Conundrum, p.12
Conundrum, page 12
The operation called “sex change” had lately become relatively respectable. Until a few years before it had been disreputable indeed, considered by most surgeons to be a cross between a racket, an obscenity, and a very expensive placebo. It was, wrote one London practitioner in the 1950s, as though when a man said he was Nelson, you were to cut off his arm to satisfy his illusion. For thirty years after the Lili Elbe case there were few attempts to change a person’s sex, and surgeons in most countries would not contemplate such an operation. In 1951 the American George Jorgensen managed to achieve surgery in Denmark, and fellow-sufferers everywhere tried to emulate him, but the doctors reacted more forbiddingly still. They were frightened by the threat of publicity. They were repelled by the weird gallimaufry that pestered them, along with the true transsexuals—exhibitionists in search of new themes, homosexuals wishing to legalize themselves, female impersonators and miscellaneous paranoiacs. They were unsure of the legal implications: in most countries the law was hazy about the definition of sex, and even obscurer about the legality of trying to change it. They were afraid that their patients might regret the change and become more psychotic than ever, besides very likely suing their surgeons for mayhem. The psychological jolt of the operation would be so terrific, the later demands upon the patient so severe, that even the most sympathetic surgeons would not operate without years of pretreatment and observation.
By 1972, when my time came, the climate of medical opinion had shifted. Thanks largely to the persuasion of Dr. Benjamin in New York City, many more doctors now conceded that surgery might after all be the right approach to a problem which seemed to be becoming more common, and was plainly insoluble in absolute terms. The old psychiatric treatments had been discredited. The degrading practices of aversion treatment were admitted to have no effect upon true transsexuals. The usual formulae of sex determination, acceptable though they might be to judges or Olympic referees, were increasingly recognized as inadequate, as the complexities of gender and identity became each year more apparent but more baffling.
In America several university hospitals had started gender-identity units, where surgery was used as a last resort, and in England too several hospitals now operated upon transsexuals. At least 600 people, of both original sexes, had undergone surgery in the United States; at least one had been ordered to do so by a court of law. Perhaps another 150 had been operated upon in Britain, many of them free under the National Health system. The technical procedures were well established. In the case of those who were born males, the penis and testicles were removed and a vagina was created, either simultaneously or in later surgery; functionally the patient was left more or less in the condition of a woman who has undergone a total hysterectomy. Orgasm was possible, because the erotic zones retained their sensitivity, but not of course conception, for nobody had yet succeeded in transplanting ovaries, let alone a womb.
This is what I now planned to have done to myself. I had long been assured by my London doctors that when the time came, there would be no difficulty. But when, in the spring of 1972, I felt myself ready for the last hurdle, and my family too, I discovered an unexpected snag. The surgeon who interviewed me, and who accepted me for surgery at the Charing Cross Hospital, declined to operate until Elizabeth and I were divorced. I saw his point, for he could not know the nature of the relationship between us, and indeed I recognized that we must be divorced in the end. But after a lifetime of fighting my own battles I did not feel in a mood to offer my destiny like a sacrifice upon the benches of Her Majesty’s judges. Who knew what degradations we might both endure? What business was it of theirs, anyway?
No, I resolved, I would make the rules now. We would end our marriage in our own time, lovingly, and I would go for my surgery, as I had gone for so many consolations and distractions before, to foreign parts beyond the law.
FIFTEEN
TREFAN · THE LAST SUMMER · ON WELSHNESS · TO THE MAGICIAN
But first, for my last good-byes to maleness, I turned to the little country to which I felt I most truly belonged, and went home to my loves in Wales. There up a long and bumpy lane, protected by ash trees, beeches, and tumble-down oaks, stood the house I had bought for us long before, Trefan at Llanystumdwy in Caernarvonshire. Its land ran damp and brackeny to the river Dwyfor, which, rising in the hills only seven or eight miles above, tumbled swiftly through rock pool and gorge to empty into Cardigan Bay a mile or two below. Behind the house one could see the mountains, green and brown in summer, in winter often covered in snow, and above the first ridge the triangular summit of Snowdon protruded, so clear when the sky was right that one could sometimes make out the smoke-puffs of the funicular railway laboring up the north flank. In front of the house, across park and meadowland, lay the sea: through a gap in the trees the islands of St. Tidwal showed, and at night a lighthouse flashed reassuringly, white and red alternately, every twenty seconds.
