Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  His short life ended dramatically in the battle to free ‘the Isles of Greece’ from Turkish tyranny. This grand gesture had its moments of absurdity, as when Achilles-style helmets were ordered from a hatters in Piccadilly, but there's no reason to doubt the genuineness of his attachment to the cause, which bore some resemblance to the Spanish Civil War of my childhood. This struggle was romantic and seemed, from a distance, to be morally clear: the good against the bad, the noble Greeks, inheritors of an ancient democracy, against the Fascist equivalent, cruel and authoritarian Turks. There was even an International Brigade composed of idealistic European liberals, paid for by Byron.

  He arrived with high hopes, having spent £4,000 on a Greek fleet to sail to Missolonghi. He took with him Pietro Gamba, the brother of his mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, who was ‘hot for revolution’. He was much taken with the warlike appearance of the Greek soldiers, the Suliotes, of whom he expected great things. As with any war fought for an ideal, it was not long before disillusion set in.

  Missolonghi was a wretched place, waterlogged, evil-smelling, a breeding ground for mosquitoes and disease. There were misunderstandings with the London Committee, money was short and Byron spent a fortune of his own. The forces of freedom in Greece were divided into rival groups, each plotting against the other. In too many instances, the freedom fighters behaved no better than their oppressors, raping women, dashing Turkish brains out against brick walls and massacring prisoners. Even Pietro Gamba spent a huge amount of money on a sky-blue uniform with expensive accessories. ‘This comes of letting boys play the man,’ Byron wrote; ‘all his patriotism diminishes into the desert for a sky blue uniform.’

  Worst of all, the fine Suliote soldiers, on whom he had pinned such high hopes, proved totally unreliable. They quarrelled endlessly, refused to attack Lepanto, as Byron had planned, and fought with the International Brigade so violently that a Swedish officer was stabbed and killed by a Suliote soldier. As a result of this, a number of British artificers threatened to return to England.

  ‘Having tried in vain at every expense and considerable trouble and some danger to unite the Suliotes,’ Byron wrote, ‘for the good of Greece and their own – I have come to the following conclusion – I will have nothing more to do with the Suliotes. They may go to the Turks, or the Devil, –they may cut me into more pieces than they have dissensions among themselves, – sooner than change my resolution.’ He had found, like many of those who have struggled for great liberal and liberating causes and beliefs, that the difficulty isn't so much fighting the enemy as stopping your friends murdering each other.

  In the foul-smelling, muddy swamps of Missolonghi, Byron took a fever, had a stroke and lay, at times, unconscious. The doctors, who recommended merciless bleeding and fastened a leech to his forehead, hastened his death. His heroism lay in his ceaseless attempts to heal differences, to prevent atrocities so far as he could, to keep his temper and to retain his belief in the justice of the cause.

  He was not entirely disillusioned. Freedom would still be a glorious thing, even if the heroes of the resistance turned out to be dubious and self-seeking. ‘Whoever goes into Greece at present,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘should do it as Mrs Fry went into Newgate [Prison] – not in the expectation of meeting with any special indication of existing probity, but in the hope that time and better treatment will reclaim the burglarious and larcenous tendencies which have followed this General Gaol delivery.’

  This is excellent advice to all those anxious to join liberal, freedom-seeking, left-wing movements. Go among your fellow protesters in the merciful spirit of a prison visitor, because you are likely to meet some extremely doubtful fish.

  11. Lying

  Michel, Lord of Montaigne, was always a reasonable and tolerant man, but he was particularly hard on liars. ‘An accursed vice,’ he wrote. ‘It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the weight and horror of lying, we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes.’

  A kindlier but anonymous commentator coupled two biblical pronouncements to describe lying as ‘an abomination unto the Lord, but a very present help in time of trouble’. Like many other things, a lie can be a serious crime, a source of evil, a forgivable vanity or an act of mercy. Lies can be used to brighten an otherwise bleak and underpopulated life. They often reveal more about the liar than what emerges when he or she is telling the truth.

