Conundrum, p.1
Conundrum, page 1
JAN MORRIS was born in 1926, is Anglo-Welsh, and lives in Wales. She has written some forty books, including the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire, studies of Wales, Spain, Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Trieste, six volumes of collected travel essays, two memoirs, two capricious biographies, and a couple of novels, including the Booker short-listed Hav, which is published as an NYRB Classic—but she defines her entire oeuvre as “disguised autobiography.” She is an honorary D.Litt. of the University of Wales and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
CONUNDRUM
JAN MORRIS
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1974, 2002 by Jan Morris
All rights reserved.
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Morris, Jan, 1926—
Conundrum / Jan Morris.
p. cm. —(New York Review Books classics)
Originally published: London: Faber, 1974.
ISBN 1-59017-189-6 (alk. paper)
1. Morris, Jan, 1926— 2. Transsexuals—Great Britain—Biography.
3. Sex change—Great Britain—Case studies. I. Title. II. Series.
HQ77.8.M67A3 2006
306.76’8—dc22
2005022740
eISBN 978-1-59017-712-9
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
Acknowledgments
CONUNDRUM
1 Under the piano—above the sea—transsexuality—my conundrum
2 Living a falsehood—the nest of singing-birds—on Oxford—a small lump—in the cathedral—laughing
3 Sex and my conundrum—in the hayloft—gender and Bolsover Ma.
4 The colonel’s greeting—as to soldiering—impostor in the mess—Otto—non-persons
5 Identity—precedents of sorts—Dr. Benjamin—‘to alter the body!’
6 ‘Zero!’
7 Rescued—a grand love—objets d’art—the nightingale
8 Three employers—‘Anybody from the Guardian’—half a column—among the Egyptians—abhorrence
9 To Everest—the male brilliance—the male rhythm—a holy man
10 A trace of paranoia?—a bad world—no place for me
11 Pleasing my senses—the lust of Venice—the solace of Africa—sublimations
12 Changing sex—hormonal effects—a precarious condition—self-protection—rules
13 Oxford again—logistics—Jan—‘Come on in!’
14 Concerning surgery
15 Trefan—the last summer—on Welshness—to the magician
16 Casablanca—in the clinic—a stunning thought—made normal—Comrades!—new out of Africa
17 All for fun?—a manner suited—views of life—female sensations—forgetting
18 Problems still—ask a silly question—‘one is baffled’—regrets?
19 The human condition—speculations—under the piano still
INTRODUCTION
This book is already a period piece. It was written in the 1970s, and is decidedly of the 1970s. The world has greatly changed since then, and conceptions of sexual identity, which is the ostensible subject of the book, have changed more than anything. Women no longer think of themselves in the same way now, men do not think in the same way about women, and that sizable proportion of the population which used to feel excluded from ordinary sexual categories are now generally more comfortable about themselves.
In particular the process vulgarly known as a change of sex, for so long a prurient staple of the tabloid press, has become almost commonplace. By now thousands of men and women have been enabled, for one reason or another, to inhabit the opposite sex. Some have gone on to distinguish themselves in their professions, some have made fools of themselves, some are ugly, some are beautiful, some are promiscuous, some are chaste, some have courted publicity, some have lived in modest privacy—in short, the persons now known as trans-sexuals have turned out to be, in most everyday matters, very much like everyone else.
What is more, science has elucidated some of the mystery of their condition. Dutch scientists, after examining the autopsied brains of six trans-sexual men, discovered that in every case a particular region of the hypothalamus, at the floor of the brain, was abnormally small for a male, and in fact smaller than most females. This seems to show that there really is some physical, as against psychological, reason for the phenomenon. It is not just in the mind, which is presumably why, over so many years, no single patient appears ever to have been psychiatrically ‘cured’ of the transsexual condition. Besides, it seems to be ever more generally accepted that every one of us is an amalgam of male and female, in one degree or another.
But if the years have made some parts of my book seem quaintly anachronistic, they have not in the least altered its fundamental attitudes. I have amended only a few words in this new edition, and they are all purely factual. I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels.
The original publication of Conundrum created some stir, as the tale spread across the world under one title or another—it was Conundrum still in Swedish and German, Enigma in Spanish and Italian, Conundrum, or Enigma in Portuguese and something extremely beautiful in Japan. Letters by the thousand poured in, invitations abounded— half a lifetime of diligent craftsmanship seemed to have done less for my reputation than a simple change of sex!
