Jan Morris a lifetime of a journey

On the eve of her 75th birthday and the publication of what she says, teasingly, is her last book, the author talks to Hywel Williams

IT'S been a life full of exploration and discovery. For more than half a century Jan Morris has been constantly on the move, and always, she thinks, on the outside looking in. Today she is just back from a sixweek world tour "in search of the new Zeitgeist", as she puts it. Yet always she returns to her home in rural North Wales, and the impression it gives is of a secluded writer's habitat. For more than 40 years a stream of books has poured out of this exquisite retreat.

Morris's life has been an exemplary 20th century journey, one that has echoed the century's confusions and its loss of old certainties. There is evidence of her preoccupations in the house: on one wall hangs a detailed architectural drawing of Venice by Morris. Venice's melancholia has inspired some of her best writing. The postimperial drift of the city into a mere pleasure park, its beauty on the wane, memories of abandoned glory: these are typical Morris themes.

She's a romantic but a tough-minded one: "The English," she now thinks, "are the only people to have deliberately destroyed themselves and shattered their institutions."

It all started conventionally enough. Born James Morris in Somerset on 2 October 1926, he - as she was for 47 years - endured public school (Shrewsbury), followed by Oxford and the Army. At the end of the war, still a teenager, Morris first went to Trieste, which is the subject of her new book.

It's very much Jan Morris's kind of place. Perched in north-east Italy on the edge of many different countries and cultures, between the Latins, the Slavs and the Teutons, it's a city of paradoxes and it intrigued the young writer; Morris sat on the quayside and penned an essay - on nostalgia.

OVER the next 50 or so years, Morris felt haunted by Trieste, and it became one of two cities which "defeated" her in print (the other is London - "the most subtle and complex of all cities"). Now, having come full circle, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is, Jan insists, her last book.

"Travel writer" seems a lame way of describing her genius. She's historian, essayist, novelist, a writer with a finger on the pulse of our times. It's as if the tremendous personal changes in her life have helped her to understand cultural suffering and national loss. She climbed Everest with Hunt and Hillary in 1953 and, as the journalist attached to the expedition, it was her dispatch, recording the eventual conquest of the mountain, that was sent to the Queen on the eve of her Coronation.

Morris's Pax Britannica trilogy records how Britain acquired, ran and then lost an empire. It's "quite perfect", she thinks - and she's right.

Reclaiming her ancestry, embracing Welsh republicanism and learning the Welsh language: these have also been a delight for her.

But beneath it all there's still the "old-fashioned British patriot" she once was.

Outside her house perches a bust of Jacky Fisher, the First World War admiral who is Morris's hero and the subject of a lifelong obsession.

"In death," she says, looking at Fisher, "I hope to consummate my passion."

In Conundrum (1974), she wrote movingly about the painful change of gender from James to Jan for which she became famous. Today she still lives with Elizabeth, whom she married more than 50 years ago and who is the love of her life.

Over lunch we talk of family origins, and there's a sudden asperity. She's been subjected to so much Freudian junk that she won't go there.

No: "Life begins with me."

Like Lloyd George, the local boy who's buried at the end of her lane, Jan Morris is both local and global but never provincial. Cities have been her thing. She's summarised them in phrases that live with an evocative intensity.

Manhattan offers the "architecture-of frozen movement"; Istanbul has the "sedimented pride" of the arrogant old; in Delhi she feels India's "sterile equilibrium between east and west".

She claims to be tired of publishing's multinational corporate treadmill as the word and the industry go global. And she fears that her writer's chutzpah is fading.

"The immediacy is gone," she sighs. It's all a tease, really. She has a very Welsh wariness with its need to protect the mystery.

Is she serious when she says that Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, published to coincide with her 75th birthday tomorrow, is her last book?

Again a tease.

"Now I am going to write a book just for myself. At last my ambition is pure."

Copyright 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.