Jan Morris – Brooklyn Bugle

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Conundrum” by Jan Morris

April 9, 2012

A few weeks ago I reviewed Jan Morris’s novel “Hav.” Reading that book and her book about Sydney, Australia, made me more curious about Morris, one of the earliest and best-known personalities to undergo gender reassignment surgery. So I read her book “Conundrum,” published in 1974 (and reissued in 2002). “Conundrum” begins with a vignette of the little boy James Morris, aged three or four, realizing “that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.” In what is deeply felt and surely the most graceful of writing about transsexuals, Morris explains how she moved from James Morris to Jan Morris.

This book is the only vehicle Oxford-educated, Army-serving, Everest-climbing Morris has used to explain a story that riveted interest across the world. After the initial insight, Morris assumed nothing could be done about this conundrum, and describes a childhood and young adulthood of keeping a secret while attending the choir school of Christ Church, Oxford, and public school at Lancing. As James, Morris went into the Army at 17 during World War II, describes himself, “like a spy in a courteous enemy camp . . . caught up in the fascination of observing how the other side worked.” Morris put these observations to good use, building on them to become a writer. There was clearly sexual ambiguity, though as James, Morris married (and fathered five children). Morris clearly owes a huge debt of emotional gratitude to her children, who are described empathetically but whose privacy is carefully respected, and to her former wife (now her partner in a civil union). The book, while deeply felt, also skates across what must have been some thin emotional ice as Morris allowed her femininity to emerge, first through drugs, and then through several surgeries.

Morris’s sense of humor is evident throughout the book, particularly during the years when she had begun hormone therapy and was intersexual, sometimes appearing as male, other times as female. Morris clearly enjoys the pleasures of femininity, to an extent that, from the vantage point of 2012, is a little disturbing to a feminist – she writes of the comfort of slipping into being cared for from being the one doing the caring, in terms of doors opened and bags carried. As she acknowledges, she has missed the full experience of periods and pregnancy. And she movingly describes the process of moving towards acceptance of her often confusing self, suggesting that she must have suffered some serious depression. Since the book’s publication, Morris has not written or spoken much about the surgery, letting the book speak for itself. She makes the point that the process did not change her as a person, except in outward form; after the surgery she felt integrated and that she had gained her identity.

Morris has discussed in an interview with the Paris Review whether her sensibilities were changed. It’s a complicated answer, so I am quoting the question and answer in full:

INTERVIEWER
The very heart of this question is: do you feel your sensibilitiies at all changed?

MORRIS
That is a different question. The trilogy: I started it and finished it in the same frame of mind. But I suppose it is true that most of my work has been a protracted potter, looking at the world and allowing the world to look at me. And I suppose there can be no doubt that both the world’s view of me and my view of the world have changed. Of course they have. The point of the book Pleasures of a Tangled Life is to try to present, or even to present to myself what kind of sensibility has resulted from this experience. I’m sick to death of talking about the experience itself, as you can imagine, after twenty years. But I’ve come to recognize that what I am is the result of the experience itself. The tangle that was there is something that has gone subliminally through all my work. The one book I think isn’t affected is the “Pax Britannica” trilogy.

(Morris began “Pax Britannica,” a three-part history of the British Empire, as James, and completed it as Jan.) Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Hav” by Jan Morris

March 2, 2012

The noted travel writer Jan Morris has published very few novels, but I found one of them at the Brooklyn Book Fair, published, perhaps not surprisingly, by NYR Books, a source of many of my favorite books. “Hav” is a novel as travelogue, allowing Ms. Morris to indulge what must have been sorely tempting during her wonderful travels: a taste for the absurd.

The novel is written in two parts, “Last Letters from Hav,” first published in 1985, and covering an early visit to the mythical Hav, and “Hav of the Myrmidons,” published in 2005 describing Ms. Morris’ “return” 20 years later. In 1985, one still entered Hav the old-fashioned way, riding a train that came down through a switch-backed tunnel under the mountain. Those au courant knew to leave the train at the frontier, and get a ride over the mountains in time to watch the train emerge from its “spiralling descent within the limestone.” Perhaps it is this touch that leads Ursula K. Leguin, in her introduction, to describe the work as science fiction. But Hav is full of peculiarities that challenge the laws of physics, of politics, and of pretty much everything else.

Everyone came to Hav – perhaps even Hitler. There is a history of defeated Crusaders, their departure still noted into the 20th century. There are a Grand Mosque and a Grand Bazaar. Hav rig fishing boats are illustrated, and Hav’s local specialties include snow raspberries, in season only briefly but much loved. There are local fauna – “the Hav hedgehog, Erinaceus hav, is odd too, since it is tailed, like a prickly armadillo, and the Hav terrier is like a little grey ball of wire wool, and I believe the troglodytes breed a pony of Mongolian origins on the foot-slopes of the escarpment.” There are also Hav cattle and a Hav bear.

There is a little Russian colony, Malaya Yalta, and a thriving Chinese entrepot, Yuan Wen Kuo. Engaging locals introduce Morris to everyone else, and she goes everywhere, welcomed and feted. She visits the Hermitage, where some local anchorites welcome her. She even peeps in at a secret meeting of local Cathars, who seem to have survived quite nicely in Hav. Morris strikes out on her own to the harbor headlands, (one of several places where Hav resembles Morris’s Sydney, Australia) to visit a local landmark, the Iron Dog, a mysterious statue standing sentinel over the entry.

Back to the troglodytes. Morris visits them, too, in their caves in the escarpment, the same one the train tunnels through. She spends the night in one of the caves in her sleeping bag, and then is taken to visit the bears, which “looked just like piles of old rugs, heaped on top of one another, like the discarded stock of a carpet-seller. . . One or two rolled their heads over sleepily like cats, burying them in their paws.”

Not all is well in Hav, and Morris’s first visit ends among ominous signs. Her forebodings are borne out on her repeat visit 20 years later, described in “Hav of the Myrmidons”. Everything is changed. Hav is now the Holy Myrmidonic Republic; tourists are mostly kept to an island in the harbor, except when they have a special pass. Familiar landmarks are gone, burned to the ground, bulldozed, or built over. Morris’s friends, so open and welcoming 20 years before, barely speak to her. Poking around, Morris is able to find some of the places she had so enjoyed on her earlier visit, but leaves quickly, saddened by the changes.

Hav is not for everyone – it’s a secretive little enclave somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, a peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean cut off by a mountain range from some country east of Lebanon and west of Turkey. And “Hav,” which gently parodies the conventions of travel writing, might not be for everyone either. But fans of Jan Morris will find their way into this landscape of the mind by using a little imagination. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. And check out my blog about metrics for people who hate numbers.