KEY POINTS:
The last time I spoke to John Mortimer, he was among several guests at the P.G. Wodehouse Society dinner in one of the Inns of Court in London.
He was frail, in a wheelchair, and his nose was as sharp as a pen, but he was still enjoying a glass of champagne, defiantly living life to the full despite the onset of extreme old age.
As a comic writer and ex-barrister with a devoted following, he seemed perfectly at home in the convivial rituals of the Wodehousians. Typically, too, he was surrounded by a bevy of admiring women who were happily playing up to his prodigious charm.
The philandering might have been a thing of the past, but the flirtation, a cocktail of seductive gossip and polished anecdote, was still going strong.
And why not? No one embodied the spirit of carpe diem more than John Mortimer, a much-loved novelist and playwright who, as a great QC, celebrated liberty as "allowing people to do things you disapprove of".
Following his knighthood in 1998, some commentators tried to cast "Sir John" as a modern Falstaff, a British "national treasure", replete with a love child, luddite sensibilities, and all the contradictions of the "champagne socialist" - his own description.
Certainly, the bon viveur who announced, "I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward," was English to his marrow. But the Mortimer I knew, although born in 1923, was really one of the last Edwardians. His dandy presence and sweetly ironic, languorous intonation suggested that, in his company, you were somehow in on a huge joke.
It was Mortimer's contagious belief that life is essentially comic. He said: "Comedy expresses the whole contrast between the seriousness with which we take ourselves and the actual truth." He confessed a deep admiration for Shakespeare and Chekhov because they were "funny, with an undernote of sadness". He might have been describing the English legal system.
Mortimer's entry to the law was in a family business out of Gilbert & Sullivan. "My father was a famous divorce barrister," he said. "I went into father's chambers and took over his practice. He was a myth in those courts, so it all fell quite easily into my lap.
"I never thought of the law as anything other than a day job," he joked, "like girls who want to be actresses". If it was just a day job, it gave him the perfect arena for his passionate belief in the freedom of the individual.
Mortimer's literary life, sandwiched between legal work, was a routine of early rising (he went to his desk at 5am) to achieve a publishable output that would satisfy a loyal, but demanding, readership. He cherished "the splinter of ice" that Graham Greene believed to lurk in every writer's heart. "I do ruthlessly use everything that happens," he said. Inevitably, it was the law that inspired his radio play (Dock Brief), first broadcast in 1957.
Contrary to legend, Mortimer did not defend Penguin's publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, although he would successfully champion the British publication of Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1969. Mortimer became celebrated as the witty advocate of the permissive society after his successful defence of the counter-culture magazine Oz in a near farcical obscenity trial. More legal vaudeville followed with the defence of Gay News against a charge of blasphemy, and finally the Sex Pistols for their right to use the slogan, "Never mind the bollocks".
His great literary creation was inspired by his father, Clifford Mortimer, the blind barrister painfully described in A Voyage Round My Father. This character morphed into his comic masterpiece, Horace Rumpole, who burst into British consciousness in Rumpole of the Bailey, a BBC Play For Today in 1975, played with memorable brio by Leo McKern.
Rumpole's motto ("Never plead guilty") might have slipped from the lips of Jeeves or Sherlock Holmes. Together with his anxiety about Hilda Rumpole, "She Who Must Be Obeyed", it swiftly endeared him to a mass audience across the English-speaking world. Australia, especially, where McKern was born, discovered a soft spot for a defence barrister with a penchant for cheap cigars and Chateau Thames Embankment.
In his 60s, Mortimer cloaked his explanation for a transition from litigation to a literary career in Edwardian insouciance. "I needed a character like Maigret or Sherlock Holmes, to keep me alive in my old age."
"Rumpole stays the same," declared his creator. "I'm not a great believer that people change. I think nobody learns anything. I think they make the same mistakes throughout their lives till they drop dead." Once Mortimer found a character who clicked with the public, his ruthless professionalism took over. From 1979 (The Trials of Rumpole), to 1983 (the first Rumpole Omnibus), to 2006 (Rumpole and the Reign of Terror), he produced a book a year. Each volume was launched on a sea of alcohol, with memorable Garrick luncheons at which the author schmoozed a gaggle of critics.
Mortimer was only too conscious of the knife-edge on which so much literary endeavour is balanced. He observed that "the shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt".
What drove Mortimer? The incessant output of films, adaptations, novels, articles and reviews unquestionably speaks of demons. He was always a great storyteller, but also hankered for recognition as a serious artist.
He joked that his commercial popularity placed him on the spectrum "between Jeffrey Archer and Salman Rushdie".
Mortimer was wise to leave the verdict to posterity, but it's a fair bet that he will still be remembered after many more fashionable names are forgotten.
As much as John Mortimer's lifelong defence of our cherished liberties against the conspiracy of dunces, bores and killjoys, it will be Rumpole who guarantees his place among the English immortals.
- OBSERVER
