The Sound of Trumpets

[written 3/14/2008 but forgotten until today]

In 1998 appeared The Sound of Trumpets, the third (and presumably concluding) novel in John Mortimer's "Rapstone Chronicles." It followed Paradise Postponed (1985) and Titmuss Regained (1990).

One suspects that Mortimer's use of a phrase from John Bunyan's circa 1730 fable of The Pilgrim's Progress... for the title of his third Chronicle is ironic. Bunyan tells the story of Christian's struggle to attain salvation and the Gates of Heaven. He must pass through the Slough of Despond, ward off the temptations of Vanity Fair and fight the monstrous Apollyon....In Part 2, his wife and children follow the same path, helped and protected by Great-heart, until for them too "the trumpets sound on the other side."¹ Leslie Titmuss—who is now, thanks to his hero Margaret Thatcher, Lord Titmuss—is no Christian, however hard he has struggled all his fictional life to attain a secular kind of salvation of power and prestige.
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1. For this gloss on Bunyan, I'm indebted to Kid's LearnOutLoud website.

Penelope Mortimer (the first's) autobiography

Like many Americans who have become acquainted with the work of John Mortimer, I was introduced to it through British television by way of PBS. "Mystery" brought us a dozen or more dramatizations from Mortimer's "Rumpole of the Bailey" (starring the late Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole), and "Masterpiece Theater" dramatizations of the first two novels of his Rapstone Chronicles trilogy, "Paradise Postponed" and "Titmuss Regained," and of his memoir, "A Voyage round My Father" (with Laurence Oliver and Alan Bates as Mortimers father and son). I've subsequently read the books (except for Voyage) and three or four other novels and the 2003 memoir, Where There's A Will.

When I learned from a review of a new biography of Mortimer, A Voyage Round John Mortimer, by Valerie Grove, that his first wife Penelope (1918-1999; his second wife was also named Penelope) had written a novel about their marriage, I decided to read it. Of course, such a book raises far more questions than it provides reliable answers¹, so this morning I started to thumb through Mrs. Mortimer's autobiography of the years 1940-1978 (About Time Too), which include the years of the marriage (1949-1972). I was immediately hooked, and I would have been hooked even if John Mortimer were never mentioned. From the very first page:

My husband [her first, Charles Dimont] was an intelligent and sensitive young man, brought up by a mother who was, or had become, a nonentity, and a teetotal clergyman father who claimed that he had found no reason to change his mind about anything since making it up at the age of twenty-one. In search of mystery their son had taken to drink and the doctrines of heathen religions. My father too was a clergyman, but a man with such an insatiable need for consolation that no faith could satisfy him. No longer finding any comfort in God, he gobbled samples of Communism, spiritualism, nudism, Nietzsche, free love, the Douglas Credit System, Krafft-Ebing, