Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  One of the many advantages of the hotel we stay in in Morocco is the fire in the bedrooms. The logs are dry, dead wood from the orange groves and cork trees. On the whole they burn easily but there is some degree of skill required in building them into a little pyramid which you can light with a single sheet of the Daily Telegraph someone has brought over on the plane. With its help, and a few twigs from the lemon tree outside the window, you can start what the French-speaking Moroccans call ‘une bonne cheminée’. Arabs who live in hot countries are always fearful of the cold, wearing sweaters and thick socks under their djellabahs and being expert on keeping log fires going. There are few pleasures to beat going to bed with big logs in the ‘cheminée’, reading a little and then switching off the lamp to go to sleep by flickering firelight.

  Back in England there are too many empty grates, although there are still unexpected delights. I did a week of performances at the King's Head, a pub theatre in Islington. To my delight there was a coal fire in my dressing room and there were two young assistant directors, who had majored in theatre studies, to keep it going throughout the evening.

  At home I can stop work around six o'clock and find happiness in the sitting room with a packet of firelighters and a box of matches. There's a little anxiety before our logs, heavy with rain and sap, unlike the quick-burning wood of Morocco, start to burn; but then there's a lot to watch. ‘Pictures in the fire’ they used to call it in my childhood; the pictures are what you choose to make of them, but in any event, it's far more interesting than sitting looking at a radiator.

  Don Giovanni, who, like Prometheus, refused to repent and so became a hero in the Romantic age, was dragged down to the fires of hell. At least, I have always thought, they must be warmer than the cold and marmoreal corridors of heaven. Even if neither of these places are found to exist, you can guess what I want done with my body when the time comes to read out my will. At least the grave needn't be cold.

  31. A Writer's Life

  ‘You speak of fame, of happiness, of a glorious, interesting life and to me all these nice words, pardon me, are just like Turkish delight which I never eat.’

  So says Trigorin, the moderately successful writer in Chekhov's play The Seagull, and he goes on to describe the writer's perpetual guilt: ‘Day and night I am overwhelmed by one besetting idea: I must write, I must write, I must write. I have scarcely finished one long story when I must somehow start another, then a third, after that a fourth…’

  It's true that guilt follows a writer wherever he goes, an unnecessarily faithful dog, always yapping at his heels. When bank managers, surgeons, garage mechanics or head waiters go on holiday to Minorca or the Amalfi coast, their work stays at home; the bank, the operating theatre, the garage or the restaurant doesn't accompany them in their hand baggage. Work would be impossible for them, at least for a carefree fortnight. But for a writer work is never impossible; the pen and the notebook, or, I suppose, even the laptop, are always with him, and can be brought out in any hotel lounge, café, train or aeroplane. A writer never has an excuse for not working. If any of you think of taking up the business, you will have to remember that the world is full of blank sheets of paper waiting to be filled, and endless hours in which you should have completed your daily thousand words. ‘I write ceaselessly, as though travelling post haste, and I can't do otherwise,’ Trigorin goes on. ‘Where's the splendour and glory in that, I ask you?’

  With this burden of guilt to dispose of, I've found it best to start as early in the day as possible. ‘Before I bath, shave or shit or anything like that,’ was Graham Greene's programme for his daily routine number of words, which, inexorably, built up to a brilliant lifetime's work. However you time it, and starting at six a.m. seems to get harder as the years go by, it's best to get it done by lunchtime, before the first drink and the heavy-lidded afternoon; although you can pull yourself together at around five o'clock to correct what you wrote in the morning and feel, of course, dissatisfied with it.

  All of this might seem a simple, even routine business, if a writer's only job were to write. I assume that you were born with an ear for prose or poetry, a gift for constructing sentences which catch the reader's attention, the ability to describe a scene or advance an argument which will seem truthful and surprising – but this is only half of it. A writer not only has to write, he has to live in order to have something to write about. And of the two occupations, living is much the hardest.

  ‘I see a cloud resembling a piano –’ Trigorin again – ‘and I think I must mention [that] in a story… I catch a whiff of heliotrope. Immediately I register it in my mind: a cloying odour, a widow's flower, to be mentioned in a description of a summer evening. I catch you and myself up at every phrase… to lock up at once in my literary warehouse, it may come in useful.’

  You can rely on childhood, a period when every endless afternoon, every corner of the garden, every night fear, moment of loneliness or rare triumph, seems brilliantly lit and clear in your memory. This part of life is every writer's free gift to start with; further experiences have to be worked at and, perhaps, suffered for.

  Love, hope, disappointment, exultation and despair will no doubt come, even if uninvited. What you'll need is some knowledge of how other people behave at moments of crisis, how they talk, what avenues of retreat and concealment they discover, or with what unexpected bravery they deal with apparently impossible lives. For this purpose it's a great help to get a job which has nothing to do with writing but one in which as many people as possible are likely to confide in you. You might be a priest or a doctor or a social worker, a hairdresser or an agony aunt, or seek employment with a dating agency.

