 Hello and welcome to today's celebration of the life and work of Royal Society of Literature fellow Jan Morris. I'm Molly Rosenberg, director of the Royal Society of Literature, and it's my pleasure to open this evening's conversation between writers influenced by Jan's work a year after she died. We're really pleased that we're joined today by so many of Jan's colleagues and those closest to her, as well as her readers. Thank you all for being with us tonight. This evening the RSL is glad to be working again with our partners, the British Library and production company Unique Media, our thanks to you all for making this discussion possible. Before I hand over to the brilliant Shahidah Bari, our chair for this evening to welcome Pico Aya, Cien Lester and Sarah Moss. I'll give my own very small welcome and introduction to Shahidah. Shahidah Bari is a writer, academic and broadcaster. She's a professor at the London College of Fashion at the University of the Arts London. She read English at King's College Cambridge and critical theory at Cornell University. She's a fellow of the Forum of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. You can hear her on radio and TV as a guest presenter of Inside Culture on BBC Two, and a regular host of BBC Radio Threes Arts and Ideas program Free Thinking. In the Financial Times, Freeze Art Magazine, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and others. Or you can pick up her wonderful book Dressed, The Secret Life of Clothes. Over to you Shahidah. Thank you Molly. Hello and welcome to this vital discussion run by the Royal Society of Literature. This event celebrates the life of the great travel writer and Royal Society of Literature fellow, Jan Morris on the first anniversary of her death. Book lovers, she wrote will understand me and they will know to the part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence. So if you're watching this, then we assume you too are part of the community of book lovers. Part of the pleasure of Jan Morris's work was its range of writing life that takes us from the summit of Mount Everest by the canals of Venice and occupied Trieste to north Wales. Here to talk about the life and legacy of Jan Morris, we have writers Pika Iyer, Cian Lester and Sarah Moss. Travel writer Pika Iyer is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, translated into many languages, including video night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and the Global Soul. He's been an essayist for Time, The New York Times, Harper's and more. His TED talks have received over 11 million views. He served as Ferris Professor at Princeton University, guest director of the Telluride Film Festival and was the first official writer in residence at Raffles Hotel Singapore. Hello Pika. Hello. Cian Lester is a multi-disciplinary musician, a leading LGBTI activist and author of Trans Like Me, which explores transgender identity and the struggle for authenticity in a world of labels. They curate the Trans Pose Arts event for Barbican and they work internationally as a trans and feminist educator. Their work has featured on the BBC, The Guardian, ABC, The Independent, Newsnight and at Sydney Opera House. Cian co-founded the first ever national UK group for young LGBT people. Hello Cian. Hi. Lovely to have you here. We are together virtually. And Sarah Moss is the author of eight novels, including The Sunday Times, Top 10 Best Seller, Summer Water and Ghost War, which was listed for the Women's Prize and shortlisted for the RSL on Duchy Prize. She was born in Glasgow and grew up in the north of England. Now she teaches English and creative writing at University College Dublin. Her new novel, The Fell, is set in the Peak District during the lockdown and has just been released. Hello Sarah. Hello. Great. Hello to you too. It's really lovely to have you and what a treat to be able to talk about a writer as gifted and as provocative, I think, as Jan Morris. Before we start, let's set the scene a little. Jan Morris was a historian, author and travel writer born in 1926 to Welsh and English parents and Wales, of course, would be an important part of her life and work. Most particularly that top left hand corner of Wales between the mountains and the sea where she lived with her wife, Elizabeth. She is particularly known for the Pax Britannica trilogy from 1968 to 1978, a history of the British Empire and for portraits of cities including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She was an accomplished novelist and she was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1961. It was an exciting life in so many ways. She was a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition and she served in the Second World War in Trieste as a regimental intelligence officer. Early works were published under her birth name James until her transition in 1972. And the story of that is recounted in conundrum, which was one of the first memoirs of that kind. And although memoir novels and travel writing would become the genres with which she was most associated, works like the 2001 Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere blurred those distinctive boundaries. In 2019 she published In My Mind's Eye, a collection of her diary entries and Allegorizing's, the latest book, I tried to put a camera there, is a reflection on key moments and memories from her life and that was published by Faber earlier this month. So many entry points into Jan's work. Perhaps that's where we start. It would be useful to know where you first encountered Jan Morris's work and what you made of it. Are you able to recall? Maybe Sarah, I can ask you that. I think the first one I read was Venice before a trip to Venice and I love Venice. I mean, I keep planning to go back while it's still quiet after lockdown. I'm sure it's not actually quiet after lockdown, but that's my fantasy. And I think it can be quite a difficult city to approach because it's so touristy and because it's somehow hard to get a grip on it, there's something quite kind of slippery. And it's I think probably the weight of everybody else who's been to Venice and the, yeah, just the volume of tourism and the difficulty of talking to people who actually live there. And that book is very erudite, but it's also quite friendly. And I think it gave me a way of thinking about Venice as an outsider and feeling legitimate about being an outsider. And I was reflecting on what Jan Morris's work has really meant to me. I was thinking that she gives you permission to be an outsider. She legitimizes that, that sense of alienation, which I really enjoy. I think the idea that you're, I mean, my thinking about travel and place writing is always based on the idea that what we aspire to is to be able to have belonging without ownership, you know, to feel a commitment to in a relationship with a place without feeling to exclude other people from it. And there aren't actually very many writers who do that that she does. And she does it with these iconic cities. The other book that really helped me was the Oxford book. I'm actually speaking from Oxford now and I'm on a book tour, but I came to university here when I was 18 as a young woman from the north of England, very skeptical about Oxford's exclusivity and its social cache and very worried about who I was going to meet. And in a