“Good or bad, virile or senile, there’s no life like the writer’s life.” (from Day 153) Morning pride, then, and evening shame.” (from Day 99) When I go walking in the evening, on the other hand, … I shall recognize what I don’t like about myself – selfishness, self-satisfaction, foolish self-deceit and irritability. “If I set out in the morning for my statutory thousand daily paces up the lane, … I enjoy the fun of me, the harmless conceit, the guileless complexity and the merriment.
Like Diana Athill (whose Alive, Alive Oh! this resembles), I think of Morris as a national treasure, and I was pleased to spend some time seeing things from her perspective. In the end, though, kindness is Morris’s cardinal virtue, and despite minor illness, telephone scams and a country that looks to be headed to the dogs, she’s encouraged by the small acts of kindness she meets with from friends and strangers alike. It seemed to me a strange issue to get worked up about, especially as enthusiastic meat-eating and killing mice with traps suggest that she’s not applying a compassionate outlook consistently. Even so, I noticed that the plight of zoo animals, clearly a hobby-horse, gets mentioned several times. Each piece is only a page or two, so I tried never to read many more than 10 pages at a time. However, as is often the case with diaries, read too many entries in one go and you may start to find the sequence of (non-)events tedious. There’s a good variety of topics here, ranging from current events to Morris’s love of cats I particularly liked the fragments of doggerel. Hold all that up against her current languid existence among the books and treasures of Trefan Morys and it seems she’s lived enough for many lifetimes. She took her first airplane flight 70 years ago, and is nostalgic for the small-town America she first encountered in the 1950s. Back when she was still James, Morris served in World War II, was the Times journalist reporting from the first ascent of Everest, and wrote a monolithic three-volume history of the British Empire. There are thrilling little moments, though, when a placid domestic life (a different kind of marmalade with breakfast each day of the week!) collides with exotic past experiences, and suddenly we’re plunged into memories of travels in Swaziland and India. Though each day’s headlines seem to herald chaos and despair, she’s a blithe spirit – good-natured about the ravages of old age and taking delight in the routines of daily one-mile walks down the lane and errands in local Welsh towns with her beloved partner Elizabeth, who’s in the early stages of dementia.
It was a momentous time in the world at large but a fairly quiet and reflective span for her personally. In this diary covering 2017 into early 2018, parts of which were originally published in the Financial Times and the Welsh-language literary newspaper O’r Pedwar Gwynt, we get a glimpse into her life in her early nineties. I’ve been an admirer of Jan Morris’s autobiographical and travel writing for 15 years or more. Morris lived mostly in Wales, where her parents were from. On May, 14th, 2008, Morris and Tuckniss remarried each other. They divorced later, but remained together and later got a civil union. Sex reassignment surgeon Georges Burou did the surgery, since doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. In 1972, she had sex reassignment surgery in Morocco.
As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. Morris and Tuckniss had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. In 1949 Jan Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Jan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer.
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