#jan morris

[takwando]

[llyfrenfys]

Today is International Women's Day ! Did you know Welsh trans woman Jan Morris (1926-2020) was the only journalist on the expedition of Mt. Everest in 1953? And that she was the first to report its first (confirmed) ascent? In 1974 she wrote a book on her transition, Conundrum.

[soupedepates]

Almost crying by seeing the picture of an elderly transwoman. This is Jan Morris. She was an historian, a journalist, a writer.

She died in 2020 at the age of 94.

You have no idea how emotional I am seeing this woman. To be fair, I am always worrying about my loved ones being targetted in transphobic hate crimes. I am terrified of them not to be able to grow old.

This feels so good.

I am hopeful we can grow old someday.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

God and the Soldier all men adore, In time of trouble and no more, For when war is over And all thing righted, God is neglected, And the Old Soldier slighted.

Jan Morris, Pax Britannica: Climax of an Empire  

The last surviving Waterloo veteran from Wellington's army was Maurice Shea who died in 1892 in Canada. But the last veteran from any nation was August Friedrich Schmidt, a Prussian, born in 1795. He died in 12 September 1899.

Photo: Maurice Shea (left) and August Friedrich Schmidt (right).

[keepcalmandwritefiction]

Your antenna must be out all the time picking up vibrations and details.

– Jan Morris

[synoddiane]

My sister is very good at dealing with the fact that she has more books than her bookshelves can hold. I returned her copy of Conundrum to her, and not only did she immediately lend it to the other person present, she ended up lending me two more books: Hav and Imago.

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Hav

In 1985 travel writer Jan Morris released her newest book chronicling the months she lived on the small and little known island nation of Hav.

Except that's not quite true. Morris is a travel writer, she wrote history and a memoir as well but travel was her main subject, and she did release Last Letters from Hav in 1985 but rather than being travel literature it is entirely fictional.

There isn't much in the way of a plot. For most of the books it simply relates different episodes from the time Morris spent in Hav.

The conceit that a work of fiction is a real text in universe is one I adore when executed well and Morris's execution is as near to perfect as I have seen.

Morris's extensive experience with travel writing lends Hav an extraordinary verisimilitude. With the exception of one scene late in the book it's all something that's easy to imagine reading in a real travel book.

Which isn't to say everything related is plausible to reality but when it departs from reality it's with embellishments or getting taken in by tall tales told by locals that you'd expect a real travel writer to relate.

Morris claims that many readers thought that Hav was a real place. While I'm generally skeptical of such claims, we've all heard the myths surrounding The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, I can almost believe it here.

Morris paints Hav so vividly that it almost feels that you can touch it. That you could close your eyes and see the city. Travel to the island and wander it's streets.

Hav is a book that's comfortable with ambiguity. I've grown tired of SFF that feels the need to always show the reader the truth with no room for uncertainty. Morris is more than happy to leave questions go unanswered. In one instance we get several different people's interpretation of an episode of Hav's history during World War 2 and absolutely none of them sound like they know what actually happened.

Morris is comfortable with not giving a answer and leaving the reader draw their own conclusions. Being willing to do that is central to why Hav feels real and many authors would benefit from learning from it.

The author and her surrogate character are well to do British women and there are chapters where that's very evident as there are parts where she exotifies the people of Hav. Given the nature of the book it can be hard to tell where the author ends and the narrator begins. It's genuinely not obvious to me whether this is just how Morris wrote about people in her travel writing or it was a deliberate decision made for her fiction.

If you decide to read it you should look for the new edition released in 2006 titled simply Hav. If it has an introduction by Ursula K Le Guin you have the right version.

This edition includes a short sequel Hav of the Myrmidons that was written by Morris thirty years after the original and is about her fictional alter ego returning to Hav thirty years after her original visit. It's not as good as the original but still a worthwhile read.

The book taken in it's entirety was of my favourite books I read last year. Morris masterfully evokes the country she has created, filling in a hundred details while hinting at even more. A life time as a travel writer made Morris able to make Hav feel real in a way few others could have.

[autolenaphilia]

I actually own a copy of this quaint 70s paperback edition. Early example of the transition timeline.

The memoir Conundrum by Jan Morris (1926-2020) created quite a stir when it was first published in 1974. It was not the first entry into the genre “memoirs by trans women about being trans”, Morris herself brings up Lili Elbe’s book (although it might be ghostwritten), and Christine Jorgensen and Hedy Jo Star had written and published memoirs before.

