Until he was five, John Mortimer was so shortsighted that he saw things only in “an impressionist haze”. Then he got his first pair of specs, and “the world sprang at me in hideous reality”. Reading Valerie Grove’s excellent, fair-minded biography, you get the impression that, consummate man of the world though he is, Mortimer has nevertheless been devising ways of avoiding that “hideous reality” ever since. Encountering a serious issue or obstacle in life, he would rather beam myopically and shuffle round it, quip on his lips and glass of champagne in his hand, than meet it head on. The worst aspects of human nature are laughed away (his most powerful weapon as a brilliant defence lawyer was always genial mockery of the prosecution case), and the dark side is consistently whitewashed.

His “antinomian” tendencies were noted early on by a schoolmaster, and as a Rumpolean barrister, stains on his waistcoat and bands hanging out, he stuck to them consistently. Seeing him perform in his prime must have made the finest comic theatre. For lunch he would avoid other lawyers, preferring a local brasserie where he might be waited on a by a judge’s daughter who had appeared in Confessions of a Window Cleaner and was reputed to wear no knickers. He also dashed off novels, which he regards in retrospect as “good, but not great”. That may be overconfident. Few people are still reading Summer’s Lease or Titmuss Regained. In fiction, as in life, a tendency to skate amiably over the surface of things is only ever going to produce fair to middling results. On the other hand, he has created one immortal character in the baggy form of Horace Rumpole, a lawyer who is – remarkable, this – likable. How many writers can claim as much?

In his married life there were numerous, unrepentant infidelities, exhaustively covered elsewhere, although these were generally affairs of the loins rather than the heart, and, as such, not terribly interesting. There were also flashes of real cruelty. “You’re useless as a wife and extremely unpleasant as a companion,” he informed his first Penelope (both his wives were called Penelope). Far more compelling is Grove’s portrait of Mortimer’s rose-tinted commitment to the permissive society. Her account of the Oz trial in 1971 is especially good. It’s well-trodden ground, but she deftly reminds us that here was something rather less cosy than the media myth has it. The Oz School Kids issue, we tend to forget, also boasted crude small ads for films of “rape of virgins”, and “pictures of ‘pre pubital’ [sic] boys and naked children”. All very liberating, I’m sure. Nevertheless, for Mortimer, it was a straightforward case of freedom of speech. Germaine Greer also offered to testify for the defence, but since she had recently had a photograph of her anus published in Suck, the Dutch underground magazine, it was felt her testimony might not be treated with complete seriousness. Mortimer likewise defended the publication of the book Inside Linda Lovelace, an exploitative spin-off from the film Deep Throat, in which, as Lovelace later revealed, she was effectively raped at gunpoint. In court, however, Mortimer described the film as one in which the female lead “cheerfully indulges in all sorts of shenanigans”. What a hoot! Both landmark cases dictate our inability to deal with the sadism and exploitation on the internet today: the kind of material that directly inspired the merry torturers of Abu Ghraib.

Grove also has Mortimer wondering why people shouldn’t be allowed to take cocaine if they want to. A quick trip to Colombia might enlighten him, where he could easily visit the shabby graves of innocent bystanders, tortured and murdered because they got in the way of the lucrative business of supplying coke to Europe’s spoilt little noses. But generally he finds holidaying in his beloved Chiantishire more agreeable, although to the reader it may all sound a little suffocating. Guests might include Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack, Anna Ford, Edna O’Brien, and Glenys and Neil Kinnock, with Neil doing his Elvis Presley impersonation to general hilarity.

This is a perceptive and affectionate biography of a national monument and treasure, clearly much-loved and with barely an enemy in the world, whose greatest fault, he says, is only “wanting people to like me”. Yet it leaves you feeling slightly uncomfortable, with a lingering, surprisingly puritanical unease that here was a man never sufficiently discomfited by human wrongdoing, either in himself or in others.

A VOYAGE ROUND JOHN MORTIMER: The Authorised Biography by Valerie Grove
Penguin Viking £25 pp542

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