Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  18. Being Vulgar

  Speaking of Byron, George Eliot called him ‘the most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect on literature’. It's questionable if Byron's mind was notably vulgar. His sense of irony never deserted him, and when at his most tender, even sentimental, moments he couldn't resist laughing at himself:

  And Julia sate with Juan, half embraced

  And half retiring from the glowing arm,

  Which trembled like the bosom where 'twas placed

  Yet still she must have thought there was no harm,

  Or else 'twere easy to withdraw her waist;

  But then the situation had its charm,

  And then – God knows what next – I can't go on;

  I'm almost sorry that I e'er begun.

  However, to deny all vulgarity to Byron would be grossly unfair. Vulgarity is not, as George Eliot would have it, something to be avoided at all costs. And you should not, in life or in literature, be afraid of sentimentality either. Some of the best things in life, works that are a pleasure to be handed on to the generations to come, have vulgarity and sentimentality in spades. And I don't mean seaside postcards or old music hall songs, but the greatest works of Dickens, Chaucer, Sterne, James Joyce and Rabelais. Indeed it's impossible to read through, say, the novels of Virginia Woolf without longing for a touch, a mere hint of vulgarity or sentimentality, a tear-jerking scene perhaps, or even a joke about a fart. Benjamin Britten and his circle of friends used to say that Puccini's operas ‘are all right, it's just the music that's so terrible’. And yet you can be tearful at the end of La Bohème or be swept away by the shameless melodrama of Tosca more easily than by Britten's cold and more tasteful music.

  And if Byron was vulgar-minded, how about Shakespeare? In the purely literary sense it's hard to criticize his poetry and infallible sense of drama. There are only very occasional over-ornate moments of showing off and sentimentality, as in:

  And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

  Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim hors'd

  Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

  Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

  That tears shall drown the wind…

  The more showy paintings of Rubens, the falling clouds of female flesh, might be described as vulgar, as might Toulouse-Lautrec's lesbians and prostitutes or the satirical drawings of George Grosz. Picasso could be vulgar but not, strangely enough, Matisse; and there is a tender vulgarity in Kurt Weill. Critics might say that the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, with its easy rhythms and populist appeal, is vulgar but this was the source of his confident mastery of verse. Vulgarity is, at least, energetic.

  The actor Donald Wolfit, playing Shylock, sharpened his knife during the trial scene and then dropped it point downwards until it stood quivering, stabbing the stage. ‘Terribly vulgar effect,’ said Gielgud with a sniff of disapproval. And yet great acting, as practised by Laurence Olivier, had its elements of vulgar showing-off. He entered as Othello, blacked up and with a rose in his mouth. He died hanging upside down, his ankles grasped by terrified spear-carriers, as Coriolanus. He swooped down from a high ramp as Hamlet, holding the sword that killed Claudius like an avenging angel. He imagined the scream of pain a small animal might emit if it found its tongue frozen to the ice and gave it to the blinded Oedipus. He slid down the length of a stage curtain as Mr Puff in The Critic. Terribly vulgar indeed, but all wonderful moments in the theatre.

  The Russian writer Nabokov thought Dostoevsky vulgar and said that reading his books was like enjoying the more lurid crime stories in some sensational newspaper, which is perhaps why Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov exercise their compulsive fascination.

  Oscar Wilde mocked Dickens for his vulgar sentimentality in writing the death of Little Nell. Perhaps Dickens didn't feel as strongly about Nell, for all her slightly embarrassing sweetness, as he did for Jo, the little crossing sweeper in Bleak House. And when Jo died of poverty and neglect he comes straight out of the book and steps down to the footlights:

  Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

  You could say this is sentimental, which it is. You might find the effect vulgar. I know it to be magnificent.

