Paul Clements paints a sparkling, multi-faceted portrait of treasured journalist, historian and essayist Jan Morris, and her illustrious 73 year career
Review by Olivia Edwards
The journalist, historian and essayist Jan Morris wrote more than 58 books and hundreds more articles in a career that stretched over 73 years, from the late 1940s to the early 2020s; however, many still her remember her for her pioneering gender transition, which took place during the early 1970s.
Upon her death in November 2020, The Guardian opined that she was ‘an outrageously successful journalist’. Adding, however, that ‘the greatest ever distance travelled by Jan Morris was not across the Earth’s surface but between extraordinary identities: from being the golden-boy newspaper reporter James to the female voyager and historian Jan’.
But Morris was so much more than her genders. It was his reporting, as James, on the 1953 Mount Everest expedition that initially catapulted him to fame. Given exclusive access to the team thanks to his position as a foreign correspondent on The Times, which was sponsoring the mission, paying half of its costs in return for exclusive press rights.
Just before they set off for the mountain, Morris wrote: ‘I am in a filthy state, like everyone else… The most unpleasant part… is the breathlessness that overcomes one. One pants at the slightest exertion, such as tying a shoelace.’
Besides keeping up with the expeditioners, one of the biggest challenges was ensuring that his dispatches made it back to London in a time before satellite phones. He commandeered a trusted team of runners to bridge the 290 kilometres to the nearest telegraph office. Even the fastest took five days to navigate the ‘roadless, wheelless, horseless, telephone-less and largely mapless’ miles.
And always there was the fear that a competing newspaper would intercept his missives and be the first to report on the success or failure of the expedition. Morris dodged this by cleverly disguising the news that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had made it to the top of the world with a coded message that read, ‘Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement,’ which, when decoded, read, ‘Summit of Everest reached on May 29 by Hillary and Tenzing.’
Events eventually proved the necessity of Morris’s cloak-and-dagger methods. The news was indeed leaked en route and several newspapers took the message at face value, reporting that the expedition had failed. But on the night before Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation on 2 June, Morris heard on the radio that the Everest expedition had triumphed, with the BBC crediting The Times with breaking the story.
It was an incredible feat of journalism on Morris’s part and Paul Clements suggests that it was probably the last time that a major world news story had to rely on long-distance runners. But, professional achievements aside, it was the sight of Hillary and Tenzing striding triumphantly back into camp that would stay with Morris: ‘I shall never, as long as I live, forget the transformation that overcame the camp when the summit party appeared and gave us the news of their victory. It was a moment so thrilling, so vibrant, that the hot tears sprang to the eyes of most of us. The day was so dazzlingly bright – the snow so white, the sky so blue; the air was so heavily charged with excitement; and the news, however much we expected it, was still somehow such a wonderful surprise; and it felt to all of us that we were very close to the making of history.’
Later, she would write that ‘for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest’, which was quite some statement, considering the number of adventures she had already crammed in by then: army postings to Venice, Trieste and Gaza at the tail end of the Second World War, later commissions to report on the Suez Crisis and more leisurely meanderings through the USA and South Africa, among many, many other places. Perhaps the most consistent presence in her life was Elizabeth, her wife, with whom she shared an open marriage, a great, life-long friendship and five children.
It’s difficult to write about a writer, but Clements does it very well. He’s measured, steadfast, kind but clear-sighted. Rather than attempting to compete with Morris’s prose, he instead allows his subject to sparkle like a garnet dropped on a sandy supportive bank of his own thorough and meticulous research. The result feels humane, reliable and rounded – a rich, multi-faceted portrait of someone whose own daughter, Suki, concurred was ‘a really complicated person’.
And underneath all the contradictions and inconsistencies was the continuous appeal and allure of her writing, and the way in which she would respond so sensitively and personally to place: ‘An idiosyncratic mix of whimsy, impressionism, high subjectivity and irreverence,’ wrote The Times. Or, as an American Midwesterner wrote in a letter to a newspaper after her death, ‘No-one has stoked the flames of wanderlust more. Rest easy, Jan, you made a lot of us happy!’