  A writer of fiction must have a confused view of the truth. To a novelist the whole world is potential fiction. But leaving the peculiar question of a writer's attitude aside for a moment, what can I say that will be of any use to my inheritors about telling the truth and the occasional use of kindly deception?

  In my childhood I lied very early to make my life sound more interesting. I was really the son of Russian aristocrats, smuggled out of the country after the revolution and hidden in a trunk on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The barrister and his wife who took me in were not my parents, but a kindly couple who cared for me after my true mother and father had been shot in Siberia. Whenever I began to lose faith in the likelihood of this story I dropped hints about my mother's infidelity, my parents' forthcoming divorce and the fact, which I thought would be more interesting than the dull reality, that I was about to become the child of a broken home. This invention was soon detected by those friends I took home for lunch on Sundays, who saw my parents still irritatingly devoted. I suppose I thought these and other lies about myself were necessary to brighten the dull plod through school and lonely holidays. At least they led to a determination to make life more interesting than my childhood inventions.

  There may be something curiously creative about those who cling to childhood fantasies in adult life, and invent wartime adventures, perilous escapes or legendary love affairs to keep boredom at bay. One such was certainly Jeffrey Archer, Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, of whom my friend Ned Sherrin said, ‘He was the only seaside pier [peer] not to have been performed on by the transvestite comedian Danny La Rue.’ He wrote novels and took up politics, becoming the Chairman of the Conservative Party, but his greatest work of fiction may have been his life. He invented his education, his sporting achievements and much else about himself, and, I'm sure, enjoyed the results. When I was connected with the Howard League for Penal Reform, we held a drinks party on the terrace of the House of Lords for the purpose of raising money from the great and the good. Jeffrey Archer kindly came down to say a few words to the assembled company. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he began, ‘I was having lunch with John Mortimer in a London club and John told me to join the Howard League, which I did and I have never regretted it.’ This was kindly intended and produced a few cheques. The only trouble with it was that I have never had lunch with Jeffrey Archer in a London club or anywhere else. It was a small and no doubt irrelevant lie, but the truth didn't come naturally to him.

  Unfortunately, Jeffrey Archer applied his talent for invention to a libel case he was involved in. I saw him last in the Old Bailey, a small, still cheerful figure peering over the edge of the dock. ‘It's an honour to see you at my trial,’ he said and added, ‘What are you doing for lunch?’ Sadly I never joined him at ‘the little Italian place where they do a very quick meal’ and he went off to serve what I thought was an unnecessarily long sentence in a prison from which he still managed to emerge for lunch.

  Even Montaigne, safe in his tower from having to rely on anything as ‘a present help in time of trouble’, might have forgiven the small lies merely intended to cheer up or smooth the lives of close friends and casual acquaintances such as, ‘You are looking well’, or, ‘I did think your poem was brilliant’ or even, ‘How beautiful you are today!’ Even if they are true, you should use these compliments carefully. My wife was, as always, looking beautiful, but I made the mistake of telling her this when telephoning from America, which made even a truthful statement sound like an invention. But even if not strictly accurate, scattering these consoling words like conf
etti could hardly be a major crime, calling for burning at the stake.

  To be convicted of being a serious liar you have to make a statement that you don't believe in or you know to be untrue. So members of the Flat Earth Society or those who, like the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, assure us that the dead are readily available to speak at seances and that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, are not liars. The statements they make may be untrue but they are convinced that they are telling the truth. In fact, they are in the same position, I think, as many unreliable witnesses. Such witnesses go through details of the car crash, the course of the quarrel in the pub that led to the stabbing with the broken glass, the row at home that ended with a head coming into fatal contact with the stone around the hearth. They are convinced of the version of events most favourable to themselves and become sure that it must be the truth.

