‘Our Jacky’ : The ever-unconventional Jan Morris reveals his face that launched a lifelong obsession : FISHER’S FACE: Or, Getting to Know the Admiral, <i> By Jan Morris (Random House: $23; 320 pp.)</i>

Jan Morris began researching a life of Admiral Lord Fisher in 1951. Forty-four years later, having assailed Everest, changed sex, been everywhere, and given us some of the most stylish topographical and historical writing of the century, she finally produces her Fisher-fest. A jeu d’amour , she calls it. If a boyhood hero can still command the affections of a grand and not uncritical lady of letters, that seems about right.

It is certainly not the book she would have written in 1951. The name of Jack Fisher, First Sea Lord of the British Royal Navy at the time of World War I, was then capable of stirring strong passions, mostly affectionate, always patriotic, sometimes vitriolic. A balanced biography was needed and two have since appeared. So has a collection of Fisher’s inimitable letters, plus appraisals of his naval reforms. Meanwhile Fisher the man, or “the great child” as the London Times called him, has slipped from public memory. In releasing him from the cloth bindings of naval biography Morris has produced more than a portrait. Arm in arm through postings various and capers hilarious, she accompanies her Jacky in what can fairly be described as an affair of the heart. It is emphatically not another biography and my only quarrel is with the publisher’s label, which consigns it to the very shelves from which Morris liberates the demon behind the seaman.

“My mission,” Fisher once declared, “is that of the mole . . . only to be known by upheavals.” But the upheavals were frequent and mountainous. He liked to think of himself as a Nelsonic figure, adapting the invincible pretensions of Her Majesty’s navy to the demands of a new century. Champion of the lower ranks and mastermind of the latest technology, he also liked to think of himself as “organizer of the Navy that won the Great War.” He liked, in short, to think of himself. To head a service that Jan Morris describes as “an institution of colossal self-esteem,” Fisher was just the man.

His face, one which probably did launch a thousand ships, is the focus of this book, providing both its title and its only illustration. Looks matter on the podia of high command and, like Mountbatten or MacArthur, Fisher photographed both well and willingly. He was as delighted with his sensational looks as is Morris who, from years of confronting his portrait every time she visits her closet, admits to having become infatuated.

Fisher’s infatuation was with Nelson yet his physiognomy resembled, if anyone’s, Napoleon’s. Close-cropped, a cowlick of black hair invades his broad expanse of flawless brow, establishing rebellious credentials. Hooded Asian eyes, well-spaced, blaze imperiously from a rigging of mirth wrinkles. The nose is neat, the cheeks billow boyishly like a matinee idol. But the mouth, cleanshaven for maximum exposure, is in a class of its own. As if capriciously assembled from photo-fit sections, the lower lip hints at impudent humor while the upper, so flush as to be almost a harelip, curls cruelly downward in a sneer of near sadistic disdain. The effect is disquieting and could not have been bettered had he designed it himself. Reserving the only string of alliterative adjectives not already wished on a class of battleships (Invincible, Irresistible, Inflexible, etc.) he proclaimed his disposition as “Ruthless, Relentless and Remorseless.”

These juggernaut qualities, augmented by underhand intrigue and deployed amid a barrage of publicity, he brought to bear on naval reform. Unsurprisingly reform turned out to be all about rearmament. Fisher’s ideas of an effective navy was one capable of blasting all others out of the water. He developed the awesome Dreadnoughts; ballistics and bhp were to rule the waves, torpedoes and submarines to prowl the depths. But whether he contributed to naval strategy is more doubtful. “Think in oceans, shoot at sight” was one of his favorite aphorisms. “The essence of war is violence.” “Hit first, hit hard, hit anywhere.” He subscribed, in short, to “the dictum that war could not be fought on homeopathic principles.”

This scarcely squared with the navy’s supposed role as a force for peace. Fisher, of course, claimed that deterrence was the best guarantee of peace. At a disarmament conference in 1899 he thought nothing of sharing his Armageddon insights with the peace delegates of Germany, Russia and the United States. They promptly drew their own conclusions about Her Majesty’s Pacific intentions. They also surmised that, if naval supremacy was all about armor plate, any industrialized country could compete; on the other side of the world, as the peace delegates well knew, Commodore George Dewey had lately destroyed a Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Yet Britain’s navy, for all its self-esteem, had not been seriously tested for nearly a century; indeed Fisher himself had never commanded a ship in battle. The British Empire had become what Morris calls “a vast ramshackle thing of infinite nuance and many self-delusions”; and Pax Britannica, the subject of Morris’ acclaimed trilogy, was beginning to look to the British electorate like “Tax Britannica” and to the rest of the world like a sham.

The great trial of strength came in 1915. Recalled from retirement by Winston Churchill, then First Sea Lord, Fisher reluctantly presided over the ill-fated assault on the Dardanelles. There, in a single day, the myth of the Royal Navy’s invincibility was shattered. Badly mauled, the mightiest fleet ever assembled in the Mediterranean retired in confusion before the Turkish batteries. Irresistible was lost, Inflexible disabled and old “Ruthless, Relentless and Remorseless” himself went missing. So much for “Hit first, hit hard, etc.” Though Fisher had warned of disaster, the bluff was called and it was his bluff.

For resigning at such a time of crisis many never forgave him. Even Jan Morris is aghast: “Perhaps he was having a breakdown.” But the same could be said of his navy and of the Empire it served. Fisher epitomized both. A showman and a charmer, he too was more spectacle than substance and subject to “infinite nuance and many self-delusions.” Jan Morris dismisses the popular notion that his peculiar cast of feature owed something to an exotic and undisclosed Asian parentage, and she doubts whether his notorious philandering was other than platonic. His letters--emphatic effusions spattered with exclamation marks and capitals--reveal a narrow field of reference limited to the Old Testament, Latin tags and plagiarized aphorisms. But the incorrigible gaiety of the man, the smile that melted the most hostile heart, and the passionate attachment of all who served under “our Jacky” cannot be gainsaid.

When it comes to the great set-piece of imperial pageantry, no one could stage them better than Fisher. And no one evokes them better than Morris. Fisher, like his Empire, was all about preserving face. Both were doomed; but faces, such faces, are well worth saving. In this delightful and revealing book, Jan Morris consummates her long affair with Empire in the arms of one of its most endearing commanders.