Word: jannings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...raise no eyebrows, let alone lead to a book. But Morris' circumstances were rather special. For one thing, the other woman was Morris himself. After undergoing a transsexual operation in Casablanca to shed his manhood and the name James, Morris now lives in Bath, England, under the name Jan Morris, happily experimenting with lipstick, twin sweater sets and pearls...
...raised travel writing to the level of art (Cities, The World of Venice), branched skillfully into history (Pax Britannica), and once turned a bespoke book on, of all things, the World Bank (The Road to Huddersfield) into one of the more memorable popular essays on economics. Yet, as Jan Morris admits in her first book, Conundrum, an autobiography about the switch from "James to Jan," James Morris regularly used to pray "Please, God, make me a girl...
...simply that during the whole of a successful life as a schoolboy, soldier and father-in short, as a male-Morris was tormented by the growing realization that his gender, his inner self, his center of being, his very soul, was feminine. Everything that he eventually did to become Jan was done-he says -from an agonized need for unity between sex and gender, between body and soul. In the process, though, he came to feel that in seeking to become female he was aspiring to a higher order of being. Conundrum quotes Goethe at the end of Faust invoking...
Fortunately for the reader, Jan Morris reads better than Goethe. She writes, in fact, very much like James. Conundrum is a lover's leap removed from those case histories of sexual maladjustment that dish up undigested gobbets of Freud liberally sauced with prurience and self-pity. The book is a brief and graceful, often witty memoir of Morris' inner and outer life. The outer life proceeds from a happy childhood in an artistic upper-class Welsh family (he read Huck Finn, cherished animals, and was taught to "wash my hands before tea"), through years as a choirboy...
Empyrean Love. Oxford, says Jan, saved James from madness by instilling in him an attitude of tolerance and self-amusement. But in his 20s, James' secret sense of anguishing incompleteness seemed hopeless. The doctors whom he saw blithely suggested that he wear gayer clothes, or bluffly urged him to "soldier on for a lifetime" as a male. Then he met Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a Ceylon tea planter...