real sense that everybody else there already knew all the special words for things and how to walk through a porter's lodge and all that stuff that you just did not learn growing up in Manchester in the 80s and 90s. And again, she gave me permission to be an intelligent outsider and to know stuff as an outsider. And I think those, those two books were the really valuable ones for me at the beginning and then I went on and read a lot more of her work. And I'm already getting some characterizations of Jan's work that we would recognize this idea of belonging without ownership seems like a really important way of understanding her, her sensibility as a traveler and the intelligent outsider is absolutely her perspective I think isn't it so thank you for that Sarah. Thank you. Where did you start with Jan's work. Really at school and I remember being exhilarated and liberated at the same time because we were having to trudge through all the classics. They felt so out of tune with what was happening in the world. And suddenly there was Jan Morris writing in a classical style that we could associate with Virginia Woolf or Haslett or somebody, but writing for Rolling Stone and writing about the cutting edge and as likely to be seen in a youth magazine as in the spectator. And I loved what Sarah was just saying because I think Jan this is another way of saying the same thing really taught me to be unaffiliated, and that I didn't have to be pressed into any category I didn't have to belong and when I was first I mean, these were pre Internet days and there was a sense that if you wanted to be a central literary figure you had to be in London and New York and I love the fact she was always in the margins at an angle. She would extoll every part of Britain except England itself. And I think she also very early gave me a sense that Well, the thing that struck me I suppose going going back to Oxford, which is where I was born and grew up is that whenever Jan Morris would write about the place where I lived, which is Manhattan or Los Angeles or Kyoto now or Oxford, she would get it intuitively better than any visitor I could imagine as well as seeing things that I don't think any local person would would ever see. And I think she in some ways gave me a sense of how to live. And this notion when I was in my teens, that you could travel around the world to visit its great cities, and take them to be your friends in some ways and I like what Sarah is saying about being both friendly and erudite, because Jan writes about place as if they're the main people in her lives. And she's always very appreciative but she's also undiluted and she writes about them as you would about your the closest place you see the morts and all, but you always find something to affirm in them. So suddenly she she made me think, oh, I can roam around the world live simply and and try to live off the impressions that I share. I think we're going to really look forward to learning more from you about Jan's travel writing because I think that's right isn't it that sense of perception without illusion is absolutely critical to the way that she viewed the world. And where did you start with Jan Morris's work. I think something which I find very interesting with Jan Morris's work is that I first encountered it really as a kind of cultural artifact and I'm part of a historical record so for me it was not reading conundrum as a young person trying to sort of come out and I was you know by that point a very different generation so coming from that sort of post 90s trans liberation viewpoint conundrum felt like a very very different book. And when I really sat down with it and and sort of began to appreciate it properly was as a researcher so looking into the history of trans narrative the history of trans medicalization. The book fitted within a very very long tradition of thinking of the so first, what we might think of as trans memoir appearing at the end of the 19th century. Morris's book is already old in its tradition and it's already sort of published in 1973, working from a lot of the values espoused by late 19th century to mid 20th century sexologists. And as a researcher it was so interesting to take this deep dive going which where is Jan here and where is Harry Benjamin and what's happening behind the scenes and how much can I trust this author. And it was such a multi leveled book that at the end I think what really touched me most was not anything to do with with being trans or sort of any kind of shared understanding of bodies and what it is to to feel the self to be in need of an expansion or change, but it was that sense of enchantment in her writing and actually the point where I felt closest to her was I have a Welsh mother and an English father. And in her writing about the magic of places that I think enchantment is the word I want to keep coming back to with her writing she has that storytellers I, and that sense of the magical that that door in the wall that sort of in sort of magical corner where something could turn into the other and there's always a story just lurking underneath the surface. And that in a roundabout way brought me back to conundrum. Not so much as a shared trans understanding but as a shared human understanding of where might the magic in our own lives lie, and where's the story that we follow and what mysteries can we uncover along the way not to expose them, but sometimes just to in their own no ability and the beauty of that. Wonderful. Doesn't this sound like it's going to be a lovely conversation. I wonder whether I can ask all three of you, where we place jans writing, we've been talking about a range of genres and traditions but is that into your mind is there a particular place that you think she belongs in the history of the 20th century and travel writing or trans member, how do we place her writing if you, if you had to give us a top line as to where she belonged, could you could you do that peak I'm going to pick on you first. I would say a master historian with a fascination for the new. And if I were allowed a second line I would say she's the first person to chronicle all the cities of the globe in that sense are one of our first global writers. I think that's a good putting it Sarah. I was just thinking that she's, she's almost one of those kind of hinge figures of the 20th century I mean, some of what she writes about empire I think we will find quite difficult now and her sense that you can somehow divide the aesthetics from the politics of empire and I mean, I think she was being willfully provocative but there's a way that you can celebrate the flag waving and the music and the, you know, the marching about from the violence. I think we would now find very problematic. But at the same time I was thinking as you were speaking about the tradition of travel writings I really like and admire and I'm thinking about people like Jonathan Rayburn and Kathleen Jamie, who I think share that commitment to to the outside the intelligence of the outside of perspective to to belonging without ownership. So I think she's really at that moment where travel writing is beginning to move away from being quite so plotted in with empire and colonialism I mean she's not looking down on people. It's not exactly part of an ongoing colonial or imperial project although it's still in quite a dark