| One Year On: Return & Re-evaluation |
Radio Arts Feature |
| Horatio Clare “Jan Morris: Writing a Life” , BBC Radio 4 , November 18, 2021 |
Artists live twice and the life-after-the-life can be uncertain. Assessments may rise; equally they may fall. Horatio Clare is the first to make his reassessment a year after the close of the first life, (below 26th November 2020.) Clare has a professional background in radio and the programme, layered in chapters, makes for an elegant and eloquent sixty minutes. He opens with a technique he has used before. He is physically there to the westward side of Snowdonia. The waters of the Dwyfor may be heard. The house outside Llanystumdwy has busts on the roof, one curiously of an admiral, Jackie Fisher. Clare is awed by the vastness of the library inside. But then writers are always readers. A strong range of contributors has been gathered: biographer Paul Clements, Michael Palin, Sathnam Sanghera. Sarah Wheeler paints the background. Travel writing was a genre that had flourished from “Eothen” to the 1930s. At the time when Jan Morris made the move from journalism to literature the genre was moribund. Twm Morus provides a family context. The sound of the typewriter was eternal. The writer wrote every day, including Christmas Day, Clare's theme is the continuity of art and person. Jan Morris “authored and guarded the story of herself with utter determination.” The early days are sketched with economy. The days of journalism saw the report of the climbing of Mount Everest. Morris broke the story of the military collusion behind the 1956 invasion of Suez. The journalist encountered Philby, Eisenhower, Che Guevara. “Cities, countries and epoch all treated with magnificence”, says Clare, with “scholarship and the authenticity of the moment.” Morris made herself a writer's land pitched between journalism and literature. The times helped. The Guardian encouraged its star writers to be essayists. Contracts were made that allowed for substantial periods of time for writers to write. Artists are of their time. To be born in 1926 is to both observe the era and to bear its imprint. The “Pax Britannica” is a monument- vivid, detailed, coloured- but difficult to accept in 2021 in its entirety. The programme has not sidestepped it. Clare: “it also contains something deeply troubling.” He is astonished at the confession in an interview: “I've nearly always found myself dealing with it as an aesthetic subject not really as a political or even a moral subject.” Sathnam Sanghera, a leader among a new generation to write about empire, is critical but generous. “She comes across as fundamentally humane”, he says, “in a nuanced intelligent way...She's not a culture warrior...Unfortunately everyone's so bloody angry. And she had a nuance, and that's a rare thing when it comes to empire.” Jan Morris has left a broadcast legacy and the programme is interleaved with her own words spoken in their unmistakable phrasing and tone. The childhood on the southern side of the Bristol Channel is remembered. It was a location of ships constantly in view, following the world's trails that connected Cardiff or Avonmouth to distant regions. The writer in old age is warm in memory: “I've enjoyed this life very much. And I admire it. It's been a very good and an interesting life. I've made a whole of it. I've done all the books to be, to make one big long autobiography. My life has been one whole self-centred exercise in self-satisfaction.” Although it was Venice that made the reputation it was the city across the nearby sea with which she most identified. She thought that “Trieste” was her best book. “Trieste is more self-indulgent than all the others. It's the one that gets closest to revealing what I feel about myself. But people sometimes don't recognise that, they read it as another damned travel book. “For me Trieste is an allegory of limbo. My acquaintance with the city spans the whole of my adult life. But like my life it still gives me a weighty feeling as if something big and something unspecified is about to happen. “Outsider as I am I see myself as part of this half-real, half-imagined seaport... I've always felt myself to be an outsider, I've written as an outsider...I'm always an onlooker. I've never pretended to be anything else.” Her book on transitioning gender was without precedent. A television interview is replayed where the tone is savage. Clare revisits an interview with Vincent Kane in 1973. “What I've done”, says the newly named Jan, “is to honour an inner lifelong and ineradicable conviction that I had been put into the wrong body.” A reading from “Conundrum” follows: “I was three or perhaps four year old when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well. It was the earliest memory of my life.” She talks of a kind of epiphany of completeness: “the marvellous thing that happened to me is that two years ago something clicked inside me and I felt that all the parts of me for the first time had formed a whole, a definition of happiness and one that often people don't achieve consciously.” “Jan Morris: Writing a Life” is a first word not a last and Horatio Clare ends on that note: “You come away from a journey with Jan Morris knowing there is no final word on any time, any place, any person. There are only the stories we tell..her religion, she said, was kindness.” The programme was produced in Cardiff by Gareth Jones I-player Link https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011jxq A guide to the sequence "A Writer Remembered" can be seen below 19th March 2021. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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