Jan Morris was one of the most celebrated travel writers of the twentieth century. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City. Born James Humphry Morris, she published under her birth name until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female. Selections of her entire body of work were collected into a magnum opus entitled The World: Life and Travel 1950-2000.
Note: Of all the travel writers I’ve approached to interview for my monthly series over the past 20 years, Jan Morris was one of the most legendary. She declined my 2006 email invitation for an interview, saying “I’ve never considered myself a travel writer, and hate to be thought one.” Still, I liked that she took the time to write back (instead of just ignoring my request). Jan died in Wales one year ago this month, at age 94. And, despite her distaste for the term, she will forever be remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest travel writers. The Q&A below, rendered in my standard format, remixes quotes from Jan’s 1997 Paris Review interview as well as the intro to her 2005 essay collection, The World.
How did you get started traveling?
I was brought up in a world whose map was painted very largely red, and I went out into the world when I was young in a spirit of imperial arrogance. I felt, like most British people my age, that I was born to a birthright of supremacy; out I went to exert that supremacy. But gradually in the course of my later adolescence and youth my views about this changed.
How did you get started writing?
I began as a reporter, having been persuaded (chiefly by American examples) that journalism was a proper avenue into literature. I joined The Times of London from Oxford, and almost immediately began my vagrant life, presently gravitating to what was then the Manchester Guardian. These two characterful newspapers, then at the height of their fame, prestige and varied idiosyncrasy, not only allowed me to treat the writing of news dispatches more or less as the writing of essays, but also gave me a grandstand view of events, which disgracefully boosted my ego. In no time at all I was pontificating about humanity’s problems, and advising states and nations how to solve them. As Max Beerbohm said of himself and Oxford, it was The Times and the Guardian that made me insufferable, and I am grateful to them still.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
If I was an aspirant litterateur, I was also an aspirant anarchist. I have disliked Authority always, though sometimes seduced by its resplendence. When I was writing for newspapers this prejudice sometimes invigorated and sometimes inhibited my journalism, but by the middle of the 1960s I had freed myself from all employers anyway, and wandered on my own. I had become precociously soured by the great world, and no longer wanted my writing to be pegged to the day’s news. For the rest of the century I was engaged chiefly in writing books, enabling the process by selling travel essays to magazines, mostly American, to keep my family from destitution. I had worked for only two newspapers, but during the last four decades of the century I wrote for dozens of magazines in the English language, and produced some thirty-five books of my own.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
I generally travel alone, but sometimes with my partner, with whom I’ve lived for forty years. But dearly though I love her, if I’m going to be working I find I’m better on my own. Love is rather inhibiting in my view. We are always thinking about what each other wants to do. Whereas, to be writing about a place you’ve got to be utterly selfish. You’ve only got to think about the place that you’re writing. Your antenna must be out all the time picking up vibrations and details. If you’ve got somebody with you, especially somebody you’re fond of, it doesn’t work so well. So, although I never have the heart to tell her this, I would really rather not have her come along.
When I started, the feminist movement hadn’t really happened, so, of course, there was more of a gulf between a male and female traveler. Now things are very, very different. Many women are unnecessarily timid about travel. I don’t believe it is so different for a woman or a man nowadays. Of course, there are actual physical dangers of a different kind. But the general run of hazard is exactly the same for men as for women, and the treatment that a woman gets when traveling is, by and large, better. People are less frightened of you. They tend to trust you more. The relationship between women, between one woman and another, is a much closer one than the relationship between men. Wherever a woman travels in the world she’s got a few million friends waiting to help her.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
If I’m commissioned by a magazine to write an essay, what I do is go to the place for a week and think about nothing but that place. And then, the last few days, in a kind of frenzy of ecstasy or despair, I write three drafts of the essay, one draft each day. I write continuously—it doesn’t matter how many hours—until the thing is done. I love the feeling of wrapping the whole thing up, popping it off in the post and going somewhere else. It is very satisfying. I do think that the impact of it, the suddenness and abruptness of it, makes it go better.
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.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
I think some of the great travel books have not prepared me for the place I’m going to. One of them is one of my favorite books, Doughty’s Arabia Deserta; it’s a marvelous book and a great work of art, but the image it presents of the desert and its life isn’t the image I felt. I’m not grumbling at all. He wasn’t trying to tell me what I was going to see in the desert. He was just telling me what the desert was like to him. But that’s one book that doesn’t seem to match up to my own conceptions of the desert. Sterne, for example, too. I can’t say that France seems very much like A Sentimental Journey to me. There are some other people too, like Alexander Kinglake, who wrote deliberately in an entertaining mode, consciously painting an arresting picture of life. It isn’t much like it when you get there.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
I’m not the sort of writer who tries to tell other people what they are going to get out of the city. I don’t consider my books travel books. I don’t like travel books, as I said before. I don’t believe in them as a genre of literature. Every city I describe is really only a description of me looking at the city or responding to it. Of course, some cities have a more brilliant image. In this case the city overtakes me so that I find I am not, after all, describing what I feel about the city but describing something very, very powerful about the city itself. For example, Beijing: I went to that city in my usual frame of mind, in which I follow two precepts. The first I draw from E. M. Forster’s advice that in order to see the city of Alexandria best one ought to wander around aimlessly. The other I take from the psalms; you might remember the line “grin like a dog and run about the city.”
Tourism encourages unreality. It’s easier in the tourist context to be unreal than real. It’s the easiest thing in the world to buy a funny old Welsh hat and pop it on and sit outside selling rock candy in some bogus tavern. It’s much easier than being real, contemporary. Tourism encourages and abets this sham-ness wherever it touches. I detest it.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Start to finish, adolescent reportage to aging attempts at literature, through all the inhabited continents in the course of my half-century, observing some of the historical events of the time, describing most of the world’s great cities, sampling many of its cultures, feeling in my bones some of its epochal changes and recording always its influences upon myself. I had a marvelous time of it, and I hope that, however nonsensical my judgements or distasteful my self-indulgences, at least some of my life’s delight infected my prose.
I was writing about the world, certainly, but it was my world – as I put myself in another context: ‘Is that the truth? Is that how it was? It is my truth. If it is not invariably true in the fact, it is true in the imagination.
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