CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  We did our best, of course, standing as the police horses advanced upon us at the time of Suez and shouting for Eden to go. Penelope was better at demonstrations than I, more determined in Downing Street and much more resolute in Grosvenor Square. There was really no need to shout because the unfortunate Mr Eden was on his way out of his own accord, victim of the fantasy that we still had an Empire and could live the heroic days of 1939 all over again. The Prime Minister retired appropriately to ‘Goldeneye’, the somewhat Spartan house in Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote his dreams of a clubland hero, licensed to kill. But the voice of protest, once found, could scarcely be silenced. Far from being without a cause, the Rebels were supplied with an almost embarrassing superfluity of causes. Within a year you could march for nuclear disarmament or sit down for it in Trafalgar Square. Time stretched on down a never-ending line of marches, for Women’s Rights and Gays’ Rights, for Abortion on Demand and Women against Rape (marches for rape were fairly unusual), an endless stage army began then and stretched to the Children’s Libbers lining the road to the Oz trial and demanding their birthright of a daily orgasm. A whole generation plodded along, perhaps nostalgically echoing the footsteps of those who had marched with equal confidence and simplicity to war.

  If political life was tame and obedient for those ten years, the theatre was conformist also. Incessant revivals interspersed with Eliot’s somewhat rarefied later verse plays and the plays of Anouilh, dealing with such comfortable themes as the pathos of lost innocence, made writers feel that the theatre would not welcome them. All this changed in 1956 with the production of Look Back in Anger. Although conventional in form there is no doubt that this play provided a theatrical revolution. For the first time the voice of someone not born to keep his upper lip stiff and take it with Britain could be heard raised in a violent soliloquy of discontent. More important to authors was the fact that the play made managements prepared to back contemporary writing. None of us who lived through that time can fail to be grateful to John Osborne, and my own childhood fantasies of performing and showing off on the dining-room staircase, the theatrical dreams which made me shut myself away in the bedroom making sets for a model theatre, might have remained a well-guarded secret but for the change his success brought about.

  It has become fashionable to disparage Mr Osborne and he has naturally had to pay for his early adulation with a good deal of undervaluation of his later work. He is also mistaken for the eloquent but embittered characters he has written so well. This is a great error. Shakespeare was described by all who knew him as a singularly sweet and modest person, although he could rail with the best of them when he took it upon himself to be Timon of Athens. When, in the course of time, I got to know Mr Osborne, I was, like most people, surprised to find a gentle and unembittered man who lived in a stockbroker’s house in Kent, went to Evensong and gave parties attended by those who administered to his spiritual, physical and financial needs: his bank manager, his vicar and his fishmonger. One of the happiest evenings I can remember was when I gave a poetry reading in his local hall. We drank a good deal of champagne and then Mr Osborne, wearing a boater and a striped blazer, made a long introductory speech in which he referred to what he suggested was the immorality of my life. I then entered, flanked by two actresses, from a door marked ‘Gents’, the area we had been allotted as a Green Room, and we read a great quantity of poetry. I felt like a wayward undergraduate who was being generously introduced by the local squire. It was a scene I never imagined possible when I first went to see Look Back in Anger.

  My own entrance into the theatre was on a smaller, not to say a minute, scale.

  Through Robin Denniston, then at Collins, who had published my last novels, I met, to my lasting benefit, Nesta Pain. She was a producer at the BBC and she asked me if I’d write a play for her to do on what my father always called ‘the wireless’. Not only did she ask me once, but she went on asking me when I showed no signs of doing any such thing. Nesta Pain turned out to be a remarkable woman. She talked precisely, but with a slight stammer, and seemed like an enlightened, extremely intelligent headmistress, a marked contrast to the expansive grey-haired men in knitted ties and the hard-drinking poets who stood around her in the bar of the George in the great days of steam radio. She had dramatized Fabre’s works in a series of programmes, and there was little that she didn’t know about the merciless world of insects.

