Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  WHERE THERE'S A WILL

  John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising barrister. He has written four volumes of autobiography, including most recently Where There's a Will, which was published to great critical acclaim and became a bestseller in 2003. His novels include the Leslie Titmuss trilogy, about the rise of an ambitious Tory MP: Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of Trumpets. He has also published numerous collections of stories featuring his best-loved creation, Horace Rumpole, most recently Rumpole Rests His Case (2001) and Rumpole and the Primrose Path (2002). All these books are available in Penguin.

  Sir John lives in what was once his father's house in the Chilterns. He received a knighthood for his services to the arts in the 1998 Queen's birthday honours list.

  Where There's a Will

  JOHN MORTIMER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  www.penguin.com

  Published by Viking 2003

  Published in Penguin Books 2004

  4

  Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce extracts from the following: ‘The Tower’ by W. B. Yeats. Reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael B. Yeats. ‘A Slice of Wedding Cake’ by Robert Graves. Reprinted from The Complete Poems published by Carcanet Press.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192802-9

  For Gus, Joe, Felix,

  Dora, Beatrix and Sam

  It is time that I wrote my will…

  I have prepared my peace

  With learned Italian things

  And the proud stones of Greece,

  Poet's imaginings

  And memories of love,

  Memories of the words of women,

  All those things whereof

  Man makes a superhuman

  Mirror-resembling dream.

  W.B. Yeats, ‘The Tower’

  Let's choose executors, and talk of wills.

  William Shakespeare, ‘Richard II’

  Contents

  1. Where There's a Will

  2. Changing Your Life – and ‘The Man in Sneakers’

  3. Getting Drunk

  4. The Grand Perhaps

  5. An Old Woman Cooking Eggs

  6. The Domino Theory and the Tyranny of Majorities

  7. Outdoor Sex

  8. Shakespeare's Favourites

  9. Listening

  10. Believing in Something

  11. Lying

  12. The Companionship of Women

  13. Causing Offence

  14. Living with Children

  15. Interesting Times

  16. Timing and the Art of Advocacy

  17. Male Clothing

  18. Being Vulgar

  19. The Marketplace

  20. Law or Justice

  21. Family Values

  22. Missed Opportunities

  23. Making a Fuss

  24. Giving Money to Beggars

  25. Eating Out

  26. The Pursuit of Happiness

  27. Looking after Your Health

  28. Inventions and the Decline of Language

  29. Avoiding Utopia

  30. Fires Were Started

  31. A Writer's Life

  32. The Attestation Clause

  1. Where There's a Will

  ‘All advice is perfectly useless,’ my father told me when he sent me away to school. ‘Particularly advice on the subject of life. You may, at a pinch, take your schoolteacher's word on the subject of equilateral triangles, or the Latin word for “parsley”; but remember that life's a closed book to schoolteachers, if you want my honest opinion.’

  And yet the temptation to give advice is almost irresistible. From the book of Leviticus, which forbade homosexuality and the eating of prawns, through Lord Chesterfield's letters informing his son how to act like a gentleman, through Victorian doctors who advised the young that masturbation leads to blindness (‘Can I just do it until I'm short-sighted?’ some bright child is alleged to have asked), to present-day classes on citizenship, endless varying diets, or calls to save the universe by the segregation of rubbish, we have always been bombarded with advice. The state of the world doesn't offer much evidence of each generation having benefited from the wise words of their elders. All that could be said of a book that told the author's grandchildren how to live their lives is that it would be singularly ineffective.

  ‘If you'll take my advice,’ said the late Sir Patrick Hastings, cross-examining an habitual offender in his threatening Irish brogue, ‘you'll answer the question truthfully.’

  ‘The last time I took your advice, Sir Patrick,’ the witness said, ‘I got four years.’

  I can think of only one piece of advice which has effectively influenced my life. When I was about seven years old I locked myself into the lavatory at the Negresco Hotel in Nice. A carpenter was called to release me. When I was extricated the hotel manager, in perfect English, said he had a word of warning for me which I should take extremely seriously. ‘Let this be a lesson to you, my boy,’ he said. ‘Never lock a lavatory door for the rest of your life!’ I never have, but this course of conduct has led to no strange encounters or indeed affected my conduct in any other way.

  However, at the end of a life, there may be a natural desire to take stock of your possessions and decide what, if anything, can be dusted off and usefully passed on. Such bequests can be easily rejected as, perhaps, too familiar articles of furniture.

  ‘Let's choose executors, and talk of wills.’ So said Richard II at the time of his defeat and approaching death. And my father chose Shakespeare's line as the epigraph of his single book, Mortimer on Probate, still a standard work on the law governing testamentary dispositions. The cases he did in court included arguments about last wills written on a blown duck egg, or on the tail of a kite, but not, as Rider Haggard once wrote, on the naked back of a woman who had to be filed at Somerset House.

