Thinking Again, by Jan Morris
MARK BOSTRIDGE
Thinking Again By Jan Morris Faber £16.99 ‘And so to bed.’
With this Pepysian flourish, Jan Morris closed her ‘Thought Diary’, published two years ago under the title In My Mind’s Eye.
At the start of her tenth decade, with no other book on the stocks, Morris decided to keep a diary for the first time. The result was a collection of 188 daily entries.
These were at once prosaic and profound, underpinned by the melancholy of advancing years, and conveyed with a strangely ethereal quality that is perhaps best described as like watching a feather falling softly through the air.
Now Morris returns with a sequel, covering her life in 2018 and 2019. She is still living in her converted stables, Trefan Morys, in north-west Wales, driving regularly into the nearest town, Criccieth, with its magnificent view of a 14th-century castle across the bay, in her beloved but battered Honda Type R.
Elizabeth, her lifelong friend and partner, is still at her side, though sadly trapped in the ‘cursed dominion of dementia’. Morris’s routine continues to include a walk in all weathers. The once great traveller is now limited to a statutory thousand paces each day, sometimes along the lane at Llanystumdwy, humming a jolly tune such as Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. Lights out is preceded by another chapter from an old favourite, Anna Karenina.
Long ago, in Conundrum, her account of her ten-year transition from man to woman, Jan Morris wrote that ‘One must live not for the day but for the moment, swiftly adjusting to circumstances.’
These diaries show that even her 90-plus years have not prevented her from achieving this. The greatest challenge for the diarist is the question of whether he or she can make something out of the short change offered up by an average – or below average – day. Morris rarely fails in this respect – and when she does, she throws in her hand and admits that she has fallen short.
This diary allows Morris to gather up the driftwood of memory, recalling the simple holiness, from the vantage point of adult agnosticism, of childhood Christmases when she was a boy chorister at Christ Church, Oxford; or her experience at age 16 as a member of the Home Guard during the Second World War, which unlike Dad’s Army was ‘not in the least farcical’ but was ‘just as endearing’.
She labels the symptoms of old age as ‘tiresomely normal’, and finds her faith in the kindness of unlikely strangers constantly renewed. ‘Gigantic lorries stop to let me cross the street! Wild, uncouth youths keep doors open for me! Evident harridans offer me gaps in queues.’
There are, of course, the downsides. There is the frustrating business of dealing with her bank by phone, as all her local branches have closed (I thought of my own mother, at 93 the same age as Morris, facing the same problem). ‘A profound silence … falls upon my enquiry,’ followed by the operator telling her, ‘ “It has been a pleasure assisting you, Jan [for senior citizens should preferably be addressed by first names].” ’
The general mood of the world is discouraging, oscillating ‘between despair and resentment about the state of everything’, though she finds something forgivably childlike about President Trump’s manners (or lack of them): ‘like the sulks and outbursts of a spoilt schoolboy’.
Morris derives much of her strength from her Welshness – her father was Welsh and she has lived in Wales since the 1960s – and from her contemplation of ‘the very nature of Wales’.
Throughout the diary, she returns to the question ‘What is it about Wales?’, and when she comes up with the answer – that it is distinguished by its introspection, its respect for tradition, its nostalgia and its imagination – she seems almost to be providing her readers with the salient characteristics of her own personality.
‘I am approaching one of the tremendous mysteries of existence,’ Morris writes movingly at one point. This is a gentle, unpretentious, perceptive book, unfailingly optimistic, but unafraid of facing up to both the highs and the lows of getting old.
At the end of it, I was reminded of a letter of Victor Hugo’s from his final years, in which he speaks of the ‘mysterious rejuvenation’ he is experiencing. His body may be sinking, but his ‘mind sees the grave and feels the spring’.
The process, he says, is like ‘an unfolding of the wings’.