Eight more miles on this sunny day and we drew into Criccieth, where I hopped out of the train. I owned a guidebook that said, "Criccieth: For several years this small town was the home of James (now Jan) Morris, probably the finest living British travel writer." The "James (now Jan)" needed no explanation, since the story of how she changed from a man to a woman in a clinic in Casablanca was told in her book Conundrum, 1974. She still lived near Criccieth, outside the village of Llanystumdwy, in what was formerly the stables of the manor house, looking northward to the mountains of Eryri and southward to Cardigan Bay.
I seldom looked people up in foreign countries — I could never believe they really wanted to see me; I had an uncomfortable sense that I was interrupting something intimate — but I did look up Jan Morris. She had written a great deal about Wales, and I was here, and I knew her vaguely. Her house was built like an Inca fort, of large black rocks and heavy beams. She had written, "It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon the other in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. Its architecture is of the variety known these days as 'vernacular,' meaning that no professional architect has ever had a hand in it."
She was wearing a straw calypso hat tipped back on her bushy hair, and a knit jersey, and white slacks. It was a very hot day and she was dressed for it. There is a certain educated English voice that is both correct and malicious. Jan Morris has such a voice. It was not deep but it was languid, and the maleness that still trembled in it made it sultry and attractive. There was nothing ponderous about her. She shrugged easily and was a good listener, and she laughed as a cat might — full-throated and with a little hiss of pleasure, stiffening her body. She was kind, reckless, and intelligent.
Her house was very neat and full of books and pictures. "I have filled it with Cymreictod — Welshness." Yes, solid country artifacts and beamed ceilings and a no smoking sign in Welsh — she did not allow smoking in the house. Her library was forty-two feet long and the corresponding room upstairs was her study, with a desk and a stereo.
Music mattered to her in an unusual way. She once wrote, "Ani-mists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing, but I go one further; I am an inanimist, holding that even lifeless objects can contain immortal yearnings… I maintain, for instance, that music can permanently influence a building, so I often leave the record player on when I am out of the house, allowing its themes and melodies to soak themselves into the fabric."
Perhaps she was serious. Inanimate objects can seem to possess something resembling vitality, or a mood that answers your own. But melodies soaking into wood and stone? "My kitchen adores Mozart," the wise-guy might say, or, "The parlor's into Gladys Knight and the Pips." But I did not say anything; I just listened approvingly.
"I suppose it's very selfish, only one bedroom," she said.
But it was the sort of house everyone wanted, on its own, at the edge of a meadow, solid as could be, well-lighted, pretty, painted, cozy, with an enormous library and study and a four-poster: perfect for a solitary person and one cat. Hers was called Solomon.
Then she said, "Want to see my grave?"
I said of course and we went down to a cool shaded woods by a riverside. Jan Morris was a nimble walker: she had climbed to twenty thousand feet with the first successful Everest expedition in 1953. Welsh woods were full of small twisted oaks and tangled boughs and moist soil and dark ferny corners. We entered a boggier area of straight green trees and speckled shade.
"I always think this is very Japanese," she said.
It did look that way, the idealized bushy landscape of the woodblock print, the little riverside grotto.
She pointed across the river and said, "That's my grave — right there, that little island."
It was like a beaver's dam of tree trunks padded all around with moss, and more ferns, and the river slurping and gurgling among boulders.
"There's where I'm going to be buried — or rather scattered. It's nice, don't you think? Elizabeth's ashes are going to be scattered there, too." Jan Morris was married to Elizabeth before the sex change.
It seemed odd that someone so young should be thinking of death. She was fifty-six, and the hormones she took made her look a great deal younger — early forties, perhaps. But it was a very Welsh thought, this plan for ashes and a gravesite. It was a nation habituated to ghostliness and sighing and mourning. I was traveling on the Celtic fringe, where they still believed in giants.
What did I think of her grave? she asked.
I said the island looked as though it would wash away in a torrent and that her ashes would end up in Cardigan Bay. She laughed and said it did not matter.
At our first meeting about a year before, in London, she had said suddenly, "I am thinking of taking up a life of crime," and she had mentioned wanting to steal something from Woolworth's. It had not seemed so criminal to me, but over lunch I asked her whether she had done anything about it.
"If I had taken up a life of crime I would be hardly likely to tell you, Paul!"
"I was just curious," I said.
She said, "These knives and forks. I stole them from Pan-American Airways. I told the stewardess I was stealing them. She said she didn't care."
They were the sort of knives and forks you get on an airplane with your little plastic tray of soggy meat and gravy.
Talk of crime led us to talk of arson by Welsh nationalists. I asked why only cottages were burned, when there were many tin caravans on the coast that would make a useful blaze. She said her son was very pro-Welsh and patriotic and would probably consider that.
I said that the Welsh seemed like one family.
"Oh, yes, that's what my son says. He thinks as long as he is in Wales he's safe. He'll always be taken care of. He can go to any house and he will be taken in and fed and given a place to sleep."
"Like the travelers in Arabia who walk up to a Bedouin's tent and say, 'I am a guest of God' in order to get hospitality. Ana dheef Allah."
"Yes," she said. "It's probably true — it is like a family here in Wales."
And like all families, I said, sentimental and suspicious and quarrelsome and secretive. But Welsh nationalism was at times like a certain kind of feminism, very monotonous and one-sided.
She said, "I suppose it does look that way, if you're a man."
I could have said: Didn't it look that way to you when you were a man?
She said, "As for the caravans and tents, yes, they look awful. But the Welsh don't notice them particularly. They are not noted for their visual sense. And those people, the tourists, are seeing Wales. I'm glad they're here, in a way, so they can see this beautiful country and understand the Welsh."
Given the horror of the caravans, it was a very generous thought, and it certainly was not my sentiment. I always thought of Edmund Gosse saying, "No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood." The shore was fragile and breakable and easily poisoned.
Jan Morris was still speaking of the Welsh. "Some people say that Welsh nationalism is a narrow movement, cutting Wales off from the world. But it is possible to see it as liberating Wales and giving it an importance — of bringing it into the world."
We finished lunch and went outside. She said, "If only you could see the mountains. I know it's boring when people say that — but they really are spectacular. What do you want to do?"