To me it seems more likely that Carter-Ruck was acting unilaterally, convinced that Dad would be embarrassed by the book and doing what he could to help. Or perhaps he sincerely believed the book was a bombshell and a call for republicans to take up arms.
This wasn’t the general reaction. Faber took the sensible step of taking a second opinion, this time from John Mortimer, a lawyer of a different stripe. Having defended the editors of Oz on obscenity charges, he was unlikely to panic over my little squib about the Queen. Mortimer’s opinion was that it was in thoroughly bad taste, as was more or less required by the genre of satire, but far from actionable.
Dad can hardly have avoided coinciding with John Mortimer at the Garrick Club, but had mixed feelings about him. On the one hand Mortimer was the best-known example of the lawyer-turned-writer, even if he had started early, while Dad’s creativity was waiting for the ripeness of retirement. Dad would certainly have approved of my borrowing the title of Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father to serve as subtitle here, carrying the suggestion of a personality so large that only chartered shipping could get a proper view, even if his real admiration was for an earlier play, The Dock Brief. Dad responded with sentimental fullness, and no identification whatever, to Mortimer’s central character of a washed-up barrister given a last chance of glory. On the other hand, John Mortimer consistently aligned himself with opposition to censorship, and disputed the corrupting effects of pornography. Hadn’t he said, in court, that if pornography really had the power to corrupt then the Old Bailey would be chugging to the sound of massed vibrators by now, considering how much smut their Lordships had seen in their time? Well, apparently not, since I can find no evidence for such a statement, though it was one of my favourite quotations for many years. There’s no search engine as powerful as wishful thinking.
When Lantern Lecture came out, Faber were hoping that Hatchards of Piccadilly, booksellers by appointment to Her Majesty, would refuse to stock it, so as to provide a starting-point for some whipped-up indignation in the press. Unfortunately they denied us that publicity coup, ordering twelve copies rather than their usual six, a favourable verdict but overall a disappointment.
In the pages of the book I had given Dad an invaluable hostage for use in future disagreements. From then on, if ever we were getting testy with each other he would announce, ‘I’m not going to take that from a son who described me in print as “wizened”!’ and we would each hare off in search of a copy of the book. When the text of ‘Bathpool Park’ was consulted I would make my case that its reference to the judge’s expression, as caught by the press photographers, being one of ‘wizened disapproval’ when he emerges onto a bright street after a day in a dark courtroom was a very different thing from saying he was actually wizened in the general run of things and under standard lighting conditions. Dad would grumble and be soothed.
In writing about the dead it’s not possible to give them the last word, except in the most artificial, self-admiring way. There can’t be a power struggle — the writer, the survivor, has all the power. You can try not to use it, or to use it responsibly, but the real gulf isn’t between the various ways of using the power you have, it’s between having the power and not. If, for instance, I want to mention a couple of occasions on which I humiliated Dad in his powerlessness, reproaching him for lapses he couldn’t help, being brusque and even sarcastic, I humiliate him all over again. Yet, given that I have written about my mother, there is no neutral position. Not to write about him, having written about her, implies a statement in itself, either that he’s not worthy of my attention or that I can’t find a way to do it.
Writing about Sheila was different. I wrote about her in her lifetime, with her consent and power of veto. I was surprised that she didn’t exercise that power, since I had included many potentially embarrassing details. Sheila was happy to attend the Virago party launching Sons and Mothers, the book for which the piece had been commissioned, and seemed to have a sense almost of ownership about what I had written. It’s funny, she said, I want to turn the page over and see what happens next, although I know what happens next and on the whole I didn’t enjoy it when it actually happened. ‘Are there any more reviews of our book?’ she would say, and stick them in a clippings file. Since my contribution was much the longest in the book it was likely to be singled out for special praise or condemnation. I particularly enjoyed reading one review aloud to her, which suggested that she had never taught me how to shut up.
When Sheila was in hospital after diagnosis, she asked me to explain to the consultant that she didn’t want to prolong her life with minimally promising treatment. I found I was repeating things I had already written about her attitude to life, and broke off to say, ‘I don’t think you realize! This is a famous woman. She’s had her life story published …’ He was extremely disconcerted. It was nice to turn the tables on authority for a moment, and for Sheila to feel that she was more than one patient among many. The paperback of Sons and Mothers had just come out, as it happened, so I was able to nip down to Foyles to pick up a copy, which we both signed and presented to the consultant.
Would Dad feel a sense of ownership about what I’ve written here? Unlikely. (Too parsimonious with the short sentences to fit the strict Denning template.) He would have enjoyed his obituaries more, with their properly formal lists of honours and famous cases. In fact one of my friends had a slip of the tongue when referring to them, and said, ‘Didn’t your Dad get great reviews?’ He became flustered and corrected himself, but it seemed the right choice of word, just the same. Perhaps obituaries should have star ratings (everything else does these days), in which case Dad would have got four-and-a-half across the board. How would that appear on a poster — a jaw-dropping roller-coaster of a life? A live-out-loud? Unambiguous success at any rate, pats on the back from every quarter.
I learned a few surprising things about his career from those columns, such as Dad’s having passed the longest single sentence ever imposed in this country. Nezar Hindawi had tried to blow up an Israeli aeroplane by planting a bomb in his pregnant girlfriend’s luggage. Dad gave him forty-five years in 1986. I remember him in conversation at the time, expressing grave dismay that a human being could do such a thing, but I never quite knew if he was being sincere at such moments. Sometimes it seemed that he needed to rehearse his outrage in a slightly stylized way, to prove (whether to himself or others) that he was still capable of registering civic horror rather than professional inurement.
The abolition of capital punishment was a measure that had Dad’s approval, but it didn’t make the problem of evil any more tractable. Seeing Myra Hindley on trial hadn’t made him reverse his judgment on the issue, and nor did the Hindawi case, but he seemed to be reaching for some extra measure of punishment by passing that sentence.
Dad certainly wouldn’t appreciate being made out to be a hypocrite in matters of sexual morality. Eminent Victorians was published in the year he was three, but he never really cottoned on to the disappearance of piety from biography, the eclipse of deference in general. He didn’t go along with this trend but had instead suppressed his own resistance and presented his father as wholly admirable. There seemed to be a law of succession in operation, as he saw it, governing the emotional dealings between successive generations of fathers and sons, so that only those who didn’t challenge their fathers were entitled to inherit respect from their children in turn. Even in the 1950s there must have been other models for the transmission of family feeling, but that seems to have been the one Dad was stuck with. I honestly don’t understand the benefits of this system. Why would I want a father who was identical with his principles, the same person inside and out, leaving nothing to be found under his bed more startling than a copy of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s On Iniquity?