relationship with that colonial and imperial project. So moving toward something much more distinctive and interesting that we see coming in in the later 20th century and I think that very much fits in with her own life history and lifespan between serving in World War two being around forever is which goodness knows as you know, empire colonialism in some ways that it's at its most obvious. And then moving forward into the later 20th century where we're looking at different perspectives and thinking differently about about the outside this point of view so I'd really see her. I'd want to start so I think if we don't do that we're going to have a lot of difficulty with that. But I'd really see her kind of facing actually facing two ways in relation to travel writing and ideology as well as in relation to all kinds of other things. Yeah, facing two ways. I think what I find really fascinating sort of across her works is her own admission that she relies on generalization she relies on sweep she you know there is a sense that she's an impressionistic writer rather than, you know, this is not a footnoted academic work, despite her learning and her enormous curiosity about life. And I think in that respect, she reminds me so very much of reading sort of Virginia Woolf's quite casual life writing I want to say life writing rather than any other form of like it's that sense of a tremendously inquisitive mind looking around and saying, how can I translate this into the poetry and the meter and the rhythm of language. And for that, it almost feels to me to be, it makes me think of people like Joan Didion actually and a lot of other writers who sort of wrote in that impressionistic style and even looking towards people who have used social media. I'm thinking of Rebecca Solnit that she writes these beautiful posts on Facebook. There is that sense of using short form and long form and whatever form you're reaching out and creating that personal connection to the reader. And she feels very friendly. All of her writing feels like I could just be sitting with her having a coffee, or, you know, a glass of wine, which I think she would have enjoyed and she was like well let me tell you this and you're thinking yes I want to hear more it's you know it's a master storyteller. We're talking of friendliness Pika you knew her personally didn't you so what was she like in person. Fearless and resourceful I remember the very first time I met her was in a lobby in San Francisco, and I asked her how are you feeling and she said I think I'm characteristically awful. She said, Ghibli. Well, I've heard that the best cure for jet lag is to walk barefoot on on grass. The next thing I know there she was in her mid 70s, striding out with a lobby taking off her shoes and walking across the nearest court. She speaks for that sense of openness and curiosity that CN was just describing. And I loved when CN was talking about mystery because I think it's a mixture of openness and mystery that makes her such a beguiling presence on the page just as it's her gift for blending and feeling that reminds me of say Joan Didion. But, and the other thing that struck me was that same first time I met her. She is goes back to what Sarah was just saying, she was seeking out some of these old sorts of empire and their memories of the Raj or whatever in northern California but she was doing so in this really really racy, open top, blue American sports car. And I always felt that her writing on empire was to some extent redeemed by the fact that she was always on the side of the renegade and the outlier and the maverick. And as Sarah was saying, she, she could exalt and some of the finer points arguably with grace notes of empire, while always preserving her sympathies for his victims. Should we talk a little bit more in earnest about Jan's travel writing in an interview with the BBC in 2016 she told Michael Palin that she didn't like to be described as a travel writer. As her books are not about movement and journeys they are about places and people which is a rather nice distinction I think I wonder Pika maybe I can start with you about this what made Jan unique among writers of place. That she wasn't giving us an account of a journey but in fact, as you said a portrait on place, and that I was used to the travel writing that was really a kind of spruced up diary and a chronological kind of going from place to place. And as has already been said, in this place of that she brought she would weave the shimmering tapestries that really were as CN said life studies there were depictions of the innermost character of a place. And it was a much more artful and subversively subjective way of catching a place and just much more work of literature, I would say, then the kind of, I went there and then I went there account that I was used to and because she had such fine works that were only refined by the number of places she she went as I say, I felt I could, I could trust her. And part of the mystery of Jan was that she kept keeps herself out of a writing so much. She's always there you're always aware of her judgments her preferences and her enthusiasm, but the piece is never about Jan you get the sense that she's a very responsive person. And as has been said already she was just taking in everything around her and her aim every time she shared a 20 page essay on a city was to give us that city and all its vitality and complexity and contradictions and not smudge it with her own personality. And that's a rare gift to that not many travelers can manage to just to be entirely in the picture but take themselves out of what they're saying really. I think along Sarah or you were a moment ago. No, I was. I was thinking that it's a kind of writing for which we still don't have a very successful word I teach it. And of course I teach I call writing places, because it's not travel writing with all of those kind of heroic implications of the quest narrative. I don't want to call it place writing, but that's not, not really an accepted term and I think we're still quite short of words for nonfiction. So yes, absolutely. And I was thinking about the flirtatiousness often of her kind of vaguely autobiographical writing where she'll drop a little hint and then back off and then say well if you haven't got it was no, you know, it's like a teenager. But I don't understand. And I was thinking that reading allegorising that she keeps it's such a kind of flirtatious peekaboo book where she says it's very intimate but it doesn't actually seem very intimate and then she says well if you can't see the intimacy then you don't get it and I think am I not getting it is there a game going on here you know can I can I find some personal revelation here where it's really kind of tricksy writing. Did you want to come in Sian. I think mainly maybe just as a musician I always love her musical sort of illusions, and that that always brings it and it has that delight for me that her music her writing is tremendously musical as well. And then when she starts bringing in the music that she's listening to or that it is a multi sensory form of writing and I loving conundrum how she talks so much about how she's a sensualist. And that that sort of sense of erotic diffusion, I think comes through her writing and it's appreciation for all those tangible and visceral