My Bold Undertakings

Travel in some of those places

Coast to Coast, Sultan in Oman, Coronation Everest, Conundrum, A Venetian Bestiary, Locations and From the Four Corners by Jan Morris

The young Jan Morris (then going by James) was an almost overnight success. That is, if Morris’s memoirs, interviews and autobiographical fragments are to be trusted and believed. Some time in the army, a little bit of motoring around the States and the Arab world, and then straight up to Nepal with Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing. There, in at the kill, ready to deliver the news (at the time of the new Queen’s coronation) that summit of Everest had been gained, conquered; that Britannia (or rather Britannia’s Commonwealth Realms) ruled the skies as well as the waves; and that everything was going to be all right.

Now wouldn’t that spark up a little fire in the old heart for the dying empire? Who would such a thing fail to affect? That’s in Morris’s telling. But reality might be different.

I will get to Conundrum in a moment, but first, one or two words on the books that preceded it. Coast to Coast is about the United States and it is pretty thoroughly impregnated with a love of the country built on seeing examples of exoticism and the differences from grey, miserable home. Britain in that period was still in parts a bombed-out ruin, cold in winter and without jobs in the summer. A hard place where people were parsimonious and dour. Who would not want to leave a country like that for the lights of New York, the charm of the small American villages, the little platoons stretching across so vast a landscape?

The thing I just said above is not the whole book, however. Morris did not write, contra some critics, romantic evocations of place alone: making every destination into an amorphous slop of good feelings and funny foreigners. Instead, there’s some pointed criticism lurking underneath the overwritten, occasionally gushing surface. In Coast to Coast, that criticism is directed at the Southerners, the so-called Remnant, the so-called Chivalry. These people, who affected European manners and upper class genealogies, only did it so they could rule over a dead slave kingdom. They do not come across well. Those people are absurd types, their lives deserving of distaste, of obloquy.

Likewise, Sultan in Oman might be considered a simple gush: overawe at being in the presence of royalty, waxing lyrical and ovulating at the exoticism of the East, following this new man, this new leader, as he climbs oil derricks and inspects the lands his soldiers have freshly secured. But there’s some depth to it – it is not all the sand and hydrocarbons and the glamour of the Orient. The sultan himself: he is a hard man. Not a hard man as in strongman, not a hard man as in just the kind of tough guy who is needed to ‘really get things done’. Just a hard man, hard man to like, hard man to love.

That kind of autocracy does not have a human face, though the men at its heart be mortal.

A Venetian Bestiary is an illustrated look at the statues and art of Venice, the animals real and mythical, historical and histrionic, that adorn the city. It’s perfectly pleasant. Locations is decent enough travel journalism. It does its best, its utmost, it puts in the hardest possible yards, to claim that the Glasgow of the last century was a hip and happening place, a place where a real economic and cultural take-off might be just around the corner. From the Four Corners is a slight selection, picked by Penguin, of highlights from another work. It’s rather good, if naturally slender (and while eating all that it wants!).

Coronation Everest is the most straightforwardly journalistic of the selection here: the account of a journey and the reporting. It discusses getting to Nepal, meeting the campaign, doing some difficult mountaineering (Morris was young and fit in those days), arranging how to break the story, if story there was. All the usual things. And it has some transcendent moments, moments up the mountain – one where Morris decides to name a glacier or a lake or a feature of the terrain after Elizabeth, the author’s wife. And it was a triumph and Hillary and Norgay did get to the summit and it was all good for the English-speaking world for ever after. So said the newspapers.

And now, Conundrum. It’s an intriguing tale, the story of a single person’s traversing the process – from realisation to surgery, of a change of sex. It’s a good book, as it happens, regardless of the subject. Stories about being a choirboy, of army days, of feeling lost and terribly confused, of making choices for the sake of making choices and for other people. It’s almost American in its wondering about whether I am living, man, really living, or just going through the motions.

It is the portrait – the first section – of a very sad man, someone for whom there are few options. I suppose some of the questions raised at the beginning might more easily be answered in a different time: if born in, say, 1984, many people would simply have chorused out that the author is gay, simply gay. But that was not, for Morris’s own reasons and the era of which we were talking, an option.

If one assumes all memoirs are fiction with the character of oneself at the centre, Conundrum passes the test with flying colours. The scene where, drugged and before surgery, Morris drags the body that will soon be changed for good from the operating table to a mirror – to catch a glimpse of the old form, to say goodbye to it, in some macabre ritual – is quite remarkable.

One wonders whether or not it was true.