  I had once gone, on the instructions of the Free Legal Advice Centre, to London Sessions to defend an elderly man on a charge of receiving stolen fish. For many years it remained my only criminal trial. London Sessions is stuck in a despondent area of South London, a sort of urban desert without a reasonable pub to go to in the lunch hour. While a hint of sunshine often touches the gilded figure of Justice on the dome of the Old Bailey, it always seems to be raining round the London Sessions. It’s a sad sort of place with all the cheeky Cockney sparrows waiting silently for the burglary to come on in Court No. 2, and the Juries look as if they rely on the work to eke out their Social Security. It was in that Court, as I defended the fish-receiver, that I saw a row of old barristers waiting for the ‘Dock Brief’. Unwanted criminal practitioners had an option not open to their unemployed learned friends in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division. In those days, before Legal Aid, penurious, unrepresented criminals could pick out any robed figure in Court to defend them; there would be a quick consultation in the cells and then the trial, for which the winning barrister received, I think, a guinea, was off to the races. Busy barristers, men with cases elsewhere and a diary full of engagements, would duck out of Court bent double when a ‘Dock Brief’ was about to be chosen. Those who were less in demand would sit on, preening themselves like a line of elderly, wigged wallflowers, in the hope of being selected by the all-powerful figure in the dock. It was quite contrary to legal etiquette to wink, wave or try and attract the attention in any way of the alleged criminal upon whom so much depended; the ‘Dock Brief’ had to be, like so much in the law, a matter of pure chance.

  I invented one such unsuccessful barrister for my radio play and paired him with an equally unsuccessful criminal. I wanted to say something about the lawyer’s almost pathetic dependence on the criminal classes, without whom he would be unemployed, and I wanted to find a criminal who would be sorrier for his luckless advocate than he was for himself. Whether it was the new freedom of writing for actors whose voices would come out of the air unattached to a realistic set I don’t know, but I found myself working with ease at a new level of reality, one that was approximately two feet above the ground. It was a style which had come naturally to me when I wrote my first novel, but which had become lost in the pursuit of more literal models. Since then I have not aimed to write dialogue which is entirely realistic, although I have always believed that comedy writing, like comic acting, must be based on some recognizable truth. If this is so, then it is possible to take off and break the sound barrier of pure naturalism. One of the great joys of writing in this way, for me, was that it would have been considered a complete heresy in the old world of the ‘documentaries’.

  The barrister I wrote then was, perhaps, a distant ancestor of a far more extrovert creation, ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, whom I wouldn’t begin to think about for another fifteen years. I had no trouble in catching hold of the whirling and confused thoughts of the Dock Brief barrister and reproducing them in suitable rhythms, but the criminal came out extremely flat. Then Nesta Pain said, ‘That sort of character would speak very elaborately. He’d never use one word when six would do and he’d always plump for the longest words possible.’ It was an obvious thing to say, but I remember it as one of the moments in which I was able to learn something of lasting value from a director. In the years to come Jack Clayton taught me how to forge links in a story and how the end of one scene can echo the beginning of the next. Jacques Charon, who came from the Comédie Française to direct a Feydeau play I had translated, gave me invaluable lessons about the nature of
comedy. But Nesta Pain added a new note to my dialogue when she told me something which I should, of course, have been perfectly able to work out for myself.

  I knew how my clients talked in divorce cases. Every day I heard involved sentences, staggering painfully under the weight of clichés got from the reports of police evidence in the News of the World or off bottles of sauce. I knew all the comfortable phrases designed to conceal the reality, and how death is always referred to as ‘a blessed release’ and sex as ‘intimate relations’. I knew it all but I hadn’t used it, and, when I wrote, I had not been listening hard enough.

