SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
No writer captivated me more than Jan Morris. She climbed 22,000 feet up Mount Everest in 1953 and raced down from base camp to tell the world that Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had reached the top. She covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann and interviewed Che Guevara. She wrote lyrical stories, capturing great places around the world - Venice, British Hong Kong, Cairo, Trieste - and so many more - and the three-volume history of the British Empire, "Pax Britannica."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
JAN MORRIS: People of my age were brought up in Britain to think of the world as ours, really. The parts of it that weren't ours were generally misguided. And so one went abroad in a spirit of unfair and illicit privilege.
SIMON: That's Jan Morris in 1989, speaking to NPR's Fresh Air. She was also perhaps the best-known figure of her time to transition from male to female in the early 1970s and wrote the memoir "Conundrum." And Jan Morris also stayed together with her wife, Elizabeth, until parted by death in 2020. Sara Wheeler has written a new biography, "Jan Morris: A Life," and she joins us from London. Thanks so much for being with us.
SARA WHEELER: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: What drew you to tell the Jan Morris story?
WHEELER: She'd always been around. And to listeners who've never heard of her, I would describe Jan Morris as, she seemed to me, as I was growing up and then making my own way as a writer, as a monumental presence in the cultural life of our time. I'll let you into a secret. When biographers are among themselves in private, they get one another to describe their subject in five words or fewer. And mine were James Bond meets Joan Rivers.
SIMON: (Laughter).
WHEELER: She was like a Walmart version of Queen Elizabeth. She published that empire trilogy, which is so relevant today. She consorted with spies in Cairo, King Farouk, pashas. She broke the story of Suez collusion. She was at early JFK rallies. She was the 20th century. To me, she was also one of the finest descriptive writers ever to have lived.
SIMON: I wrote down some words - Jan Morris' description of Venice. Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur or parasites on an oyster shell.
Wow.
WHEELER: Wonderful. And I would add to that, the domes and riggings and crooked pinnacles of the Serenissima - that was Venice. She published, of course, "Venice" in 1960, and it topped the bestseller list on both sides of the Atlantic for many, many weeks. She was already famous. It was Everest that made her famous. But in "Venice," for the first time, she inserted herself into the story. And I just love the bits about she and her two children and Elizabeth, her wife, whom you've mentioned.
They took a palazzo on the Grand Canal. And every day, the postman would arrive at the bottom, and he'd shout up, Morris, and they'd lower down a basket into which the postman would put all the letters, and they'd haul it up again. And there's so many stories - personal stories - like that in Venice, which combined with the history, to my mind, makes it a transformative travel book.
SIMON: You quote a 1977 telegram to her from Rolling Stone, which I think should be framed somewhere, asking her to travel, quote (laughter), "Vienna, Trieste, Greece, Australia, Lagos, with advances and payments promised." Some pop psychology - did Jan Morris travel so much because she was always looking for some place she could be comfortable?
WHEELER: Yes. Although I think she was comfortable at home, and she was also comfortable away. What she loved was the chiaroscuro. She wrote letters home to her wife, Elizabeth, all the time, saying she was longing to get back. And readers might say, well, then, why didn't you come back? And the truth was she needed to be on her own a lot. She found solitude among the masses that suited her.
In the years before her transition in 1972, she needed to find out who she could be on the road, and she needed the comfort of a wife when she got back. Elizabeth was the foundation of her life. Jan wrote more than 50 books, if you can believe that. And I can tell you, Scott, none of them would have been written without Elizabeth. Elizabeth is presented often in many of the accounts of Jan's life as a doormat. And I was really keen to show in my book, which is dedicated, in fact, to the memory of Elizabeth, that she wasn't. She was a strong, feisty, independent woman, but she didn't like the limelight.
I was fortunate enough to meet her - spent a day with her and Jan in their home in Snowdonia in North Wales. And I was so impressed and I so enjoyed her company. And I wanted her to come alive on the pages and not be just a handmaiden because she was so much more than that.
SIMON: Of course, Jan Morris transitioned during the 1960s and '70s when the medical procedure could be even more taxing and painful, couldn't it?
WHEELER: Yes. And the pharmaceutical regime that Morris went through in the 10 years prior to '72, which is when she had her operation in Casablanca, was really punishing. The drugs were really tough then. She was ill for - pretty much for 10 years straight and having to work incredibly hard all the time. She was such a hard worker - reusing copy night and day to squeeze out more pieces.
And you've mentioned, Scott, "The Conundrum," the pioneering trans memoir that Morris wrote in '74, and she came over to the U.S. to promote it. She was on "The Dick Cavett Show" - absolutely wonderful on that show. And I think we can see in the response to "Conundrum" the seeds of the rather rancid debate that's going now. I think we can see - she wasn't a mascot for either side, Morris. What we see in "Conundrum" is an individual battling to find her identity, which she did find. And I think it's useful to look at that story of an individual.
SIMON: Jan Morris often wrote about the importance of encountering kindness in her travels. But she had a side to her that even friends found hard to take, didn't she?
WHEELER: She did. There was a dark side. I have tried to show her, in the biography, in all her contradictions. She had a difficult relationship with some of her children, which has been documented. There was a dark side. And although she preached kindness, as you say, all the time, she couldn't quite stick to it herself. There were some inconsistencies there. And I had to show her in all her inconsistency. I mean, who isn't inconsistent? I saw in my own life such a lack of coherence, and I saw it in hers. And I think that any biographer that tries to present anybody's version of the truth is bound to fail. So I just tried to show all the sides, the light and the dark.
SIMON: Sara Wheeler - her new biography, "Jan Morris: A Life." Thanks so much for being with us.
WHEELER: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF ASHLEY HENRY'S "BREEZE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