  In another sense Shakespeare has a healthy sense of vulgarity. Even his most serious texts are dotted with sexual innuendoes, and he didn't rule out fart jokes. Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona takes personal responsibility for the indiscretion of his dog, Crab: ‘he had not been there – bless the mark! – a pissing while, but all the chamber smelt him’. Shakespeare was also certain of a laugh from the groundlings when Pompey, in Measure for Measure, announces that his surname is Bum. ‘Troth, and your bum is the greatest thing about you,’ says Escalus, ‘so that in the beastliest sense you are Pompey the Great.’

  ‘Vulgar’ was a term of abuse much used in my youth. It could be applied to furniture (‘what a vulgar little chair’) seaside resorts (Brighton and Blackpool) and even after-dinner drinks (créme de menthe frappé). It was vulgar to say ‘serviettes’ instead of ‘table napkins’ or ‘lounge’ instead of ‘sitting room’. Wearing a ready-made bow tie, or eating asparagus with a fork or peas on a knife, all such things were thought of as unforgivably vulgar. It was horribly vulgar to pour your tea into your saucer to cool it (once a common practice) or wear brown shoes with a blue suit or have a gnome in your front garden. There was a whole world of things which non-vulgar people, including, of course, the Bloomsbury group, would never permit. Harrow, among the English public schools, was thought of as ‘vulgar’, producing unreliable characters wearing scuffed suede shoes who drove battered sports cars and frequented gin palaces on the Great West Road. The alleged vulgarity of old Harrovians attracted John Betjeman so much that, although he had been to Marlborough, he used to put on a Harrovian boater and sit at the piano playing Harrow school songs. Nothing excited him more than carefully observed vulgarity.

  Such definitions of vulgarity belong to an arcane snobbery and a vanished standard of good taste. Now political correctness has tried to enforce an artificial code of polite conduct on our basic instinct to laugh at most things, including, sex, death and going to the lavatory. In life and in literature there may still be opportunities to show off, exaggerate, embellish and startle. The only advice I would give to those who come after me is, ‘If you can find a streak of vulgarity in yourself, nurture it.’

  19. The Marketplace

  My uncle Harold was rich. I think that in the 1930s, when such things were more rare, he was a millionaire. His father had owned a furniture shop in Tottenham Court Road and a patented bed spring. He left the shop to his other son, Ambrose Heal, and the bed spring to my uncle Harold. Out of this device, by the time he married my aunt Marjorie, Harold owned a factory at Staples Corner, on the outskirts of London, making mattresses which were so comfortable that King George V, having hurt his back during the 1914–18 war, chose to sleep on one.

  My rich uncle was mildly eccentric. He had his waistcoats made with flannel flaps behind to keep his bottom warm. He designed his own wide-brimmed hats and drove a Lagonda. He was also superstitious, refusing to walk under ladders or have lilies in the house, and feared the thirteenth of each month. In the taste of the 1930s he designed some good furniture, including the desk I am writing on now. Towards the end of his life, he flew into a terrible temper with my aunt because she wrote a shopping list out on a clean envelope. In spite of his wealth, he considered this a terrible waste.

  I don't think we ever envied my uncle's wealth, the Lagonda and the country estate with the cottages in which the workers would be given boxes of biscuits and pounds of tea at Christmas. All this took place in the days when doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, even architects were thought to follow useful, valuable callings, with rules against professional misconduct. Millionaires seemed to
us, on the whole, to be something of a joke.

  We scarcely ever heard the word ‘entrepreneur’ and if we did it was used to describe the middleman who produced nothing. He intervened between the manufacturer and the consumer and made easy money out of both of them. Now entrepreneurs are thought to follow the most worthwhile of all professions and every child, in the market-oriented way of New Labour education, should be taught the art of becoming one. Indeed, this calling has been judged to rank so high in the field of human endeavour that President Bush, in one of his wilder flights of verbal confusion, was heard to say, ‘The trouble with the French is that they haven't got a word for “entrepreneur”.’