  Radio plays have many advantages. They are not subject to the technical mischances and distractions of the theatre and television. They call on the audience to make a great effort of imagination and in them words must be used, as they were in the Elizabethan theatre, to paint scenery or suggest changes of light. They also appear in decent obscurity. Last night’s radio play is hardly ever front-page news and I never had to fear ‘Mortimer Lays Egg on Third Programme’ as a headline in the Daily Express. Where The Dock Brief was noticed, however, it seemed to be liked and the BBC paid me an extra £20 for it, a gesture of goodwill which I was told was almost unknown in the history of the Corporation. My father said, ‘When you first read that play to us I thought it was poor fooling, likely to come very “tardy off”. But much to our surprise, when we listened to the wireless, it really came across quite well.’

  Michael Codron had just come down from Oxford and decided, as an alternative to his father’s cement works, to go into theatrical management, where he became the greatest patron and promoter of new writers and now enjoys great commercial success. His then partner, David Hall, had written to me and when I called on Mr Codron he appeared to be rather young and very silent. In the years to come I discovered that this silence was an effective technique for conducting interviews; if you can keep quiet for long enough your interviewee is bound to make some rash promise if only to save the occasion from becoming boring. In this way patients apparently blurt out bitter self-truths to avoid boring the analyst who sits couch-side and silent. In my case the commitment was to write a companion piece to The Dock Brief which Mr Codron wished to stage at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in the course of a season which was to include the first production of Harold Pinter’s play, The Birthday Party. If I failed to produce a second play in about two months, Mr Codron threatened to do The Dock Brief with something he called an ‘Ionesco’, a word I thought, in my appalling ignorance, denoted an educational branch of the United Nations.

  Ignorant of the terrors of playwriting and its technical difficulties, I wrote a companion play called What Shall We Tell Caroline? surprisingly quickly. I managed to persuade Michael Hordern, who had given an impeccable performance as the hopeless barrister, to play a banjolele-twanging prep-school master, a character who also stepped, obediently, out of the shadows of my past. The plays came on in the season at the Lyric and my father, having potted nineteen dahlia plants, was driven up to London to, as we all said, ‘see’ the play. He seemed to have forgotten his first impression as his diary notes that the play was a success and ‘John pointed out Harold Hobson who, to our surprise, is quite small.’ He had an excellent dinner at the Clarendon Restaurant in Hammersmith. The next morning, he noted, the newspaper reviews were ‘surpassingly good’. He planted seed pans and pots of stocks, arcotis ipomea, marigolds and blue and pink salvia. On the whole life continued, in spite of the notices, to go on much as usual.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There’s no business, as I had learnt earlier in my life, like movie business, and there’s nothing like having had a small success with two miniature plays about an unsuccessful old lawyer and an eccentric prep-school master, to make the movie moguls prick up their ears, reach for their synopses and decide that you are just the person to write a three-hour epic about the Conquest of Mexico, or the love life of Genghis Khan. The period after The Dock Brief marked the start of my second love affair with the art of the film, a relationship as frustrating but rather more exotic than my first.

  The two plays tranferred to the West End of London where, despite the ‘surpassing’ notices, they didn’t live for very long, this being due to various theatrical diseases such as the fact that it was raining, or too hot, or Holy Week, or the news was bad, or there was a bus strike, or it got dark at night. All the same I enjoyed, in my mid thirties, all the pleasures of being a new, young writer (although Harold Hobson did point out, among many kind and flattering remarks, that at my age Racine had been dead for at least five years). Just as old character actors are the better for having had a period of acclaim as a jeune premier to look back upon, it’s as well for an ageing author to be able to remember a period when he was thought of, no doubt mistakenly, as being of the avant-garde. This was the situation in which I found myself after five novels, some of which it must be admitted clung firmly to the middle of the road. A couple of years later when Michael Codron put on three short plays in an evening which I shared with Harold Pinter and N. F. Simpson, I remember that Emlyn Williams, who acted in all of our pieces and is not a man to mince his words, took a look at me during the first rehearsal and said, ‘Well, you just got into the New Wave as the Tube doors were closing.’ The metaphor might have been mixed, but there was a good deal of truth in what he said.

