John
Mortimer, The Art of Fiction
Interviewed by Rosemary
Herbert
The
only child of a highly literate and eccentric barrister and his wife, John
Mortimer was born into a life of literature and the law. After Mortimer’s birth
in April, 1923, he was raised in his parents’ flat in the Inner Temple in
London and later the Chiltern Hills, in a home and garden designed by his
father. Mortimer led a rather solitary childhood, enlivened by long walks in
the company of his blind father who recited Sherlock Holmes stories to him from
memory.
Mortimer
was educated at The Dragon School in Oxford, then at Harrow where he escaped
the sports program to attend the theater, and at Brasenose College, Oxford.
During the war he served in the Crown Film Unit making documentary films as an
assistant director and then scriptwriter. He studied law and was called to the
bar in 1948, subsequently working as a divorce barrister and later as a Queen’s
Counsel in criminal law. He went on to act as defense lawyer in several
celebrated cases concerning questions of censorship and freedom of expression.
Mortimer
retired from the law ten years ago, but not before he had established himself
as a playwright for stage, screen and radio, and as a novelist, journalist,
translator, and author of nonfiction volumes—even while pursuing a full-time
law practice. He has written over sixty-five scripts for film and television,
some forty scripts for radio, nine novels, several volumes of Rumpole stories,
five volumes of nonfiction, and countless articles for newspapers and
magazines. One of his latest accomplishments is a translation of the Strauss
opera Die Fledermaus.
Mortimer
was married to the writer Penelope Mortimer for twenty-three years, during
which time the couple had two children and were parents to her four children
from a previous marriage. The two wrote one travel book and a screenplay
together.
In
1972 Mortimer married Penny Gollop, with whom he now has two daughters, Emily,
age seventeen, and Rosamund, four years old. The family resides in London and
in the expanded house in the Chilterns, in Oxfordshire, where they maintain the
lovely gardens established by Mortimer’s parents. The Mortimers also spend
considerable time in Italy, where Mortimer has set his latest novel, Summer’s
Lease (1988).
The
following interview was conducted in Mortimer’s homes in London and Oxfordshire,
and in his favorite local pub, The Bull & Butcher, a stone’s throw away
from the idyllic churchyard where his parents are buried. We also conversed
during a tour of his garden. There he spoke about his father while pointing out
various flora that his parents had cultivated as well as the very tree where
the accident occurred that destroyed the elder Mortimer’s vision. Driving us
through the Chiltern Hills in his red Mercedes with opera gently emanating from
the stereo, he recalled his boyhood and showed us some of the locations filmed
for productions of Voyage Round My Father and Paradise Postponed.
Places from his boyhood, familiar to viewers of the television series—the local
churches, a windmill, the homes of the local gentry, even the grave of a pet
monkey—were all pointed out in due course along with revealing comments
disclosing that this rural outbuilding actually houses a Jacuzzi, and that
one is owned by a rock star. It seems the chair makers and field-workers of
Mortimer’s childhood were driven from their beautiful real estate years ago.
But the bulk of our conversation occurred in Mortimer’s study in the
Oxfordshire house, where he relaxed on a sofa with his dog Tizzy beside him,
and where he frequently bestirred himself to stoke a blazing wood fire.
INTERVIEWER
Because
of the popularity of your character Rumpole of the Bailey, and because you
practiced law for the greater part of your working life, one thinks of you as a
barrister and writer. In your autobiographical novel, Clinging to
the Wreckage, you wrote, “As a barrister who wrote, or, as I wanted to
think of it, as a writer who did barristering, I was stretched between two
opposite extremes.” Did your dual professions sometimes make you feel as if you
were leading a double life?
JOHN
MORTIMER
Yes,
but then that’s what I like. I liked it! I mean I love leading double lives
because I have a very low threshold of boredom. My happiest thing was to go to
court and do a murder case and then come out and go to a rehearsal and see a
lot of actors acting something I’d written. And I’d always had a feeling that
the real life was in the acting and the pretend life was in the murder trial!
INTERVIEWER
Which
was the more real to you as a person, the role of the writer or of the
barrister?
MORTIMER
Life
as a barrister never was terribly real to me and courtrooms were always a place
of fantasy to me. They had nothing to do with discovering the truth, really, of
course.
INTERVIEWER
Your
father was a barrister, so presumably the idea of a barristerial career came to
you early in life. Did you also, at a young age, dream of becoming a writer?
MORTIMER
I
knew early on that I was going to be a writer. I think it’s something rather
like a curse that you’re born with. I knew I wanted to be a writer and my father
was far too intelligent to tell me not to be one. Instead of that, he said, “Of
course you’ll be a writer. Of course you’ll be a very successful writer, but
just till you make a fortune by writing, just divorce a few people. You know,
just a few. There’s nothing in it.” He thought that writers’ wives led such
terrible lives because the writer was always at home brewing tea and stumped
for words. And he said, “Your marriage will be much happier if you go down to
Temple tube station and go to the law courts and divorce people.” And he told
me there was really nothing to being a lawyer except a certain amount of common
sense, and relatively clean fingernails. You see, I was practically born into
the divorce courts. My father was the doyen of the divorce barristers. He was
an extremely erudite and very famous divorce barrister. So that when I was a
little boy in the nursery, instead of a story like “Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs,” I used to get “The Duchess and the Seven Correspondents.” My father
used to return to me glowing with his triumphs in the divorce courts and give
me wonderful lines, which I was afterwards able to use in a play I wrote about
him. He did really come home to me one night in the nursery and say, “I had a
wonderful day in court, John. Terrific trial,” he said. “Managed to prove
adultery by evidence of inclination and opportunity,” he said. “The only piece
of evidence we had was a pair of footprints upside down on the dashboard of an
Austin 711 parked in a Hampstead garden suburb.” That was my father. You’ve
read Voyage Round My Father, my play about him, so you know that my
father went blind and my mother had the task of reading aloud to my father all
of this terrible evidence in all of his divorce cases. And they used to travel
up to London from Henley-on-Thames, where we lived, and they used to sit in the
first-class compartment on the Great Western Railway. If you may picture the
scene: my mother was reading out all this terrible evidence about stained
sheets and male and female clothing scattered around hotel bedrooms—and the
train would grind to a halt, somewhere around Slough, and the entire first
class carriage would fall absolutely silent, listening to the ever-diminishing
tale, in the hope of catching the name of some close friend or relative who has
at last been caught out!
