BIOGRAPHY
Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides
Paul Clements
Scribe, $55

More than 30 years ago, I had occasion to compare a new book by Jan Morris about Spain with Robert Hughes’ Barcelona a bit disparagingly.

The most famous man to have transitioned into a woman at that time happened to be in Melbourne and I received a letter in a calligraphic, very masculine hand, saying in an echo of my own phrasing about Hughes, “Sir, my major work is a three-volume history of the British Empire in the 19th century and if you look at it you will see that it is at least as full of blood and will as anything by Robert Hughes.”

Jan Morris was a journalist of genius, and also struck a blow for sexual transition that sounded around the world when she had that operation in Casablanca in 1972. She was born James in 1926 and died in 2020. The stirring account of how she had her body changed is Conundrum, but Morris’ sexual identity was always a puzzlement to her.

It didn’t stop her marrying Elizabeth Tuckniss and she said her feelings for her “over-rode from the start all my sexual ambiguities”. Her first son was born in 1952 when she was 26 and several more children followed. One of them, another son, said, “We were introduced, but we never actually got to know each other”, and got far away. The rest were passionately on her side.

But James Morris was a star, the young journalist on Edmund Hillary’s Everest expedition in 1953. The Times had paid for the expedition in return for exclusive coverage. Morris said of the explorers, “the world’s finest and friendliest climbers, they pushed me over the precarious makeshift bridges and dragged me through the wilderness of crumbled snow and ice”. Morris also caught the moment when the demonically energetic Hillary was asked, after the ascent, why he was staying in a particular hotel. In a brilliant play on George Mallory’s famous remark about Everest he replied: “Because it is there.”

And Morris was there all over the place. For The Guardian he covered the Suez Crisis and reported how the French together with the Israelis had napalmed Egypt. The great Israeli general Moshe Dayan denied it, as did the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, but Morris’ reporting proved true and helped to change the course of history: Eden had lied to parliament and had to resign.

Morris’ reflections had that edge of almost novelistic ambivalence. You catch a hint of the same kind of ambiguity in the Adolf Eichmann trial. She writes with a formal magnificence beginning, “In the year of Nisan,” (invoking the high music of the ancient Hebraic calendar), and concludes that through its ritual the Jews have answered back to history. But she also notes that, through his expensive new suit, Eichmann is perceptibly trembling, and you have the remote sense of a writer who does not believe in vengeance even when it is just.