About the writer Jan Morris –
Jan Morris, Welsh patriot, historian, lucid writer, roving reporter and much else. Well what a life. Aged 20, as James, he sat on the water’s edge in Trieste at the close of World War II. He was part of a peace keeping force. Trieste, a kind of mini-Berlin, a building block in the rise of the cold war; Trieste, well who was really in power there, did it face East or West? He wondered just what kind of future this decimated continent would hold for him in the coming years.
Just a few year’s later, he finds himself, as the foreign correspondent for the London Times, halfway up Everest, communicating a dispatch to his employers. This confirms, on the eve of Queen Elisabeth’s II Coronation, that Edmund Hilary and Tenzig Norgay have become the first explorers to scale the mountain’s height. A wide range of other global assignments follow, covering key moments in history or just giving a deep insight into the nature of life in renowned locations.
Marriage and five children follow.
By now his literary prowess is beyond question. His on-location correspondence read like road maps for the soul, literary sat navs. Each street he turns down feels like a tapestry. Many of his paragraphs stand alone by themselves, as things of beauty.
In 1972, a short break from writing is required, whilst he makes the physical transition from man to woman, from James to Jan Morris. But then she gets back on the case producing a jaunty trilogy of eminently readable books on the history of the British Empire, often challenging the view that it had been such a wonderful adventure. She publishes a compendium of her dispatches in 2003 in A Writers Life, an extract from which appears below.
At the point of her gender transition Jan has to legally divorce her wife, but they continue to live together as partners. Then, as we move into the 21st century, they are legally reunited again with the introduction of civil ceremonies for same sex couples.
Jan Morris died in 2020, aged 94, in Pwlleli, Wales, survived by her partner of over fifty years, Elizabeth Tuckniss, and four of their children.
A Writer’s World, 1950-2000 (2004)
1950s Berlin – Before The Wall:
“Berlin is the capital of a lost empire, and its imperial past lies like a helmeted skeleton in its cupboard. It forms on one side the capital of the Democratic Republic of East Germany, on the other a province of the Federal German Republic: but the Germanness of it survives by sufferance, by suggestion, by retrospection. In the eastern sector the placards and the exhortations, the state shops and the slit-eyed arrogance of Lenin-allee bring to the purlieus of the old Unter den Linden an oily whiff of Asia. In the west all the gallimaufry of the American world prances and preens itself: neon signs, juke boxes, Time, apartments by Corbusier, hotel rooms by Conrad Hilton, paperbacks, pony-tails, dry martinis and Brigitte Bardot. The old Germany lives on underground, surfacing sometimes in a splendid opera, a Schiller play, a melody or a neo-Nazi.
On the one side the East Berliners find themselves remoulded, month by month, year by year, crisis by crisis, into a new kind of people — brainwashed, as it were, en masse and by force of habit. On the other, the West Berliners have become walking symbols: inhabitants of a city that has no economic meaning no geographical sense, no certainties and no security, but which is kept alive like some doomed and cadaverous magnate, just to spite the beneficiaries. Few Berliners seem to suppose that their city will ever again be the capital of a free united Germany. The East Berliners live for the hour, or the Party meeting after work. The West Berliners accept What a paradoxical fortune offers them, and move blithely enough through life, like fish in a glittering goldfish bowl.”
Published by Faber & Faber
Featured image: Julian Nelson, Pixels.com