  It's for this reason that false witnesses in court can sound so convincing. Appeal courts often defer to trial judges, who, they say, ‘have seen the witnesses and can form a view as to their credibility’. Often seeing a witness is a poor, even a misleading guide. The worst liars may remember to wear ties and suits, speak considerately in time with the judge's pencil, call him ‘My Lord’ and survive a scorching cross-examination. Those who stammer, contradict themselves, take offence at hostile questions and come to court looking like an unmade bed can often be telling nothing but the truth.

  So what of the advocate who has to stand up in court and repeat a quite possibly untrue account of events? Is he saying something he doesn't believe to be true? Quite possibly; but the advocate has gone through a process well known to those struggling for religious faith, the suspension of disbelief. My own disbelief was kept hanging up in the robing room of the Old Bailey for years. A barrister's job is to put the case for the defence as effectively and clearly as would his client if he had an advocate's skills. The barrister's belief or disbelief in the truth of this story is irrelevant: it's for the jury to decide this often difficult question. Would this explanation of a barrister's role defend him from the strict judgement of Montaigne? I know that most non-lawyers find it hard to understand and their most frequent question is, ‘How can you defend a man you know to be guilty?’ The answer is that if he tells you he's guilty, you can't call him to tell a story you know to be untrue. But if he says he didn't do it, you must put his case. You are a mouthpiece, a spokesman in an argument which is directed not at uncovering the truth, but at deciding whether or not the prosecution has proved guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

  Life as a mouthpiece for more or less convincing stories can, in the end, prove unsatisfactory. For the writer the situation is entirely different. For him, falsehood is not a thing which has to be decided by other people. He is no longer a stand-in for anyone else. He must look into himself and find the particular truth which is his alone and be faithful to it in all that he writes. He must express a view of the world which seems truthful to him, regardless of what anybody else may think about it. So although it may seem odd, the person whose trade has least to do with lying is not the lawyer or the businessman or, most certainly, the politician. It's the writer of fiction.

  12. The Companionship of Women

  This section is intended for those of my heirs and assigns as happen to be men. Men are undoubtedly going through a hard time nowadays. It's not such a hard time as women went through when they couldn't own property or divorce their husbands for adultery and felt compelled to publish their novels under assumed masculine names. In divorce cases they could be valued in cash terms, as though they were so much real estate, and if they found their husbands no longer sexually attractive they could be met with a legal proceeding known as a Petition for Restitution of Conjugal Rights (Restitution of Convivial Nights, the old hands in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division used to call it). If the conjugal rights were not forthcoming a hard-up and estranged husband could claim maintenance from his rich, lawfully wedded wife on the grounds of her ‘wilful refusal’ of sex.

  Men may never be the victims of such absurd acts of subjugation. Their difficulties are more subtle but, none the less, real. Boys at school are easily outdistanced by girls, who take their lessons more seriously and are not, on the whole, proud of failure. Women are more realistic and open-minded than men, who tend to live in a world of wishful thinking, fantasy and make-believe. For that reason I always welcomed women on juries, although the old-fashioned criminals I defended thought that a woman's place was in the kitchen, or looking after the children, and not out robbing banks or sitting in judgement on hard-working safe breakers and those accused of long-firm fraud.

  I'm conscious of the fact that all that I have just written is sexist, politically incorrect, oversimplified and grossly unfair to the male sex. Male and female characteristics are not evenly distributed to men and women. Quite apart from homosexual preferences, there are men with strong female perceptions and women with a masculine tendency to self-delusion. But I suppose the reasons for most women's realistic attitude to life lie in the physical changes she has to suffer. Bleeding and stopping bleeding and coping with the agony of childbirth are traumas such as no man has to suffer. His only certain suffering is death, thoughts of which can, even in old age, be postponed indefinitely. Forcing a living, breathing human being out of your body is an encounter with reality from which men find themselves thankfully absolved. It's hard enough for us to pluck up the courage to be in the room when this alarming process is taking place.

