Near the end of Conundrum, Jan Morris writes about walking through Casablanca on the eve of her sex change operation as feeling like she was about to pay “a visit to a wizard,” like she was “a figure of fairy tale, about to be transformed” (119). And, as in some fairy tales, what she is to be transformed into is only what she has been all along: she writes, at the start of the book, that her earliest memory, from when she was three or four, was the realization that she “had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl” (3). This slim book is full of Morris’s experiences on her journey from male-bodied to female-bodied, from her childhood sense of differentness and her early sense of affinity with particular places and landscapes to her years, pre-transition, in the army and as a journalist, including her increasing sense of isolation due to the gulf between her inner self and the self the world sees. She writes about her sense of the wrongness of her male body, but also an appreciation of its energies and what it can do, e.g. on a 1953 journalistic assignment to join the British expedition climbing Everest. She writes about taking estrogen for years before her sex-change operation, and about how it was to travel in the resulting in-between body, reading as a man to some and as a woman to others. Morris is primarily known as a travel writer, and some of the loveliest bits of this book are the ones about landscapes or cities, like this description of the place where she grew up:The sky may not always have been as blue as I recall it, but it was certainly clear as crystal, the only smoke the smudge from a collier laboring up-Channel, or the blurred miasma of grime that always hung over the Swansea valleys. Hawks and skylarks abounded, rabbits were everywhere, weasels haunted the bracken, and sometimes there came trundling over the hill, heavily buzzing, the daily de Havilland biplane on its way to Cardiff (4).Or this, about Oxford: “a presence so old and true that it absorbs time and change like light into a prism, only enriching itself by the process, and finding nothing alien except intolerance” (8).Or this: London was in that heightened version of itself that one always discovers when one returns from abroad—the buses redder than usual, the taxi-drivers more Cockney, and everything more thickly infused with the pungency that is London’s own. Even the light that came through the consultancy window was more than reasonably London, much creamier than the Italian light, and charged with the dustflakes of W1. (44)(And those are just a few: there’s also a great long list-paragraph about the cathedral in Oxford during Morris’s time at the choir school there, and a beautiful description of the sensual pleasure of being in a small boat in the lagoon of Venice at night.)The edition of Conundrum I read is the 2002 reprint, which has a new introduction, which Morris wrote in 2001. In it she says the book “is already a period piece. It was written in the 1970s, and is decidedly of the 1970s” (ix). It does sometimes feel dated, particularly some of the gender-related bits, like one moment in the part about the Everest expedition in which Morris says she thinks women can’t have the “feeling of unfluctuating control” over their bodies that men can have: I suspect elite female athletes might disagree. And there’s a bunch of stuff at the end about how nice the courtesies afforded to women are, and how it isn’t so bad when you’re a woman at a restaurant with a man and the waiter assumes the man is the one who knows about/is choosing the wine, and anyway it’s nice to have doors opened for you and things done for you, right? But at the same time, Morris is very up-front about the fact that her conception of femininity as being tied to “gentleness” and “helping” and “give more than take” is her conception of it, not necessarily everyone’s.
Understanding my identity as a transwoman came about for me in the late 2000's, and thus most of what I read and learned from was on the internet and not set down in ink and binding. Of the trans memoirs I've held in my hands, this ties with Jamison Green's Becoming a Visible Man as my favorite. Whereas Mr. Green's is a more political, academic and recent work, and is imminently more suited as inspiration and fodder for the kinds of public speaking work I've been fortunate to engage in, it is also a work that betters helps me understand who I am now, as opposed to who I was for those first 20-or-so years.Who I was for my first 20-or-so years was frightened, confused. I had no terminology, no ability to use rationality to heal myself, no notion of the trans movement or even the belief that anyone existed with my affliction other than poor me. I would not meet a person who self-identified as trans, or even hear the word "transgender," until I was in college. So in those bright brief moments where I was not hating myself and permitted my mind to envision my desires, what did I see? I saw a beautiful red-haired woman who held me from behind, eyes closed, her chin on my shoulder. She would tell me that it was okay, that she and I would meet one day. Sometimes, she had wings.Author Jan Morris, transitioning as she did in the 60's and 70's, did not have the internet, or books, or movement. She had instead her mind, her desire, and a psycho-spiritual flare for processing the universe that was her omnipresent guide. It is her very lovely brain that means oh so much to me. Because I will never be that person who did not know the word "trans" again. I will never be that scared girl who stayed alive because of the images and visions her brain gave her to keep her going. To make her believe in...in anything, anything at all. Anything that wasn't you were born, you will die, and always in between shall remain unfulfilled.This book is wise and insightful, filled with words by an old soul, and is a valuable text because it isn't born out of our current debates between whether trans is real or not, whether a minority's rights are worth affirming or not, whether we should call ourselves this word or that word. While there are older stories of gender variance than this, this for me is my ur-trans narrative. A pre-everything story that is as different from our trans discussion now as a shaman's tale over bonfire is from a vlog. It is an important chapter in a history that has too few entries and long-form memoirists whose works were put down before the 80's.Do give this beautiful work the time of day. It is short, as filling as a big dinner, and as warm as a cuddle.P.S. My undying thanks to Wilton Barnhardt for referring me to this work many years ago. I needed it, then as now.P.P.S. Kim Fu's recent fiction work, For Today I Am a Boy, is likewise recommended if you enjoy trans-related books in this vein. And if you enjoyed this or Mr. Green's book, I would also recommend you check out Letters for My Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect.
What do You think about Conundrum (2006)?
Morris writes beautifully with a bit of flourish and Conundrum was an engaging read. I did have problems with the way Morris portrays men and women in her book, by reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes in her writing. For her men and women are each described as a homogenous group, without remembering that every person is different. She does say at the end of her book that every person feels different and that no one can know what the other person feels exactly, because we all have different experiences. I just wish she had remembered that when she wrote about men and women and pushed each group in a box. (Though she ascribed men to have more differences in their group whereas women are pushed into a box without the possibility of toeing or stepping over the line of gender boundaries.)
—Annika
I began this book with a real thirst to understand better the identity and experience of transsexuality. The writing is fluid and evocative; key moments, like Morris hiding under the piano at age four, and undergoing surgery in a secret North African ward, will stay with me vividly. But I became progressively more disappointed by the essentialist, even sexist, statements Morris makes (and applies to herself). For instance, she writes that she did not enjoy working for the Manchester Guardian as a journalist "because it was like working for a woman rather than a man." (68) She seems to revel in stereotypes of men and women as tough versus gentle, war-loving versus shopping enthusiasts, as the true definitions of masculinity and femininity. This perspective dominates, with only a few flashes of something different, as when she reflects that, "nobody really knows how anybody else feels--you may think you are feeling as a woman, or as a man, but you may simply be feeling as yourself." (156) I realize Morris's memoir was originally published in 1974 and like anything, to some degree a product of its times. But still: in feeling gender unease in oneself, would not a person be *more* inclined to reject society's definitions of what it means to be male or female (or neither)? It troubles me that the answer to my question may be No.
—Laura
This book written nearly 40 years ago tells us how much has changed in technology available for transgender gender treatment, and perhaps more disturbingly how little has improved in society's understanding and reaction to trans people. Perhaps, it seems from Morris' s narrative, the American culture is even less tolerant and compassionate than the culture she struggled through. Morris is an artist of English language, and perhaps the allegory was the most challenging part of reading this book for me. I'd encourage those interested in learning more about gender identity to read this book by one of the earliest voices on this subject. It is still very relevant.
—Judd