elements of where she is. I think that's the most incredible thing for a reader that there you are with her because it is so tactile and audible as a way of writing. You're making her sound very alluring she's a musical flat. How delightful is that Pico, you're going to share a little reading with us which is I think an extract from a piece that you wrote about Jan and I think it will give us a sense of the kind of travel writer that she was. Yes, and if I may just to pick up on what Sarah was saying a minute ago. What I loved about allegorizing was that it's a declaration of independence in some ways and it's a statement of her creed. Yeah, at one point she says give me callowness give me fears give me a responsibility. But as I was reading it I started noting down the adjectives. And she did notice that everything on every one she wrote about was a suitably discreet and disguised self portrait, even she walks through a college in Oxford and she says it's a serene and private. And then she describes the ocean liners and she says they're elegant, racy and strong. Who could that be suddenly she encounters a furrier of born to a Hungarian refugee, and she says that his great qualities were to be kind, merry and generous. And again that almost is an affirmation of what she believed in, and I think a declaration of who she thought herself to be. In the Trieste book what's lovely about it is that she gives us this watery in between left behind rather wistful place, and you realize very quickly that she's writing about herself. And I remember to go back to memory I had of her, I kept that book once for Christmas morning, and I read it on Christmas day, and I wrote to her instantly and I said this is not just the best book you've ever written but the most revealing. With Gianni and fluency she wrote back immediately and said yeah that's how I think about it too this is this is my autobiography. I don't I apologize for reading but this won't take too long and one of many pieces I've written on her. Morris likes people, even if she does not always like the countries in which they live, and there's an early morning freshness to her prose that nighttime scenes that are often most distinctive in others are missing from her work. Imagine her talking to everyone she passes on her morning walk, as she describes herself doing or saying even in Sydney having excoriated it before that youth hope and silliness go together in cities as in people. And it's the hope that counts. She admires the patient fatalism of India, you can't help feeling that she's telling us something about herself, describing quote, a kindly acceptance of things as they are supported by the sensible thesis that things are not always what they appear to be. What's made her the definitive chronicler of empire is the fact that she can respond with warmth to both the purple swagger and the swank of its rulers, and even more perhaps to its mavericks and victims, it's quote, the flash of under life that gives her a great city's avariety she writes, and that she who relishes most that the book of her essays put out by Oxford University Press was originally written for Rolling Stone style, panache spirit or her thing, and her sentences are a near perfect blend of ceremony and quiet subversion. Thank you. How perfect. Do you think Pico knowing Jan's work that there is a city above all others that she understood best of all, or a place. I think Venice Venice was closest to her heart maybe. But what always struck me is that she went every single year back to Venice and Manhattan this classical European city, and you know the last word and what's coming tomorrow. It seemed to be very much I love the, the genius faced quality that came out earlier looking both ways. And as I said, to me that's what made her unusual as a chronicler of empire that she was always looking to the future and in some ways she seemed to me this almost Victorian Brit of a vanished age. And, and yet she was in love with young and brash America in allegorizing. It's very much the book of somebody in her 80s but she's love. She's cherishing everything about youth and she's always on the side of the young, I felt. And yourself as a writer of travel. Do you have a sense of how the subsequent tradition traditions of travel writing have emerged might be indebted to Jan's work. I certainly am I mean when I began writing it was embarrassing to me because everything I wrote looked like lesser turned down a muted jam. And I think she influenced me more than any writer, especially when I began to write and more than that the particulars I mean not just the length of the sentences and the texture of the paragraphs, but I would go to the zoo wherever I went and I would go to the cemetery and I and I would pick up the telephone and I realized all of these were things I'd almost subconscious subconsciously picked up from from Jan. And again, what makes her such a pivotal figure is had cadences addiction, the length of her paragraphs so old style, and yet the buoyancy and energy of them are so much 21st century, even a few years ago every now and then reading the New York Times, I'd come upon this really irrepressible fizzy piece of prose and I think here's the latest you know 22 year old when they came out of college and I go to the byline and there was Jan Morris aged 88 I mean she never grew old in a sense. Isn't that a great tip as well whenever you're in a new place, go to the zoo and pick up the phone book I always need the parish notices or pick up a local newspaper but now I should go to the zoo. Sarah, can we can we shift our conversation to talk about the novels and the writing we've really started to talk about Jan's particular skill here as a novelist how do we characterize her work what are its features. Actually, we'd had travel writing far more than her novels which is really interesting and I find. I find the travel writing really novelistically helpful and I was always a bit skeptical about the division between fiction and nonfiction anyway. Because I think the travel writing teaches the novelist so much about observation and looking and noticing and you know place and character and how to write about the unfamiliar with which is really important so for me she's. I mean she's a writer of the real somehow she's. Yeah, I don't I don't think of her much as a novelist which I'm sure is my weakness but it's the travel writing that I really, really love and return to. But I wonder what it is about that that makes perfect sense to me but I wonder what it is about the travel writing that would appeal to a writer fiction like you what is it about the form the sentences, the image whatever it is that makes her a writer writer as it I think it's something to do with what we've been talking about. In relation to her individuality and her kind of reaching towards the word subjective but I'm always pretty skeptical of that in relation to writing because you know subjectivity and objectivity don't really apply. Her willingness to have, I know what it is, her willingness to have her own encounters with a place that she's there quite freshly and immediately. And although as we said before she's very erudite she's read everybody else who's been there and she's read quite a lot of the history. She is absolutely present to place in a way that feels unmediated and is absolutely not unmediated