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?"
I said that I had had a glimpse of Portmeirion from the train and wanted a closer look, if there was time.
We drove there in her car and parked under the pines. She had known the architect Clough Williams-Ellis very well. "He was a wonderful man," she said. "On his deathbed he was still chirping away merrily. But he was very worried about what people would say about him. Funny man! He wrote his own obituary! He had it there with him as he lay dying. When I visited him, he asked me to read it. Of course, there was nothing unflattering in it. I asked him why he had gone to all the trouble of writing his own obituary.
"He said, 'Because I don't know what the Times will write in the obituary they do of me.'"
We walked through the gateway and down the stairs to the little Italian fantasy town on this Welsh hillside.
"He was obsessed that they would get something wrong or be critical. He had tried every way he could of getting hold of his Times obituary—but failed, of course. They're always secret."
She laughed. It was that hearty malicious laugh.
"The funny thing was, I was the one who had written his obituary for the Times. They're all written carefully beforehand, you know."
I said, "And you didn't tell him?"
"No." Her face was blank. Was she smiling behind it? "Do you think I should have?"
I said, "But he was on his deathbed."
She laughed again. She said, "It doesn't matter."
There was a sculpted bust of Williams-Ellis in a niche, and resting crookedly on its dome was a hand-scrawled sign saying, the bar UPSTAIRS IS OPEN.
Jan said, "He would have liked that."
We walked through the place, under arches, through gateways, past Siamese statuary and Greek columns and gardens and pillars and colonnades; we walked around the piazza.
"The trouble with him was that he didn't know when to stop."
It was a sunny day. We lingered at the blue Parthenon, the Chantry, the Hercules statue, the town hall. You think: What is it doing here? More cottages.
"Once, when we lost a child, we stayed up there in that white cottage." She meant herself and Elizabeth, when they were husband and wife.