For on the whole the responses were kindly, and I was lucky that it all came to light in what is now disparagingly called the Permissive Age, but which still seems to me, for all its excesses, a time of joyous liberation throughout the western world. Almost all the radical movements that sprang into new life then, the new concerns with individual freedoms, the state of the planet and the happiness of animals, found their small reflections in my own development. I had seen in my affairs some mythic or mystic yearning for universal reconciliation, and at that moment there were many people to agree with me.
Things have hardened since then, but my views have not changed. My loves remain the same loves; my family, my work, a friend or two, my books and my animals, my house between the mountains and the sea, the presence of Wales all around me. And have I discovered, you may ask, the real purpose of my pilgrimage, the last solution to my Conundrum, or Enigma? Sometimes down by the river I almost think I have; but then the light changes, the wind shifts, a cloud moves across the sun, and the meaning of it all once again escapes me.
Trefan Morys, 2001
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe my thanks to all those who, by reading my book in early drafts, acted as guides or bearers in this self-exploration—but especially, of course, Elizabeth and Mark, who knew the terrain as well as I did, and often spotted the route sooner.
The quotations from Dr. Robert Stoller come from his book Sex and Gender, Science House, New York, 1968. The C. S. Lewis passage is from Perelandra, Macmillan, New York, 1965. The verses by Cecil Day Lewis are from Overtures to Death, Jonathan Cape, London, 1938.
CONUNDRUM
ONE
UNDER THE PIANO · ABOVE THE SEA · TRANSSEXUALITY · MY CONUNDRUM
I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.
I was sitting beneath my mother’s piano, and her music was falling around me like cataracts, enclosing me as in a cave. The round stumpy legs of the piano were like three black stalagmites, and the sound-box was a high dark vault above my head. My mother was probably playing Sibelius, for she was enjoying a Finnish period then, and Sibelius from underneath a piano can be a very noisy composer; but I always liked it down there, sometimes drawing pictures on the piles of music stacked around me, or clutching my unfortunate cat for company.
What triggered so bizarre a thought I have long forgotten, but the conviction was unfaltering from the start. On the face of things it was pure nonsense. I seemed to most people a very straightforward child, enjoying a happy childhood. I was loved and I was loving, brought up kindly and sensibly, spoiled to a comfortable degree, weaned at an early age on Huck Finn and Alice in Wonderland, taught to cherish my animals, say grace, think well of myself, and wash my hands before tea. I was always sure of an audience. My security was absolute. Looking back at my infancy, as one might look back through a windswept avenue of trees, I see there only a cheerful glimpse of sunshine—for of course the weather was much better in those days, summers were really summers, and I seldom seem to remember it actually raining at all.
More to my point, by every standard of logic I was patently a boy. I was James Humphry Morris, male child. I had a boy’s body. I wore a boy’s clothe
Not that I dreamed of revealing it. I cherished it as a secret, shared for twenty years with not a single soul. At first I did not regard it as an especially significant secret. I was as vague as the next child about the meaning of sex, and I assumed it to be simply another aspect of differentness. For different in some way I recognized myself to be. Nobody ever urged me to be like other children: conformity was not a quality coveted in our home. We sprang, we all knew, from a line of odd forebears and unusual unions, Welsh, Norman, Quaker, and I never supposed myself to be much like anyone else.
I was a solitary child in consequence, and I realize now that inner conflicts, only half-formulated, made me more solitary still. When my brothers were away at school I wandered lonely as a cloud over the hills, among the rocks, sloshing through the mudbanks or prodding in the rockpools of the Bristol Channel, sometimes fishing for eels in the bleak dikes of the inland moors, or watching the ships sail up to Newport or Avonmouth through my telescope. If I looked to the east I could see the line of the Mendip Hills, in whose lee my mother’s people, modest country squires, flourished in life and were brass-commemorated in death. If I looked to the west I could see the blue mass of the Welsh mountains, far more exciting to me, beneath whose flanks my father’s people had always lived—“decent proud people,” as a cousin once defined them for me, some of whom still spoke Welsh within living memory, and all of whom were bound together, generation after generation, by a common love of music.
