John Mortimer interview: A law unto himself

Published on Monday 19 January 2009 18:23

THE last time I saw John Mortimer, he was telling a story about being on a radio show with a boy band, one of whom had just come out of a detox centre. He told them that he made a point of always having his first glass of Champagne at 6am. "Are you having counselling?" they asked him.

He repeated the anecdote in his book Summer of a Dormouse, he told it again from the stage at book festivals and on his Mortimer's Miscellany tours of the country's more select theatres. It always got a laugh, so he kept it in. Right to the end, he always knew what worked.

Now that he's gone, I can't help thinking just how much that single joke reveals about the man and his work.

Not too many octogenarians would ever, for example, get to meet boy bands. But the circle of Mortimer's social and professional acquaintances was impossibly wide.

"I would have breakfast with a murderer, lunch with a judge and dinner with an actress," he would tell assorted interviewers and Mortimer Miscellany audiences, beaming out behind almost comically oversized glasses.

What the boy band probably didn't realise was at six o'clock, Mortimer was starting to work. There'd be three or four hours before the telephone starting ringing, and he was nothing if not productive: 37 books (including 16 featuring the redoubtable Horace Rumpole), 12 plays (including his classic A Voyage Round My Father), innumerable screenplays and radio adaptations and shoals of journalism all bear testament to that.

The obituaries have already highlighted Mortimer's work as a defender of civil rights, and the cases he fought and won in defence of free speech. But it is in his books and plays that he lives on in the only afterlife he, a firm atheist, believed in – the memories and imaginations of other people.

And this is where I get back to his anecdote about meeting the boy band (incidentally: Rumpole and the Boy Band – can't you just imagine that?) and the idiosyncratically early glass of Champagne.

One sign of vintage Champagne is apparently the smallness of the bubbles, the way they will float naturally to the surface, and not shatter the meniscus. And one could almost say the same for many of Mortimer's novels: like bubbles of sparkling wit, they don't trouble the surface too much, but nor does anyone particularly want them to.

Horace Rumpole, his greatest comic creation, worked for a number of reasons. Here was a crusty original right at the heart of the British establishment, who stood up for the underdog not for money but out of principle and who (like his creator) only took defence cases.

Rumpole's yellowing court wig, cramped legal chambers and modest, underheated flat on Cromwell Road hardly spoke of materialism, his taste for the good life extending little beyond inexpensive cigars and glasses of "Chateau Thames Embankment" at Pommeroy's Wine Bar before returning home to face the redoubtable Hilda.

Avoid predictable people, Mortimer advised his grandchildren in Summer of a Dormouse, and one can imagine Rumpole saying exactly the same things: better the cheeky defiance of the Timson clan of "minor villains" than Guthrie Featherstone, the feckless head of chambers (and future judge). Better people like his adored Byron (who, like Mortimer, went to Harrow) than any of the other old Harrovians half-way to being "something big in the City". Mortimer's plays and books did have a wider compass than Rumpole's social world, but critics will point out that it wasn't that much wider. Leslie Titmuss, the main protagonist in Paradise Postponed, may have been lower-working-class, but is little more than a cipher for Thatcherism, and both that novel and its sequel, Titmuss Regained, are really more concerned with the unfolding of his career as a Conservative MP.

Titmuss was emblematic of the new, duller Britain and both he and Rumpole were Mortimer's commentary on a country that had lost its way. Once he defined its glories as "the plays of Shakespeare, the presumption of innocence, the herbaceous border and the great British breakfast". Now, with Shakespeare sidelined as a Dead White Male, muesli reigning supreme on the breakfast menu, the herbaceous border vandalised and Labour rushing in the kind of anti-libertarian measures Mortimer so deplored in 2006's Rumpole and the Reign of Terror, it is an altogether greyer age and one in which Mortimer's novels fit less easily.

So is Rumpole destined for literary oblivion, read by no-one apart from the occasional social historian? My guess is that will happen to the two Titmuss books, and some of the more formulaic Rumpoles.

But there's still something about Horace. It goes beyond the comedy implicit in all those scenes of the courtroom's fearless fighter for truth reluctant to return home to She Who Must Be Obeyed. It even transcends memories of the unforgettable Leo McKern in his full flow for the defence.

Horace Rumpole is that rarest of creatures, a believable ham. Why? Because when you look at him you catch an echo of Mortimer's one unequivocally great work, his autobiographical play A Voyage Round My Father.

As with his blind father Clifford Mortimer QC, immortalised in that 1963 play and subsequent TV film, so with Rumpole: there's a warmth about him, but a coldness too. Emotions are dealt with at arm's length, if at all, masked by barked quotations from those other great unpredictable men: Keats, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. For Clifford Mortimer gave his son not just his own poor eyesight, but also the part of his education he most valued.

More than that, he turned him into a storyteller.

When he told his father stories, Mortimer later wrote, he "always pitched them about two feet off the ground" – not quite real, but amplified, slightly exaggerated.

That's how Rumpole is, too. Shabby, yes, but still showy. Baffled by modernity but still battling for centuries-old ideas of liberty to have some place in it. Quietly sympathetic to the victims of society but fighting for them, a stentorian Shakespearean every bit as much as a 19th-century actor-manager.

As long as we're interested in the battle for ideas, in defending tolerance, in drawing out the contrast between high ideals and the compromises of everyday life, Rumpole will still be with us, knocking cigar ash from the wings of his gown, getting up on his feet for the closing argument and telling the ladies and gentlemen of the jury as persuasively as possible exactly why his client's innocence is beyond doubt.

There was, and is, something wonderful about Rumpole. And there was something wonderfully noble about his creator too. Aged, infirm, half-blind, there wasn't a trace of self-pity about him. Instead Mortimer's sparkling wit, like vintage Champagne bubbles, rose up to gladden our own dormouse summers. It's not just incredulous boy bands who will miss him; it's millions of his readers too.