but that's that's part of her gift. So I think it's that kind of rawness or openness or almost agnosticism in the face of the new in the face of a new experience that that teaches us all how to write. See and do you want to come in here. Do you have a sense of chance fiction or have right to leave fiction. So I think I really gravitated towards the Trieste and Venice and Hong Kong places that that I have been very important to me or that I've lived. So I apologize there it's on my to read list. But you, I mean, I think I'm quite interested that you've already said that you, you place her next to Virginia Woolf, for instance, that we are understanding her in a rightly context and that Pika you were talking about her as a as a as a Victorian in some ways and has I think your point Sarah that the line between fiction and nonfiction is decidedly and distinct for for Jan Morris. Yeah, I think I wonder if another way to ask this question to all of you is that the people who don't know her work, where should they start. See and maybe you've got a thought on that. Well, I would be. I'm prejudiced because the the composer that I spend the most time with academically and performatively performance wise is Barbara Strozzi who was a great great Venetian composer whose music is so of the place and I would say if you would love a sort of intro. You know, read Jan Morris on Venice listen to some Venetian composers Vivaldi Monteverdi, Cavalli Strozzi and get that sense of. Oh it's just romance I mean it is impossible romance and that war fluidity and the light that sort of streamed through. I've never actually been to Venice in the summer I've only ever been in January. And that sort of beautiful watery dappled light. And I think Trieste similar similarly it's got that sort of. It just feels like a romance I can't I can't describe it in any other way and there is that. It makes me feel quite swoony. And I'm in the absolute best way this is not but maybe again coming back to Pico's point about this sort of Victorian sensibility there is that sense of sort of reading something which is is lush and yet formal and and I would recommend that but actually having only recently read in my hands I think that's a lovely way in to the rhinos. And again that we keep talking about this sort of Janus figure but but the holding it together both, you know, hot on sleeve and ironic, you know, both hopeful and hopeless it is the everyday it's the magical it's it's a really lovely way in. Yeah, I think we're really getting a sense of her writing fiction or nonfiction Pico did you, did you have an entry point for for reading Jan Marys would you suggest something. I would recommend to anybody among the cities which is really just a collection of 50 portraits some very short many 20 pages long of the great cities of the world some of these written in the 1950s when she was writing these quick dispatches for the Guardian, and these are the 10,000 word pieces for the Rolling Stone. When CN was talking just a minute ago I was loving the fact that, if I'm right, see Sarah called Jan perfectly a writer of the real, and CN was pointing out what a romance she is and there's the sort of heart of Jan which is almost essentially could surrender emotionally to the way maybe she would dream a place would be, but at the same time she was acutely taking note of every last detail so you never feel that she's she's taking taking poetic license as it were she's getting a place precisely, but she's able to see maybe what it dreams, it could be in its best self. Yeah, I would also start with Venice and it's interesting as the end was talking about the romance and the swimming I was thinking yes yes that's absolutely the appeal of that book but you know Pico is also right that I just called her a writer of the real. And I was thinking about the difference for me between reading the Venice book when I've been to Venice several times they're also never in the summer and Trieste which I haven't been to and would like to go to. I'm wondering if there's a difference between reading her when you've been to the place and reading her when you haven't been to the place because those are the two books I would choose and it's interesting that there's there's one where I visited and one one that I haven't. And I'm not sure I would have particularly wanted to go to Trieste if I haven't read her book either so there's something there about the relationship of her writing with its with its locations. That's quite interesting. What great reading this so far. Let's turn again see and perhaps I can come to you to talk more about Jan's the significance of Jan as a figure for the trans community yet when when you were, I think Pico said he read Jan at school and I did too. At the time, of course I had no idea of her story which I think is part of the, the importance of her story that actually you could read a great deal of her work and not know that about her also featured in her memoirs. So how significant to figure has she been the issue for the chance community. I mean I think she is tremendously significant but it's not easy to put in a straightforward kind of way. There's a beautiful essay by Stephanie Bert on what it is to read conundrum now I think it's in Paris review. And I would urge everyone to go and read that before you read conundrum because I think it gives you such a wonderful grounding and what's going on and I think it's odd backwards and sense, because there is this rat, which is so wonderful and particularly as we are we are you know, at the moment we're in a pretty bad cultural transphobic backlash and I think I am not the only. In fact, every trans person I know, both as friends as colleagues. There is a real sense that the walls are closing down and everything we do is pushed through this incredibly narrow lens of, you know, it has to be about this it has to be about this kind of debate which has been fostered on to you and which you didn't choose to be part of. I mean, he's Jen sort of dancing away in a sports car. I love that I absolutely adore that and I, I don't know if this is the point to sort of bring up other works but but I'm you know for the discussion was asked what what books, we would like to see and there are two books out here, one by Harry Josie Giles called deep wheel or or Katie and one by Josephine jakes Josephine my brain is really going to be my brain working very well I apologize. There are so many different variables variations and both of them I feel, I hope that jam would have approved you have sort of sort of hs book, which is a sci fi poetic take on acne. That wonderful mixture of the absolute romance, the deep sense of place sense of possibilities playfulness playing with the with the readers expectations and Juliet's book of these historical stories against sort of jazz place of history and both of them so far removed from the narrow bounds that we frequently find ourselves in this trans people. And I love that about about Jan's work her inspiration. I do find calendar a very difficult book and I think as I have maybe expressed maybe it's a very different read from someone who is trans and who knows the history then then maybe someone who isn't so all the way the language through is not of it's not the of its time and that's what's very interesting to me it's of some parts of its time, but other