Both prospects, I used to feel, were mine, and this double possession sometimes gave me a heady sense of universality, as though wherever I looked I could see some aspect of myself—an unhealthy delusion, I have since discovered, for it later made me feel that no country or city was worth visiting unless I either owned a house there, or wrote a book about it. Like all Napoleonic fantasies, it was a lonely sensation too. If it all belonged to me, then I belonged to no particular part of it. The people I could see from my hilltop, farming their farms, tending their shops, flirting their way through seaside holidays, inhabited a different world from mine. They were all together, I was all alone. They were members, I was a stranger. They talked to each other in words they all understood about matters that interested them all. I spoke a tongue that was only mine, and thought things that would bore them. Sometimes they asked if they might look through my telescope, and this gave me great pleasure. The instrument played an important part in my fancies and conjectures, perhaps because it seemed to give me a private insight into distant worlds, and when at the age of eight or nine I wrote the first pages of a book, I called it Travels With a Telescope, not a bad title at that. So I was always gratified when after a few preliminary banterings— “That’s a big telescope for a little boy! Who are you looking for—Gandhi?”—they wanted to try it for themselves. For one thing I was a terrible swank, and loved to focus my lens for them deftly upon the English and Welsh Grounds lightship. For another, the brief contact of the request made me feel more ordinary.
I was intensely self-conscious, and often stood back, so to speak, to watch my own figure stumbling over the hills, or sprawled on the springy turf in the sunshine. The background was, at least in my memory, brilliant and sharp-edged, like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. 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 hung always 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.
My emotions, though, were far less distinct or definable. My conviction of mistaken sex was still no more than a blur, tucked away at the back of my mind, but if I was not unhappy, I was habitually puzzled. Even then that silent fresh childhood above the sea seemed to me strangely incomplete. I felt a yearning for I knew not what, as though there were a piece missing from my pattern, or some element in me that should be hard and permanent, but was instead soluble and diffuse. Everything seemed more determinate for those people down the hill. Their lives looked preordained, as though like the old de Havilland they simply stuck dogged and content to their daily routes, comfortably throbbing. Mine was more like a glider’s movements, airy and delightful perhaps, but lacking direction.
This was a bewilderment that would never leave me, and I see it now as the developing core of my life’s dilemma. If my landscapes were Millais or Holman Hunt, my introspections were pure Turner, as though my inner uncertainty could be represented in swirls and clouds of color, a haze inside me. I did not know exactly where it was—in my head, in my heart, in my loins, in my dreams. Nor did I know whether to be ashamed of it, proud of it, grateful for it, resentful of it. Sometimes I thought I would be happier without it, sometimes I felt it must be essential to my being. Perhaps one day, when I grew up, I would be as solid as other people appeared to be; but perhaps I was meant always to be a creature of wisp or spindrift, loitering in this inconsequential way almost as though I were intangible.
I present my uncertainty in cryptic terms, and I see it still as a mystery. Nobody really knows why some children, boys and girls, discover in themselves the inexpungeable belief that, despite all the physical evidence, they are really of the opposite sex. It happens at a very early age. Often there are signs of it when the child is still a baby, and it is generally profoundly ingrained, as it was with me, by the fourth or fifth year. Some theorists suppose the child to be born with it: perhaps there are undiscovered constitutional or genetic factors, or perhaps, as American scientists have lately suggested, the fetus has been affected by misdirected hormones during pregnancy. Many more believe it to be solely the result of early environment: too close an identification with one or the other parent, a dominant mother or father, an infancy too effeminate or too tomboyish. Others again think the cause to be partly constitutional, partly environmental—nobody is born entirely male or entirely female, and some children may be more susceptible than others to what the psychologists call the “imprint” of circumstance.
Whatever the cause, there are thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, suffering from the condition today. It has recently been given the name “transsexualism,” and in its classic form is as distinct from transvestism as it is from homosexuality. Both transvestites and homosexuals sometimes suppose they would be happier if they could change their sex, but they are generally mistaken. The transvestite gains his gratification specifically from wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, and would sacrifice his pleasures by joining that sex; the homosexual, by definition, prefers to make love with others of his own sort, and would only alienate himself and them by changing. Transsexualism is something different in kind. It is not a sexual mode or preference. It is not an act of sex at all. It is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction, and no true transsexual has ever been disabused of it.
I have tried to analyze my own childish emotions, and to discover what I meant, when I declared myself to be a girl in a boy’s body. What was my reasoning? Where was my evidence? Did I simply think that I should behave like a girl? Did I think people should treat me as one? Had I decided that I would rather grow up to be a woman than a man? Did some fearful legacy of the Great War, which ravaged and eventually killed my father, make the passions and instincts of men repugnant to me? Or was it just that something had gone wrong during my months in the womb, so that the hormones were wrongly shuffled, and my conviction was based upon no reasoning at all?
