Conundrum

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Jan Morris: She sensed she was 'at the very end of things'. What a life it was …". The Guardian. 22 November 2020 . Retrieved 23 November 2021. It was getting dark, and we had to go down through the icefall,” Morris tells Palin. “I was hopeless – kept getting tangled up in ropes and things.” Into that hiatus, while my betters I suppose were asking for forgiveness or enlightenment, I inserted silently every night, year after year throughout my boyhood, an appeal less graceful but no less heartfelt: ‘And please, God, let me be a girl. Amen,‘” Morris wrote in her memoir. If there is anything typical about Miss Morris's experience, however, she has successfully disguised it. The Pax Britannica trilogy demands the adjective “magisterial” more readily than just about any other series of books I can think of. It begins with the birth of Victorian ambition and ends with the death of Churchill. Written with all Morris’s characteristic brio it is a compulsive exploration of patriotism, of manly endeavour, which ends in elegiac retreat and submission. Morris began the books as James and ended them as Jan; I wonder if that trajectory of tone in her history reflected that great change in her own life?

For anyone who knows the Jan Morris of today and has read fairly widely in James/Jan’s oeuvre, these statements written in 1973 sound unconvincing. And Jan would appear now to accept this. I suspect there is no real difference between what Jan Morris in her later life has been as a person and a writer, and what James Morris would have been had he remained a man. As regards her competence, anyone who has had the experience of being a passenger in her car as she drives down the rutted road to her home will attest to her skills and enthusiasm. At the same time as these professional and literary achievements, however, Jan was also undergoing a deep crisis of personal identity. In one of her books, Conundrum, she described how the conviction she’d had as a child that she was in the wrong body had never left her, but by her thirties she was in despair and had even considered killing herself. Conundrum describes how she succeeded in making the transition from man to woman in 1972. She said the sex change brought her the happiness she’d always sought. She also claimed that her decision had made little impact on the happiness of her four children, but that claim is put to the test in the programme.a b c Lea, Richard (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, historian, travel writer and trans pioneer, dies aged 94". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 20 November 2020. Jan Morris wrote Conundrum very soon after the operation, and by now, nearly fifty years after the event, it seems clear that it is describing a transitional emotional state. Jan writes: A very good writer telling a profoundly poetic story...In fact, it is the author's extreme subjectivity that makes the book as good as it is...After reading this most charming of all Cinderella stories, one feels that sex is just as much a conundrum as ever, which is to say, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, "a riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun," or "a problem admitting of no satisfactory solution." Rusbridger, Alan (10 July 2006). "Courage Under Fire". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 30 August 2013 . Retrieved 12 March 2010.

There is a lovely diary entry in the current book in which, with the weather raging outside, she determines to do her thousand steps indoors: “round and about the sofas I whistled my way, never pausing, left, right, left right… counting the paces on my fingers and sometimes bursting into song, until at last, breathless but triumphant, I reached the millennium on my thumb.” Differentness affected her childhood acutely, although she did not see this as attributable to her gender identity. A lonely child, Morris describes watching other people through a telescope, feeling left out of life in general. Despite this, she was “not unhappy,” although “habitually puzzled” by the conundrum of her gender. As one of Britain's best and most loved travel writers, Jan Morris has led an extraordinary life. Perhaps her most remarkable work is this grippingly honest account of her ten-year transition from man to woman - its pains and joys, its frustrations and discoveries. On first publication in 1974, the book generated enormous interest and curiosity around the world, and was subsequently chosen by The Times as one of the '100 Key Books of Our Time'. Including a new introduction, this re-issue marks a return to that particular journey. Morris went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her “Pax Britannica” histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris. In 1985, she was a Booker Prize finalist for an imagined travelogue and political thriller, “Last Letters from Hav,” about a Mediterranean city-state that was a stopping point for the author’s globe-spanning knowledge and adventures, where visitors ranged from Saint Paul and Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud. Jan Morris on her travels in 1988. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media via Getty ImagesLast Letters from Hav". The Booker Prizes. The Booker Prize Foundation. January 1985. Archived from the original on 20 October 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. And it is a triumph of this book that we, the readers, understand them both. We know what goes through both their minds, because the artistry of its author makes the boyish enthusiasm of the young man as immediate as the tempered experience of the old.” Naturally one of the questions readers of Conundrum have asked is ‘What about sex?’ Jan is perhaps a little evasive about this, and understandably so. Her desire to be a woman was not about wanting to have sexual relations with men, though she does rather charmingly describe the pleasures of being flirted with. A marriage that produces four children must be to some extent sexually healthy. But it is to Jan’s credit as a writer that the reader does not dwell on this for long. We accept that for her, sex was not so much a physical as a spiritual matter. Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world | Jan Morris". The Guardian. 2 October 2016 . Retrieved 23 November 2021.

Later Morris forfeited a promised job on the Observer after telling its anti-colonial editor, David Astor, that the British empire “is on the whole a force for good in the world, and ... fighting a rearguard action is the right and honourable thing to do”. He was anyway an outrageously successful journalist, moving with his family to live in the French Alps, flush with flash magazine commissions (a single piece – not one for the Guardian – paid for a car) and contracts for more books, including Sultan in Oman (1957) and The Hashemite Kings (1959). Morris relished the adventure: “I was a member of two clubs in London, one as a man and one as a woman, and I would sometimes change my identity in a taxi between the two.” Morris had been denied surgery in the UK because the couple refused to divorce, and wrote in Conundrum (1974), which told most of the story, that the marriage had no right to work, “yet it worked like a dream, living testimony ... of love in its purest sense over everything else”.In recent years transgendering has become almost fashionable. There are stories about it in newspapers and magazines practically every day. Tom Hooper’s adaptation of David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne, was a great success (Hooper crediting Conundrum as an important source of inspiration and information, by the way). It is perhaps difficult for us now to appreciate just how momentous a decision this was for James in the 1960s and early 1970s. The sheer bravery of the act is easy to underestimate. James was about to change his ‘form and apparency – my status too, perhaps my place among my peers . . . my reputation, my manner of life, my prospects, my emotions, possibly my abilities’. What would the ultimate consequences be? He couldn’t then know.

Delhi is not just a national capital, it is one of the political ultimates, one of the prime movers. It was born to power, war and glory. It rose to greatness not because holy men saw visions there but because it commanded the strategic routes from the northwest, where the conquerors came from, into the rich flatlands of the Ganges delta. Delhi is a soldiers' town, a politicians' town, journalists', diplomats' town. It is Asia's Washington, though not so picturesque, and lives by ambition, rivalry and opportunism.”NatGeoUK (19 July 2021). " 'Women felt at ease to write about the experience of being outside.' ". National Geographic . Retrieved 27 March 2023. The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire. He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man’s man. There is a wonderful moment in that book when she returned to Wales and went to the local shop for the first time as Jan. No one who knew her batted an eyelid, and very few have done since. Has she been surprised? Lively, Penelope (23 February 2014). "A Writer's House in Wales". The Independent . Retrieved 22 November 2020.