  I count myself extremely lucky to have been called to the bar in my twenties and to have immediately found middle-aged women, businessmen and suburban housewives ready to pour out all the secrets of their lives. I was fortunate enough to meet murderers, con men, contract killers, politicians with unrevealed scandals and, on one horrible occasion, an assistant hangman. All of this was a great privilege and seems to me to have been more useful than moving, with the publication of my first novel – an event which happened shortly before I got called to the bar – into the world of editors, publishers and other writers. The bar exams are pretty dull, as is learning law academically when it's not connected with real human beings in trouble, but it's well worth it for the help you may get as a writer.

  You will also have to face the fact that, as a writer, you will be a difficult if not a maddening person to live with. The writer is seldom entirely involved in any situation. Some part of him is standing aside, the detached observer, taking notes to store in his ‘literary warehouse’. This is deeply frustrating to those in need of a fully committed love affair, or even a completely meaningful quarrel. On the rare occasions when I am in dispute with my wife, a partner in what is an unusually happy marriage, I am memorizing her dialogue so that I may give extracts from it to Hilda Rumpole in one of her many disagreements with her fictional husband.

  The fact that writers are hard to live with is another good reason for getting a job where you'll meet real people and learn something of their secrets. ‘You may become a writer,’ my father told me when I had confessed my secret ambition. ‘You might even become a moderately successful writer. But consider the horrible life your wife would lead if you were such a thing. Writers are at home all day, wearing a dressing gown, brewing tea, stumped for words. Choose a job which will get you out of the house, if only for the sake of your poor wife. Why don't you divorce a few people? It's not very difficult.’ So, wisely he guided me towards the bar.

  Getting to know people, living an eventful life with useful experiences, such tasks have to be faced, and can be performed by the writer. But there still remains a daunting question for the author of fiction. What on earth is the story?

  Story-telling, it has to be admitted, has gone somewhat out of style. A plot has come to be considered a mechanical thing, unimportant compared to fine writing,
startling but unconnected situations or a novel attitude to life. And yet a plot, a story, is what induced weary audiences to stay awake listening to Homer, or what still makes us turn the page or watch the unfolding of a play. Unless the reader, or the listener, wants to know what happens next, he or she quickly loses interest. Stories are therefore essential to the writer of fiction; but where they come from is often a mystery, and the great worry is that they may not come at all.

  There is general agreement that the characters should create the plot, and that the plot shouldn't be there to create the characters. However, in his Aspects of the Novel E. M. Forster contemplated the embarrassing situation when wonderfully created characters refuse to bestir themselves to act out any scene of a story:

  In vain it (the plot) points out to those unwieldy creatures (the characters) the advantages of the triple process, complication, crisis, and solution so persuasively expounded by Aristotle. A few of them rise and comply… but there is no general response. They want to sit and brood or something. And the plot (which I here visualize as a sort of higher government official) is concerned at their lack of public spirit.

  Every writer in search of a story must recognize this agony but I can't agree with Forster's dismissal of the plot as a sort of busybody bureaucrat. Hamlet, Lear and Othello have their characters revealed through the plots and counter-plots that concern them and we wouldn't have learned much about them if nothing had ever happened.

  In a time when plots are considered to be of minor importance, it's still recognized that crime stories, tales of detection, can't do without them. For this reason crime writing is regarded, in some quarters, as a sort of inferior occupation, the popular musical compared to the grand opera of the serious novel. And yet much of the greatest literature could, in one sense, be described as crime writing Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Hamlet are certainly crime stories. Othello is a story about the theft of a handkerchief. Macbeth deals with the unpleasant murder of a house guest, and the effect or non-effect of remorse after that crime has been committed. The works of Dickens, which are regarded as mainstream literature, depend greatly on crime. Bleak House produced a detective and Great Expectations depends on the introduction of a criminal very early in the proceedings. It has been suggested that the slow unfolding of a mystery that is known to the author but isn't exposed to the reader is the mark of a crime story. But again, Great Expectations is founded on a mystery that is not revealed until the conclusion of the book. All writers in all fields use mystery, suspense, the withholding of information, the puzzlement and the final enlightenment of the reader.

  So when you have learned that a workable plot is not something confined to detective fiction, you have to look for a story and wonder, and this is certainly the hardest part of a writer's life, where on earth it might be discovered. Shakespeare got most of his plots from his comparatively small library of books and transformed them, but we are not Shakespeare. It has also been said that there are only a few basic stories in the world, Cinderella and Blue Beard both having given birth to numerous descendants, but even this thought may not comfort you. How can you make a fully developed, credible and yet surprising, revealing and mysterious story enter your head when it is needed? The answer is that you can't. You have to wait for a miracle to happen, and such periods of waiting can be extremely painful.

