Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  After the party Da Ponte hurried back to Vienna. And the elderly Casanova, who wrote, ‘the first business of my life has been to indulge my senses. I felt myself born for the fair sex’, may have sat in the theatre to hear the Don tell Leporello, ‘Women are more necessary to me than the bread I eat or the air I breathe.’ The old man must have felt himself living again as the seducer on the stage.

  Da Ponte had gone, having business to do, fresh love affairs to attend to and other opera libretti to write. He travelled to England and then turned up unexpectedly in Boston, after a terrible crossing of the Atlantic without a mattress or regular meals, to teach and sell Italian books. And then he was in New York, opening his new opera house. Some Americans objected to watching music drama sung in Italian. Da Ponte invited them to dinner, where delicious garlic-scented, succulent Italian dishes were set before them. Before they could start eating, all these delights were cleared away and replaced by bowls of American corn. The dinner also had changed identity.

  Finally the opera house burnt down, but Da Ponte lived on until his ninetieth year, respected, grey-haired, still handsome and smiling through all life's changes. When he died, he had an elaborately theatrical funeral at the Roman Catholic Cathedral on 11th Street. His grave was, like Mozart's, unmarked, the cemetery has been built over and no trace of this extraordinary consumer of life exists except on the stage.

  Changing the life that's been allocated to you, throwing in your hand and asking for a redeal, may require courage and determination. Our friend Derek has both. He was born the only child of two poor, totally underprivileged Jamaican immigrants in Battersea. He is now a rich and successful businessman and financial adviser, and perhaps the only black master of foxhounds in England.

  Once again it's the story of a remarkable teacher, a woman at Derek's state school who liked this obviously bright little boy and invited him for weekends to her cottage in Norfolk, where he learned how to ride. When he left school, he got a job in the Attorney-General's office, made contacts and entered the world of big business. So, quick-witted and ready with an apt phrase, Derek was able to change the unpromising hand he had been dealt.

  He was sailing over a fence in his full master of foxhounds regalia when a hunt saboteur shouted up at him, ‘Two hundred years ago they would've been hunting you.’

  ‘Oh yes, my dear,’ Derek shouted back, ‘and five hundred years ago, I would've been eating you!’

  Derek is a Tory. His reason for this must be a constant accusation to those of us who are on the left, and should be a weight on the conscience of a new generation of politicians. ‘When I was a poor boy in Battersea,’ he said, ‘and saw the way Labour treated its own people, I decided to become a Conservative.’

  Hitchcock's movie North by Northwest has an early scene in a crowded hotel lounge. A bellboy is walking among the guests calling out that he's got a message for Mr George Caplan. Cary Grant, who isn't Caplan, raises his hand because he wants to make a telephone call to his mother. The villains, who have been looking for Caplan in order to kill him, assume that Cary Grant has answered the bellboy's call and that he is, therefore, the man they're after. For the rest of the film Grant has to live the life of a stranger who turns out not to exist, avoid his assassins and share the non-existent stranger's troubles; so easy is it to slide from one identity to another.

  The best of times, so far as I was concerned, was when I was both a writer and a defence barrister. The lawyer was able to learn many secrets, to meet a huge variety of people, to bear their misfortunes with great heroism and see the solutions to their problems quite clearly. Talking to juries and judges in court, I was always telling them things I thought they'd like to hear. What I thought, what I felt, was immaterial. I was someone else's voice doing my best to persuade tribunals of other people's innocence. But early, very early in the morning, before the judges, the jury members or those under arrest were awake, I was a writer trying to be entirely myself, saying exactly what I thought in a voice I hoped was no one else's.

  This led to an enjoyably varied way of life. I used to spend breakfast time with a suspected murderer in an interview room in the cells under the Old Bailey, I would have lunch with the judges, who ate and drank with their wigs on at the City of London's expense, and in the evening I would have dinner with an actress. I could go, when court ended, to a rehearsal room. In doing so, I seemed to step from the world of make-believe and ‘let's pretend’ to the harsh reality of the theatre, where an attempt, at any rate, is being made to say something truthful about the human condition.