Here I spent the last summer of my manhood. For me it will always be the most beautiful house in the world, and though I have since sold the Plas itself, keeping only some of the outbuildings, still Trefan will always be home to me. Architecturally it was hardly distinguished, but it had an easy, amateur air to it that I liked. Its east elevation was accomplished enough, looking like a comfortable Georgian rectory with its climbing magnolia and bay window, but the north side, where the front door stood, was palpably unprofessional—a gaunt, very Welsh façade, one floor too high for elegance, with a funny pillared porch in a manner more neo than Classical, and rows of windows, oblong and many-paned, such as children like to draw. The house was white, and with its multitudinous diverse chimneys, its rambled outhouses, and its serried fenestration, seemed from a distance to lie lumpishly among its trees. But it was instinct with baraka, that scented concept of the Arab mind which means at once blessed and blessing, full of grace in itself and able to bestow grace upon others. It was a magic house.
Most people liked it best in the early spring, when the woods down to the river seemed to shift almost before one’s eyes from snowdrop white to daffodil yellow to the shimmer of bluebells—when the rooks cawed furiously in the beeches, the garden woke to life in a splurge of rhododendrons, and the young lambs caught their heads five times a day in the fencing down the drive. I shall always remember it with the profoundest gratitude, though, as it was that May, that last May, in the last of my old summers.
Then after dinner Elizabeth and I would often wander down to the river, to watch the bats skimming and wheeling over the long pool, or hear the brown trout rising. The smell down there was an intoxication of river, weed, and moss, and at a point where the river flowed through a small steep gorge, we would clamber over a fallen tree trunk to a little island there, and find ourselves enclosed in the green, dark, rushing presence of the place. I so loved this spot that when I sold the house I kept the island, and there one day I shall be buried, beneath the epitaph HERE LIES JAN MORRIS OF TREFAN, AT THE END OF A HAPPY LIFE. For it was a restless, searching place, just right for me. Sometimes we made out the thrilling dark shapes of sea trout in the stream, as they ran up to the mountains from the sea; sometimes Sam the dog, snuffling around the wood, suddenly dashed into the darkness in pursuit of squirrels, or foxes, or lesser beasts of his own conception; sometimes glowworms lay like embers in the mold, and sometimes the faint pungent smell of a home-rolled cigarette, or the muffled click of a reel, told us that the poachers were out that night.
Then when the woods became too dark we would clamber up the bank beside the badger’s sett, half expecting to hear a wheezing or grunting of protest from the warren beneath our feet, through the park field where the cows lay in the twilight munching, or the donkeys sidled after us in hope of affection, and round to the garden gate. Across the rough old lawn the house lay dimly white, with a night light glimmering in Susan’s window, Mrs. Forward’s television flickering from hers, and very likely the hastily extinguished flash of a torch from Tom’s. If Mark was home we might hear Mahler or John Cage from his attic; if Henry was about we might meet him at the gate, back like a poacher himself with his rod and net from the long reach.
I always dragged out those last few yards to the house. It lay there like a dream for me, full of all I loved, my children and my animals, my books and my pictures, and blessed I thought like a healer’s presence with a cure for my sickness. I was home in Wales, but not for long. Where would I be next summer, I wondered? Whose lights would greet me then? We wound up the library clock, fed Sam and Menelik, scolded Tom as he deserved, cast a spell on Mark for using all the hot water, said good night to Henry as he fried himself a pancake, and went wistfully to our beds.
