Travel Blog

The review in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review of Sara Wheeler’s new biography of Jan Morris noted that the great travel writer was “a terribly flawed human being,” “a narcissist and a snob” who “could be cruel.”

All probably true, but she could also be kind – kindness being a quality she prized above all others. I interviewed her after her panel at the Key West Literary Seminar in 1991 and she apologized profusely for keeping me waiting while she graciously fielded questions from a pack of admirers. One Sunday afternoon in 1994, while I was reading about Vietnam before my first trip to Asia, the phone rang; it was Jan, apologizing again, this time for not doing more to promote my first book, which she had just reread and found much better than on the first reading. I told her I was headed to Vietnam, and she said it was a country she had never visited. It thrilled me that I would be traveling somewhere Jan Morris had never been. (Though her specialty was the British, not the French, empire.) When my second book came out, she kindly gave it a blurb. We emailed occasionally over the years, short messages about a new travel book, or an upcoming trip; I reviewed her book Contact!, a small, overlooked masterpiece, and got a warm note of gratitude. Often she would close her emails with an invitation to visit her in Wales, which I assumed was a nicety and never took her up on. Idiot. Wheeler contacted me while she was researching her biography, and I sent her the meager  Morris-Swick e-correspondence, but there was nothing in it that was worth putting in the biography. Which was a shame, as it would have been an honor to find my name connected to Jan’s.