Rumpole's Call To Bar And Bed
The Age
Saturday January 5, 2008
John Mortimer was the ebullient lead in his best dramatisation, his life, writes Brian McFarlane.
A Voyage Round John Mortimer: The Authorised Biography By Valerie Grove Viking, $55'I KNOW WHY I BECAME A novelist: only in fiction is everything about other people explained," wrote the protagonist of William Boyd's short story, The View from Yves Hill. Well, maybe, but I can't believe Valerie Grove's magisterial Voyage Round John Mortimer leaves much "unexplained".What she has given us in this biography of an inveterate autobiographer comes surely as close as most novelists come to explaining everything about her subject (who is identified with, but should not be confused with, Rumpole of the Bailey). Grove is endlessly fascinated with the relationship between the writer's experience and what he writes. A look at some of Mortimer's key works offers ample evidence for the extent to which it draws on the contours of his life, and indeed on its minutiae. Grove confesses that "John's life has been in my hands for three years", and clearly believes that understanding his life will enhance an appreciation of his work, which, as she demonstrates, cannibalises his life ruthlessly and leads us to reflect on it.He has put so much of himself and those nearest to him into his plays, novels and screenplays that they come to feel like fragments of autobiography. Everything he wrote seems intricately connected to his disorderly, irresistibly engaging life. What Grove displays and analyses is a woman's view of a man who loved and liked women, regarded them as his "best friends", even if it cannot be said that he always treated them well. As one of them said, "He made women feel important, genuinely interested in how you were feeling". Grove herself writes not just as his biographer but also as his friend. Not that this blinded her to his faults, or stayed her writer's hand.The book is organised chronologically, but avoids that numbing sense of "and then, and next" that can be the biographer's trap. There are four major "blocks" in the book's construction: the lonely childhood with the blind, barrister father whose formative influence is impossible to overstress; the first marriage to writer Penelope Mortimer (Fletcher) , a liaison of triumphant messiness that she chronicles so acutely in her roman-a-clef, The Pumpkin Eater; the second marriage, to another Penelope (Gollop), less demanding but more resilient; and the long descent into still-prolific old age.Can Grove have intended that the two Penelopes (neither having much in common with Odysseus' patient weaver/unraveller) should meet exactly halfway through the book? If not, it confers a serendipitous shapeliness on the work.What sort of man emerges from the scrupulously but never tediously excavated detail of the lives of this author-husband-lover-father-polemicist? The answer, in short, is a whole man, or at least as whole as he is prepared to reveal, and as she is able to pull together as if he were a fictional character - as which, as years pass, he often appears to be presenting himself.He is a man who needed to have too much to do. When he wasn't in court, where he found the basis for Rumpole, he was writing plays, such as A Voyage Round My Father, which also offers a voyage round young John. He was interviewing the famous or, as one of the latter, being interviewed. He was writing the television series Paradise Postponed, based on the Leslie Titmuss trilogy (which mirrored crucial shifts in the social life of England), or turning out novels or doing one-man shows.His is such a busy life that one wonders how he had time for the infidelities that bedevilled both his marriages. It's not as if these were limited to lunchtime fumblings either. The affair with actor Wendy Craig, who'd appeared in his play The Wrong Side of the Park, lasted 18 months and produced a son he didn't get to meet for 42 years.It is one of Grove's achievements to deal with these dalliances without ever succumbing to the biographer's frequent curse of seeing them pruriently as mere spice in the narrative. In reading the biographies of celebrities, one so often longs to say, "I don't care if she had carnal knowledge of a garden gnome; just tell me something about what made her famous in the first place". Grove is interested in how knowledge of Mortimer's romances increases our grasp of his complexity and in the two unusual marriages he contracted and carried through with some panache.A Voyage Round John Mortimer gives a brilliant view of how the life informed the writing, and reveals the man in his dealings with his wives and lovers, with his father and with his children, and with the liberal causes he espoused. He may be now best known for Rumpole but there is much more to him than that. Grove's triumph is to register the largeness of his personality without being so dazzled by it as to miss its limitations. The result is as near to the novelist's "truth" as one could expect. Perhaps as a writer and "mother of four" she was the ideal biographer, one who could understand both Mortimer and the two fecund marriages that are so intricately woven into his fictions.Brian McFarlane is an honorary associate professor at Monash University and visiting professor at the University of Hull.
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