INTERVIEWER
According
to both your play and your novel about your father, his blindness was never
mentioned by anyone in his family?
MORTIMER
Yes.
That is so.
INTERVIEWER
Your
work about your father is handled with humor and affection, yet it would seem
that the circumstances of having such a father would not always have been easy.
It appears that there was sometimes a lack of communication and, as in the case
of his blindness, an unwillingness even to mention an issue of major
importance. How did you come to your fond comprehension of your parents?
MORTIMER
Well,
they were very nice to me, my parents; they were never nasty. And they did
treat me as if I were grown up. I try and treat my children from the age of ten
months as if they were totally grown up, which I think is the only way to treat
children. But as for that lack of communication you mention, I’m very fond of
that, I think. I hate people saying what they think. If you’re an American you
must say what you think, whereas if you’re English you should say everything except
what you think.
INTERVIEWER
This
leaves much more room for speculation, obviously.
MORTIMER
And
also it’s a much more interesting way to write, because you have to tell the
audience what people think by means of what they’re not saying,
instead of what they are saying. So with my parents, I was perfectly able to
cope with all of that, really, and the fact that they didn’t say things
indicated a trust, in a way.
INTERVIEWER
And
your father’s appreciation of literature was also a great influence upon you as
a developing writer.
MORTIMER
That
is so. As he couldn’t see, I used to read to him. I read everything to him. I
read a lot of poetry and Shakespeare—he knew all of the plays of Shakespeare by
heart. We used to go to the theater every year at Stratford-on-Avon. We always
used to arrive about a quarter of an hour after the curtain rose, because my
father enjoyed a seven-course dinner. But he was a wonderful help in the
audience because he always sat in the front row of the stalls, he knew all of
the plays by heart, and he could always recite all of the lines about fifteen
seconds before the actors. And like Rumpole—this was something I used in
Rumpole later—my father would always quote Shakespeare extremely inappositely.
When I was about four, every time he saw me, my father would say, “Is execution
done on Cawdor?” which, when you’re four, is a pretty tough question to answer.
INTERVIEWER
You
say you knew from an early age that you wanted to be a writer. Aside from your
father’s love of literature and his influence upon you, do you recall any hints
coming from within yourself that you might one day write? For instance, did you
find yourself narrating your own day-to-day activities to yourself as they
occurred?
MORTIMER
Oh,
absolutely! And also talking to myself in the third person. I remember doing
that and I still do it.
INTERVIEWER
I
understand your father was also a great admirer of Sherlock Holmes.
MORTIMER
Well,
I think everybody enjoys Sherlock Holmes. I suppose there are people
who don’t enjoy detective stories. But Sherlock Holmes is a great part of my
childhood. My father was absolutely besotted with him. We used to take long
walks together during which my father would recite the whole of a Holmes story.
INTERVIEWER
Your
father had an extraordinary memory. Do you think your own memory is similarly
excellent?
MORTIMER
I
don’t know. It developed gradually. I think it’s a great pity that nowadays
nobody ever learns poetry in school, because the poetry you learn in school you
never forget in your entire life. And of course I learned a lot of Shakespeare
because I used to perform the plays for my father. Then, if you’re a courtroom
lawyer, it’s like playing bridge; you do have to remember the evidence, you
have to remember what people have said day-to-day. You have to be able to think
on your feet.
INTERVIEWER
This
well-trained memory must serve you well as a writer.
MORTIMER
Absolutely.
But of course there are areas where my memory is not so good. I have a very bad
memory for people’s names, for instance.
INTERVIEWER
I
noticed that you have made allusions to Sherlock Holmes in the Rumpole stories.
Are these ideas that sprang to mind from your memory of the Holmes canon?
MORTIMER
Rumpole
is terribly founded on the Sherlock Holmes stories. The structure of the
Rumpole stories is very Sherlockian. And there are lots of quotations from
Sherlock Holmes in Rumpole. When Rumpole pretends to die in order to get an
adjournment of a case in “The Last Resort,” it’s taken from Doyle’s “The Dying
Detective.”
INTERVIEWER
What
is, for you, the particular appeal of the Holmes stories?
MORTIMER
They’re
a whole way of looking at life, aren’t they? I’ve always enjoyed crime fiction.
I think that much of the best writing being done today is in crime novels. The
plot and discipline essential to a crime novel save it from the terrible traps
of being sensitive and stream of consciousness and all of that stuff. You do
need that discipline, I think, and plot! Life happens in plots all the time;
life is absolutely composed of plots!