I call myself Anglo-Welsh, but I have always preferred the Welsh side of me to the English. When I looked Januslike to my double childhood view, it was always the line of the Black Mountains that compelled me, with their suggestion of mysteries and immensities beyond, and their reminder that there lay my strongest roots. If some of my troubles lay perhaps in dual affinities, so did much of my delight: for by and large the Anglo-Welsh, spared the heavier disciplines of pure Welshness, are exceedingly happy people, and concede it more readily than most. “What a marvelous life I’ve had!” said I in satisfaction to my neighbor Clough Williams-Ellis the architect, then in his eighties, when he came to my fortieth-birthday celebrations. “You’ve enjoyed it so far?” he beamed. “You wait for the next forty years!” He was a man who had known suffering in his time, but he was not ashamed to admit his compensating happinesses, and nor was I.
So that last summer at Trefan held no sadness for me, and the setting seemed almost allegorically suited to my denouement. As it happens I admire the English genius more than the Welsh. I prefer its humor, I admire its profounder poetry, its skeptical pragmatism, its confidence. But the Welsh in me had better qualified me for my tangled pilgrimage; for behind the Anglo-Welsh high spirits, I knew of deeper and darker instincts in myself, inherited from the heart of Wales—itself a country which, caught in the lore of magicians and the web of bards, tenaciously struggling for eight hundred years to preserve its identity, is a bit of a conundrum too.
I knew myself for a romancer, in the Welsh way: not a romancer to achieve wicked ends, or even to achieve ends at all, but simply one whose instincts lead him now and then into fiction. “A Scotsman’s truth,” said the American Walter Hines Page, “is a straight line, but a Welshman’s truth is more in the nature of a curve.” Harmlessly bent in this way was my own conception of the truth, and it colored my reportage always as it gave piquancy to my self-awareness—for as a novelist manqué I probably romanced to myself more than to anyone. In Khartoum once a Sudanese Minister of National Guidance, soon to be shot for misdirecting the nation, offered me a succinct definition of my duties as a correspondent. They were, he said, to produce “thrilling, attractive, and good news, coinciding where possible with the truth.” Erring as I did generally on the side of the ingratiating, I followed his posthumous guidelines fairly faithfully down the decades, and habitually accepted a fact as being more in the nature of a blur.
Then I often detected in myself that taste for the flamboyant which, in the Welsh especially, is so often a compensation for uncertainty. Coming as they do from distant and dramatic parts, the Welsh love to show off their distinction; translating the national hwyl into perpetual performance. Playing a part has always come naturally to me, if not one part, then another, and I have often indulged a weakness for display, in flowery adjectives or flashy cars. My guile, which had brought me safely through so many esoteric perils, is pure Welsh; so is the quick emotionalism, the hovering tear, the heart-on-sleeve, the touch of schmaltz, which has given my books the more sickly of their purple passages.
More deeply, I believe myself to have an extrasensory streak that springs directly from the strangeness of Wales. I see the dead sometimes; or more precisely, I see three dead persons, none of whom I knew well in life, and all of whom had always impressed me by their elusive, dappled quality—Gerard Fay the journalist, John Connell the biographer, Dennis Brain the horn player, all of whom I repeatedly encounter, walking through London, curiously embodied in the persons of men who, when I catch them up or meet them face to face, bear no resemblance to those ghosts at all.
I was never surprised by such phenomena. The Welsh are a disordered people, a people on the edge, and it came naturally to me to live outside the frame of things. Later that summer Henry went to India, planning to come back the following year to go to his University. When the time for his return approached, and we were expectantly awaiting news from him, I happened to see, standing beside the road outside Hereford, a figure astonishingly like him, loaded with rucksacks and pacing up and down the pavement with a proud thoughtful movement that was peculiarly his. I slowed down, and as I did so he looked up at me and smiled, gravely and without surprise; it was Henry’s face, but subtly orientalized, Tibetanized perhaps, brown, its eyes a little slanted and its cheekbones high. I turned round, down the road, and went back for a second look; but this time the boy bore no resemblance to Henry at all, and took no notice of me.
A few weeks later we heard that Henry would not be coming home, but planned to stay in India instead; and there he remains to this day, the freest spirit of us all, teaching, writing, and learning in the Himalayan foothills. He was born when I was on Everest, and when I think about that messenger on the Hereford road, looking me so steady in the eye, I remember too the envoy I met long ago, alone and gently smiling, on the snows above Khumbu.