  At the time The Dock Brief opened, Penelope and I rented the nursery wing of an enormous manor house in Norfolk, to which we would go for long weekends and family holidays. The climate there was what they call ‘bracing’, that is to say it was a few degrees up on that in which Captain Oates took his final and heroic departure. There were big empty beaches and cliffs which the children slid down in an avalanche of sand, and with rare courage they sometimes swam in the treacherous waters of the North Sea. Then we would build bonfires of driftwood on the shore to cook shrimps and sausages and still their chattering teeth. The conditions were Arctic and I remember seeing a seal under the pier in the local town.

  When the children became ill a Norfolk doctor recommended that we tie dirty socks round their throats, treatment from which generations of infants may well have died in the nursery wing, and ours might have followed them had we not fallen back on newer-fangled remedies. I sat, on days of pale sunshine, in the garden and wrote with pen forced between freezing fingers. The importance of failure and critical attack is that it may rob a writer of confidence. It is like riding a bicycle and being told you can’t do it: if you listen to this verdict you immediately fall off. The small success of The Dock Brief had given new confidence to the voice I had found. New stories came to me easily and almost uninvited, I wrote quickly and with great happiness. In another part of the garden, wearing gumboots and a fisherman’s sweater, Penelope typed without interruption, charting the sea of marriage and its hidden rocks and shallows. The children discarded their sock chokers and played happily in the house, losing themselves in the long corridors and dust-sheeted drawing-rooms of the part of the manor we did not inhabit.

  It was in those days that I heard from Mr Anatole de Grunwald, known to his many friends as ‘Tolly’, and was invited once more to write for the movies.

  When I first met Mr de Grunwald he was asleep on a small gilt sofa in the sitting-room of his suite at the Ritz Hotel. His shoes were off and a pale toe stuck through a hole in his sock. He was a handsome man whose hair, face and moustache wore a uniform tinge of grey. When he awoke he lifted the lid of a silver chafing dish which had come up with the room service at the same time as my arrival. ‘Something I can only get in England,’ he said joyfully, and fell hungrily on a plate of sardines on toast.

  Tolly de Grunwald had produced many distinguished films, including Henry V. When I met him he was about to start work on another great movie. His problem was one little project which, for obscure and political reasons, he had to do first. If I would join him in getting through the preliminary chore the world, he always told me, was at our disposal. We could do The Possessed, perhaps, or
Nostromo or had I, perhaps, a little story of my own in the bottom drawer? Meanwhile there was this subject to which he was committed for the sake of a number of important people, including the head of the studio to whom he was exceedingly close. It was a job which, ‘At the speed you write will take you four weeks maximum,’ Tolly said, adding, ‘I would be prepared to make you a promise to that effect, but I have only ever made one promise and that was to my wife on a purely personal and private matter.’ This one film, it seemed, would solve all Mr de Grunwald’s financial problems. I only had to say ‘yes’ and give him four weeks of my life. ‘What’s four weeks, after all, a drop in the ocean,’ he said. After that a bright new future stretched before me, filled with exotic parties and films which would make movie history. Not feeling that the time had come to reject all the kingdoms of the world, I followed Mr de Grunwald down a primrose path which led after months and months of discouraging work to a quite awful movie.

  I moved, during my early film life, from Pinewood to Pacific Pallisades, from Slough to Los Angeles, towns which seemed to me to differ mainly in climate. Driving to work in Hollywood, a distance of never less than twenty miles, was much like negotiating a familiar stretch of Western Avenue; there was the same mess of scrubby garages and supermarkets, but in the somnolent atmosphere of Los Angeles the traffic seemed to go much more slowly. Between the buildings tall palm trees stretched up to the sky and in their branches you could hear, on still evenings, the rustling of rats. Stranger animals like mountain lions came in from the desert in which the long streets ended. I got to know a producer whose roof was seriously gnawed by a possum. He rang the City Sanitation Department, who came with a possum trap, a heavy iron cage which they placed on his roof. During the night the cunning possum ate neatly round the trap, which then fell through the roof, injuring the producer’s wife.