INTERVIEWER
That’s
the truth of life, I think.
MORTIMER
Yes.
And coincidences. All of these things happen in life. And suspense. I think
that the writer Ruth Rendell said the most important thing is suspense.
Whatever it is, whatever story you are telling, unless it’s got suspense it
won’t keep people wondering what’s going to happen next.
INTERVIEWER
Did
you learn this lesson early in your career? Tell us about your early days in
writing, leading to the publication of your first novel.
MORTIMER
Well,
the war started. And you can’t divorce people in war; it doesn’t look good. So
I entered a thing called the Crown Film Unit which was making documentary films
about the war; and I went into quite a new world, the world of film
technicians, of cameramen, of prop men and actors and actresses, and it was all
a wonderful world to me. But I was a fourth assistant director in this film
unit. The scriptwriter was a wonderful writer named Laurie Lee to whom I owe a
great deal. As a fourth assistant director I found that the only job I was
asked to do was to make tea for the director and to say, “Quiet please,” at the
beginning of every shot. And so I used to say, “Quiet please,” in a very
nervous and timid voice—being very nervous and timid as I am to this day. And
when I said, “Quiet please,” everybody on the set went on sawing wood,
hammering nails, making love, playing pontoon, and they took absolutely no
notice of me at all. So one day I lost my patience with them all and I yelled,
“quiet please, you bastards!” and they all threatened to strike. So then they
decided I’d do a lot less harm being a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Was
Laurie Lee a significant influence upon you? Was he a mentor?
MORTIMER
Well,
this was part of the documentary movement that had started before the war.
There was a man called John Grierson, who was a Scot, and he was a major force
in the documentary idea. One of our precepts was that you didn’t use actors;
you used the actual people. You did write stories and you did
write scenes but they were played by real farmers or aircraft pilots.
INTERVIEWER
But
since you weren’t a farmer or pilot yourself, how did you know what to write?
MORTIMER
You
had them say “Roger!” a lot. But no, you did research. I went down in a mine,
for instance. It’s a funny trick that you learn, writing documentaries, or
being a barrister, for that matter. You can prepare yourself to
cross-examine a doctor on the vagal nerve. You don’t really know all
about it but you know how to put it so that a jury can understand it.
INTERVIEWER
Or,
in film, an audience; or in prose, the reader.
MORTIMER
That’s
right.
INTERVIEWER
You
wrote about your experience in the Crown Film Unit in Charade, your
first novel, originally published in 1947. The novel was published in its first
American edition by Viking in 1986. How was Charade received when it
was first published?
MORTIMER
It
was quite a success. The first notice I got—and I don’t like notices, they make
me very frightened—was by a man called Daniel George who wrote in The Daily
Express, “Not for fifteen years have I found so certain a touch.” Now if I
got that nowadays I would be absolutely delighted. But when I got that when I
was twenty-three I was absolutely furious. I thought, Who is this swine whom he
read fifteen years ago who had such wonderful writing?
INTERVIEWER
But
in any case you were encouraged enough by the critical response to write more
novels, even after you returned to the legal profession?
MORTIMER
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
Would
you have continued to write novels, even if the reviews had not been so
favorable?
MORTIMER
Well,
novels were the only thing to write in those days, really. That was 1947. There
wasn’t any television, for a start. The theater was given over to revivals. Of
course, T. S. Eliot was writing plays, but those were verse plays. It wasn’t
really until Look Back In Anger, in the mid-fifties, that new serious
writers came into the British theater. So nobody thought of writing plays, and
a novel was the only thing to write. And you know, Charade was turned
down by a few publishers before it was accepted, and I’d written one
unpublished novel before that. So I don’t think bad reviews would have stopped
me, however much they might have depressed me.
INTERVIEWER
How
did your service in the Crown Film Unit come to an end?
MORTIMER
Well,
it all did come to an end. All the husbands came back from the forces
and life took on a grimmer hue. And I didn’t really know what I would do. I
could have gone on writing films for the Rank Organization. But all of the
films of the Rank Organization featured Margaret Lockwood dressed in Regency
costumes and flourishing a riding whip. I thought that was rather a distasteful
thing to have to write, so I went back to divorcing people.
INTERVIEWER
Would
you comment on how your work as a barrister influenced your literary career,
even before you created Rumpole?
MORTIMER
There
are a lot of similarities between writing and the law, particularly in the way
in which I did the law, which was by being an advocate. If you’re a defense
person, you don’t usually open cases. But if you do open cases, which you do in
civil cases if you’re the plaintiff, you have to tell the story to the jury or
to the judge, very, very simply, and you must tell them in a narrative
that is going to make them listen. That’s very good narrative training, I
think. You may have to assemble the facts of some very, very complicated cases
and narrate them in a way that will arrest them. So that’s good
training for a writer. And there’s the fact that you’ve got to get up and make
a final speech; there’s no way you can say you want to go out for a walk or
make a cup of tea or you’ve got writer’s block. You’ve got to stand up and do
it.
INTERVIEWER
Right
then and there.
MORTIMER
Do
it then and there! And provide a joke if necessary. It makes you able
to think quickly.
INTERVIEWER
Are
there ways in which work in the law is not helpful to the writer?
MORTIMER
In
the law you can bore judges into submission, you know, by going on until they
scream for mercy—whereas you can’t bore your readers into submission!
INTERVIEWER
In
the quotation that I mentioned earlier, you said that as a barrister and writer
you felt “stretched between two opposite extremes,” but you say you enjoyed the
double life. Was this, then, a comfortable balance for you?