  Death, in the probate cases we used to do, was the preliminary to endless family feuds, bitter recriminations and lengthy contested claims to the bedroom furniture, the elderly Bentley or the set of golf clubs. It has to be said that the deceased often encouraged this infighting by making contradictory promises to friends and relatives in order to ensure their visits and a kindly interest in a lonely old age. All the same, after twenty years spent knocking around the criminal courts, it's hard to remember cases which showed human nature as more selfish, more predatory, redder in to
oth and claw, than those probate actions which concerned the remnants of a finished life and the property of the dead.

  What can we leave behind that will be of any use to our relatives, apart from the second-best bed, the deflated pension fund, the bundle of letters carelessly left undestroyed, the cupboard full of old suits or vintage evening dresses, the sporting prints and the doubtful Chippendale?

  Having decided to make his will, W. B. Yeats announced from his tower that he had ‘prepared my peace/With learned Italian things/And the proud stones of Greece,/ Poet's imaginings/ And memories of love,/Memories of the words of women, /All those things whereof/Man makes a superhuman/Mirror-resembling dream’. These were, no doubt, wise choices. No one is likely to start an embittered and fiercely fought legal action over the possession of a poet's imaginings, memories of the words of women or even all the things whereof man makes a superhuman, mirror-resembling dream.

  And yet such bequests may be of far greater value than the seaside bungalow, the tarnished silver or the four-seater sofa. Apart from his intimate knowledge of the law of probate, my father left me his memories of Shakespeare, Browning and the Sherlock Holmes stories, together with his laughter, which I can hear quite often echoing in my children's mouths, and his sudden rages at trivial inconveniences such as cold plates, waiting for things and soft eggs. He left me, I also have to admit, his house and garden; but it's for an approach to life, a view of our brief existence suspended between two vast eternities, that I am just as grateful.

  Wills are not usually places to find comments on life as it has been lived. If they are subject to prolonged and expensive interpretation, it's only to discover what items of property fall into residue or the precise effect of an act of revocation. Nor are the old, near to death, necessarily wise. Many of the greatest crimes, much of the most bigoted behaviour leading to widespread suffering and mass slaughter, have been committed by angry old people stuck, like trucks in the soft sands of the desert, in the errors of their ways. King Lear, until moments of madness brought him some illumination, had far less understanding of the human condition than the clear-sighted young Cordelia. Indeed, old age can lead to panic and irresponsibility. Old men may contract near-fatal marriages or old women may fall victims to drink and cosmetic surgery. The account of accumulated wisdom may, at the end, be seriously overdrawn and an intelligent teenager may be a far more reliable guide to life than an old person with a plastic hip or a face-lift.

  So where should we look, outside ourselves, for an awareness of the human condition, a country which can never be entirely explored but glimpsed, more or less widely, and penetrated in varying degrees of depth?

  What can be said is that the passage of time, the addition of this or that invention, even of many scientific discoveries, has not necessarily helped towards this essential understanding. It can be argued that no writer had a clearer insight than Shakespeare, and he managed to achieve this in a world without refrigeration, Darwin, Freud, Bill Gates, e-mails, television or the mobile phone. The characters in the plays of Euripides are no less capable of revealing universal truths than those created by Eugene O'Neill or Harold Pinter. All great literature, so far as our understanding of the essential facts about ourselves goes, is modern literature.

  And what is true of literature may be true of history also. The contemporary holy wars of Islam are as wrong-headed but, so far at least, less deep in blood than the Crusades. Ireland is endlessly re-enacting the days of Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange. Yugoslavs were murdering each other as a result of divisions in the Roman Empire. And yet we are busily closing our eyes to all these valuable clues. Shakespeare is dying out in schools, no one learns poetry by heart and literature seems to have begun with Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies and, perhaps, The Hobbit. History begins, in our schools, with the Russian Revolution or, at its most remote, the origins of the 1914 war.

  So the Delphic instructions to know ourselves, Shakespeare's advice, put into the mouth of Polonius in one of the rare moments when he was being sensible, ‘to thine own self be true’, and Montaigne's announcement that living ‘is my trade and my art’ are made harder by severing relations with the past. Perhaps Yeats's bequests are, in fact, the most valuable assets we can leave, the ‘learned Italian things… the proud stones of Greece’ and, above all, ‘Poet's imaginings’. These may give us wider, clearer views, but the whole truth is still unknowable. The definitive map of our universe doesn't exist. Those who think they know it all usually know the least; those who think they have all the answers have always lost the plot.

  2. Changing Your Life – and ‘The Man in Sneakers’

  I live surrounded by ageing rockers. Joe Brown of The Bruvvers is in the next village, Jim Capaldi of Traffic is in a nearby town, George Harrison, until his untimely death, lived in Henley, and our great friends are a beautiful pair of twins, known to us as the Heavenlies, who are married to members of the group Deep Purple. Jon Lord, the keyboard player and one of the founders of the group, has changed his life and now successfully composes classical music. One of my own changes of life is more rapid and fundamental.