  The change became complete in the Thatcher years. As the factory gates closed there were no jobs for manufacturers any more and we became a nation of shopkeepers and hairdressers. It was then that politicians, ‘entrepreneurs’ and practically everyone else began to speak, in tones of religious awe, about the ‘marketplace’. Ignore the fact that Jesus made some uncalled-for remarks about the poor being blessed, forget the sometimes uncommercial nature of art or literature that reveals the truth about our lives, and instead take everything down to the marketplace to discover how it sells and how much it's worth.

  All this comes as something of a surprise to those of us who know marketplaces. From Portobello and the Caledonian Road to the great souk of Marrakech, they are places for the quick disposal of stolen property, where you will be offered sham antiques and quack medicines, where you can have your wallet and your bottom pinched, where you may be sold a dead bat as a sovereign cure for sciatica, or tickets for a non-existent lottery, and where some seemingly helpful and committed guide will lead you, infallibly, to the shop owned by his relatives in order that you may be deceived over the price of carpets. And if it's said that the great, established businesses or the world's global corporations have little in common with the back streets of Marrakech, you have only to remember Enron and its accountants and directors to appreciate that marketplaces are where no sucker ever gets an even break.

  The other mantra of the Thatcher era was ‘consumer choice’ and this conception lingers on as the great opportunity of our times. The heavenly marketplace, if it is to do its job properly, must be furnished with at least fifty-seven varieties of everything. Anyone who has fewer than this number of varieties of yoghurt to choose from is not living life to the full. And to see this blessing working at its best you must ‘shop around’, which means, I suppose, trudging wearily from one supermarket to another, comparing the price of cornflakes.

  The idea that a wide choice is always a desirable, or even a useful, part of life can be tested in the cases of restaurants and television. You know that when you are handed a heavy menu, bound in vellum with a dangling gold tassel, offering you fifteen choices of everything, you can be sure none of it will be any good. Eat somewhere where the whole offering is chalked up on a short board and it's likely to be profoundly satisfactory.

  In the best period of television there were only two choices, so that a play or a film commanded a huge and united audience. As the choices multiplied the programmes, reduced to a desperate grab for ratings, noticeably deteriorated. But the remorseless process goes on until the viewer can enjoy the luxury of flicking through fifty channels of identical rubbish. With not enough money, or advertising, to provide for all these outlets, what the audience is offered is what Proverbs called ‘a small choice of rotten apples’.

  The doctor who makes a friend of his patients, the lawyer who defends death penalty cases in distant countries for no fee, the schoolteacher who opens a child's eyes to a new world of books and poetry – such people do nothing that can be measured in marketplaces. The greatest painters, composers and writers don't offer you choices, they present you with what only they can do, and you must take it or leave it. So when such subjects as the values of the marketplace are discussed, you will probably not have much to contribute. You can repeat a poem in your head and wait until the conversation is over. But if anyone starts talking about ‘level playing fields’, get up and steal quietly from the room.

  20. Law or Justice

  As I have said, my first encounter with the law was in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division. Probate cases were the ones in which ruthless relatives fought tooth and nail for the furniture. Admiralty cases, where the judge sat in front of a large anchor and seafaring men arrived unrolling charts, were closed books to us and called for specialist lawyers with a knowledge of salvage and chartering vessels. Divorce was sexier, more dramatic and supplied our daily bread, so that in my childhood I was housed, fed, watered, clothed and educated almost entirely on the proceeds of adultery, cruelty and wilful neglect to provide reasonable maintenance.

  The divorce laws at the time I started life as a barrister, in the late 1940s, dramatically illustrated the gulf between the law and reality, the law and morality or, in many cases, the law and justice.

