Clinging to the Wreckage by John Mortimer

First published: 1982

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1923-1971

Locale: London and Turville Heath, England

Principal Personages:

• John Mortimer, a British lawyer, playwright, and novelist
• Clifford Mortimer, his father
• Kathleen May Smith Mortimer, his mother
• Penelope Fletcher Dimont, his first wife
• Penelope Gollop, his second wife

Form and Content

Famous as a defense barrister at London’s Old Bailey and for his popular mystery novels and teleplays built around the character Rumpole, John Mortimer takes the same approach in writing his apologia pro vita sua that he took in conducting his defenses of unpopular figures and in relating the adventures of his fictional character. That approach, neither sympathetic nor hostile, is epitomized in Mortimer’s quotation from Albert Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955) in the front matter of the book: “For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.”

Encompassing twenty-six short chapters, each from four to nine pages long, Clinging to the Wreckage: A Part of a Life includes photographs documenting various phases in Mortimer’s life, from his student days in a Sloane Square public school to his life during early middle age with his second wife and a young daughter. The autobiography covers the period up to the sensational six-weeks-long Oz trial in 1971, in which Mortimer defended a young Australian, Richard Neville, who had published a pornographic schoolboy version of Oz magazine.

Mortimer finds that memories of his childhood—“acting my solo version of Hamlet before the blind eyes of my father,” for example, or, in his schoolboy days, the fear he felt as he grunted and feinted “with huge balloons of boxing gloves lashed to the end of white, matchstick arms”—are for him as clear as yesterday. Events of the more recent past, however, are “lost in the mists of a vanishing memory.”

Unlike most memoirists, Mortimer eschews use of dates and other conventional autobiographical facts, choosing to frame experiences within general times, such as his Harrow days and his years at the University of Oxford. His chapters have no titles and are merely numbered.

Anecdotal in style, each chapter reads like an entertaining collection of episodes seemingly unrelated to one another, yet subtly creating a progression of theme which concludes with an elegiac note for a time that is gone. This underlying unity results largely from a focus on the strong personalities of Mortimer’s father and mother, especially the former, who not only influenced but even determined the course of his son’s life. At times, Mortimer himself seems to retreat into their shadows. At the end, the father’s strong influence can be seen in Mortimer’s choosing to return to Turville Heath to live in the home that his father had built, just as earlier he had followed his father in a career at the Old Bailey.

Like his father, who had written a primer on probate law, Mortimer edited a volume of accounts of trials, Famous Cases (1984). Indeed, in reviewing Clinging to the Wreckage, Michael Davie suggested that Mortimer “consider stretching his considerable talents by writing the book he certainly has in him about the legal system and its practitioners, without worrying too much about whether it is entertaining or not.”

Although memories of his mother are strong, particularly of her traditional English reticence, they pale in the light of those of the father, whose refusal to acknowledge his blindness eventually drew his wife and son into an existence of near-total dedication to supporting his work as a divorce and probate advocate at the Old Bailey. Clinging to the Wreckage evokes images of a wife riding to London by train, reading in loud tones to a hard-of-hearing husband the lurid details of the case in which he would be involved that day, much to the amusement of fellow travelers. The images include those of a youth spending hours reading to his blind father.

I read to find new characters to adopt on lonely runs round the periphery of football pitches. I read aloud to entertain my father and when we had got through Shakespeare’s sonnets, Browning and The Shropshire Lad, we went on to Fragments of an Agon and Sweeney Among the Nightingales.

Another important theme, perhaps a secondary one, is the process by which the English court system dispenses justice. In a love-hate relationship with it, as both barrister and writer, Mortimer describes his father’s cases of divorce and probate, farcically depicting foibles of English life and law. In addition to portraits of his father in the courtroom, Mortimer includes his caricature of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, who became in part the basis for his best-known character, Rumpole.

Mortimer writes about his own advocacy of free speech and press, as he participated in efforts to repeal the stage censorship law that had been in existence for more than two hundred years, efforts that finally realized success in 1968. Despite his dislike of the judicial process, Mortimer, like Rumpole, loves the golden thread of justice—the right of every man to be heard—worn and frayed though it has become.

The autobiographical themes that haunt nearly everything Mortimer has written received exclusive treatment in his stage play A Voyage Round My Father (1970), which was produced during the period with which Clinging to the Wreckage concludes. In form and content, both works reflect the “lucid indifference” of Camus’ absurd man, developed from the experiences that add up to a life. Mortimer recalls a story he was told by a man with a bristling gray beard about the dangers of yachting. The secret of handling that danger, the man concluded, is not to learn to swim, for then one may cling to the wreckage and be rescued by a helicopter. Mortimer adds that it is the very advice he thought he had been taking for most of his life. This advice supplied his autobiography’s title. He developed an absurdist style which enables him to distance himself emotionally from his experiences and to create memorable visual portraits. His self-deprecating humor is at times gently Chekhovian, at other times grotesquely Gogolian or Dickensian. In either case, his sense of the absurd frees Mortimer from the tortuous analysis of psychological motivations and the earnest social criticism in which many of his contemporaries have indulged.

Appropriately, Mortimer concludes his autobiography with brief references to his mother’s death in a hospital, even as an actress was playing her part in A Voyage Round My Father; to Alec Guinness playing Mortimer’s father at the Haymarket; to the court’s setting aside the convictions of the editors of Oz; to his waiting in the corridors of the Old Bailey for the verdict in his latest case; to his taking possession of his parents’ home; and, finally, to memories of reading Sherlock Holmes stories in the garden to his father, who already knew them by heart. These images signal the end of one era and the beginning of another, postlude to the bits of wreckage of his first fifty years and prelude to the safety of his happy second marriage and growing success as a writer.

Critical Context

Mortimer’s autobiography covers his writing career to 1970, when he had a reputation more as a barrister than as a writer, even though he had written a substantial number of novels, stage dramas, and scripts for television and films. It was in 1970 that A Voyage Round My Father, his first play since the short The Dock Brief (1957) to draw strongly favorable reviews, was produced. In 1975, a single Rumpole episode on television proved successful enough that six series of Rumpole stories were eventually televised and published in the 1980’s. It was in the 1970’s and 1980’s as well that Mortimer’s impressive television adaptations of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945, 1959), Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934), and his own A Voyage Round My Father received high critical acclaim. Clinging to the Wreckage serves as Mortimer’s assertion that in 1970, his career as writer is replacing that of jurist.

Clinging to the Wreckage is important because it clarifies the autobiographical sources of much of Mortimer’s other work. Furthermore, it sheds light, with a Dickensian sharpness of detail, on a life, a time, and the ultimately absurd condition of man.

Bibliography

Carey, John. “The Case of the Levitating Lawyer,” in The Sunday Times. March 28, 1982, p. 40.

Davie, Michael. “Predestined to Serve,” in The Times Literary Supplement. April 16, 1982, p. 431.

Lahr, John. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (October 17, 1982), p. 12.

Library Journal. CVII, September 1, 1982, p. 1653.

Listener. CVII, March 25, 1982, p. 23.

New Statesman. CIII, April 2, 1982, p. 20.

The New Yorker. LVIII, October 26, 1982, p. 166.

Pritchett, V. S. Review in The New Yorker. LVIII (October 25, 1982), p. 166.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXII, July 30, 1982, p. 67.

Ratcliffe, Michael. “Absurd Man,” in The Times (London). April 1, 1982, p. 8.

Taylor, John Russell. Anger and After, 1961.

The Wall Street Journal. October 11, 1982, p. 20.