This is the recent biography of Paul Clements, which I really enjoyed. In part, I liked it because I never really liked his writing, nor found it insightful. For me, the book raises (to some extent unintentionally) the question of why so much travel writing doesn’t age well, and why so much travel writing is just plain boring to read, even if a trip to the same place can be fascinating.
Here is a good passage:
…by a conservative estimate, Morris’s books alone contain more than five million words – and then there’s his journalism and literary criticism, which number several million more. From the days of the Arab News Agency in 1948 until its conclusion, his career spanned seventy-three years of publication. Every aspect of his life fueled his writing; her entire published corpus, from 1956 to 2021, numbered fifty-eight books, while she edited five other volumes.
Posterity will remember Jan Morris. What makes her work? sui generis is the genre-free way in which she combines topography, social landscape, history, personal anecdote and a keen imagination. Morris has forged an improbable style, vigorous, precise and entertaining. His language was nourished by the music of childhood, conditioned by The Book of Common Prayer and Shakespeare, energized by journalism and inspired by traveling the world as a student of human nature. Like all writers, Morris had his weaknesses: his voluptuous vocabulary included words such as “tatterdemalion”, “swagger”, “gallimaufry”, “coruscate”, “fizz”, “arrivee”, “rodomontade”, “gasconade”, “palimpset”. , “simulacrum”, “fandango” and “chimeric”. The three Morris ms – magnificent, melancholy and innumerable – are reflected in his work, without forgetting his love for the two Welsh h –road And Hireth. Her writing could be indulgent at times, but Morris did not have an exalted view of herself as a writer. It was she who called her work, in A writer’s world“hedonistic”, “loud” and “sassy”. In a newspaper questionnaire in 1998, Morris was asked how she would like to be remembered, and she responded: “As a joyful and loving writer.”
By the way, all these quoted words do not seem so strange to this writer. Swagger, fizz and upstart are in common use, chimerical too.
Among its other virtues, I think this book reflects British history and British intellectual history very well. Either way, you can buy the book here, and I ordered a few more of Morris’s works to read. If I really like any of them, I’ll let you know.