  Perhaps it's having gone to an all-boys school that made me for the rest of my life prefer the company of women. Homosexuality seemed to be the only choice on offer in my schooldays. We scarcely saw a woman, there were no female teachers and our meals were served by two footmen in blue coats with gold buttons (they frequently cut themselves shaving and would bleed in the cabbage) and a butler in tails. The boys, when not involved in sexual approaches to each other, seemed greatly interested in sport, which included a strange version of football played with a ball shaped like a cheese and, from time to time, the throwing of a stick on to the ground with a strange cry of ‘Yards!’

  Sometimes games and sex became curiously involved. One of the butlers was said to conceal himself behind a bush on the way to the games fields. He would then covertly change his tailcoat for football clothing and trot down to join in the rugby scrum. This gave him ample opportunity to interfere with the boys. Brought up in this atmosphere, I rapidly became allergic to any game which involved chasing a ball up and down a muddy field in a fine drizzle. I have to confess that this reluctance to participate has spread to all games, even those such as contract bridge and backgammon, during which there is little danger from partially disguised butlers out for sex.

  It has also confirmed my belief that hell would be an eternal masculine public-school reunion, or a black-tie dinner of all-male chartered accountants. When Yeats wrote his poem, and made his will, he included ‘Memories of the words of women’ as part of the recipe for a ‘superhuman, mirror-resembling dream’. The words of men in the locker room or down the pub during a boys' night out are not of such a superhuman dream-like quality.

  And, in spite of David and Jonathan, Hamlet and Horatio, Caesar and Antony, Bush and Blair, women have a greater gift, I think, for friendship. It's true that girls in school can be extraordinarily bitchy to each other; but both at school and in afterlife they are capable of forming great networks of friends to spread news and gossip and cheerfully discover the inadequacies of their husbands. The air between mobile phones is heavy with the words of women confiding in each other – and of men failing to communicate.

  So it is always better to sit in a restaurant with a woman. Fantasies can wander freely over the creamed spinach and Dover sole. There are always vague possibilities hovering over the table, however young or old the couple. Perhaps it's more restful if they have been lovers in the past, if that is over and done with and perhaps seems, in retrospect, even better than it was at the time. If they are very old a
nd not quite sure whether it happened or not, it's better to assume that it did and speak with the appropriate nostalgic yearning for the past. Whatever the relationship was, is or might have been, you can be sure that women will drink as much and smoke more vehemently between courses than men; but they will be more full of shared secrets, astute observations, anecdotes to be treasured and opinions to be expounded than men at a restaurant table. You are soon lulled into the belief that you are the only person in the world they would ever say half of these things to.

  Looking back down the long corridor of the years, you will be able to remember so many glorious women and wonder why it is that so many of them have married such appalling husbands. Robert Graves wrote a poem on this subject and ended with a thought I share:

  Or do I always over-value woman

  At the expense of man?

  Do I?

  It might be so.

  13. Causing Offence

  Causing offence, together with smoking, fox-hunting and the enjoyment of a motor-car, is now considered criminal conduct by the politically correct. This is a serious mistake. A life during which you're caused no offence would be as blandly uneventful as death itself. Being caused offence stirs up the spirits, summons up the blood and starts the adrenalin flowing. A parliamentary system that includes an official opposition and an adversarial method of trial proves the effectiveness of going on the offensive to reach the truth. A state in which everyone tiptoed around whispering for fear of hurting somebody's feelings would be dull beyond human endurance. A political or religious belief which can't stand up to insult, mockery and abuse is not worth having.

  The sad signs are, however, that anxiety about causing offence has reached the point of insanity. A town council was censured recently for advertising a job for candidates with ‘pleasing personalities’. This was objected to as it might cause offence to people with displeasing personalities. The three towering geniuses of European culture, Shakespeare, Mozart and Leonardo da Vinci, were not allowed to appear on the euro note as they might, in their separate ways, cause offence: Mozart because he was a ‘womanizer’, Shakespeare because he wrote The Merchant of Venice, a play judged to be anti-Semitic, and Leonardo because he was reported to fancy boys. Now the euro note carries a picture of a rather dull bridge.