I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.
I was sitting beneath my mother’s piano, and her music was falling around me like cataracts, enclosing me as in a cave. The round stumpy legs of the piano were like three black stalactites, and the sound-box was a high dark vault above my head. […] I always liked it down there, sometimes drawing pictures on the piles of music stacked around me, or clutching my unfortunate cat for company.
Jan Morris was one of the most original and complex literary figures of the twentieth century. A historian, journalist, and acclaimed writer of travel books, which are, in truth, books about the inner life of places. She is widely known for Conundrum (1974), one of the earliest autobiographical accounts of gender transition ever published. The book does not present itself as a manifesto or a confession, but as a deeply literary inquiry into identity: lived, perceived, inhabited long before it is named.
It is no coincidence that Conundrum opens with this domestic and almost secret scene, which Morris herself identifies as her earliest conscious memory. Beneath her mother’s piano, as music falls from above and the outside world seems suspended, identity is not yet a matter of definitions, but of sensations. Beside her, under the piano, there is a cat, her only company. Not an ornamental detail, but a necessary presence: silent, non-interrogative, capable of sharing a space of listening and protection.
That image returns at the end of the book, when Morris steps back from her own story and observes it as if it were a mythical tale: “I sometimes seem, even to myself, a figure of fable or allegory,” she writes, before rejecting any rigid polarity: “not as a man or a woman, self or other, fragment or whole, but only as that wondering child with a cat beneath the Bluthner.” The circle closes exactly where it first opened: not with a definition, but with a scene of companionship and attentive listening.
Cats recur throughout Morris’s life in much the same way: as presences that ask for no explanations, that do not need to define, classify, or order. Creatures that accept ambiguity as a natural condition.
For Morris, cats are not abstract symbols of independence or mystery. Rather, they are presences that accompany thought and make it inhabitable. Even when she imagines her own version of heaven, ironically revisiting Sydney Smith’s famous definition, she does not conceive it as a spiritual afterlife, but as a concrete journey. She describes it vividly: bowling across Castile in her Rolls-Royce of the day, the roof open, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto on the radio, and her Abyssinian cat beside her on the front seat. A reader of different impulses wrote to say that he agreed with the car, the place, and even the music, but as a companion he would want “something a damned sight more interesting than a cat.” Morris’s reply is implicit in the scene itself: for her, no companion could be more fitting.
Still in Conundrum, Morris describes her Abyssinian cat Menelik and, in doing so, once again describes herself:
[T]he greatest pleasure I get from my Abyssinian cat Menelik is the feeling that I have, by the very magnetism of my affection, summoned him from some wild place, some forest or moorland, temporarily to sharpen his claws purring upon my knee. I loved my children in the same fierce and calculated way, even when they were far away, and I hope they caught the habit in return. Certainly I have received from them always an affectionate if amused attitude of possession. They have looked at me rather as I have looked at Menelik, as some free spirit from somewhere else whom they have enticed and made their own. I have sidled among them, arching my back and trembling my tail, from destinations that must have seemed in their childhood as remote as any Abyssinian heath.
This is one of the most revealing passages in Morris’s work: not a celebration of feline independence, but a recognition of an affinity between two forms of otherness. Menelik remains “other,” yet loved. Just as she is. In both cases, difference does not obstruct closeness; it intensifies it.
Morris recognises in Menelik a way of being in the world that feels her own: discreet, oblique, resistant to immediate categories, yet capable of forming deep bonds.
Perhaps this is why, in later years, Morris no longer separates her public image from the presence of cats. Ibsen, a large Norwegian forest cat, becomes a constant figure in her daily and narrative life, appearing in interviews, essays, photographs, and late writings, where Morris even speaks of the “ghost of Ibsen” as an affectionate presence that continues to accompany her.
This continuity finds a particularly eloquent form in the official portrait held by the National Portrait Gallery, painted by Arturo Di Stefano between 2004 and 2005. The work emerges from an intense collaboration: Di Stefano visits Morris’s beloved home in Wales and later paints her from life in his studio, with Morris actively involved in the process. From the outset, she asks for an “allegorical landscape of the imagination” and sets one non-negotiable condition: the inclusion of Ibsen. Behind her unfolds a geography of significant places (Wales, Venice, Trieste, Manhattan, Everest) forming an inner map of her life. Ibsen, seated beside her, is neither symbol nor attribute, but an indispensable presence.
To tell Jan Morris’s story through her cats is to return, once more, to that initial scene beneath the piano: a space of listening, shelter, and companionship. Cats do not provide answers and do not ask for explanations. Their presence is enough.
Sources
- Morris, Jan. Conundrum. Faber & Faber, 1974. (Italian translation: Enigma).
- Morris, Jan. In My Mind’s Eye. London: John Murray, 2018.
- Di Stefano, Arturo. Portrait of Jan Morris, 2004–2005. National Portrait Gallery, London. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw123456/Jan-Morris