  Today, of course, ending a marriage is a matter of filling out a form, dividing up the property and saying, ‘Cheerio!’ When I started practice you had to prove something extremely serious like cruelty or adultery. One of my first clients was a husband, longing to end his marriage, who was finding it extremely hard to discover anyone prepared to commit adultery with his wife. He was reduced to the horrifying expedient of disguising himself in a false beard, a false moustache and a pair of dark glasses and creeping into his own bungalow, in full view of the neighbours, pretending to be his own co-respondent. The plot was discovered and the unfortunate husband was sent to prison for ‘perverting the course of justice’. I thought this was extremely hard. If you can't sleep with your own wife wearing a false beard, what can you do? His case showed, however, in an extreme form, an unbridgeable gap between the law, justice, morality or even common sense.

  Matrimonial law had come down from the ecclesiastical courts, through the years when women couldn't own property or divorce their husbands for adultery, unless it was coupled with cruelty. It had been humanized to some extent by the writer and independent MP A. P. Herbert in the 1930s, but when I started just after the war a husband could still get damages from his wife's lover. This entailed an argument in court about her value in hard cash. In these unseemly proceedings, a husband had to argue that his wife was a fabulous cook, mother and lover and therefore worth a great deal. The ungallant lover, however, swore she was a cold fish in bed and never did the washing-up. There was no such thing as a divorce by consent; in fact consent was called ‘connivance’ and was a bar to freedom from an unhappy marriage.

  In these circumstances lawyers, and very often judges, had to achieve fair and reasonable solutions for their unhappy clients, not only with no assistance from the law but very often in spite of it. This raises the question, do laws have to be respected and obeyed simply because they're there?

  Once again it's a poet's imaginings which provide the most helpful debate and throw the brightest light on this question. Measure for Measure tells of an old, rarely used Viennese law making fornication punishable by death. The Duke, like God taking a sabbatical, leaves the city and appoints as his regent the puritanical, rigorous, painfully virtuous Angelo. The normal and perfectly harmless young Claudio is guilty of what the brothel keeper's servant, Pompey, calls ‘Groping for trouts in a peculiar river’. Mistress Overdone, with a duller use of language, says Claudio is to have ‘his head… chopped off… for getting Madam Julietta with child’. Angelo is dedicated to the belief that the letter of the law has to be obeyed and to hell with natural justice.

  The debate starts when Escalus, ‘an ancient Lord’ and servant of the Duke who, full of humanity and common sense, is another of Shakespeare's favourite characters, tries to plead Claudio's case, asking Angelo to think:

  Whether you had not sometime in your life

  Err'd in this point which now you censure him,

  And pull'd the law upon you.

  Angelo's answer is simple. ‘We must not make a scarecrow of the law’ so
it becomes a ‘perch’ and not a ‘terror’ for ravens and lawless birds. Furthermore, our own possible weaknesses are no excuse for not strictly enforcing the legal code. ‘'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,’ he says. ‘Another thing to fall.’ A jury condemning a thief to death, he agrees, may contain a ‘thief or two/Guiltier than him they try,’ but that makes no difference to the laws we all have to obey. Don't tell me about my guilty thoughts, Angelo is saying, but ‘When I, that censure him, do so offend/Let mine own judgement pattern out my death’.

  The theoretical debates become drama when Claudio's beautiful sister, Isabella, on the point of becoming a nun, comes to plead for her brother's life. Angelo lusts after her and feels himself sorely tempted to go groping for trouts just like the criminal he despises. Before the breakdown of Angelo the seagreen incorruptible, in his scenes with Isabella, the conflict between the strict upholder of the letter of the law and natural justice is played out.

  At first Angelo is obdurate: ‘Your brother is a forfeit of the law,/And you but waste your words.’ ‘Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once,’ Isabella reminds him. ‘And He that might the vantage best have took/Found out the remedy.’ So there is a power greater than the law, that of Christ who redeemed all our sins, who broke the strict laws of the Pharisees and died a convicted criminal. ‘How would you be,’ she asks Angelo, ‘if He, which is the top of judgement, should/But judge you as you are?’ This is Escalus's argument returning. What we regard as the just process of criminal trials is not much more than sinful human beings punishing each other. True religion points the way to a more merciful process.