Jan Morris: Review of life from both sides – flights of fancy | Biography books

Jhere are two things that annoyed Jan Morris. One was called a “travel writer”. True, she had written a bookshelf full of books on an atlas of places – Oman, Trieste, Sydney and, most famously, Mount Everest – but that was not the point. She went to these places to learn about the people, architecture, history, and art (not nature, though – she always preferred trains to trees). The “travel writing,” on the other hand, was reminiscent of Baedeker-style tourist manuals, which was not the effect she was looking for. The second thing that invariably irritated her was being called a person in transition (no one was quite sure of the right term in 1972 when, at age 46, she was having surgery in Casablanca – and “cross-dressing” as well than “transsexual” were often used). But that, she staunchly maintained until her death in 2020 at the age of 94, was not the most interesting or important thing about her.

In fact, she had an extremely productive career in which she wrote about everything that caught her eye or pleased her, from the World Bank to Abraham Lincoln, and turned it into something intimate and lively. It is precisely his eclecticism that has won him thousands of fans around the world. She became the beau ideal of the belle-lettrist, a scavenger of inconsiderate trifles that she turned into lyrical art in newspapers and magazines ranging from Encounter to Rolling Stone. For those who were beginning to tire of her prolixity – she produced so many books in her life that even her agent was not always sure of the latest count – she became a boring spout who substituted impressions for hard facts and never could refrain from doing everything. on herself.

In this meticulously researched biography, Paul Clements is careful to chart a judicious path between these two visions of Morris. While he quotes extensively from the reviews that have come his way, especially once he became a brand in the 80s, he is careful to remind us of his extraordinary achievements. There’s Boy’s Own’s thrilling tale of how Morris, a Times reporter on the British team that conquered Everest in 1953, managed, by sending a coded telegram, to be the first to send the message to London in time for the Queen’s coronation. .

The whole episode of bravery worked as an elegy for an empire that was already enjoying its last hurray. Morris’s great genius, however, was to realize that even if sensible Britons accepted that their country was now an insignificant island in northern Europe, their hearts still lingered on the glory days. Morris’s three-volume Pax Britannica, published between 1968 and 1978 and widely regarded as his masterpiece, was an attempt to inhabit the empire from within, to feel its pitfalls and anecdotes, whether through the eyes of a beleaguered petty official of the East India Company or General Gordon wavering at the siege of Khartoum.

What is not in the Pax Britannica, of course, are the experiences of the thousands of displaced, enslaved and oppressed people who were driven out for the empire to have its momentary hold. And you wouldn’t necessarily read it to find out what people were thinking in 1897, the year Morris identifies as the height of British influence in the world. But as a record of what empire meant to generations that followed, it remains a remarkable primary source.

The fact that Morris has lived so long and written so much means she can be extremely hard to pin down, which is no doubt exactly what she wanted. She was born in Somerset to an English mother in 1926, but became passionately attached to Wales, her father’s land. Even then, her position constantly shifted as she moved from Anglo-Welsh patriotism in the 1970s to full-fledged Welsh separatism in the 1980s, and eventually to what she called a “Welsh Euro-utopian” position. . She was, as her detractors never tire of pointing out, a fierce Republican who accepted a CBE in honor of the Queen’s birthday in 1999.

She was adamant that she did not want a biography written, at least not in her lifetime. In her polite rebuffs, she explained that she had written so much about herself that another book would be redundant. She was right. As recently as 2020, in Thinking Again, she gives a wonderfully numinous account of her Christmas experiences as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford, in the late 1930s. Clements’ treatment of this material barely two years later seems drained of all vitality. This, however, may be the price we have to pay for its scrupulous, if sometimes pedestrian, approach. Morris was such a temperamental writer that his biographer is forced to tie his book to solid ground, partly to avoid suggesting that he fell under her spell too hard.