Back in August 2021, when I interviewed Michael Walmer about his independent press MichaelWalmer.com, which has reissued dozens of fine neglected books, he asked if I knew anything about the 1960s British author Jessamy Morrison: “I’m wondering whether or not you’ve looked into her,” he wrote — “Who she actually was — if indeed it was only one person. My searching so far has revealed nothing.”
The name was completely new to me, and that in itself is an increasingly uncommon thing.
Well, having since tracked down, purchased, and read four of Jessamy Morrison’s novels and awaiting a fifth to make its way from South Africa, I can answer Michael’s inquiry. I’ve looked into her, who she actually was.
And my searching so far has revealed nothing.
According to the British Library’s catalogue, Jessamy Morrison is a pseudonym. Having checked with the Society of Authors, Penguin Random House (which now owns the backlist of Morrison’s original publisher, W. H. Allen), and several major literary agencies, I’ve been unable to find any record outside library catalogues and a handful of bookseller listings.
What’s worse, I’m no longer even sure that Jessamy Morrison was, in reality, a she or a he. Or both.
Three of Morrison’s books have male narrators, which in itself offers no clue. Plenty of women have written novels with male leads and male narrators.
Of the very, very little that was written about Morrison’s books even when they first came out, the one thing consistently mentioned in reviews was the “unusual” nature of their subjects. Given that these books came out when England was just learning how to swing, that was undoubtedly code for homosexuality. W. H. Allen dropped a big, unsubtle hint on the cover of Morrison’s first novel The No-Road (1963) by announcing it as “A brilliant new novel in the tradition of The Well of Loneliness” — Radclyffe Hall’s one-scandalous novel of lesbian love. And that’s confirmed through the rave reviews that Barbara Grier, a pioneering lesbian writer and publisher, wrote for The Ladder, a 1960s lesbian journal, in her identity as Gene Damon.
Grier delighted in the ways in which Morrison puts the reader into the minds of men who consider themselves urbane and intelligent and then demonstrating beyond all doubt that they’re as thick as bricks when it comes to understanding women.
Gerald Milton, for example, acknowledges at the very start of The No-Road that he failed to see what was going on with his wife Clarissa: “One needs detachment in order to know. Detachment is easy when one isn’t involved.” He admits that he was “involved up to the neck,” yet still prides himself in thinking that “I retained my detachment to the last.”
Gerald and Clarissa are a fairly conventional upper-middle-class English couple. He is a shipbroker whose business to various European ports and Clarissa’s primary passion is for horses. They enjoyed a very British sex life, “neither of us attaching too much or too little importance to sex.” Gerald does share with the reader that he takes the occasional opportunities that arise on business trips through “a drink too many but never by planning or premeditation.”
On a holiday to Majorca, the Miltons encounter a boisterous group at a restaurant that Clarissa suggests are probably gay men and women but that Gerald dismisses as simply loud and unpleasant. One of the group, a self-confident woman named Diana Upton, however, befriends Clarissa on the beach and soon the two are inseparably. After their time on the island, though, the Miltons return to London on schedule.
Within a few weeks, however, Diana Upton arrives in London and begins making frequent calls on the Milton house. The two women go out riding together. Gradually, even Gerald starts to realize they’re having an affair. Though he puts all the blame of Diana as the devious seductress, he condemns Clarissa as a deviant:
I know, I said to myself, there are women homosexuals the same way as male homosexuals, but I know too that society has to defend itself against them. In my own nest was an enemy of society and to my misfortune the enemy happened to be my wife. And what she had down was in my eyes, and according to my sense and rules or morals, almost as illegal as murder. There are no extenuating circumstances for sexual depravity.
Clarissa agrees to end the affair and Gerald agrees to bring in Jill, a rather plain and dumpy woman in her thirties, to help with the children and household matters in consideration. And all is forgotten, bygones easily becoming bygones.
And so, this particular story might end, were it not for Gerald’s indominable obtuseness. For him, Clarissa’s affair was a disgraceful but forgivable dalliance. For her, it was a transformative experience. As John Lee Hooker’s mother observes in “Boogie Chillen,” once the boogie-woogie’s in someone, “it’s got to come out.” Or, to put it another way, three into two won’t go. And it’s not Gerald the Upright who fails to live happily ever after.
Herbert Brownlow, the narrator of Morrison’s next book, The Wind Has Two Edges (1964), is equally obtuse but perhaps a bit less hypocritical in his propriety. Herbert has retired from civil service to a flat in a Channel-side town neither too touristy for comfortable nor too dull to be deadly, where he intends to write the definitive history of administration.
His sole acquaintance is Stephen, a fellow civil servant who seems, upon their meeting again, to have become somewhat too louche and fond of drink for Herbert’s taste. Stephen has also made friends with two young, noisy, and brutish brothers named Alan and Michael. They spill drinks, jostle tables, make lewd comments about girls, and generally unsettle Herbert when he tries to have a quiet drink in the pub with his old friend.
Herbert becomes particularly offended by the brothers when they begin toying with the affections of Beryl, the beautiful and apparently strait-laced granddaughter of his landlady. In hopes of putting affairs back into good order, Herbert ends up thoroughly entangled in lives his entire worldview makes him ill-prepared to deal with. He attempts to play matchmaker, then peacemaker, and finally, the knight in shining armor to resolve matters in what, to him, seems a straightforward and rational manner.