MORTIMER
Well,
looking back on it, I probably did the barristering for too long. And I got too
good at it for my own good. You know, I was too successful. And I think if I’d
stopped it earlier I should have written more. But on the other hand, I don’t
regret it at all, because without that career I wouldn’t have written the
things that I’ve written; I wouldn’t know about the things that I do; I
wouldn’t have ever met a murderer. And, you know, that seems a great privilege,
to have met a few murderers in my life.
INTERVIEWER
You
have said before that you handled the question of defending the person “who
dunnit” by leaving the burden of deciding upon innocence or guilt to the judge
and jury. You said, “The thing you, as the defending lawyer, are concentrating
on is trying to convince the jury that guilt hasn’t been proved beyond a
reasonable doubt. Guilt isn’t a question you have to decide, really, and you
can get quite used to suspending your judgment about that, suspending your
disbelief.”
MORTIMER
That’s
right. Really, you’re suspending your disbelief, which is what Catholics do all
the time. So my belief remained hanging in the hall.
INTERVIEWER
Tell
us, please, some anecdotes from courtroom life that were useful to you as a
writer. I don’t mean simply anecdotes that you have used in plotting Rumpole
episodes, but rather, memorable moments that opened your eyes to character,
language, and other aspects of writing.
MORTIMER
I
learned a lot about literature divorcing people, because nothing equips you
more for a life in letters than a career in the divorce court. I learned first
of all a very important lesson about English dialogue. I learned the importance
of the sporting metaphor in English life, and I remember very well the case in
which I learned that. I was appearing for an admiral. And this admiral had a
very unhappy married life because he’d fallen desperately in love with a
skating instructress at the Queensway Baths. And this skating instructress was a
beautiful little blonde lady who used to pirouette around on the ice in her
little white tutu and her little white skating boots. My admiral sat on the
corner of the ice rink and he fell so passionately in love with her
that he skated across to embrace her. But he was so passionate that he forgot
to remove the leather guards from his skates. So the admiral attended the
conference in my chambers in a wheelchair. But in those days in divorce law you
had to ask your client when he’d last made love to his wife. It was very
embarrassing, but you had to ask. And there was I, about a twenty-five-year-old
divorce barrister, and I said, “Admiral, could you just tell me please—it’s
very embarrassing to have to ask you this—but when did you last make love to
your wife?” It was then that I learned the importance of the sporting metaphor
to the English. Because I’ll never forget his reply. He said, “Well, we batted
on for the first three years,” he said, “but then we drew stumps.” I also
learned as a divorce lawyer the importance of learning when to end the
dialogue, when to cut the scene. And I learned that when I was doing a rural
divorce case. I can just give you a little passage from that case that will
show you the importance of knowing when to stop. If I may just fill in the
facts of the case, I had a client who was accused of committing adultery with a
young girl in the middle of the Seven Acre Barley Field. And the only witness
to this appalling act was Farmer Brown, who had been standing at the time at
the edge of the Seven Acre Barley Field and had seen it all happen. And so I
got up and I cross-examined Farmer Brown with my usual aplomb, and I said,
“Farmer Brown, perhaps on some occasions during your younger years you might
have taken a girl into the middle of the Seven Acre Barley Field.” And he said
“Ooh ah,” or some such rustic reply. And I said, “You might even have sat down
in the barley field next to this girl.” And he said, “Ooh ah ah.” And I said,
“Perhaps you sat very close to her.” He said, “Ooh ah.” And I said, “Perhaps
you kissed her.” And he said, “Ooh ah.” And I said, “Maybe you even laid down
beside her, Farmer Brown.” He said, “Ooh ah.” And that was the point, for all
students of English literature, for all students of law, at which any decent writer,
any sensible barrister, would have cut the dialogue, sat down, ended the scene.
But I had to ask the final, fatal question. “So, Farmer Brown,” I said, “any
witness standing on the edge of the Seven Acre Barley Field at that time might
have come to the conclusion that you were committing adultery.” “Ooh ah,” he
said, “and he’d be damn right, too.” So it is desperately important to remember
when enough is enough, when you’ve finished the scene.
INTERVIEWER
Have
you anecdotes to share from your career in criminal law?
MORTIMER
I
took to crime rather late in life. But I learned in all the courts many very,
very important lessons about the English language. One of the most important
lessons, of course, is that there isn’t one English language: there are about a
hundred English languages that are spoken on this island. And the language
spoken by judges and the language spoken by clients are totally different. And
by and large each is totally unable to understand the other at all. I used to
end divorce cases and the judge used to give a most reasoned, brilliant little
summary. But at the end of it all, the sort of fifty-year-old lady you
represented had absolutely no idea whether she’d been condemned to death, or
offered huge sums of damages, or been sent for long-term imprisonment. And when
one had to explain that she was probably still married to the rather boring
person to whom she had been married for the last fifty years, a sort of look of
puzzled bewilderment used to come right onto her face. I never really got to
the whole beauty of the difference between judgespeak and clientspeak until I
went to the Old Bailey and I met a wonderful judge called Judge Maude. And I
would like just for a moment to remember Judge Maude with you. This Old Bailey
judge had a gorgeous profile; he had beautiful little gray sideburns; he wore
exquisite little golden half-glasses; he used to adjourn the court at
eleven-thirty every morning for his glass of cold chablis and a little nibble
of cheese. And Judge Maude had the onerous duty of sentencing a totally drunk
Irish laborer who had been rightly convicted of urinating down the stairs of
Leicester Square tube station, indecent exposure, using indecent language,
assaulting the police, everything you can think of! And Judge Maude looked over
his beautiful little gold glasses and he said, “I am going to take a most
unusual course, a most merciful course, with you my man.” And this man said,
“Oh, God bless Your Royal Highness for your charity.” “I’m going to place you
upon probation.” And the man said, “Ah, Your Holiness, this is the most
wonderful thing I’ve ever heard.” The judge said, “But I place you on probation
upon one condition, and one condition only.” And the man said, “Oh, I’ll do
anything for Your Reverence, anything.” The judge paused and said, “Well, the
condition is that you must never touch another drop of alcohol for the rest of
your natural life.” And the man said, “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” And the
judge paused and he said, “Look, by nothing, I mean really nothing.