  Most lives are long enough to play at least two parts; but the problems of identity raised by Così fan tutte remain. I'm writing this in Italy, and back in England a week ago Leo McKern died. He was an actor who magnificently portrayed a character I'd written, Rumpole, the claret-swigging, small-cigar-smoking, fearless upholder of our great legal principles, trial by your peers, the presumption of innocence and the rule that the police shouldn't invent more of the evidence than is strictly necessary. At a restaurant I go to near our home in England, the owner saw a newspaper headline, ‘Rumpole Dies’, and for days she spoke in hushed and, I'm relieved to say, regretful tones about my unfortunate death. Rumpole doesn't exist except in books and television plays. I, who wrote him, am still, unaccountably, alive. The actor who pretended to be him is dead. No wonder the newspaper headline was confusing.

  And what about ‘The Man in Sneakers’? I do wear trainers, gym shoes, whatever you call them, because of the state of my feet. Dressed otherwise respectably, I am in the bar of the Essex House in New York with my actress daughter, Emily, and her newly wed actor husband, Alessandro. We are with our respective families and are about to go to the opening of a film he is in. Emily moves a little away from our group to take a photograph of us all.

  She is now close to a man sitting at a bar table who takes her hand and, looking at her lovingly, says, ‘Sit down with me! I'll buy you drinks all the evening and liberate you from the man in sneakers.’

  She disillusioned him, perhaps too soon, and told him that the man in the sneakers was her father. My change of life was short and I was no longer the well-known menace padding round New York in worn white trainers for the purpose of seducing young women.

  3. Getting Drunk

  I am in a broadcasting studio with a number of guests including a boy band. One of them, or one of their controllers, has just emerged from detox and everyone, including the chat-show host, is listening with the greatest respect to his account of kicking a habit. Then they turn to me. ‘Have you got any addictions?’ they ask. Their faces show how tolerant and understanding they are prepared to be.

  ‘Not really,’ I say. ‘Except I do have my first glass of champagne around six o'clock in the morning.’

  There is an awed, deeply sympathetic silence, and then the host says, ‘Are you having counselling for that?’

  ‘No,’ I have to confess, ‘I'm not having counselling.’

  ‘Well, how long has this been going on?’

  ‘Ever since I could afford to have a glass of champagne at six o'clock in the morning,’ was what I had to admit.

  It seems that, in classical times, drunkenness was considered a sort of higher ecstasy, such as the elevated states enjoyed by mystics, poets and lovers, in which the soul becomes separated from the body. The ecstatic behaviour of the disciples at Pentecost caused them to be accused, according to the commentaries of Erasmus, of being pissed out of their minds.

  Montaigne is harder on drunkenness and more suspicious of ecstasy, but then he lived in a time when a great lord, famous for his success in several wars, never drank less than two gallons of wine at every ‘ordinary meal’. Montaigne has a cautionary story of a lady with a chaste reputation who, while provocatively asleep at her fireside after drinking a great deal of wine at dinner, was impregnated by a young farm labourer without her having any idea of what was going on. So he welcomes the fact that, in his day, heavy drinking was declining, ‘becaus
e we threw ourselves into lechery much more than our fathers did’.

  No doubt Montaigne drank in a reasonable manner; but learning to drink can be a painful, although a necessary experience. The art master at Harrow bicycled with us to sketch the suburban countryside – a few patches of agricultural land which then existed around Ruislip reservoir – and, on the way home, we used to knock back an extraordinary number of gin and limes in the local pubs – a sickening experience. In my first term at Oxford my friend Henry Winter and I managed to drink several bowls of sherry and then boil blue Bols and crème de menthe in an electric kettle and drink the horrible result. I have to say I felt none of the higher ecstasies, nothing to compare with the out-of-body and soulful pleasure of mystics and lovers, and nothing to approach the joy of the disciples at Pentecost, nothing in fact but the nauseating sensation of a room spinning out of control. Coming back to reality, I found a theology student from next door kneeling beside me in silent prayer.

