Conundrum

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Certainly the best first-hand account ever written by a traveler across the boundaries of sex. That journey is perhaps the ultimate adventure for a human being, but although it has been the subject of myth and speculation since ancient times, it is an authentically modern experience...What Jan Morris does offer, through her life and her work, is a window on the wondrous possibilities of humankind. With the opening sentence of Conundrum, Morris makes a simple declaration: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and I should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” At one point in Conundrum, written in 1974, Morris wonders whether she might be simply ahead of her time, a premonition of gender fluidity to come. Whatever the case, she had a certainty about her “slow motion Jekyll and Hyde” that was all her own. When the transformation was complete in Casablanca, she writes “I had reached Identity” with a capital I. (Elsewhere she described it as “At-one-ment”). She pictures herself as Ariel, “a figure of fable and allegory” in pursuit of the “higher ideal that there is neither man nor woman”. Had the possibility of safe surgery not existed, she had no doubt she would “bribe barbers or abortionists, I would take a knife and do it myself, without fear, without qualms, without a second thought”. She was, in a sense, a foreign correspondent already, embedded in “an entirely male adult world.” Morris says that she was “pining for a man’s love,” though not in a directly sexual sense: Morris denied that her feelings were (her word) homosexual. Instead Conundrum insists on a more diffuse sensuality that Morris found in ritzy fast cars, in Venice, in a “caress” from a loved one of any gender, in other “tactile, olfactory, proximate delights,” prose style itself perhaps among them. Morris’s sense of “the British masculine ethos” emphasizes esprit de corps, shared devotion to a shared public goal, like statecraft or mountain climbing. Women, by contrast, keep on “doing real things, like bringing up children, painting pictures, or writing home.” The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

It was only when he was in his sixties that he set about turning his youthful walk across Europe into a book. The first volume of the consequent work, A Time of Gifts, was published in 1977 and instantly recognised as a classic. This second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, appeared in 1986, and by then Leigh Fermor was seventy-one years old. Reporting from Cyprus on the Suez Crisis for the Manchester Guardian in 1956, Morris produced the first "irrefutable proof" of collusion between France and Israel in the invasion of Egyptian territory, interviewing French Air Force pilots who confirmed that they had been in action in support of Israeli forces. [20] She also reported on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. [21] Later Morris opposed the Falklands War. [22] Personal life [ edit ] NEW YORK (AP) — Jan Morris, the celebrated journalist, historian, world traveler and fiction writer who in middle age became a pioneer of the transgender movement, has died at 94.In the long, beamed sitting room of Trefan Morys, we talk first about the house itself. When they all lived down the road, the kids used to come and play here in the stables, overgrown with bramble. Later Jan and Elizabeth felt the big house was unmanageable so they found a buyer, cleared out the horse stalls here, brought the books and bookcases from the other place, along with the weather vane, renovated and moved in.

I mean, you have to be a very good musician to be a choirboy at Oxford, to be in the intelligence service in the British army, to be the one journalist at the Times to go up Mount Everest." That's an understandable response to the pressures Ms. Morris must have been under in her time and place, but her description of her life post-transition is by turns tedious and excruciating to read now, and it was poorly timed in its day — cisgender feminists spent the rest of the seventies quoting Ms. Morris's autobiography any time they needed to bludgeon trans women for existing, and the image of trans women as inherently reactionary and anti-feminist lives on long after the people who chose Ms. Morris as representative of every trans woman have died or faded from relevance. Certainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.” He slipped into journalism at 16 on the Western Daily Press in Bristol. Colour blindness prevented him from joining the navy during the second world war, so he signed for the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers and a commission as intelligence officer, celebrating his 21st birthday onboard a troop train from Egypt to Palestine. “I knew life was going to be OK. At last, in the army of all places, I felt I was free.” After demob, he worked in Cairo for a news agency, read English at Christ Church, Oxford, and edited Cherwell magazine. Morris went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her “Pax Britannica” histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris. In 1985, she was a Booker Prize finalist for an imagined travelogue and political thriller, “Last Letters from Hav,” about a Mediterranean city-state that was a stopping point for the author’s globe-spanning knowledge and adventures, where visitors ranged from Saint Paul and Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud.Derek Johns: Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris, London: Faber & Faber, 2016, ISBN 978-0-571-33163-5 NatGeoUK (19 July 2021). " 'Women felt at ease to write about the experience of being outside.' ". National Geographic . Retrieved 27 March 2023.