But Morris was a special case. She was probably the first trans person to be famous before transitioning, Jorgensen became famous because she transitioned. And she was no showgirl like Star but a serious writer, a member of the British literary establishment and one of the most respected travel writer and journalist of her day. Conundrum was probably the most respectable account of transitioning available in the 1970s.

That didn’t mean it had an easy reception. Many of the reviews were quite scathing of Morris and her ideas on gender and womanhood. Of course, these negative reviews were often very transmisogynistic, and Morris became a negative example of how transfemininity is all about gender stereotypes and misogynistic ideas about what it means to be a woman. Janice Raymond in the ur-terf text The Transsexual Empire refers to Morris quite heavily.

And reading it now, in 2023, there is a lot in the book that is worthy of criticism. Morris saw gender in binary and essentialistic ways, and writes of her transition in these terms. Morris saw traditionally feminine traits as innate to her womanhood. While she condemns misogyny and sympathizes with feminism, her writing indulges quite shamelessly in feminine stereotypes in the text and views them as natural. She even quotes C.S. Lewis approvingly about the gender binary being a “fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.” Terfs even today think trans people all believe in gender as being some mystical religious quality and I think it is a distant echo of the 70s-era fixation on Morris, who did in fact believe gender has some spiritual quality to it.

Morris was a believer in the idea of the “true transsexual” who knows from childhood and distinguishes them from the misguided trans people (like “homosexuals” and “transvestites”) who transition in error. Unlike modern truscum, she literally was treated by Harry Benjamin. And like all “true transsexual” narratives it sometimes seems tailored to appeal to cis tastes. Morris for example seems to downplay her obviously close relationship to her wife as mere close friendship while playing up her attraction to men, for the same reason that Morris had to divorce her wife as part of her transition.

There are other problematic things in the book. Morris came from a position of class privilege and was educated at an Oxford public school and was raised during the waning days of the British Empire, and she never really challenged that upbringing despite her transition. Morris was very well-travelled, but her worldview of non-white people are often racist and exoticizing and condescending at best. Even her positive depictions of non-white people come across as the exoticized “noble savage” or the orientalist trope of “Eastern Wise man”.

So in modern terms, Jan Morris had some bad takes, problematic writer for sure. And yet, the negative response to her book has been poisoned by transmisogyny. The criticism lacked nuance and was focused on invalidating her womanhood because of her internalized transmisogyny. The faults of Jan Morris as an individual quickly became ascribed to all trans women in ways that might echo even today in the anglophone debate. And due to transmisogyny, she has been judged more harshly for her failings than men or even cis women would be. The fact that most cis women have internalized misogyny, many of them severe, is often forgotten in the debate about how trans women are all problematic misogynists.

And Morris didn’t represent all trans women, far from it. And she was somewhat of an anachronism even when the book was written. She was 48 years old when the book was published, and had started transitioning around 1964. As it was written a younger generation of trans women in the post-stonewall era were challenging the narratives of womanhood and transsexuality in ways that Morris refused to do. In fact some of the more insightful criticism of Morris comes from Sandy Stone’s transfeminist classic The Empire strikes Back.

Conundrum and Jan Morris as a writer still have virtues. I don’t read to get my views affirmed or to read about paragons of virtue, I do it to read about interesting people, real or fictional. And Jan Morris was a very interesting person. She had an incredibly colorful life, and the book is full of vivid depictions of places and experiences that are now lost (even if many of these practices died for good reason). The writings about public school life, of British military life in the 1940s, of traveling across the world as a journalist, of places where Morris lived, of being trans in the mid 20th century, of transitioning in the 1960s and 70s, including a description of the Casablanca clinic of surgeon Georges Burou are well worth reading. And despite all of her prejudices and reliance on clichés about non-white people she was admired as a writer for a reason, it’s a well-written book. If you read it as an account of a flawed but accomplished and interesting trans woman, and not as some authoritative guide to gender, womanhood and transsexuality, it still has tremendous value.

[goodpark]

Los Angeles is, like some incurable disease, a balefully organic phenomenon. Its streets are forever nibbling and probing further into its perimeter hills, twisting like rising water ever higher, ever deeper into their canyons, and sometimes bursting through to the deserts beyond. If the city could be prised out of its setting, one feels, it would be like a dried mat of some bacterial mould, every bump, every corner exactly shaped to its landscape.