parts, you know she completely rejects sort of other more more radical readings that were happening at the same time. And the pressure, you know one of her doctors was Harry Benjamin and Harry Benjamin, very famously set up systems whereby he was an arbiter of who counted as a true transsexual which is a term you see over and over again in Morris's book, with set phrases that acted as shibboleth that you can access through Benjamin and his ilk if you could find the right narrative if you could put it into words, and all the way through conundrum we see Benjamin's clinical language reflected in Jan's story about herself and I'm I can't help but think that this language originate in your own conception of yourself or was that a later addition and later made sense of the narrative. And a book like that is both a huge life saving gift to so many people, and yet at the same point, you know in Jan's description of people who were not true transsexuals of people that she saw deemed sexual perverts or sort of people who were psychotic or mentally unwell, who didn't deserve to transition, you set up that double, double edged sword it could be a gift or it could be a punishment to read that book. So I think it's, I think it's a beautiful book and it's, but it's difficult, you know that the moments where she's really tackling her own racism are difficult to read. But you know it is not a straightforward, you know, oh you think you might be trans go out and read this book I think it's much much more. It is a mystery in and of itself, I, you know, I don't want to sound horrifically corny, but it's called conundrum it's a conundrum of a book. It's not straightforward. So I think she couldn't be reduced to one, one simple figure trans community because she's so many. I do think it must. It demonstrates tremendous courage to confront with openness those conundrums actually. I don't know myself but it on a public sphere as well in that way but I wonder whether there is a place for Jan Morris, and if it is a widely acknowledged place in trans writing and trans history, where we are historicizing the phenomenon seems to be really important that it is not just something that's been happening in the 2020s. It has always been happening and it's always been a conundrum and has been wrestled within complicated ways. I absolutely and I think there is this wonderful aspect, you know you you reconundrum and in it you have Jan Morris writing about the Chevalier day on and you know you have Jan. Okay, so the Chevalier day on is an amazing figure in history I almost don't want to spoil too much. I believe that her portrait might still be in the National Portrait Gallery. Yep, a spy, a diplomat, a tremendous sword fighter, and there were bets on the London's buck exchange as it was back then about what sex she actually was and it. Again, it feels almost, you know if Jan Morris hadn't written about her as a historical figure maybe Morris may have had to make her up because she is such a perfect example of what we're getting at. But there's so much debate obviously you know who was day on which would we say that she's a trans woman now would we not you know some scholars were very sort of insistent saying no no no you know he just pretended to be a woman as a diplomatic mission or a spy mission. Whereas sort of more evidence which has now been uncovered we indicate maybe that's not the case and maybe she really did understand herself as a woman as she lived. And it brings me certainly as a as a trans researcher and writer currently writing my own history of place and of gender and gender variance into that impossibility of knowing what we can't know you know that the known the known unknowns the unknown unknown it all of that kind of stuff you. You have Morris, who is so curious and so open and intellect, writing a book where she clearly was not open or curious about quite a lot of other things she could have drawn from. Yet here am I sort of researching into Morris thinking oh well I'm doing the same thing we're only human of course we're going to be doing this as well it. How best to describe this except that I don't think it is helpful to think in terms of oh man this person is a heroin to the trans community and this person is a villain. But she is an enormously important figure and she is real and tangible and human in the way that we all are. And it would be wrong to say that that's all 100% positive, but, but by saying that I'm not negating the tremendous positivity either because it is incredible and she did save lives by what she wrote what she did and, and I would not be able to integrate that at all. And maybe there's a humility of her writing and maybe encourages the humility of the reader and also the writer themselves to think, or we're all just doing our best and again maybe in that sense of travel in place all I can do is sort of look into the phone book and, you know, look at the zoo and think where am I now. I think that's very well said and we must get a reading from you in a moment because I know you've selected something of Jan's work but I just want to give Pico and Sarah a moment to come in on the question of memoir and that part of Jan's writing whether you had any thoughts that you wanted to add to see ends there. As I'm listening to our discussion develop I keep thinking that Jan was basically mischievous and majestic at the same time which is a really unusual combination. And I think one word that one needs to invoke is pleasure, because it seems that's the word that the rings through allegorizes, allegorizing and an earlier book of hers memoir ish was pleasures of a tangle of life. And one thing that strikes me as I listened to see and talk about conundrum is whether it's in conundrum, or in navigating very difficult parts of the world, to which most travel writers are hostile or a quick to share their discomforts. Jan was sort of indomitable, and it's striking and allegorizing, she gets robbed in Venice in fact, and that episode, she comes out with an unforced happy ending. Later she's overcharged by a cab driver, and she says oh he's an endearing old rascal bless him. And there was something about the way that Jan was this kind of pleasure craft is sailing at high speed through the waters and really undented by any that came her way and I think that's a rare gift there was some degree of resilience in her that nothing would really throw her off course including maybe that remarkable change of genders midlife. Sarah, did you want to add anything. I don't think I have much to add really I mean I think I go back to what I said about allegorizing there's this kind of hide and seek game going on that I like but find slightly frustrating. I think Pico is absolutely right about the, the resting on pleasure I was rereading pleasures of a tangle of life a couple of days ago, and thinking she's so gloriously unashamed about the primacy of pleasure in her life. Sometimes quite provocatively, but you don't very often read that and I wonder how it, how we might see it in relation to some of the issues of identity that she's absolutely upfront. It's not moralized. She's not, she's not interested in kind of moral grandstanding at all she's interested in insensuality and pleasure and fun. And I think that it's quite hard to integrate that into many of our public discussions and debates at the moment