JAMES & JAN

If reading a book is like taking a journey, as so many have claimed, then the author functions as a kind of tour guide, showing readers the important sights, oddities, and wonders that life offers. A guide like Proust takes us through the labyrinth of the human heart; a guide like Stephen Hawking takes us to the most rarified reaches of the universe.

That leaves a lot of terrain in between. This is where the great travel writers come in, since, as authors and guides combined, their sightseeing responsibilities become paramount. And as has been known for a long time, if you want the best guide available, hire yourself a Brit.

Laurence Sterne, Alexander Kinglake, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Eric Newby, Bruce Chatwin, Christina Dodwell. Whether because the old empire gave them license to roam, or because they wanted an excuse to flee their damp, cramped little island, British travel writers—learned, witty, curious, brave—long ago set the standard for what a book journey should be.

One of the greatest of these legendary travelers only died four years ago, after living their last years quietly in Wales: James Morris, who completed a change of gender identity in 1972, and thereafter lived and wrote as Jan Morris, CBE FRSL. Born the same year as Queen Elizabeth, for decades the undisputed monarch of all travel writers, there are few authors in any genre who gave me so much plain old-fashioned reading pleasure in the years I followed her work.

“James” Morris made his reputation when assigned by the London Times to cover the 1953 Mount Everest expedition; he was instrumental in getting news of the British first ascent back to London on the very day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. His book about the expedition, Coronation Everest, goes beyond the usual mountaineering cliches to deliver real insights into the unique set of characters who made up the climbing team, including the legendary Sir Edmund Hillary.

“There Hillary worked with his ice axe in the half-light, huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some bright, burly diesel express pounding across America. But underneath the good fellowship and energy was a virtuoso deeply embroiled in his art.”

(I’m looking down at a photo of Morris circa 1953 in the official history of the Everest expedition taken down from my bookcase. Posing in a shabby military overcoat, he’s unshaved, frail, sensitive, someone who looks uncomfortable in his own skin. And yet—surely the weakest link in a gaggle of superheroes—he lived long enough to be the expedition’s last remaining survivor.)

Morris’s travel masterpiece is Venice, published in 1960, and very possibly the best book ever written about that much-written-about city.

All his virtues as a guide are on display here. History, culture, everyday sights and sounds, the little out-of-the way corners and characters that often reveal more about a place than do the famous landmarks—they’re all brilliantly mixed in. One moment— still writing as James—he describes how majestically the cityscape rises from the lagoon, the next, how humble Venetian housewives greet each other on the street.

“As they catch sight of each other a sudden soft beam of commiseration crosses their faces, as though they are about to barter sympathies over some irreparable loss, or share an unusually tender confidence.”

(Great writers are great in their verbs: “barter” is greatness.)

Morris summed up the book best in a forward to the third edition.

“It is a highly subjective, romantic, impressionistic picture less of a city than of an experience, possessing the particular sense of well-being that comes, if I may be immodest, when author and subject are perfectly matched; on the one side, the loveliest city in the world, only asking to be admired; on the other, a writer in the full powers of young maturity.”

Morris followed this up with book after new book, on places from Sydney to Hong Kong to Manhattan. (One assignment—writing as Jan now—even brought her to Vermont right across the river from me, commissioned by New England Quarterly magazine to drive up Route 100 in foliage season and report back on what she found—and what she found included insights way beyond any I was capable of myself, despite having lived here for so long.) She knew better than anyone how to capture the spirit of place, taking the broad overview one moment, telling you what you need to know about the history and culture, then zooming in on those characters who, like the Venetian housewives, epitomize the city she’s describing.

And so in Manhattan ‘45, her evocation of New York City at mid-century, she gives us, on the macro level, “On a bright summer day, the skyline of Manhattan seems to stand against the blue like a masonry thicket, or a huge jagged palisade; in winter, when the tops of the skyscrapers are sometimes lost in cloud, their bases suggest so many gigantic roots or trunks, and the life of the city proceeds as within a gargantuan forest,” then, on the micro level, “A bus driver’s body seems to be in endless twitchy motions—his eyes constantly flickering to the mirror, to the fiercely gesturing cop outside, to the coins beside him, to the latest idiot passenger asking where Fifth Avenue is.”

Like any prolific writer, James and Jan had some misses. His Pax Britannia trilogy, a fond, nostalgic history of the British empire (he claimed to be trying to capture “the aesthetic of empire”) was derided by critics as probably a little too fond, too nostalgic, the empire having been built on a lot more more brutalities than dignified imperial architecture and delicious afternoon teas would suggest.

By the 1960’s, James Morris would seem to have it all: a big reputation, a devoted wife and four loving kids, editors anxious to send him anywhere he wanted to go. And yet so conflicted was he over his identity, so depressed by all the evasions it required him to make, it nearly drove him to suicide.

She wrote about this in a groundbreaking book, Conundrum, which, in its frank treatment of a then-taboo subject, was 50 years ahead of its time.

“I was three or four years old,” it begins, “when I realized that I had been born in the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

“An extraordinary personal narrative of transsexualism,” Conundrum’s garish cover calls it, using the old term for transgender, but the book itself is a courageous, heartfelt explanation of the long tortured road that led James to transition to Jan. Again, as in all her books, she’s acting as our guide, only this time she’s leading us, not through a city, but into the deep, unexplored terrain if human psychology, a journey that leaves us with a lot more understanding and sympathy than when we started.

The last book she wrote before retiring is my favorite, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, explaining, in almost mystical terms, why that Italian port city hidden away at the top righthand corner of the Adriatic—culturally more Austrian and Slovenian than Italian—became, along with Wales, one of her two favorite places in the world, just because it stands so oddly out of the mainstream. The book impressed me so much that several years ago my wife and I went out of our way to visit Trieste, and I found it does indeed convey the bittersweet, temps perdu mood that fascinated Morris.

“I have tried to get the hang of many cities during a lifetime of writing,” she says, in trying to explain its hold over her, “and I have reached the conclusion that a peculiar history and a precarious geographical situation have made Trieste as near to a decent city as you can find. I’ve never met such kindness as I did in Trieste.”

She vowed to send her ghost there to haunt its streets when the time came for her to go. I hope she’s there now, Jan Morris. No better guide to the world’s wonders ever wrote.