In her twilight years, Jan Morris was adamant no one should try to write her biography during her lifetime, and following her death in 2020 aged 94, Paul Clements has stepped into the breach with the comprehensive Life From Both Sides. A quasi-scholar of the veteran journalist’s oeuvre, he first became an acquaintance of Morris through, it seems, his fandom, and if these 500 pages lionise both her prose and her work rate, it generally stops short of hagiography.
That said, suggestions of failings are inferred more than underlined. As a young Times reporter, shadowing Edmund Hillary and co on their ascent of Everest in 1953 was a career-defining experience for Morris – and time apart from wife Elizabeth for nearly four months began a pattern where the latter would be effectively a single parent to their children for large segments of the proceeding decades.
Success in the field of, especially, travel writing – Morris remains one of the best-known English-language exemplars of the form – and a wish for stability took her in the mid-1970s to Gwynedd, where she lived until her passing. With this comes an embrace of her Welsh familial heritage, and entertaining recounts of her chaotic approach to nationalism (scorning devolution as a meek compromise while maintaining affection for the royal family and British empire).
Morris’ gender transition surgery in 1972 was personally life-changing, of course, and being one of the first British people – certainly, the first renowned one – to undergo such a procedure had a significant impact on the discourse around trans issues. Clements is sceptical, correctly I suspect, of the view that her writing was ‘feminised’ as a result. A decidedly more depressing angle comes when contemplating the British media landscape on this particular issue: many publications which commissioned Morris over multiple decades would, in 2022, be more likely to try and drive her out of a career.
Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides, Paul Clements (Scribe)
Price: £25. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER