There were two things that annoyed Jan Morris. One was being called a “travel writer”. True, she had written a shelf full of books about an atlas of places – Oman, Trieste, Sydney and, most famously, Mount Everest – but that was not the point. She went to these places to find out more about the people, architecture, history and art (not nature, though – she always preferred trains to trees). “Travel writing”, by contrast, conjured up Baedeker-type tourist manuals, which was not the effect she was after. The second thing that irked her was invariably being referred to as someone who had transitioned (no one was quite sure of the right term in 1972 when, at the age of 46, she underwent surgery in Casablanca – and “transvestite” as well as “transsexual” were often used). But that, she maintained crisply until her death in 2020 at the age of 94, was hardly the most interesting or important thing about her.
In fact, she had a hugely productive career in which she wrote about whatever caught her eye or took her fancy, from the World Bank to Abraham Lincoln, and made from it something intimate and vivid. It was precisely her eclecticism that earned her thousands of fans around the world. She became the beau ideal of the belle-lettrist, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles that she turned into lyrical art in newspapers and in magazines ranging from Encounter to Rolling Stone. For those who started to tire of her prolixity – she produced so many books in her lifetime that even her agent wasn’t always sure of the latest count – she became a tiresome gusher who substituted impressions for hard facts and could never resist making it all about herself.
In this meticulously researched biography Paul Clements is careful to steer a judicious path between these two views of Morris. While he quotes at length from the critical reviews that came her way, especially once she became a brand in the 80s, he is careful to remind us of her extraordinary achievements. There is the thrilling Boy’s Own account of how Morris, a Times reporter embedded with the British team that conquered Everest in 1953, managed, by sending a coded telegram, to be the first to get the message back to London in time for the Queen’s coronation.
The whole derring-do episode functioned as an elegy for an empire that was already enjoying its last hurrah. Morris’s great genius, though, was to realise that even though 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 generally regarded as her masterpiece, was an attempt to inhabit empire from the inside, to feel its trappings and trivia, whether through the eyes of a hard-pressed minor functionary of the East India Company or the vacillating General Gordon at the siege of Khartoum.
What isn’t in Pax Britannica, of course, are the experiences of the thousands of displaced, enslaved and oppressed people who were cleared out of the way in order for the empire to have its momentary sway. And you wouldn’t necessarily read it to discover what people were thinking in 1897, the year Morris identifies as the apogee of Britain’s influence around the globe. But as an account of what empire meant to the generations that followed, it remains a remarkable primary source.
The fact that Morris lived so long and wrote so much means that she can be exasperatingly hard to pin down, which is doubtless just as she wanted it. She was born in Somerset to an English mother in 1926, yet became passionately attached to Wales, the land of her father. Even then, her position shifted constantly as she moved from Anglo-Welsh patriotism in the 70s to full-blown Welsh separatism in the 80s, and eventually what she called a “Welsh Euro-utopian” stance. She was, as her detractors never tired of pointing out, a fierce republican who accepted a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in 1999.
She was adamant that she didn’t 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 had a point. As late as 2020, in Thinking Again, she gives a wonderfully numinous account of her experiences of Christmas as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford, in the late 1930s. Clements’s treatment of this material just two years later feels drained of all vitality. This, though, may be the price we have to pay for his scrupulous if sometimes pedestrian approach. Morris was such a compellingly flighty writer that her biographer is obliged to tether his book to solid earth, in part to avoid giving the suggestion that he has fallen too hard under her spell.
• Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides by Paul Clements is published by Scribe (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