  Since then no gin, lime, Bols, sherry or crème de menthe have passed my lips. I'd go so far, with Montaigne, as to say that being really drunk is not a pleasant experience, and being cornered by a drunken person who repeats every sentence at least six times is as bad as being drunk yourself, and that drunk scenes in plays or films are never funny. It's also true to say that, although crimes are committed to pay for drugs, very few crimes are committed under their influence, whereas drink, particularly a mad mixture of snowballs, vodka and pints of lager, leads to bloodstained quarrels between friends, assault and often murder.

  On the other hand, a world without wine would be an extremely depressing place, and no equally enjoyable drink has ever been invented. My grandfather, a Methodist who signed the pledge and thereafter drank nothing but a temperance beverage of his own invention, which apparently produced in him all the outward and visible signs of mild intoxication, might as well have stayed with the wine. There is something strangely depressing about lunch with people who drink nothing but water. W. C. Fields said it should be avoided because fish fuck in it. What is needed is some sort of lesson in schools for intelligent drinking. Nowadays schoolchildren spend a great deal of time watching films about the evil consequences of drugs, dire warnings which seem to have little or no effect, or learning how to use the computer, which can be picked up quite simply at any age. Basic truths about how to know when to refuse another glass could be included in the GCSE syllabus.

  The study of champagne might be reserved for A-levels. The French and the Italians are in dispute about its origins. According to the French, it was invented by a little monk, Dom Perignon. Italians trace this life-enhancing drink back to ancient Rome, when it was kept in urns buried in the earth. It was dark in colour and drunk qualified with water, except at orgies.

  It's greeted as the ‘King of all the wines’ in Die Fledermaus, and a glass of it was taken at midday by Charles Ryder at Oxford to shock his puritanical cousin in Brideshead Revisited. It can cure aching legs and dispel colds, and a glass drunk to the overture of The Marriage of Figaro can banish depression. It's by no means a drink reserved for right-wing toffs. Trotsky was devoted to it, Chekhov called for a glass of it before his brief life ended and Nye Bevan invented the National Health Service aided by frequent bottles of it. I have been called a ‘champagne socialist’ (or even a ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’) because I think this cure-all should be made readily available on the NHS.

  The study of drinking would take in a great deal of English literature, from Chaucer to Kingsley Amis, and should conclude with Byron's answer to hangovers, printed in the verses that precede Don Juan:

  I would to heaven that I were so much clay,

  As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling –

  Because at least the past were pass'd away –

  And for the future – (but I write this reeling,

  Having got drunk exceedingly today,

  So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)

  I say – the future is a serious matter –

  And so – for God's sake – hock and soda water!

  4. The Grand Perhaps

  It's notable that the list of bequests Yeats prepared in his tower didn't, in any clear way, leave his descendants any particular faith in God. He does say, ‘That, being dead, we rise,/Dream and so create/Translunar Paradise.’ But he has already made his view of ‘Death and life’ clear. ‘Till man made up the whole,/Made lock, stock and barrel/Out of his bitter soul’. So, is the translunar paradise beyond the grave a creation merely of the dreams of a bitter soul? Such dreams would not have been particularly attractive to my father. ‘The immortality of the soul?’ he used to say. ‘Isn't that rather a boring conception, like living for all eternity in some vast hotel with absolutely nothing to do in the evenings?’

  I suppose we hand on what we have ourselves inherited. I received from early childhood the opinions of a Darwinian evolutionist father (‘Huxley was to Darwin,’ he used to say, ‘as St Paul was to Christ’) and a mother who was, from her early days as an art student, a Shavian ‘New Woman’, a painter who had exhibited in the Paris Salon, with a head full of Clive Bell and Roger Fry and the paintings of Cézanne, and who never seemed troubled by the possible existence of any God. My father was more openly dismissive, at least of the Creation story. ‘You couldn't possibly make a horse in seven days,’ he told me in childhood. ‘You couldn't even evolve one over seven centuries.’ Accordingly I lived through my school life, and many Church of England services, unbaptized, unconfirmed and more or less quietly unbelieving. Being an only child, I had every opportunity of observing my mother and father closely and I have to say that the absence in their lives of the ‘Grand Perhaps’ didn't cause any deterioration in their behaviour. They didn't, so far as I could see, take to drink or lovers; they didn't, when invited out to dinner, pocket the spoons; nor did they defraud the Inland Revenue.

