Where to Start Reading: The Travel Writing of Jan Morris
‘At one time or another I have approached some splendid places, most of them distinct with mystery or age: Venice on a misty Spring morning, silent and shrouded, like a surrendered knight-at-arms; Moscow, its fortress barbarically gleaming; Everest, the watch-tower, on the theatrical frontiers of Nepal and Tibet; or Kerak of the Crusaders, high and solitary in the mountains of Moab.’
— from Coast to Coast: A Journey Across 1950s America (1956)
Soldier, journalist, historian, author of forty books, Jan Morris led an extraordinary life, witnessing such seminal moments as the first ascent of Everest, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Eichmann Trial, the Cuban Revolution and so much more. Here, we revisit a selection of her most well-loved travel writing in the form of short extracts taken from each book.
Coast to Coast: A Journey Across 1950s America (1956)
‘The approach from the sea is marvellous enough, but has become hackneyed from film and postcard. It is the road from inland that is exciting now, when Manhattan appears suddenly, a last outpost on the edge of the continent, and the charged atmosphere of the place spreads around it like ripples, and you enter it as you would plunge into a mountain stream in August.’
Coronation Everest (1958)
‘We moved into the big dome tent, and sat around the summit party, throwing questions at them, still laughing, unable to believe the truth. Everest was climbed, and these two mortal men in front of us, sitting on old boxes, had stood upon its summit, the highest place on earth! And nobody knew but us! The day was still dazzlingly bright – the snow so white, the sky so blue; and the air was still so vibrant with excitement; and the news, however much we expected it, was still somehow such a wonderful surprise – shock waves of that moment must still linger there in the Western Cwm, so potent were they, and so gloriously charged with pleasure. Now and then the flushed face of a Sherpa appeared in the doorway, with a word of delight; and as we lay there on boxes, rolls of bedding and sleeping-bags, Hillary and Tenzing ate a leathery omelette apiece, and told us their story. I can hear Hillary’s voice today, and see the lump of omelette protruding inside his left cheek, as he paused for a moment from mastication to describe the summit of Mount Everest.’
Manhattan ’45 (1987)
‘It was above all a romantic style. Towering islanded on the edge of a continent, facing the wild ocean, Manhattan was as truly romantic a city as Venice itself, and in one way or another the look of it reflected that romance. Except for the old grid of the streets (First to Twelfth Avenues, 1st to 220th Streets), hardly anything was regular in it, whether in the detail or in the whole there were no monumental malls, no colonnaded boulevards or pompous segmented circuses, only a bare minimum of statued squares. The civic orientation was inexact, north-south avenues running twenty-eight degrees out of true, west-east streets really running northwest to southeast, while even in midtown the wayward route of Broadway, meandering from one end of the island to the other, fatally upset the street plan and confused the anxious stranger.’
Sydney (1992)
‘All the same the harbour seems to me less a spectacle than an event. It is like a perpetual pageant, punctuated by astonishments. Something is always happening on it, even in the small hours of the morning – always a ship passing, a helicopter flying by, unexplained lights wavering in the distance, dim white sails loitering. I looked from my balcony one morning to see an enormous pair of inflatable sunglasses perched high upon a wing of the Opera House as upon its nose: they had been placed there by a group of ecological activists, including the first three Australians to read the summit of Everest, in protest against the depletion of the ozone layer, and I could see those adventurers scrambling over the high roofs pursued by policemen.’
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001)
‘A great city that has lost its purpose is like a specialist in retirement. He potters around the house. He tinkers with this hobby or that. He reads a little, watches television for half an hour, does a bit of gardening, determines once more that he really will read Midnight’s Children, get to know Beethoven’s late sonatas or try for a last time to get to grips with rock. But he knows that the real energy of his life, the fascination of his calling that has driven him with so much satisfaction for so many years, is never going to be resumed. He no longer reads the technical journals, because they make him feel out-dated. He no longer goes to professional conventions. The world forgetting, by the world forgot! What’s it all been for, he wonders?’
Spain (2008)
‘But then you turn a corner out of the woodland, and suddenly there before you, below the level of the mist, there unfolds the great plain of the Ebro, with the foothills sweeping down towards the river. Space immeasurable seems to lie down there [ . . .] all of Spain seems to be expecting you. Spain of the shrines, Spain of the knights-errant, Spain of the guitars, the bull-rings, and the troglodytes.’
Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother. She spent the last years of her life with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, the Pax Britannica trilogy and Conundrum. She was also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. She was recognised in 2018 for her outstanding contribution to travel writing by the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. In the same year, In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary was published. It was followed by a second volume of diaries, Thinking Again, in 2020, and then her posthumously published final book, Allegorizings, in 2021.
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Venice (1960)
‘Venice stands, as she loves to tell you, on the frontiers of east and west, half-way between the setting and the rising sun. Goethe calls her “the market-place of the Morning and the Evening lands”. Certainly no city on earth gives a more immediate impression of symmetry and unity, or seems more patently born to greatness. On the map Venice looks like a fish; or a lute, Evelyn thought; or perhaps a pair of serpents locked in death-struggle; or a kangaroo, head down for a leap. But to understand the modern topography of the place, you must throw the street plans away and go to the top of the great Campanile of St Mark, above the bustling Piazza. You can make the ascent by lift: but if you prefer to take a horse, like the Emperor Frederick III, there is a spiral ramp for your convenience.’
Our new heritage edition has been exclusively designed and crafted for Faber Members, with reproduced cover artwork based on the 1974 first edition by Jan’s son Mark Morris.