Not even the teeniest, weeniest little dry sherry before your dinner.” So there
is a sort of gap, a sort of language gap, between the judges and the
judged.
INTERVIEWER
What
inspired you to try your hand at drama?
MORTIMER
I’d
written about five or six novels and I found writing novels rather a lonely
business. You very rarely actually catch anyone reading them. I’ve heard of a
novelist who got onto the tube at Picadilly Circus for the purpose of getting
out at Green Park, a distance of one stop. And as he got onto the tube he found
himself sitting next to a girl who was in fact reading one of his novels. And
he knew that two hundred pages further on there was a joke. So he sat on till
Cockfosters, the end of the line, in the faint hope of hearing a laugh, which
never came. But somewhere after my fifth or sixth novel, I found it such a
lonely occupation, and Nesta Pain, whom I knew and admired as one of the most
distinguished of radio producers, asked me to write a play for the radio. At
that time I considered myself a novelist, although it is true that during a
lonely childhood I quite often acted out Hamlet and Macbeth,
duelling with myself and pretending I was mad for hours at a time.
INTERVIEWER
And,
of course, you had the documentary film experience. In the introduction to the
1958 edition of The Dock Brief, you note that “documentary films bear
as little relation to art as they do to life, existing uninterestingly between
the two like the instructions you get with do-it-yourself garden furniture.”
MORTIMER
Yes!
Yes, so at first I procrastinated about writing a radio drama. But when I got
the idea for The Dock Brief, I remembered Nesta’s request. So I wrote
the play. It was about an old barrister and an unsuccessful criminal in a cell,
and by a wonderful stroke of luck the barrister was played by Michael Hordern,
who later played in the television dramatization of Paradise Postponed.
INTERVIEWER
How
extraordinary! He played the rector, Simeon Simcox, I believe.
MORTIMER
That’s
right. And there he is, on the cover of the paperback of Paradise Postponed,
to this day. And with The Dock Brief, for the first time I actually
heard dialogue that I’d written being said by actors and I became intoxicated
with the idea of that, and the idea of theater, and the idea of dramatic
scenes. And the writing of radio plays is a wonderful exercise because they
entirely depend upon the imagination of the audience. The Dock Brief
was rather successful for me. And if you are successful, if you write a play
about two old men in a cell, the moguls of Hollywood immediately think you’re
absolutely the right man to write The Decline and Fall of Genghis Khan!
So off I went to Hollywood from time to time and wrote for the movies. And so
there I was, barristering, writing, doing all of these things.
INTERVIEWER
And
you were heading a large family. How did you fit your writing in between
working as a barrister and leading a busy family life? When did you find the
time to write?
MORTIMER
It
was very difficult. I used to get up very early in the morning, and when I
became Queen’s Counsel, a criminal lawyer, it was much easier because I would
do a big case, then have a gap, then do another big case. And by the end I was
only doing about five cases a year.
INTERVIEWER
Was
it helpful having another novelist in the family? Did you provide support for
one another in literary matters?
MORTIMER
No.
I don’t think writers being married to each other is very helpful.
INTERVIEWER
You
can both sit home brewing tea, stumped for words.
MORTIMER
Or
else you sit listening to the other person’s typewriter rattling and it drives
you mad. Also, you share common experiences, so you only have the same thing to
write about. We did write a travel book together: With Love and Lizards.
INTERVIEWER
Did
you feel a sense of competition?
MORTIMER
Yes.
I think the problem was Penelope used to type, so I could always hear the
typewriter clacking, but I always write by hand.
INTERVIEWER
You
must have had a number of literary friends. Was that a major part of your life,
being involved with other writers?
MORTIMER
Not
really. I think that English writers tend to avoid other writers. When I was
young there were pubs you could go to and find other writers. And when I was at
Oxford you could find Dylan Thomas at a pub, and Stephen Spender, and that was
really exciting. That’s all totally gone now. When I used to live with Penelope
we knew a few writers. Now I see Peter Nichols and John Osborne, but not
regularly. And we don’t always talk about writing. I don’t think the society of
other writers is all that significant to my actual work in writing.
INTERVIEWER
To
get back to a character whom you created both for the screen and the printed
page, would you comment on the genesis of Horace Rumpole?
MORTIMER
Well,
somewhere around the mid-seventies, about twelve years ago, I thought I needed
a character to keep me alive in my old age and I remembered all of the rather
underpaid barristers I’d known, trudging around some very unsympathetic courts,
and I thought of my father’s uniform, the sort of Winston Churchill set with
the black jacket and striped trousers and cigar ash down the watch chain. And I
thought of all the barristers I’d known who called the judges “Old Darling.” So
I thought of Rumpole, and he’s been a great comfort to me. You might say he’s
taken me around the world.