  Far from abusing me, they trusted me with continual kindness. My mother forsook her art and devoted her life to helping my father in his blindness with as much devotion as any saint. My father, as a barrister, fought hard for his clients and carried on his practice, fixing witnesses with his clear blue, sightless eyes and remembering every date and every page in the bundle of correspondence when his world went dark. He also kept on gardening, pricking out seedlings and getting news of them, when they burst into flower, from my mother and me. Neither the loss of sight nor the approach of death caused him to turn to God.

  George Eliot, who stopped going to church on principle walked in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity College, Cambridge, solemnly speaking three words: ‘God’, ‘Immortality’ and ‘Duty’. She then announced that the first was inconceivable, the second unbelievable but the third ‘absolute and peremptory’. The early atheists thought good behaviour was more important, and of greater value, because it wasn't inspired by the hope of supernatural favours or the fear of any eternal punishment. I believe my mother and father had a similar sense of duty, perhaps more cheerfully expressed because my father was a great one for jokes. I suppose it was their example that made it possible for me to separate good behaviour from religious belief. It has seemed to me since that the worst crimes and cruelties can be committed by people who think they are carrying out God's will. It's hard to imagine that anyone who didn't believe they were obeying some sort of divine command could bring themselves to bury a young mother up to her neck in the sand and stone her to death for having committed adultery.

  Yet no one can deny that the Christian belief in the supreme importance of each individual soul was a great advance on faiths which thought of slaves as soulless. The King James Bible is of extraordinary power and beauty, and subsequent cack-handed translations now used in churches have reduced a work of inspired poetry, said P. D. James, a woman with strong religious beliefs, to mere improbability. Much of the literature I've valued, the art I've most enjoyed, has been produced by unquestioning Christians. Whether I'm a believer or not, I'm a part of a Christian civilization.

&nbs
p; The difficulty, as George Eliot and many others before and since her have found, is how to reconcile the existence of a loving and omnipotent God with, to give only one instance, the Holocaust. The argument that God has given us free will so we can choose to behave with ghastly cruelty and pay the bill for it in the hereafter can be applied to the Nazis who built the gas chambers and the guards who drove men, women and children into them. It falls down completely when you try to apply it to the children who were pushed down the steps to their deaths. They had no chance to exercise free will. They hadn't behaved badly. So what are they, then? To say they are simply the victims of an experiment the Almighty made when he allowed the Gestapo to do as it liked seems morally repulsive. And what about children stricken with leukaemia, teenagers dying of cancer, those who have lived impeccable and selfless lives strangled slowly to death by motor neurone disease? Free will doesn't enter this equation, the debate is about the inexplicable and apparently reckless use of omnipotence.

  If this still puzzles you, I have to report that I have consulted some impressive authorities and received no very clear guidance. Cardinal Hume told me it was one of the great mysteries and it was not granted to us, nor should we ask, to know everything. This is probably the easiest way out of the difficulty. Archbishop Runcie said that every hill has a way down as well as a way up, which didn't seem to me a very helpful observation. The best reply I had came from the writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who cast God as a sort of supernatural Shakespeare, a great dramatist of the skies. ‘As you know,’ Muggeridge told me, ‘a good play has to have heroes as well as villains, tragic as well as comic moments, piles of corpses at the final curtain instead of a happy ending.’ So are good and evil merely the tools of an Almighty Playwright, eternally at his desk and thinking up new plots? Are we all, so far as God is concerned, like the ‘poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’? It is, I suppose, possible, but it's not exactly a comforting explanation.