The death has been announced of the celebrated author and trans-pioneer Jan Morris at the age of 94.
When I received her book Trieste for review in the Taipei Times, I wrote to her telling her I was taking it with me to the dentist’s to read in the waiting room. She replied that I was going to use it as a talisman to protect against any painful experiences. When my highly favorable review appeared (the Taipei Times Dec. 30, 2001) she wrote thanking me, and said no-one else had compared the book to Mozart’s late quartets.
She said that she’ll be writing no more books except one to be published on the occasion of her future death. She didn’t strictly adhere to this and brought out Ciao, Carpaccio (reviewed in the Taipei Times July 30, 2015), plus another book of her diaries, In My Mind’s Eye (2019).
Photo: AP
KINDRED SPIRITS
I met Jan Morris in Hong Kong shortly after her book on the city appeared in 1988. I’d reviewed it at length in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) and then met her in person at a book signing. She told me she didn’t normally read reviews of her books, but had read that one.
Some time later I received a phone-call. It was Jan Morris, and she asked me if I’d like to meet the next day. She suggested the steps of the city’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club as a meeting-place.
I duly showed up, and had to tell her that I wasn’t a member. I later realized the club was what she really wanted to see; I had many journalist friends who were members and would happily have invited us in if only Jan had been more forward about her interest. Instead, I invited her to the Senior Common-room of Hong Kong University, of which I had been made a temporary guest-member while working on a mature student’s post-graduate thesis. So we went there by taxi, only to find the place almost deserted. Jan said she’d ideally like a dry Martini, but doubted if they’d know how to make one. So she opted for a white wine instead.
I told her the university department I was in was full of “post-structuralists” who advanced their theories on literature in jargon-filled articles that even I, an English native-speaker, couldn’t understand. What chance, I said, would their Chinese-speaking Hong Kong students have? I suspected that they resorted to learning gobbledegook sentences by heart and reproducing them in their examinations.
“But do these teachers read the books that the rest of us write?” asked Jan. I doubt it, I replied.
She then announced that she was tired and wanted to go to bed. As it was only eight o’clock I was somewhat surprised, but accompanied her to the Mandarin Hotel (which she told me had given her a 50 percent discount). She showed me her room, and then we said goodbye. I said one day I would show her the foreigners’ drinking area, Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong which, despite having written a book on the city, she’d never heard of.
A day or two later a Hong Kong University lecturer invited me to dinner, adding “Oh, if Jan Morris is free, please invite her as well.”
Clearly, I thought, that was the real reason for my being invited, because that particular lecturer had never approved of my informal attire. But Jan replied that she had a meeting scheduled with the Hong Kong governor, Chris Patten, so couldn’t accept.
After that, she and I engaged in a fairly lengthy correspondence. It began when sent her a copy of my book Falstaff in Macau, and I received a message on my answer-phone which went as follows:
“Oh Bradley, I’m so sorry to miss you. This is Jan Morris. I’m lying in bed and I’ve just finished the last page of Falstaff in Macau. Thank you so much for sending it me. My partner Elizabeth read it first and she said I’d like it. It’s a lovely thing, and I learned some things from it too … I expect you’re out on that horrifying ridge!” (Laughs. I’d described the climb up The Dog’s Tooth ridge on Lantau Peak in the book, something that I hadn’t found named on any English-language map, and which was, and maybe still is, little visited despite being spectacular). “Anyway, all best wishes. Jan Morris.”
I wrote to her asking if I could quote her in my book’s publicity, but she replied by a friend’s fax, with my name in gigantic letters, that she was sorry but she “didn’t do endorsements.”
MAINTAINING CONTACT
On another occasion I was responsible for putting together a pre-Christmas feature in the SCMP in which I asked various Hong Kong celebrities which books they’d enjoyed reading that year. It transpired that almost none of them had read anything, with recommendations such as Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth and a Steinbeck novel, both from many decades ago, which the personalities must have read when they were teenagers.
So I asked Jan if she would contribute, as the leading contributor. She asked me what the fee was and I said there wasn’t one. She replied that it was many years since she’d written anything for a newspaper for nothing, but sent me an item anyway based on the recommendations she’d already done for a London paper.
In later correspondence she invited me to call in on her in her house in Wales, Trefan Morys, for a glass of wine. I’d read in Paul Theroux’s book, The Kingdom by the Sea, of how in 1982 he’d called in on his walk round the coast of the UK, despite having sworn not to visit anyone on what was planned as a solo-trip. Jan had welcomed him wearing a dress, saying something like he was not to worry — it was only an experiment. Theroux finished off with what I thought was a distinctly unfriendly comment about her hairy arms.
Jan Morris’s sex-change was described in her 1974 book Conundrum. As James Morris he had achieved fame by reporting the first ascent of Everest from Nepal in 1953 (a report sent to The Times in London in code, so that no-one else would get the news in advance). He went on to pen a hugely successful book on Venice in 1960.
My last contact with Jan was after I’d had a dream about Wales in which the mountains were purple, children were dancing and the music was by Brahms. She replied with a repeated invitation to look in for a glass of wine.
Unfortunately I never made it.
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