  There are certain things you shouldn't do. Film producers want writers to provide a ‘treatment’, or a sort of synopsis of events, before they settle down to produce a script. Such treatments are a waste of time, impossible to write and a pain to read. No story can exist until the characters come to life, start to think, feel, talk and play their part in its creation, and don't sit silently sulking in the way Forster described.

  I don't think you need to have a whole story in your head before you start writing. You should know, I believe, what you want to say about the human condition. You should have a theme. You should know the place and the characters and probably have an idea of the final destination. And then start to write, because writing pulls down writing in a way that plans and treatments and synopses can never manage. So you can begin ‘anywhere, probably by writing a speech for one or more of the characters, bringing them to life and setting them to work on the plot. If you get them right, they may start to tell a story for you. With any luck you may have the surprising pleasure of writing something which seemed unimportant at the time but turns out to be the very point, the axle on which the story turns. If you get a character right, he or she may tell you what their problem is of their own accord.

  If you are very lucky, you may reach that miraculous moment when a character does something that is totally unexpected. You will look at your piece of paper in amazement and think, I never dreamt that you, of all people, would do a thing like that. And then you know that you are on to a thoroughly good thing.

  Given the right characters in a situation full of possibilities, the story may begin to tell itself. Of course, it will be up to you to write it, in the voice you will have found which is now, I hope, yours and no one else's. If you're looking for advice on how you should feel when writing, you need look no further than to Muriel Spark, who, in her novel It's a Far Cry from Kensington, gave her most precious secrets away.

  You are writing a letter to a friend… Write privately, not publicly, without fear or timidity… So that your true friend will read it over and over and want more enchanting letters from you. Before starting the letter rehearse in your mind what you are going to tell… But don't do too much, the story will develop as you go along, especially if you write to a special friend, man or woman, to make them smile or laugh or cry… Remember not to think of the reading public, it will put you off.

  Writing like this may give you great pleasure. Even Trigorin in The Seagull found it ‘pleasant’. But then he had to admit that the worse moment comes when the public reads it: ‘Yes, charming and clever, but a long way off Tolstoy.’ Or: ‘It's a fine thing but Turgenev's Fathers and Children did it better.’ ‘And so,’ he says, ‘until I drop into my grave it will always be “charming and clever”, “charming and clever”, nothing more – and after I am dead, acquaintances passing my tomb will say… ‘“ A fine writer, but he didn't write as well as Turgenev”.’

  32. The Attestation Clause

  Yeats, having made his will on the top of his tower, resolved to compel his soul to study ‘in a learned school’, until

  Testy delirium

  Or dull decrepitude,

  Or what worse evil come –

  The death of friends, or death

  Of every brilliant eye

  That made a catch in the breath –

  Seem but the clouds of the sky

  When the horizon fades:

  Or a bird's sleepy cry

  Among the deepening shades.

  It may not be necessary to go through the stage of testy delirium, or even dull decrepitude. Death comes as unexpectedly to the young as it does to the old and our continued existence, Montaigne pointed out, is something of a favour. Both Jesus Christ and Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-three. Montaigne then went on to list the many surprising or comical ways in which death can suddenly overtake you. One of the ancestors of the Duke of Brittany, it seems, was killed ‘by a bump from a pig’. Another choked to death on a pip from a grape. An emperor died from a scratch when combing his hair. Aeschylus was warned against a falling house and he was always on the alert, but in vain: he was killed by the shell of a tortoise which slipped from the talons of an eagle in flight.

  The Lord of Montaigne then lists those who died ‘between a woman's thighs’. Among them were a captain of the Roman Guard, the son of Guy di Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, a Platonic philosopher and Pope Clement V. Such a death, although no doubt delightful for the man concerned, most have been deeply embarrassing for the woman whose thighs were on offer.

  We were in the South of France one year when there was a serious outbreak of forest fires. Small aeroplanes were used t
o scoop up water from the sea, fly over the burning trees and douse the flames. An innocent and harmless man was happily snorkelling, observing the clouds of bright little fish, when he was scooped up by an aeroplane, carried off and dropped on to a blazing inferno. After writing her death scene, Hardy said that the ‘President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess’. At least the sport in that case was of a serious, even tragic nature. In the other cases outlined above, the President of the Immortals would seem to be an unprincipled practical joker with a warped sense of humour.

  Conscious as he was of falling tortoiseshells and fatal hair combs, and would be now of scooping aeroplanes, Montaigne said he was always prepared for the sudden arrival of death, which might visit him at any hour: ‘Being a man who broods over his thoughts and stores them up inside him, I am always just about as ready as I can be when death does suddenly appear.’ And he had this advice to give: ‘If you have profited from life, and you have had your fill, go away satisfied.’ And he ended his message on the subject: ‘We must rip the masks off things as well as off people. Once we have done that we shall find underneath only the same death which a valet and a chambermaid got through without being afraid. Blessed the death which gives no time for preparing gatherings of mourners.’

  I seem to have completed my will. I can sign it off and there will be the usual attestation clause, in which the witnesses certify that they have seen me sign in their presence and in the presence of each other.