Tormented genius

Married as I am to an antiquarian book dealer, and living in a house infested with books and manuscripts, I’m constantly having to edit my own little library so as to be able to breathe. But three volumes have survived successive culls — Pax Britannica, Heaven’s Command and Farewell the Trumpets — Jan (or James as she was when these books were written) Morris’s trilogy about the British empire. It is, Morris says, ‘the intellectual and artistic centrepiece of my life’, and it opens on the morning of 22 June 1897 with Queen Victoria visiting the telegraph room at Buckingham Palace on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee.

She was, Morris tells us:

wearing a dress of black moiré with panels of pigeon grey, embroidered all over with silver roses, shamrocks and thistles. It was a few minutes after 11 o’clock. She pressed an electric button; an impulse was transmitted to the Central Telegraph Office in St Martin’s le Grand; in a matter of seconds her Jubilee message was on its way to every corner of her Empire.

From these few sentences alone, you can begin to see why Rebecca West thought Morris ‘the greatest descriptive writer of her time’. She draws us immediately and irresistibly into the story, and while it’s clear that her canvas will eventually reach as far and wide as the Queen’s Jubilee message, she keeps us anchored and alert through precise details: the panels of pigeon grey, the exact time.

Derek Johns was Jan Morris’s agent for several decades, and, while not authorised, this ‘literary life’ has been written with her blessing. In chapters that are thematic rather than strictly chronological Johns quotes liberally from Morris’s 40-plus books — or what he reckons are three to four million published words — and from her journalism (which kicked off in 1950 with a piece for The Spectator).