Unlike Gerald Milton, however, when the facts of the situation — which include the efforts of several gay men and women to love as they choose without running afoul of the law or their community — are make clear to him, it is Herbert who adapts his values and put friendship ahead of such labels as “deviant” or “enemy of society”: “If you want to give it a label, Beryl had said on that unfortunate morning, then call me a lesbian. I could not. For I remembered only two nice and happy girls who in their harmonious way had given me a delightful meal.”
His error in trying to make sense of affairs deliberately convoluted to disguise the actual sexual orientation of its participants, as he admits in the end, was failing to consider “the human element.” The Wind Has Two Edges reminded me very much of Kathleen Sully’s novel Merrily to the Grave, similarly set in a house in a Channel-side town and similarly about how a collection of society’s outcasts and misfits can find community and acceptance together.
If The Wind Has Two Edges ends in a sort of sadder-and-wiser sunset glow, Morrison’s third novel The Girl from Paris (1965) opens with a scene certain to offend conventional British proprieties of its time. Duncan Diplock (which sounds like a name out of Catch-22) is trolling the streets of Montparnasse after midnight in search of a prostitute. Not just any prostitute, however, and not, as you might expect, for sex. Duncan is on a recruiting trip. He’s looking for a suitably attractive and refined prostitute to bring back to London and install in his mate Martin’s call-girl service. Duncan and his wife will host her as, ostensibly, an au pair to fool the immigration authorities, while she earns a small fortune for Martin by bringing in a better class of client.
Duncan selects Josette, a stunningly beautiful widow on the stroll to pay for her daughter’s care in a safe and respectable country home. After her initial surprise when Duncan starts talking business instead of hopping into bed, the wheels in her head begin turning and she negotiates a tough bargain: she will take the job for just one year and at a higher than planned rate.
Once settled London, though, Josette proves an agent of chaos — sexually, emotionally, financially, and practically. Martin the pimp falls in love with her, Duncan’s wife Wendy is seduced by her, a wealthy and shallow young lord contemplates marrying her, and Duncan simply struggles to keep it all from attracting the attention of the police. Josette, as he slowly realizes, is calculating and acting at a level of self-interest that makes the rest of the cast look like hapless amateurs. While their lives fall to pieces, Josette is able to return to Paris with a tidy sum to open a dressmaking business with — her intent all along.
The Girl from Paris is not a particularly profound book, but Morrison is quite effective in making Josette’s highly unconventional position seem more balanced than that of any of the lovestruck or simply bewildered English men and women around her. And as with all of the Morrison novels I’ve read so far, it flies like the wind. You keep turning the pages in each out of fascination, wondering just where this is all going.
I haven’t located a copy of Morrison’s rarest novel, Rusty (1967), which seems to be about the affair between a wild ingenue and a prominent author, and I’m still waiting to get my copy of The Office Party (1967), which was the only one to be widely reviewed. But the sixth and last novel, The Widow (1972), offers a few hints that clarify, if not solve, the mystery of Jessamy Morrison.
The Widow has, again, a male narrator. Nigel Hood is a successful art dealer dealing with an exclusive network of artists and clients. While in Durban to arrange a sale, he runs into an old Oxford friend, a South African poet named Roy Banting. After great initial fame and critical success, Banting has become something of a has-been, spending much of his time building an elaborate garden on a country estate and looked after by his adoring wife Charlotte Ann.
When Roy dies suddenly of a heart attack, Nigel finds himself enlisted into the roles of executor, counselor, and problem solver. The root of the problem is that Roy and Charlotte Ann’s marriage was a fake. He’d married a sexy but troubled undergraduate while teaching in the U.S. and never managed to secure a proper divorce. And now Charlotte Ann is pregnant with Roy’s child. So, will the child be a bastard or will Roy be revealed as a bigamist? This leads Nigel to devise an elaborate charade with all the complexities of a Feydeau farce and none of the humor.
Morrison spins out the tale with the usual flair for convolutions, but this time around it’s a little like listening to a very long-winded explanation of a situation you weren’t much interested in to start with. “Yes, yes,” I found myself saying, “get on with it.” If the real author behind Jessamy Morrison gave up publishing after The Widow, it may simply have been that he or she ran out of ideas.
I say he or she because I found it difficult to convince myself that The Widow was written by anyone but a man. Not only is there not the slightest hint of anything but good old-fashioned heterosexuality going on, but the book is riddled with one of the most notorious tells of male writers: a fixation about breast size. Nigel makes sure the reader knows that Charlotte Ann is well-endowed while Nancy, his long-time girlfriend, is not. He even makes sure we are forced to witness a scene in which Charlotte Ann lactates for his edification.
Perhaps this alone is not enough to prove that Jessamy Morrison was, in fact, a male author, but it certainly raises questions. Why would a man take a woman’s name and then publish novels written from a man’s perspective? The Wind Has Two Edges aside, is the lesbian element in two of the other three novels a serious attempt to stimulate a conversation about the complexities of gender and sexual preferences, or is it simply a literate version of the very old story of a guy trying to talk his wife or girlfriend into a threesome with one of her friends?
I still hope to unravel the mystery of Jessamy Morrison, but at this point it’s more out of curiosity than any interest in trying to bring a lost-lost talent back to light. Three of the four novels discussed here may have some value as artifacts of a time when sexual mores in England were beginning to change, but only The Wind Has Two Edges has more than average merit.
I welcome any assistance any reader of this piece might be able to lend in solving this mystery. It would still be nice to know what was going on with these books. If nothing else, they are certainly atypical for their time.