INTERVIEWER
Are
there ways in which Rumpole reflects the barrister, John Mortimer?
MORTIMER
Well,
I mean, Rumpole says the things that I think. But if I say them, they sound
rather sort of trendy and progressive; if he says them they sound rather crusty
and conservative and nice.
INTERVIEWER
What
about some of the other characters. “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” for instance?
MORTIMER
“She-who-must-be-obeyed”
isn’t like anyone, really. You can put any scene that happens in marriage into
the Rumpole marriage. My wife is not at all like “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” but
any scene that happens with my wife could be used in Rumpole.
INTERVIEWER
You
seem to have a particular sensitivity to and flair for portraying older, rather
eccentric men, and bringing humor to their portraits.
MORTIMER
Oh,
yes. Old men are my specialty, rather! And in my latest novel, Summer’s
Lease, I’ve had rather a good time with another older character; so I’m
still at it, portraying old men.
INTERVIEWER
In
working on your adaptation of Brideshead Revisited for television, you
must have found the portrayal of Charles Ryder’s father natural territory for
your talent. It would seem that your own father and Ryder’s were kindred
spirits. It must have been delightful working on those scenes.
MORTIMER
Yes,
absolutely. I mean the father character is very much like my father.
INTERVIEWER
The
Oxford scene must also have seemed designed for you since you grew up near
Oxford and went to university there.
MORTIMER
Well,
I was in Oxford during the war, during the blitz, and the blackout, and
rationing, and a period of austerity. Although there were relics of the old
Evelyn Waugh period, my Oxford was very different. I was very pleased to do Brideshead,
which I remember reading at the time that it came out. In the forties everyone
liked it because it took them away from the austerity, and it talked of a past,
vanished age and wonderful golden youth and all that. And so it’s popular now,
when there’s another age of austerity in Britain.
INTERVIEWER
What
do you think accounts for its huge popularity in the U.S.?
MORTIMER
As
to the popularity of it with the American audience, there’s a letter from
Evelyn Waugh saying he never thought that more than eight Americans would like Brideshead.
And now they have Lord Sebastian look-alike contests in the streets of San
Francisco! I’m not sure it hasn’t done a terrible disservice to the world, with
all of these young men being frightfully right wing and carrying teddy bears!
INTERVIEWER
I
don’t believe you shared many values with Evelyn Waugh. Did this in any way
cause difficulties for you in writing the adapation?
MORTIMER
Well,
he was a great Catholic reactionary, and I’m a sort of an atheist and an
inactive socialist. But on the whole I like the book and I love
writing about religion. I mean I love writing about it, but I don’t have any
religion.
INTERVIEWER
Did
you therefore find it difficult to identify with Charles Ryder’s eventual
religious awakening?
MORTIMER
No,
I found that very easy. The difficulty I had with the character was his
political stance, his behavior during the General Strike, which I could hardly
bear to write about. And there’s also a scene in which he takes Rex out to
dinner, in which he feels terribly superior because Rex chooses the wrong sort
of food and the wrong glass. This I find unbelievably snobbish. I don’t mind
his religion, but I do mind his snobbery. And he’s a difficult character
because he’s the most boring character in the whole thing—and all the other characters
are so good.
INTERVIEWER
I
read that the actor, Jeremy Irons, hesitated to take the part for this reason.
MORTIMER
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
But
I’m so glad he did. His enunciation of the narrated sections—
MORTIMER
Was
beautiful, just beautiful. Yes. But I did share with Evelyn Waugh the fact that
both of our backgrounds are very middle-class. I mean, I went to Harrow and
there met upper-class people. And Oxford was an extraordinary part of that
English upper-class education. What happened was you went to a prep school or a
public school in which your life was incredibly circumscribed. I mean,
I never met a girl; I never met a member of the working class except the girl
who came to make the bed, you know, in Harrow. One really lived in a
sort of monastic, one-class world in which everything you did had rules
attached. And then you suddenly got to Oxford and you were treated like a
grown-up person—and you could even get drunk!
INTERVIEWER
Well,
that’s certainly similar to Ryder’s experience! Your latest television series
was adapted from your own novel Paradise Postponed. What inspired you
to return to the novel after so many years?
MORTIMER
Well,
about two or three years ago I went to defend an opposition MP in Singapore. So
I flew out of England on Boxing Day to defend this man. I arrived jet-lagged,
hung over, with no particular idea of what the case was all about. In short, I
was in the usual position of a defending Queen’s Counsel in the beginning of an
important trial. And I staggered into the Singapore Central Court. There was
this robing room, which looked to me exactly like every robing room from
Snaresbrook to Bodmin to the Old Bailey to Hong Kong. It was a huge, dirty room
with the floor lined with torn-up newspaper. There were barristers lying on benches
in their stocking feet, sleeping off their hangovers. There were other
barristers ringing up their wives in the vain attempt to explain where they
were the night before. And the whole of this familiar environment was presided
over by an eighty-four-year-old Chinese woman who was making Nescafe and
pouring out Chinese cough mixture for barristers with sore throats. And so I
went into there and she looked at me and she said, “Ah, there you are. Lumpore
of the Bailey.” And I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being
called Lumpore of the Bailey, so I decided to give it up, for the time at
least. Then what happened was that I was having lunch with Bryan Cowgill, who
heads Thames Television, and he said, “When are you going to write a story about
England since the war?” At first I thought I didn’t want to write a story about
England since the war. And then I thought maybe I could. And then I thought,
well, I’d adapted Brideshead for television and it’s a long novel. I
thought, “Well, I don’t want to adapt anybody else’s novel so I’ll
write a novel and then adapt it.” So I wrote down the idea for it on a piece of
paper in handwriting, and I never even typed it out. I sold it to the
television company and to the publisher. I think they bought it and paid lots
of money for it because they never could read the handwriting. So then I set
about it and I wrote them both at the same time.