we don't make much space for pleasure. So that's one of the things I like about I think that that insistence that pleasure has huge value and that we should, we should prioritize it. Dan, should we should we get the reading I think you've selected something from in my mind's eye which is diary entries that right. I did I thought I wanted to read her entry for day 186 simply because it felt that for me it really captured her combination of magic and every day, which I find so enchanting I keep saying the word enchanting but that's what it feels like she's casting a spell. So, when the skies are clear once or twice a day I see the silent white streaks of vapor trails high among the clouds and they never fail to move me. They always seem to traveling couples one after the other like pairs of faithful friends, and they are always flying purposefully to the West. I assume they are airliners from England or perhaps from the continent of Europe on their way to America, but it is the silent enigma of their passage that fascinates me. There's a sense of mystery from birds day after day I wonder as I watched the birds in our garden or down by the sea shore what an earth they are all up to, and what enables or obliges them to do whatever it is they're doing. Today, for instance, a small flock of turns flew over my head and settled on the sea surface a few hundred yards out. I watched them attentively through my binoculars. And what do you think they were doing. They were doing absolutely nothing at all. They sat there gently bobbing up and down with the tide. They were not eating anything or foraging or even apparently communicating with each other. They simply sat there on the sea until quite suddenly for no apparent reason they rose from the water as one and flew back over my head into the fields behind. What were their purposes. Were they preparing for some immense migratory flight later in the year where they are paying some celestial instructions. Whatever their intentions or obligations I saw them as remote ancillaries of those high white vapor trails silently silently navigating the imperial. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Why did you select that particular day. I adore travel, and I adore those moments, which I think traveling brings to life in which you can bring back into your own home where you sit somewhere you've never been before and you feel instantly at home and you have a cup of coffee and you've never tasted it before and you're soaking in the smells and the sounds and everything is unfamiliar and everything is homely at the same time that that sense of almost. Coming back to Virginia Woolf almost that you've you know the curtain has lifted and you get that sort of peak behind and in that moment just of being at home in her little corner of Wales that sense of that both deep connectedness and that wonder of being on a magical journey I I love it and I love how she could take that and and find it not just you know in every corner of the world but find in her corner of Wales as well. I wanted to ask you about memoir as a particular form for for for Jan and for the trans writers at the moment that it seems to be the exemplary form in which trans identity is being expressed and I wonder how we place Jan in that tradition and if you if you think that it is the why is it the form at the moment. I think it's got a long history as a form and I personally think it would be quite a good time for it to die off as a primary form. And I say this is someone maybe I have a chip on my shoulder because I, I use life writing in my work but I have not written the memoir and I don't plan on writing a memoir and yet I am often said oh you've written a memoir and you're thinking I really haven't knew if you've read it you would know I haven't and I'm not try I think memoir is a tremendous form and I love reading it, but it grew out of. I think we can argue quite convincingly that it grew out of the sex ecological patient accounts from the 19th century, and it became sort of the primary form that we understood gendered sexual minorities was as a unburdening of to a sympathetic ear. And, again, we see that through very early texts like the diary of an androgen to a co authored work by Colin bear and Magnus Heschfeld in very early 20th century called the memoirs of a man's maiden years which still has the best title ever. And I, I find it fascinating I find it useful but I think it reaches a point where it doesn't move us forward and it doesn't allow us as trans authors to do more. And I think what I think is very sad is that in in lots of independent presses trans authors are doing more and Jan Morris, you know, in all of her writing, she did more. And I would love to see memoir, maybe come back into a broader selection a broader menu of choices that we could make rather than being the only the only option on the menu which I think currently it is. And I think it's, you know, it follows a set pattern which again is very much set out in the early sex ecological reports you know, when did you know how old were you, what did you do about it now here's the peak of our story here's here's the surgery, and then we subside down and again and Yeah, I think we can have more fun. And again, the thing about Jan is being someone very mischievous. I would love to see more and again from independent presses I think we are we're seeing sci fi novels and love stories and incredible poetry collections. Or children's books and graphic novel, you know, I just want all of them I want to be greedy and grab them all. That's exciting isn't it that new frontier of that form of writing or that for that mode of expression I think that's very exciting. Can we, can we turn to Jan's last posthumous book allegorizing. I think you've already you will have it. I'm afraid I have not send you a copy. Thank you, I really appreciate it. But I wonder a picot and Sarah, and how you see this book in the context of Jan's career what what is this book trying to do do you think I see it as a companion piece to the test book, which almost was a culmination of her writing life and victory have farewell to place writing really through disguised memoir, I would say. And as I was listening to you and see and talk a minute ago I was thinking that my sense as she we made the form of travel writing by turning it into this impressionism we've been discussing. And I think she only wrote one novel but it was certainly a novel not like most people's. And she sort of upended the the genre of memoir by writing a memoir without disclosing too much of herself I felt. And that's exactly that passage that CN wrote when I read when she was describing the clouds flying west together. I thought that's a self portrait of Jan and Elizabeth and one of the remarkable things she did is James Morris became Jan Morris and sailing in other words, lived with Elizabeth 61 years as if nothing had ever changed. And that's one of the other beautiful mysteries of Jan that the kind of thing that would lead to so much soul searching for many people. She seemed just to carry off lightly, which takes us away from from your question but I think allegraising is a is a sort of playful coder and footnotes to the many other self portrait she's given us. Derek did you want to add to that. I kind of read it as a provocation from beyond the grave I mean there's