Jan Morris, “Los Angeles”

[queerographies]

[Enigma][Jan Morris]

Anni '70: un'epoca di grandi cambiamenti. Scopri come Jan Morris ha vissuto sulla propria pelle la rivoluzione sessuale e ha contribuito a plasmare la società di oggi

Un’icona LGBTQ+ racconta la sua vita: il memoir di Jan Morris Titolo: EnigmaScritto da: Jan MorrisTitolo originale: ConundrumTradotto da: Lucrezia GiorgiEdito da: AstoriaAnno: 2024Pagine: 208ISBN: 9788833211633 La trama di Enigma di Jan Morris Questo memoir è il racconto di un percorso transgender compiuto all’inizio degli anni ’70. Perché James Morris – ufficiale dell’esercito durante la…

[famousborntoday]

Jan Morris was a British journalist and travel writer, known for her vivid descriptions of people and places. She wrote for The Times, Sunday Times, and other publications.

Link: Jan Morris

[queerwelsh]

Updated post on Jan Morris!

Jan Morris was born on the 2nd of October, 1926 in Somerset, to an English mother and Welsh father. She was educated at Lancing College Boarding School and Christ Church, Oxford, was in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers during World War 2, and then became a writer and journalist.

Jan Morris began her transition in 1964 and underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1972 in Morocco, which she wrote about in the 1974 book Conundrum. Her autobiography was the first written as ‘Jan Morris’ and was one of the first to discuss transitioning and as such was extremely influential in 20th century UK trans history (and beyond, as it was a worldwide bestseller);

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

Jan married Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949 and they had 5 children (4 surviving) including the Welsh language poet and musician Twm Morys. Jan and Elizabeth would have had to divorce for Jan to undergo her surgery in the UK, rather than in Morroco - they later still had to divorce but entered a civil partnership in 2008.

Through her life, Jan published travel books, essays, memoirs, short stories, articles, and more. She was a Welsh nationalist republican who also wrote several books about Wales. Jan was influential as a trans pioneer, but also influenced with her words, her exploration of the world, her politics, and even with her Welshness.

Jan and Elizabeth mostly lived at Trefan Morys, near Criccieth in North Wales, and were together for 70 years.

Jan Morris passed away on the 20th of November, 2020, aged 94, on Trans Remembrance Day.

Elizabeth Morris (née Tuckniss) passed away on the 17th of June, 2024, aged 99.

Image: Jan Morris portrait (at her home in Wales, with Norwegian cat, Ibsen) by Arturo Di Stefano, on display at the National Portrait Gallery.

[wisdomfish]

The Internal Contradiction in Transgender Theories

One of the transgender movement’s most remarkable achievements has been to conceal the internal division at the heart of gender theory. “There is no single trans narrative.” There are two, “wholly incompatible and mutually destructive, which have somehow been fused into a single, all-conquering cause.”

The first narrative holds that there are two realities, maleness and femaleness, and that some people are tragically exiled from their true states. Jan Morris, in the opening lines of the only trans memoir written by an acknowledged master of English prose, puts it like this: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” This kind of story is compelling at an emotional level: It speaks to the universal feeling of dislocation, of alienation, of longing for completeness, and at the same time resonates with the hope of the oppressed for justice, with the sorrows of every human being denied true flourishing by prejudice and fear.

The second narrative is one of radical doubt, one that asks whether maleness and femaleness are, in fact, real. It queries whether the kaleidoscopic diversity of human self-experience really can be squeezed into so restrictive a binary; it contends that language is always conditioned by the power structures of the day, that it rarely grasps life as it is actually lived; and it concludes that ultimately—to quote the very same memoir by Jan Morris—“there is neither man nor woman.” This is the skeptical trans narrative which, of course, demolishes the “wrong body” one. If the ultimate reality has no place for gender, then Morris’s original epiphany was false: To “realize” that one has been “born into the wrong body” must be, not realization, but illusion.

It doesn’t take long to recognize the internal inconsistency between these two narratives. The first depends on maleness and femaleness being something real, for a binary must exist for it to be transgressed or transcended. The second questions reality altogether, falling for a radical skepticism that reimagines the world in terms of linguistic power plays.

~ Trevin Wax

[tonreihe]

The confused and confusing politics of the interior of what is now the United Arab Emirates, c. 1956. (Jan (then James) Morris, The Market of Seleukia, published in the United States as Islam Inflamed)

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #368

An end of week recap “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming features, see what’s on the nightstand and keep readers abreast of various book-related happenings. CHATTERBOOKS >>  If you are…