INTERVIEWER
The
novel reads very much like a Victorian novel, with its episodic nature, its
plot centering around a question of money and a debatable will. It calls to
mind Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens. Did you have the Victorian novel in
mind when you began Paradise Postponed?
MORTIMER
I
knew that I wanted to write a long novel, as much like a long Victorian novel
as possible. I think that Victorian novelists and television writers have got a
lot in common because, after all, they have a big audience and their work comes
out in parts. I knew it had to have one strong plot which would keep people
reading it from beginning to end. Immediately I thought of Bleak House.
I thought, if you asked anybody what the plot to Bleak House was, they
would never really be able to tell you, but they would be able to tell
you all about the funny little things that happened along the way. But if Bleak
House didn’t have a central plot, they wouldn’t have gone on reading it
and discovered those things along the way.
INTERVIEWER
The
fact that Paradise Postponed revolves around the central mystery of
the rector’s will ties it in with your first novel, written almost four decades
earlier. Charade, too, centered around a crucial mystery. In much of
your longer fiction you’ve set out to resolve central questions in the plot as
well as to discover the truth of character.
MORTIMER
The
detective story comes, really, into everything, I think. And the detective
story is hard, much harder to write, than a sensitive novel of adultery in
Hampstead-on-Hill. Plots are terribly important. I think they must be
important because I find them terribly difficult. Plots are the hardest thing
for me. But you’ve got to have that plot in which you find out in the
end, as you point out, the truth of the characters. And so the whole detective
story reading is the important thing, to my mind. I think it’s the hard thing and
the important thing; it’s the surprise, the suspense.
INTERVIEWER
Did
you have your surprise all planned out when you embarked upon writing Paradise
Postponed? Are you the sort of writer who has to know where everything is
going before you start?
MORTIMER
No,
not at all. No, I don’t believe in that at all. I only know where everything is
going about halfway through.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you mean to say that while writing the beginning of Paradise Postponed
you did not know that Charlie was the illegitimate daughter?
MORTIMER
Yes.
I never have a plan. I know vaguely what’s ahead but I never write any plan
down because I think that unless the characters come to life and do it for
themselves, you’re lost. You know, that’s the great thing: they’ve got to do
their own living; they’ve got to be free to do what they feel they
ought to do.
INTERVIEWER
That’s
fascinating. Many authors of fiction will say that they hope for the characters
to take on lives of their own, but to add to that the dimension of the
characters having an inward compulsion to behave in a certain way is rather
different.
MORTIMER
Yes.
I was reading E. M. Forster who was writing about plot, and he said the awful
thing is you create these wonderful characters and then they won’t do anything;
they won’t be bothered to get involved in a plot!
INTERVIEWER
Lazy
characters! Was that in Aspects of the Novel?
MORTIMER
Yes,
it was.
INTERVIEWER
So
you see the characters through their own eyes. Did you find that any one
character was more fun for you to write than the others?
MORTIMER
Not
really. I mean some characters are nearer to me. You’re always writing yourself
in a novel. The author is always talking. Of course my strong point is old men.
Simeon was easy for me because he was just sort of my father. But I enjoyed
writing about Leslie Titmuss because he does appalling things. And Henry and
Fred I thought of as two sides of my nature. Fred was the nice, decent, quiet,
professional person and Henry was the show-off writer.
INTERVIEWER
You
are far more personable and likeable than Henry!
MORTIMER
I’m
glad to hear it!
INTERVIEWER
In
Simeon, here again you’re writing about a character driven by religion.
MORTIMER
I
don’t know about Simeon’s religion. The great thing about Simeon and Dorothy is
that they don’t want to be vulgar. There’s a great key line when she says that
she wants the working classes to rule the world but she doesn’t want to have
them to tea. And Simeon would think that the sort of conventional idea of
heaven would be frightfully vulgar and a bit down-market. So we can’t have
that! Simeon is one of those people who probably mistakes Jesus for being the
Labour member of parliament.
INTERVIEWER
But
what about you? How do you, with atheistic views, understand the Simeon
character?
MORTIMER
There
are two things I think about. I mean, I find it very difficult to believe in
God. But apart from that I would believe in everything else to do with the
Christian religion. If you reject the idea of God, still the importance of the
individual, and freedom, and all those traditions that are a part of
Christianity are very valuable and we cannot throw them out.
INTERVIEWER
In
discussing crime writing and the author’s attitude toward death, P. D. James
told me that she felt one could have doubts about some essentials of
Christianity but still lead a religious life.
MORTIMER
I
think so, too. I just did an interview with Graham Greene. And his Catholicism
is so near atheism that it’s practically the same thing. There’s a very good
poem that he quoted that says you either have faith interspersed with doubt or
doubt interspersed with faith.
INTERVIEWER
This
sounds like a description of English weather! Sunny intervals with cloudy
periods or—
MORTIMER
—cloudy
intervals with sunny periods! That’s right! Well, I have doubt interspersed
with faith.