Against this beautiful, complex, haunting background, physical and spiritual, I prepared myself for the climax of my life. An irrepressible force had driven me through every barrier almost to the achievement of my inexplicable goal, and it was not spent yet. Love, luck, and resolution had saved me from suicide—for if there had been no hope of ending my life as a woman, I would certainly have ended it for myself as a man. Now those same happy attributes, which I seemed to draw from Trefan and from Wales like fuel from a pump, must see me over the last obstacle.
I booked myself a return ticket to Casablanca in Morocco, and waving a long farewell to the old house as I drove down the lane, in July, 1972, I flew away to Africa, where I had found solace before, and knew of a magician now.
SIXTEEN
CASABLANCA · IN THE CLINIC · A STUNNING THOUGHT · MADE NORMAL · COMRADES! · NEW OUT OF AFRICA
Everybody in my predicament knew of Dr. B——. It was he who, over the years, had rescued hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of transsexuals from their wandering fate. Denied, all too often, surgery in their own countries, the more desperate sufferers roamed the world in search of salvation, to Mexico, to Holland, to Japan, knocking upon the doors of ever less distinguished surgeons, pleading, threatening, sometimes mutilating their own persons as a kind of blackmail. Many spent their life savings upon these tragic missions, and often they returned home irrevocably maimed, or no nearer their goal than they had been before. Nobody knows how many killed themselves. If once they got to Dr. B——, though, their desires if not their needs would be satisfied. He did not bother himself much with diagnosis or pretreatment, and expected handsome payment in advance; but his surgery was excellent, he asked no questions, and he imposed no conditions, legal or moralistic.
I did not know his address, but when I arrived in Casablanca I looked him up in the telephone book, and was told to come round to his clinic next afternoon. So I had time to wander round the town. As a city Casablanca is sometimes less than romantic, being mostly modern, noisy, and ugly in a pompous French colonial way. The experience I was to have there, though, struck me then as it strikes me now as romantic to a degree. It really was like a visit to a wizard. I saw myself, as I walked that evening through those garish streets, as a figure of fairy tale, about to be transformed. Duck into swan? Scullion into bride? More magical than any such transformation, I answered myself: man into woman. This was the last city I would ever see as a male. The office blocks might not look much like castle walls, nor the taxis like camels or carriages, but still I sometimes heard the limpid Arab music, and smelt the pungent Arab smells, that had for so long pervaded my life, and I could suppose it to be some city of fable, of phoenix and fantasy, in which transubstantiations were regularly effected, when the omens were right and the moon in its proper phase.
I called upon the British Consul in the morning. It occurred to me that I might die in the course of changing my sex, and I wanted him to let people know. He did not seem surprised. Always best, he said, to be on the safe side.
The clinic was not as I imagined it. I had rather hoped for something smoky in the bazaar, but it turned out to be in one of the grander modern parts of the city, one entrance on a wide boulevard, the other on a quiet residential back-street. Its more ordinary business was gynecology of one sort and another, and as I waited in the anteroom, reading Elle and Paris-Match with a less than absolute attention, I heard many natal sounds, from the muffled appeals of all-too-expectant mothers to the anxious pacings of paternity. Sometimes the place was plunged in utter silence, as Dr. B—— weighed somebody’s destiny in his room next door; sometimes it broke into a clamor of women’s Arabic, screechy and distraught somewhere down the corridor. At last the receptionist called for me, and I was shown into the dark and book-lined presence of the maestro.
He was exceedingly handsome. He was small, dark, rather intense of feature, and was dressed as if for some kind of beach activity. He wore a dark blue open-necked shirt, sports trousers, and games shoes, and he was very bronzed. He welcomed me with a bemused smile, as though his mind were in Saint-Tropez. What could he do for me, he asked? I told him I thought he probably knew very well. “Ah, I think that’s so. You wish the operation. Very well, let us see you.” He examined my organs. He plumped my breasts—“Très, très bons.” He asked if I was an athlete. “Very well,” he said, “come in this evening, and we shall see what we can do. You know my fee? Ah well, perhaps you will discuss it with my receptionist—Bien, au revoir, until this evening!”
