Jan Morris on Sex

In the memoir Conundrum, Jan Morris, who lived the first 35 years of her life as a man before beginning a decade-long process of sex change, confesses a total disinterest in sexual particulars. She preferred ‘pleasures that were neither penile nor vaginal. Intercourse seemed to me a tool, a reproductive device, and at the same time, in its symbolical fusion of bodies, a kind of pledge or surrender, not to be given lightly, still less thrown away in masquerade.’ There is perhaps no clearer summary of the literary stance on sexuality than Morris’s: sex is too coarse and mechanistic to be worth description, and yet its symbolic value is so sacred it must stand for the interconnectednessof all beings.

—Michael Thomsen from his article titled “Great Artists Make Lousy Lovers” in the Hazlitt blog. If you’re interest in Jan Morris’s other writings may we suggest Hav, a fictive travel book that introduces you to a place where time stood still, until corporations realized its economy potential.

Simon Winchester, whose biography of the Atlantic is now out in paperback, chats here about his mentor, Jan Morris. Morris famously broke the story of Edmund Hillary’s successful ascent of Everest. The news (in the form of the coded wire below) reached England on the eve of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation—exactly 60 years ago tomorrow. Paul Clemente at the Press Gazette writes amusingly about Morris’s role in the climb.

Also amusing is Winchester’s account of finally meeting Morris—whom he’d known as James—in person after carrying on a correspondence for many years: “When he opened the door, he had changed into a woman.”

And there’s lots more here too, on friendship and writing, and choosing a career. And if you weren’t already convinced, the story confirms that Jan Morris must surely be one of the kindest writers alive.

The great Jan Morris considers the writing of Lawrence Durrell (rhymes with “squirrel”) on the centenary of his birth on the Guardian Books Podcast.

Hav by Jan Morris →

From a review of Jan Morris’s Hav up at Full Stop:

“Hav is a fictional travel narrative and in it, Morris mixes fact into fiction like mushrooms into scrambled eggs – if you look for the bits of mushroom, you can pick them out of the eggs, but unless you spend a lot of time scraping, you’ll never get all the egg off.  When Morris wrote the first half of this novel, published in 1985 under the name Last Letters From Hav, she was so well regarded as a travel writer people didn’t understand the book was fictional and called their travel agents (LOL wut is a travel agent!??!?) to plan vacations to Hav.

While all novels involve some interplay of fact and fiction, Morris’s has a third layer: fictional nonfiction.  In 1985, the internet didn’t live in everyone’s cell phones, so they called their travel agents.  Now we can do a quick Google search with the book open next to us.  The immediate availability of all common knowledge in contrast to the delicate interplay of real and unreal adds a fourth, subjective, layer to the reading of this novel: what facts you, the reader, know to be true and what facts you, the reader, know to be false.”

Hav, reviewed by Michael Dirda →

Michael Dirda has reviewed Hav in The Washington Post. He thinks readers will prefer the “beautifully written, nostalgic excursion to the final station stop on the Mediterranean Express” from the earlier Last Letters from Hav over the post-9/11 Hav of the Myrmidons, where “Hav has become crudely vulgar and totalitarian, its landscape shadowed by the ominous Myrmidon Tower, its government a theocracy ruled by the so-called Perfects.” 

We think readers will enjoy both, together for the first time in this edition.

Happy Birthday, Jan Morris

Yesterday was Jan Morris’s birthday, and to wish her well we’re excerpting the first fews paragraphs of her book, Conundrum. We have also just released Hav, which combines for the first time two of her pieces, Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons.

“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.

I was sitting beneath my mother’s piano, and her music was falling around me like cataracts, enclosing me as in a cave. The round stumpy legs of the piano were like three black stalagmites, and the sound-box was a high dark vault above my head. My mother was probably playing Sibelius, for she was enjoying a Finnish period then, and Sibelius from underneath a piano can be a very noisy composer; but I always like it down there, sometimes drawing pictures on the piles of music stacked around me, or clutching my unfortunate cat for company.

What triggered so bizarre a thought I have long forgotten, but the conviction was unfaltering from the start. On the face of things it was pure nonsense. I seemed to most people a very straightforward child, enjoying a happy childhood. I was loved and I was loving, brought up kindly and sensibly, spoiled to a comfortable degree, weaned at an early age of Huck Finn and Alice in Wonderland, taught to cherish my animals, say grace, think well of myself, and wash my hands before tea. I was always sure of an audience. My security was absolute. Looking back at my infancy, as one might look back through a windswept avenue of trees, I see only a cheerful glimpse of sunshine—for of course the weather was much better in those days, summers were really summers, and I seldom seem to remember it actually raining at all.