INTERVIEWER
In
Paradise Postponed, you used doctors and the clergy as main
characters. Did you do so in part because they would have access to an inside
view of the community and because, somewhat like barristers, they minister to
people’s needs?
MORTIMER
Yes.
Exactly. There’s that, and also the fact that the British professional middle
class is my territory. I was looking at the decline of those professional
values that aren’t to do with money. Whereas the Titmuss world or the whole Thatcher
world is all to do with money—the only thing that matters is money. So I wanted
to write about the professional middle classes whose idea is not to make money
but to perform some kind of duty.
INTERVIEWER
Your
female characters are also a particularly strong aspect of Paradise
Postponed. Perhaps here they are more strongly portrayed than in any of
your earlier work.
MORTIMER
I
think the women in Paradise Postponed are stronger in a way than the
men. Certainly Dorothy is stronger than Simeon. In my other work, in Rumpole,
Hilda is stronger; Miss Phillida Trant is much stronger than her husband.
INTERVIEWER
Strong
or not, most of the women in Paradise Postponed, along with some of
the men, are ultimately frustrated with life. Can you comment on this?
MORTIMER
I
think everybody is frustrated. Everybody fails himself in a way. The
interesting thing about writing, to me, is the gap between what characters wish
to be and the reality of what they become.
INTERVIEWER
And
whether or not the characters can accept that reality.
MORTIMER
Yes.
Or if they can’t, what that produces! The women are brighter. They realize much
more. And Agnes is incredibly strong. I think the women are much more realistic
than the men. I think men really lead a much richer fantasy life than women.
INTERVIEWER
In
Paradise Postponed you develop, more so than in some of your other
work, a sense of place. There is more description of setting. Was this a
challenge that you set for yourself in writing this novel?
MORTIMER
Yes.
Places are important to me. I have to know exactly where the action
goes on—but I don’t like to spend too much time on being atmospheric.
INTERVIEWER
Descriptive
writing, of course, would be one aspect used in the novel but not in the
television version. How else was writing for the two media different?
MORTIMER
If
you’re writing for television you’re always thinking of little scenes, whereas
novels are all about the long flow of life, so to speak. I had to cure myself
of writing like television in the novel. Television writing is all to do with
scenes of two or three people in conversation at dramatic points in their
lives. Most people’s lives aren’t great dramatic points. Most people’s lives
are what happens to them when they’re sitting at the top of buses, lying in the
bath, waiting for the doctor in surgery, thinking to themselves. That’s what
novels are. It was a great effort to get back into the way of writing a novel.
I did it and now I can’t think of anything I want to do more than write novels.
And I’ve also published a book of interviews, my second book of interviews,
called In Character.
INTERVIEWER
Earlier
we were talking about Paradise Postponed as it related to Victorian
literature. It also reminds me of the Victorian novel in the sense that
individuals and their impact upon one another are regarded as essential. The
individuals are regarded as significant.
MORTIMER
Yes,
I’m glad you noticed that.
INTERVIEWER
A
perfect example of this is the incident where the rector dresses up as Father
Christmas in order to deliver the Christmas stocking to the sleeping child. And
when Fred later asks him what was the point of dressing up if the child was
likely to be asleep anyway, the rector replies, “I don’t think it matters in
the least whether she saw it or not. Even if she saw absolutely nothing, I have
played my part.” I thought that was wonderful.
MORTIMER
Well,
you’re very kind. In a way, too, that incident is a metaphor for these
progressive beliefs in human progress. It doesn’t matter whether they’re true
or not; really, it doesn’t matter that they’ll never be achieved. What matters
is that you do your best and defend those values, isn’t it?
INTERVIEWER
And
similarly, the whole question about the validity of the rector’s will is also a
question about these values, isn’t it?
MORTIMER
That’s
right. Again it has a sort of symbolic, metaphorical application because the
question is whether somebody who believed in an optimistic view of the future
of mankind is a lunatic or not!
INTERVIEWER
Speaking
of the future, are there new works that your readers can look forward to?
MORTIMER
Well,
I’ve done a radio play entitled Glasnost, which is about three English
writers in Moscow and people’s attitudes toward Russia. People either fall in
love with Russia, or they hate it. The middle classes love it, whereas the
working classes tend to hate it. And I’ve written a new lot of Rumpoles called Rumpole
and the Age of Miracles. These will eventually be televised. I am also
working on a television script for Summer’s Lease, which will be done
probably in four episodes.
INTERVIEWER
It
would seem that you have accelerated your writing pace rather than slowing down
over the years. You always seem to have a whole range of ideas for the future.
MORTIMER
Yes,
and the other thing is that I’m about to start a novel using one of the Paradise
Postponed characters, to be called Titmuss Regained.
INTERVIEWER
Really?
This makes me think about the end of Paradise Postponed where several
of the characters come to accept great disappointment in life. And yet at least
for some there is a sense of a new beginning and new possibilities ahead. Are
you yourself an optimist?
MORTIMER
About
my own life? Yes. I mean if I weren’t, I wouldn’t have a four-year-old
daughter, a girl called Rosamund. Yes, I’m optimistic. But I think, on the
whole, pessimism is the best basis for a happy life.
INTERVIEWER
I
like the way you say that while laughing, though!
MORTIMER
’Tis
all a great cycle, isn’t it? And you think everybody was different, that
earlier generations were different, that your parents were different. Well, not
at all. But I always think about my baby and how she’s got to find out all
about The Magic Flute and all those wonderful things. And it’s all
rather wonderful, really, isn’t it?
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