R.I.P. Jan Morris

I am one of those people who wanted to be Jan Morris.

Admittedly some of that was simply the job description which involved traveling the world, spending long periods of time in a place, trying to get beneath the surface of things in different ways. That was how Morris wrote about Venice and Trieste and Hong Kong and elsewhere. Morris hated being called a “travel writer” - though I feel like everyone who’s been described as such hates the term. But I understand the annoyance because of course Morris didn’t want to write about travels or traveling, but rather about places and the people there.

Most people’s experience of travel writing is short bullshit articles (pardon my French) in newspapers and bad magazines about traveling to places, naming a few restaurants and sights. But what Morris did is in a long tradition of Robert Byron and Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Rebecca West, Bruce Chatwin and Peter Matthiessen.

Morris understood the conventions of travel writing and used them to good effect in her two novels, which were recently collected into a single volume as Hav. The Book Prize nominated work isn’t a great novel but for lovers of Morris’ work and travel writing, it’s a strange work of speculative fiction and just a delight on many levels.

But I always come back to her memoir Conundrum. Because Morris wasn’t born Jan, but James. In 1974 Morris published a memoir about the experience and what it meant and years ago, when I first read it, at a time when trans wasn’t something people talked about or acknowledged, and it was eye-opening.

Many people cite Morris’ books about Venice as a career highlight and others point to the Pax Britannica trilogy. My favorite book of Morris’ would have to be Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. And explaining my love of the book is relatively easy - a lot easier than explaining to people who have not read the book why I have so long been obsessed with and fascinated by Trieste. Maybe some of that is imply because I had been obsessed with and fascinated by Venice - it’s hard not to be - but to become obsessed with Trieste, that requires time and effort and the skills of a writer and observer. It was a lesson about being a writer and about life.

For all her travels, though Morris loved Wales, and always identified as Welsh. She wrote a lot about the region in different ways and I always think about what her tied to the land. Despite traveling to every corner of the globe, she always wanted to come home. One reason was her marriage. Married in her twenties, they had five children together, but were forced to divorce when Jan transitioned. But they continued to live together, raised their children, and when civil unions between same sex couples were allowed in Britain, they made their partnership official, again. It’s the kind of love story between two friends that most of us can only envy.

Morris’ best work remains insightful and fascinating. And points to what good travel writing can be. Because it’s not about an up to date guide of what’s on this street now, and the best place for a falafel. But about something deeper and truer, about a sense of place and of what it means. Of history and what it means. This complex web that is life. And making a foreign place something understandable in different ways. Morris did that to places and with her own life and we all owe her a debt.