[[{“value”:”That is the recent biography from Paul Clements, which I enjoyed very much. In part I liked it because I have never much loved her writing, or found it insightful. To me the book (to some degree unintentionally) raises the questions of why so much travel writing does not age well, and why so much
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That is the recent biography from Paul Clements, which I enjoyed very much. In part I liked it because I have never much loved her writing, or found it insightful. To me the book (to some degree unintentionally) raises the questions of why so much travel writing does not age well, and why so much travel writing is simply boring to read, even though a trip to the same place might be fascinating.
Here was one good passage:
…at a conservative estimate, Morris’s books alone contain more than five million words — and then there is her journalism and literary criticism, which run to several million more. From the days of the Arab News Agency in 1948 until its conclusion, her career spanned seventy-three years of publication. Every aspect of her life fuelled her writing; her entire published corpus, from 1956 to 2021, totalled fifty-eight books, while she edited a further five volumes.
Posterity will remember Jan Morris. What makes her work sui generis is the genre-less way that she combined topography, the social landscape, history, personal anecdote, and an acute imagination. Morris forged an unlikely style that was vigorous, precise, and entertaining. Hers was a language nourished by the music of childhood, conditioned by The Book of Common Prayer and Shakespeare, energised by journalism, and inspired by travelling the world as a student of human nature. Like all writers, Morris had her foibles: her voluptuous vocabulary included words such as ‘tatterdemalion,’ ‘swagger,’ ‘gallimaufry,’ ‘coruscate,’ ‘fizz,’ ‘parvenu,’ ‘rodomontade,’ ‘gasconade,’ ‘palimpset,’ ‘simulacrum,’ ‘fandango,’ and ‘chimerical.’ The three Morris m’s — magnificent, melancholy, and myriad — ripple through her work, not forgetting her love of the two Welsh h’s —hwyl and hiraeth. Her writing could be indulgent at times, but Morris did not take an exalted view of herself as a writer. She was the one who called her work, in A Writer’s World, ‘hedonistic,’ ‘boisterous,’ and ‘impertinent,’ In a newspaper questionnaire in 1998, Morris was asked how she would like to be remembered, and she replied: ‘As a merry and loving writer.’
As an aside, not all those words cited seem so weird to this writer. Swagger, fizz, and parvenu are in ordinary usage, chimerical too.
Among its other virtues, I feel this book captures British history and British intellectual history very well. In any case, you can buy the book here, and I have ordered some additional Morris works to read. If I really like any of them, I will let you all know.
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Books, Travel, Uncategorized
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