)
Lincoln (1999)
Our First Leader (2000)
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001)
A Writer’s House in Wales (2002)
A Writer’s World (2003)
Hav (revised edition) (2006)
Contact! (2010)
Ciao, Carpaccio! (2014)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks are due primarily to Jan Morris herself. For many years Jan made it clear to me that she had no interest in authorising or collaborating on any sort of biographical project. Her view was that after she was gone people could say whatever they liked about her, but not u
ntil then. That she has given her blessing to this book, and her full co-operation, is something I am very grateful for. She read the text before publication and, a few corrections aside, pronounced herself happy with it. I have not refrained from criticism where I felt it was merited, and she has cheerfully accepted this. My gratitude also extends to both Jan and Elizabeth for their hospitality on my visits to their home.
In addition my thanks are due to my literary agent Caradoc King, my editor Julian Loose, Jan’s current agent Caroline Dawnay and her associate Sophie Scard, and Faber & Faber’s archivist Robert Brown, all of whom gave me sound advice and assistance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Derek Johns has been a bookseller, editor, publisher and literary agent. He is a former trustee of English PEN and a member of the Advisory Committee of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. His novel The Billy Palmer Chronicles was published in 2010. He lives in London.
COPYRIGHT
First published in 2016
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2016
All rights reserved
© Derek Johns, 2016
All quotations from the works of Jan Morris are copyright of and reproduced courtesy of Jan Morris, and by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
Design by Faber
Jacket drawings by Jan Morris
The right of Derek Johns to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–33165–9
