• Jan Morris was a journalistic superstar, courted by editors over several decades
• Morris transitioned to female aged 46 in 1972, going on to write 58 books
• Her daughter revealed how difficult this was on her and her mother, Elizabeth 

BOOK OF THE WEEK

JAN MORRIS: LIFE FROM BOTH SIDES

by Paul Clements (Scribe £25, 608pp)

The telegram from base camp on Mount Everest, scribbled by a young ex-Oxford and ex-Army journalist called James Morris, arrived at The Times offices on June 1, 1953: ‘Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.’ 

This was secret code, agreed with his editor in advance, that meant the precise opposite. 

It was Morris’s steely determination to outwit his rival journalists — first by being up on the mountain itself rather than hanging around in Kathmandu as his fellow hacks were, then by sending a Sherpa to sprint through miles of snow to the nearest radio post with that fake report of the expedition’s failure — that brought about his scoop of Hillary and Tenzing’s summiting triumph, announced to the world on the morning of the Coronation the following day. 

From that moment on James, later Jan, Morris was feted as a journalistic superstar. Over the next seven decades, courted by editors in Britain and the U.S., Morris — who would transition after an operation in Casablanca aged 46 in 1972 — would go on to write 58 books, plus many more words of journalism.

A great writer, or a fanciful word-spiller who blurred fact and reality and used the expression ‘I like to think’ too much? A charming, zestful enjoyer of everything the world had to offer, or a selfish, selfindulgent spouse and parent? 

Morris has been called an ‘impressionist’, or a ‘pointillist’, as if she were a painter. It’s true that reading her widely loved book on Venice makes you feel you’re with her on the shimmering lagoon. 

But Morris did not like being referred to as a travel writer. Though she penned countless books and articles on cities and countries from Venice and Manhattan to Spain and Wales, she considered herself above that narrow category. 

Paul Clements’s fascinating biography is subtitled Life From Both Sides, referring to Morris’s experiencing of life from the point of view of a man and a woman. (He refers to Morris as ‘she’ from the start the book, which I did find a bit confusing in the early years, when ‘she’ was a chorister and later undergraduate at the then men-only Christ Church, Oxford.) But this is also Jan Morris seen from both sides — her admirers and detractors. 

And I must say, by the end, I was rather on the side of Morris’s daughter Suki, who mentioned in an interview with the author that Jan ‘was a really complicated person, not, in my view, the simple, lovely being that people see at all... there was a drip, drip of unkindness with her, undermining everything, making me look and feel inferior and worthless, while I constantly tried to make her proud’. 

I couldn’t help noticing that whenever she received a bad review, Morris wrote a complaining and self-justifying letter to whichever publication it was, turning on the charm and wit to pour sympathy and sunshine onto herself. 

And on Desert Island Discs she chose one of her own books (never a good look) to take with her to the island. 

‘The flirtatious persona and reliance on humour contribute to the crafted illusion of openness,’ wrote the author Sara Wheeler after meeting her. In reality, Morris was a hard nut to crack. 

When she was seven in 1972, Suki was informed by her mother, Elizabeth: ‘You can’t call Daddy your daddy any more — you have to call Daddy Jan.’ Jan refused to discuss the subject and no further help was offered. 

What was this really like for the children and the wife? ‘I can’t imagine what my mother must have gone through,’ Suki later said, recalling that time of great strain on the family, when Elizabeth effectively became a single parent. 

Elizabeth comes across as a non-complaining domestic angel who for seven decades ran the house and garden wherever Jan decided to live (mainly in North Wales), brought up their four children (a fifth died in infancy) and put up with everything her husband (later wife) threw at her, from extended absences during her travels, to living apart while she was first experimenting with wearing bracelets and dresses, to the fullyfledged sex change. 

Germaine Greer, reviewing Morris’s book Conundrum about her experience of transitioning, was scathing, saying that the story had been ‘webbed out by self-indulgent impressionist prose’. 

She wondered what ‘the silent wife’ was really thinking. ‘Germaine Greer was dead right,’ Suki said in an interview with Clements, ‘when she said that my mum didn’t have a voice.’ 

Elizabeth and Jan divorced in 1972, but carried on living together, and entered into a civil partnership in 2007 when Jan was 81 and Elizabeth 84. It was a remarkable partnership. 

Suki (born four years after the death as a baby of her sister Virginia) was shocked, on reading Jan’s posthumously published book Allegorizings, to find herself described as a ‘substitute’ for that lost baby daughter. 

You can’t fault Morris when it comes to dedication to the act of writing. She was a workaholic, knocking out 3,000 words per day, rising to 4,000 when a book was due. (One imagines her at the typewriter all morning while Elizabeth got the lunch ready.) 

You keep thinking she’s about to retire — and she did actually have retirement parties after writing her book on Trieste in 2001 — but then she went on to write nine more. She couldn’t stop. She started keeping her first-ever diary aged 89, in 2016, and it was published when she was 91, two years before her death at the age of 94 in 2020. 

There are some riveting passages in this book, as well as some rather tedious ones where Clements quotes at length from reviews of every book Morris wrote. 

For me, the Casablanca transitioning day in 1972 stands out. Morris chose to travel to Casablanca for the operation because British law required that she would need to be divorced from Elizabeth to do it here. 

In Room 5 of the clinic, just before the operation, she stood in front a mirror to say goodbye ‘to himself’. ‘We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that self a last long look in the eye, and a wink for luck.’ 

Then she sat on the bed and did The Times crossword. She felt, she wrote in Conundrum, ‘no tremor of fear, no regret and no irresolution.’ 

Just before administering the anaesthetic, the eminent French gynaecologist Dr Burou said to her, ‘Au revoir, Monsieur’. When she came round seven hours later, his first words to her were, ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle.’ 

Bernard Levin wrote, on reading Conundrum, ‘James Morris crossed the strangest river that any man can come to in his life; now let the trumpets sound for the woman, Jan, on the other side.’ 

And those trumpets are still sounding, 50 years later. Jan became a touchstone for a generation of people who, like her, felt ‘entombed’ in the wrong physique and felt compelled to do something about it.