Writing the life of John Mortimer? What fun!” That was the general reaction.
Of course it would be fun. Didn’t I always enjoy his company, laugh at his
endlessly repeated jokes? I must have seen his Mortimer’s Miscellany
show, full of yarns and poems, about 25 times and it hadn’t palled yet.
But writing this life was unlike the usual biographer’s trail. My subject was
not a corpse but a living national treasure. The ideal subject is a keeper
of letters and diaries who departs leaving boxfiles of papers. Nobody
outside John Mortimer’s family could produce a letter from him since 1947.
Nor is he a diarist. There were two notebooks: one from schooldays, and one
from 2001, which revealed that his galloping productivity was not as
effortless as it always seemed.
But he had written his own memoirs, sub-titled A Part of Life, with scant
regard for chronology or verification and often disguising names. His best
stories had been rehashed a thousand times. Have you no letters, John? I
asked sadly. “Well,” he said, equally sadly, “Michael Hamburger has some . .
.” Professor Hamburger, distinguished poet, had been at Oxford with John.
When I read these letters, as John knew, I would discover that he had been
obliged to leave Oxford under a cloud. There were Brideshead overtones to
his undergraduate years.
John has enjoyed a lifelong reputation as a Lothario, during and between
marriages – and at Oxford he was briefly engaged. But when he fell among
Oxford’s aesthetes he went through a phase of affecting to be an Oscar Wilde
manqué. Artistic, passionate about the theatre, he had adopted a flamboyant
mode of dress – velvet jackets, purple trousers, sombrero hats. And thus
attired, he had conceived a romantic infatuation for Quentin Edwards, a
fresh-faced, handsome sixth-former, who had visited Oxford from his public
school in the balmy spring of 1941. One weekend they went punting on the
Cherwell, dined in style and attended a ballet (Fonteyn in Comus). In his
Christ Church rooms John had given the young man a copy of Shakespeare’s
sonnets, with a fond inscription from Sonnet 144 (“two loves have I, of
comfort and despair”).
Afterwards he had written him letters in the style of Wilde to Bosie,
addressed to “My dear Boy”. Unfortunately, this bundle of letters had been
found at the boy’s school by his housemaster. The headmaster summoned his
pupil during the summer holidays and told him not to return to the school.
Even worse, the headmaster wrote to the Dean of Christ Church (where John
was billeted, although a Brasenose man) and John too was advised not to
return for his third year. He went home wretched with misery, buried himself
in his lonely room in his father’s house near Henley-on-Thames, writing his
first (unpublished) novel and Audenesque poems, and sad letters – “I’ve been
a bloody fool” – to his friend Hamburger.
As John insisted, their mutual attraction was a youthful crush, not a physical
relationship, and looking back after 65 years, Edwards, by now a
distinguished retired circuit judge in his 80th year, told me: “John and I
had, I suppose, a crush on each other: it didn’t amount to more than that.
It was all about nothing!
“We’d been to single-sex public schools, where people form romantic
friendships, which are not really quite homosexual. I was not a homosexual,
never have been, and neither, the truth is, was John, but he had this idea
of romantic friendships. I like to think that what John felt about me was
what Tennyson felt for Hallam – elevated, romantic – not what you’d call a
homosexual relationship. When we met, it was 40 years since Oscar Wilde
died, but something lingered in the Oxford air, and Waugh captured that
atmosphere very well in Brideshead Revisited. We would tell stories about
Brian Howard, and Ronald Firbank, who was a great one for pottery rings and
long pale hands and floppy ties.”
John has never made a secret of his homosexual inclinations at school, even at
the Dragon prep school; and “Horatian” activities were rife at single-sex
public schools. (When a writer speculated that John might have had “an
unpleasant homosexual experience” at Harrow, “which might explain. . . his
wariness of men and his adoration of women”, I read this out to John. He
gave a whinnying laugh and said: “But I had perfectly pleasant homosexual
experiences at Harrow!”)
Noël Coward was his hero, along with Byron, and John was, despite his father,
destined for the theatre. One of his early triumphs as a playwright was a
play called Bermondsey, in which a married man passionately kisses his
former male lover from their army days. This kiss was, in 1971, a first for
the West End. It made the audience gasp, and the critics extol the
playwright’s groundbreaking and sensitive treatment of homosexuality. In the
same decade, John Mortimer, the great libertarian QC, defended Gay News in
the 1977 blasphemy trial. In another play he would return to the subject of
a man’s passion for another man in youth: Naked Justice (2001)
featured a judge confronted by a blackmailer who reminds the judge of one
long-ago afternoon at “St Tom’s College” when he was “fascinated by my
purple trousers”.
Yet John remained reluctant to exhume this episode in his past. He had not
forgotten the pain of its aftermath. Becoming a scriptwriter of wartime
propaganda at the Crown Film Unit, and a bohemian young blade about town
with a preference for “boyish” girls, was his preferred history.
It was not until I told John that I was acquainted with his Nemesis – Quentin
Edwards, QC, that John agreed that he could talk to me. “Dear Quentin,” he
wrote. “Sorry we have not met since our small scandal at Oxford.”
But here John’s selective memory was at work. Both were called to the Bar on
the same day, and both had Chambers in the Temple. And once, in 1971, they
found themselves in court together, on opposing sides. It was a blasphemy
case brought by the Dowager Lady Birdwood against a play called The Council
of Love, produced by wicked Willie Donaldson. At Bow Street Court, Edwards’s
prosecution was swiftly demolished by John – and the case was dismissed.
