Daisy Dunn

Beautiful and illuminating: Radio 4’s the Venice Conundrum reviewed          

Plus: the Birmingham suburb where British surrealism was born

Pre-transition, Morris’s biggest fear was that the hormones might affect his talents as a writer. Credit: Photo by Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images 
issue 05 August 2023

The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men and women turned into monkeys’ in 18th-century Venice, and Jan Morris, visiting in the 1950s, did likewise. It would be more than a decade before Morris went under the knife, but already he was contemplating a transition more permanent than any he observed at carnival time.

The Venice Conundrum, which aired on Radio 4 on Sunday, knitted together Morris’s most famous travel book with Conundrum, the story of his sex change, completed in the 1970s. I had my doubts about how well these two works would sit together, but the dramatisation was not only beautiful, but also hugely illuminating of Morris’s psyche as a traveller caught between two worlds.

It was not Jan Morris’s body so much as his mind that he felt was in jeopardy

Shortly before arriving in Venice, Morris had flushed the oestrogen pills he had been prescribed down the loo and resolved to try to live as a man.

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