something knowing and playful and almost manipulative about the way she writes about death and her own dying in that book and she knows it's not going to be published until after she's dead and that therefore by the time you're reading it she's speaking from the great beyond. There's almost something like her travel writing in that or her place writing. She's really pushed I mean you know, the bound from which no traveler returns. You can't write about your own debt you can't write about being dead you can't write from beyond the grave but she's really kind of pushing at that one, and kind of mocking and provoking and it's it's balanced on the edge of the impossible and you know that and she is still doing it. That extent it seems like a final sort of high wire act of how you know how far can you go and what can you get away with it's kind of outrageous actually as a book. I really enjoyed that but I was also, yeah it's just really hard to know how to read it because when she keeps saying everything is an allegory and I'm allegorising I was thinking. I'm not sure I get it, you know, I don't I'm not sure I see the allegory and maybe I'm not a very good reader here maybe you know maybe I'm failing, but I also think. I think we're all failing or she knows that we're all failing or there's something there's something really mischievous about that. I have people who have not yet read it that I mean the book as a thesis as it were a kind of gambit which is that and John writes I have begun to think that my life itself is one long allegory. And the older I get the more my conviction grows and I, you're right Sarah it's quite hard to understand quite what that means I don't know if you you got to the bottom of it, what that what John means by that. No, I agree with both of you. She sets up this premise and then flits away from it really. But it's interesting that it's a book about getting old and approaching death, and yet there's no fragility in it and very little fear, and at certain points she describes falling on her face, more than once in many cities in the world but again no poignancy or self pity there. Yes, yeah. I will listen to you. The three of you talk I look sus to wonder whether perhaps this is a very basic way of thinking about it but but in all the ways that Jan is writing about not herself but about other places that she is also writing about herself that the clouds that she sees are her as you say Pico, and that there is a kind of very subtle subjectivity to use the way that Sarah was screaming about that is is in the work and that is Jan without being overbearing. And so that the things that she writes about our allegories of her sensibility her subjectivity. I don't know if that's right but I think that's part of the mischief of the book isn't it. Absolutely. Well, well I did because I think I would tie that in with what Sarah said earlier about the places she has been and the places she hasn't. And I think that's the ultimate compliment that that it doesn't really matter but I do feel that, even though we always feel this presence of Jan and everything that she writes, I think she's one of the most reliable guides to cities and other themes that I can think of. And if I wanted to know, as Sarah was saying before what what Trieste is like, or actually, Hong Kong or Sydney or Toronto. She's the only person I would turn to I wouldn't turn to somebody who lived in those cities and I, it's no other traveler I could think of that. She has so much faith in her instincts so that the interplay of the subjectivity and this extraordinary gift for responsiveness and observation. That's probably part of the, the great magic of Jan. That's quite a compliment isn't it. I wonder whether I can turn to the three of you more personally whether you might be able to speak as we come to the end of our conversation. How she influenced you, how she's influenced your work, is there a way that you might be able to identify Jan's influence exerted on your own writing and or work more broadly. CN perhaps you could speak to that. I think one of the reasons I chose the extract I did is because I love the rhythm. And I think the use of words is so extraordinary. And yet at the same point it's, it's occasionally purple but it's very not flashy. It manages to have that conversational tone with those little moments of glory that just capture you and sort of you feel that lift. And for me as a nonfiction writer as opposed to sort of the fiction that I write and no one gets to read. It's something I'm always aiming for is that sense that it's the best of conversation. And it is it is the elevated sense of conversational style that that yet has within it. The rhetoric and I think about, you know, I do wonder about that childhood being a chorister and I think, you know, as a sort of former sort of choral scholar. I wonder how much that call and response and that musical intonation how much it played, because when you read these words they, they flow they hit their beats, they hit their beats and then they'll do a little repetition little cadence. And that, you know, beyond any sense of the content of the writing is what I'm looking to express as a nonfiction writer and what I love most and reading nonfiction is that sense of calling within a fiction's grasp and loving every ebb and flow of their storytelling. I really love that yes and I think that that matters to me as well and I don't think it's particularly quality of nonfiction either I think you can do it in fiction it's probably one of the things I have learned from reading her. But I think certainly thinking about my own travel writing which I do more more as essays and books. That way of being unashamed of her own vulnerability and uncertainty and alienation. And I think the rather writers who do that I mean I come back to Jonathan Raven and Kathleen Jamie but they're doing it after her. And I think the idea that alienation can be a position of narrative strengths, rather than weakness in relation to place writing I mean we've known that in relation to fiction since the 18th century but that you can approach a place with certainty and a sense of not belonging and that that's actually a position of narrative and intellectual strength was really important to me. Okay. Well I think I already confessed that writing on place when I began writing, I was much too influenced by John but I can't think of a better person to be influenced by and I still can't think of anyone really who writes like her which is another very high compliment. And then I started to feel that I had to go inward more than I had to leave Jan behind because I think as we've been saying she's coy and she plays complicated games and she talks about all agree but doesn't really push hard into it. But I still suspect they'll never be another Jan and when I was reading allegorisings. I was thinking there's such warmth in the book and yet such a sense of adventure. There's so many people who can travel to the far ends of that world and still keep that their poise intact and their sense of delight. Uninjured. Thank you so much. Pico IO, Sarah Moss and CN Leicester. Allegorisings by Jan Morris is out now as is served with new novel the fell. And if you'd like to learn more about RS elements to visit our web page we hope you might join us again. In the meantime, happy reading and goodbye.