Jan Morris was a man, then a trans woman—but always a narcissist

In July 1972 the man once known as “James Morris” walked into a clinic in Casablanca. Days later, after a brisk operation, Jan Morris walked out. “I really am me!” She felt instantly different. As a man her role had been to “push and initiate”; now it was to “yield and accept”. She felt closer to animals. She found herself “talking to the garden flowers, wishing them a Happy Easter”. Women are like that. You can barely move in London parks for women talking to flowers.

Not all women were so nice. Some, when they read “Conundrum” (1974), Morris’s account of her transition, did not smile at flowers and think pretty, yielding thoughts. Instead they said some pretty unyielding things. Morris is “to me a man who has eaten a great many pills”, wrote Germaine Greer, an Australian feminist. Morris was “a man’s idea of a woman”, said Rebecca West, a British critic. Though not wholly a man’s idea of a woman. When it came to domestic labour, Morris’s daughter observed, “she did nothing.”

All lives are complicated. The life of Jan Morris—soldier, journalist, writer, man, woman, father, mother—is more complicated than most, as a new biography by Sara Wheeler, a travel writer, shows. (Her pronouns can feel complex too: this review, like the book, refers to Morris as “he” pre-transition.) Morris lived an “insanely interesting life”, witnessing the second world war, the conquest of Everest, the end of British rule in Palestine. “She was,” Ms Wheeler writes, “the 20th century”. Certainly, after he became world-famous for covering the first conquest of Everest as a journalist for the Times, Morris met many of its most interesting players. Harry Truman chatted to him; Walt Disney spoke with him about his cartoons.

Time erodes all lives, however great, into a few “Ozymandias”-like fragments: Napoleon is Waterloo and Elba; Caesar is the Rubicon, Cleopatra and his assassination; lesser lives are littler yet. Morris—who had been “James of Everest”—became the man who, in 1972, had had an operation and started dressing, says Ms Wheeler, like “a Walmart version of the Queen”. She was, as another trans woman said of herself, “a sex change first and anything else second”.

But Morris did so much. When he was born, in 1926, the British Empire lay over the map in “huge red slabs”—and empire coloured his life, too. His wife, Elizabeth, was brought up in it (she lived in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with a pet baby elephant); Morris’s job was “to help dissolve” it (he was sent to Palestine as an intelligence officer by the War Office); later, he chronicled it (in his “Pax” trilogy).

His big break came when he was sent by the Times to cover the Everest expedition (much to the irritation of the leader, John Hunt, who considered Morris “physically substandard”). The expedition was such hot news that its results had to be telegrammed in codewords: the death of a climber was to be “SIGNALBOX”; success was “SNOW CONDITIONS BAD”. On May 30th 1953 Morris sat, dizzy with altitude in his tent, and typed: “SNOW CONDITIONS BAD STOP”.

The ascent of Morris’s career had begun. His family life was now thriving (he and Elizabeth eventually had five children), but Morris was struggling. At four he knew he “had been born into the wrong body”. And so he began his transition in his early 30s. The description of this change is interesting—but far more interesting is Morris’s unchanging narcissism. When their baby daughter died of meningitis, Morris was not at the hospital: he had refused to go. Morris may have talked to flowers, but paused to consider few other living things. Particularly not Elizabeth, who kept house, kept quiet over the gender transition and endured.

As this detailed (at times far too detailed) biography shows, her transition would, in the end, eclipse all else. “I want to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris” she said. But she noted, “the headlines will read, ‘Sex Change Author Dies’.” Many, Ms Wheeler notes, “more or less did”. Few people today read her works. The sun is setting on Empire Morris. ■