More to my point, by every standard of logic I was patently a boy. I was James Humphry Morris, male child. I had a boy’s body. I wore boy’s clothes. It is true that my mother had wished me to be a daughter, but I was never treated as one. It is true that gushing visitors sometimes assembled me into their fox furs and lavender sachets to murmur that, with curly hair like mine, I should have been born a girl. As the youngest of three brothers, in a family soon to be fatherless, I was doubtless indulged. I was not, however, generally thought effeminate. At kindergarten I was not derided. In the street I was not stared at. If I had announced my self-discovery beneath the piano, my family might not have been shocked (Virginia Woolf’s androgynous Orlando was already in the house) but would certainly have been astonished.”

“In Short, is Hav real or just a dream?”

So goes the headline of a review of Last Letters from Hav, published in 1985, and collected with Hav of the Myrmidons (2005) in our edition called Hav.

“But nowadays, Hav is barely known in the outside world. The more’s the pity, for it would be hard for the sophisticated traveler to find a destination more indefinedly mysterious. Hav is a land of enigmas and mazes and curiosities. Indeed, does it really exist? Did it ever exist? Or is this tantalizing city-state that Jan Morris visited in 1984 simply a superbly fashioned product of a travel writer’s dream?”

Hav

Here is the first two paragraphs of Ursula K. Le Guin’s introduction toHav by Jan Morris, an edition that combines Last Letter From Hav: Six Months in 1985 and Hav of the Myrmidons: Six Days in 2005.

“When Last Letters from Hav was published (and shortlisted for the Booker prize) in 1985, Jan Morris’s well-deserved fame as a travel writer, and the unfamiliarity of many modern readers with the nature of fiction, caused an unexpected dismay among travel agents. Their clients demanded to know why they couldn’t nook a cheap flight to Hav. The problem, of course, was not the destination but the place of origin. You couldn’t get there, in fact, from London or Moscow; but from Ruritania, or Orsinia, or the Invisible Cities, it was simply a matter of finding the right train.

Now, after twenty years, Morris has returned to Hav, and enhanced and marvellously perplexed her guidebook by the addition of a final section called Hav of the Myrmidons. To say that the result isn’t what the common reader expects of a novel is not to question its fictionality, which is absolute, or the author’s imagination, which is vivid and exact.”

Jan Morris’s Hav in Bookslut

 Hav, by Jan Morris, got a great review in Bookslut, one of our favorite literary blogs. Here’s an excerpt:

“The reader follows Morris as she tries to navigate this unreal city, with its multifarious architectural styles, Babel of languages, mélange of smells and sounds. She familiarizes herself with its cafes, its music, its trademark urchin soup and snow raspberries. She attends the Roof Race (which is exactly what it sounds like), and her descriptions of the frenzy of the crowd tearing through the city to follow the athletes running and jumping across alleyways above is among the more riveting parts of the novel.

One could go on for some length and is tempted to, for Morris’s prose is so resplendent and exacting in its erudition and craftsmanship. Her knowledge of Mediterranean history and culture shines through on every page, and her attention to seemingly minor details, such as witnessing two elderly Buddhist monks alone in a crowd of merchants purchasing saffron, for instance, preserve the veneer of an ‘official’ travel narrative.

Ultimately, though, Hav is a place utterly fluid, where identity is consistent only in its Heraclitean flux. History swirls around Hav, yet always inchoate, subject to the whims, distortions, and sedimented agendas of countless peoples of countless factions over countless years. And like that other fictional city Bellona, Hav is a mystery in which nothing is as it seems — or maybe everything is exactly as it seems until it changes into something else, until over time everything possible in human history has already happened, is still happening, and will happen again. Last Letters from Hav, indeed, ends with a cataclysm known as the Intervention, the details of which the reader is never entirely informed.”

Jan Morris on Fact & Fiction, in The Paris Review

INTERVIEWER: You use anecdotes and stories in certain places to punctuate the narrative [of Sydney]. Do you consciously use the techniques of fiction to move a narrative along?  

MORRIS: I do believe in the techniques of fiction, so I’m very gratified you should ask this. I really don’t see that there’s much difference between writing a book of this kind and writing a novel. The situations that arise are the sort of situations you’d often make up—the background you would devise for a novel, the characters you would produce for a novel. And you have an added attraction, of course: the fact that the overwhelming character of the whole book is the city itself, which is an advantage you have over the novelist. Paul Theroux said to me once that he liked writing travel books because they gave him a plot; he didn’t have to think one up. It works the other way around too. I edited the travel writings of Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse is in many ways a travel book: the descriptions of the journey across the bay, the views that she provides, are exactly what she would do if she were writing a work of literary travel.

—Jan Morris, “The Art of the Essay,” The Paris Review, Summer 1997

This interview took place in the interval between writing Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons, both novels are collected in our just-released book Hav, available in electronic and paperback editions.

Ursula Le Guin on Hav
Donald Morris reviews Hav in Time (World edition)

The Best LGBT Books of All Time →

Picks from Peter Cameron, Alexander Chee, Elaine Myles, and your other favorite LGBT writers. J.R Ackerley, James Schuyler, and Jan Morris all make the list.

goodmenproject:

Let us know if we left anything off!