‘A drip of unkindness, undermining everything’: what was life like for Jan Morris's children?

Last year, amassing the facts of Jan Morris’s vast life, Paul Clements wrote to Henry Morris. Born while his father was reporting the conquest of Mount Everest in 1953, Henry was 19 when James became Jan in 1972. Could he describe their relationship? “We were introduced,” came the terse reply, “but we never actually got to know each other.”

How easy is it for a biographer to get to know Jan Morris? For all the super-abundance of material, which Clements has ferreted out with commendable tenacity, she feels an elusive, even niggardly subject. Throughout her 94 years – half spent yearning for the elsewhere of womanhood, half as a reluctant transgender torchbearer – her self-defence lay in secrecy. She moated herself behind twinkling charm, the gaiety of laughter and words, words, words: 3,000 a day, 4,000 at her most Stakhanovite, almost all of them delightful.

The figure who peeps through cracks in Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides is a sphinx. “No questions about me,” she told one interviewer. “She wriggles out of hard issues and self-revelation,” found Sara Wheeler, interviewing her for the Telegraph in 2003.

When Morris submitted Conundrum, her exuberant 1974 account of transitioning, her editor at Faber insisted on a less veiled draft ­honestly confronting her family’s confusion, which it seems she did little to alleviate. Morris’s youngest child Suki was eight. After informing her that Daddy was now to be called Jan, Morris refused to talk about it further. The child was left to work out what to tell people.

While the youngest son Twm (né Tom; like Morris, a committed Welsh nationalist) keeps the flame, the other children are more vexatious. Henry essentially vanished. Mark, the oldest son, would publicly refer to Jan as “my father”. Contradicting Morris’s frequent avowals that kindness is the primary virtue, Suki alludes to “a drip, drip, drip of unkindness with her, undermining everything”.

Being unauthorised (Wheeler’s official life is scheduled for Morris’s centenary in 2026), Clements has done well to secure these perspectives. But he doesn’t wire them into the circuit board of Morris’s psychology. Perhaps, having edited her 80th birthday tribute, he feels loyal to his subject, whose generosity to him is acknowledged. There should be more, too, on the considerable ego Morris often joked about herself (she picked her own book, Venice, on Desert Island Discs). You would also wish him to find better words for the marvellous euphony of Morris’s prose, which embodied all the swagger and swank she so enjoyed in the British empire. ­Praising her “crisp”, “unfussy”, “readable”, “witty and personal” style, her “precise phrasemaking” and “vivid similes” isn’t up to snuff.

This is as much encyclopaedia as biography – “a heavy doughnut” as Morris once said of a book by Laurens van der Post. Some discoveries are presented as accountancy. No fewer than 20 footnotes in a history by David Cannadine, we learn, refer to the Pax Britannica trilogy, in which there are 17 references to Morris’s naval pin-up Admiral “Jacky” Fisher. If we’re playing that game, there are a good 300 uses of the word “review” here and an exhausting number are quoted: roughly 10 per Morris book.

To write about gender is to enter a minefield. As a baby, Morris was nicknamed “Him” by his father. Clements, tasked with choosing pronouns, plumps for “she/her” from the off, yielding some odd sonorities in all-male spaces: “She never became a member of the Scouts... Morris explored La Serenissima with her fellow soldiers.” While efficiently tracking Morris through school, the Army, Oxford, journalism and books, then into old age, the story of the transition is the biography’s true Everest and Clements clambers up it with finesse and sensitivity.

There’s an inevitable amount of fog at the top. Morris’s interdict on privacy was observed with Trappist rigour by Elizabeth Morris, whom James married in 1949. “She should write a book about life with [you],” someone suggested. That would surely have been discouraged. Aside from one wise and empathetic letter to the Sunday Times in 1974, we barely hear from Elizabeth for more than 40 years until, during an interview, she quietly slips Jan a note of magnificent banality: “I’m going out to buy some superglue.” Perhaps it was for refastening the joins of an unfathomable union.

Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides is published by Scribe at £25. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books