  I am at my first rock concert, admittedly late in life. Deep Purple, having toured the world and played to many thousands of enthusiasts in Bengal, where they were greeted with headlines like ‘The Rock Heroes are in Town’, are giving a concert in Oxford. The theatre is packed with an almost all-male audience, many of them playing air guitar or standing with their arms raised, swaying to the music.

  I am standing in the wings, drinking champagne out of a paper cup as the band crashes triumphantly through the sound barrier. Ian Paice completes a miraculous drum solo and throws his sticks into the applauding audience with the elegance of Marie Antoinette chucking out a few cakes to the hungry mob below her windows. As I clap enthusiastically, a man standing beside me asks, ‘Are you Ian Paice's dad?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say modestly. ‘I'm Ian's dad and we're terrifically proud of the boy.’ It was a moment of relief, a sudden escape from too many other problems. I could give up being myself and concentrate on being the delighted father of a brilliant drummer, if only for half an hour. Occasionally, meeting other rock bands and talking to drummers, I become Ian's dad again. All this only points to something else I should mention in a will, the importance, in a long life, of changing it whenever possible.

  If you feel stuck in any kind of a rut you might contemplate the chameleon life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Jew who became a Catholic priest, the librettist of the three greatest operas ever written, the friend of Casanova, Mozzart (as he always spelled the composer's name) and two successive Austrian emperors, who married an English wife and ended up living in New York, owning an opera house and teaching Americans about Italian poetry.

  In that great period of history which included the Age of Reason and the French Revolution, the world of Rousseau and Napoleon, Byron, Wellington, Shelley and Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven, Da Ponte appears in flashes of light, enjoying extraordinarily different lives in various disguises. Even his name wasn't his. The child of a Jewish family which had converted to Catholicism because, in the province of Venice, Jews were not allowed to marry, the future librettist was given the name of the bishop who baptized him.

  We get a glimpse of Da Ponte in the priests’ seminary at Cenada, where, in six months, he learned most of Dante's Inferno by heart, as well as the best sonnets and songs of Petrarch and ‘the most beautiful works of Tasso’. He was fluent in Latin and became a brilliant teacher. Now we see him taking holy orders, followed by a succession of unpriestly love affairs. An anonymous denunciation accused him of an ‘evil life’. Someone had seen a woman put her hand in his breeches. He fled from Venice to avoid his trial by the Inquisition and was sentenced, in his absence, to seven years in a prison cell without light.

  After a tender love affair with the wife of an innkeeper, and having renamed himself for a short while with the eccentric pseudonym of ‘Lesbonico Pegasio’, he appears again in Vienna as ‘poet’ t
o the Burg theatre, and the favourite of Emperor Joseph II. So we find him writing libretti for three operas, one by Mozart, one by Salieri and one by Martini, feeling as he writes that ‘I am reading the Inferno for Mozart, Tasso for Salieri and Petrarch for Martini.’ He is working for twelve hours at a stretch, assisted by a bottle of Tokay on his right, his inkwell in front of him and a box of Seville snuff on his left, with a beautiful young girl, the housekeeper's daughter, to bring him a biscuit, a cup of coffee or merely her smiling face.

  Da Ponte's lasting fame rests on his writing the words for Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte. He was convinced, in these works, as in his life, that quick and complete changes of mood are essential. So, in Don Giovanni, scenes of farce (the changing of clothes between the Don and Leporello) are followed by moments of high comedy, tragedy and, finally, the refusal to repent, which has made Don Giovanni into an existentialist hero as he is dragged down to hell.

  In Così fan tutte Da Ponte makes changes of identity more significant than changes of mood. The silly bet, which has caused the pair of male lovers to return in disguise to test the fidelity of their mistresses, becomes stranger and more bewildering when each mistress falls for the charms of the other's lover. Those who dismiss Così as a ridiculous story with deathless music seem unaware of this disturbing development. Does it, can it, mean that we are creatures without any personality, one lover, in the moment of temptation, being as good as another? In Da Ponte's libretto the possibility remains that, in the inevitable ‘happy’ ending, the girls actually marry the wrong partners, although this is not the way we can bear to see it performed nowadays. The pride we take in being consistent and individual souls would be far too deeply disturbed.

  We can't resist a look at Da Ponte in a country house party just before the first night of Don Giovanni. The house was on the outskirts of Prague and the October weather was still warm and beautiful. ‘People lingered happily in the open air, with the feeling that days like this were a blessing,’ one of the guests wrote. It was at this party that Mozart was lured into an upstairs room and the door was locked until he finished the yet unwritten overture. Da Ponte appears at this party with an aged librarian from the Castle of Dux. This was a man who may have been a model for the sensual Don, and who also had a rascally servant. ‘Signor Casanova seems to be a really worthy old man,’ one of the guests is reported to have said to Da Ponte, who replied, ‘There you are making a terrible mistake. He's an adventurer who has spent his days playing cards, brewing elixirs and telling fortunes.’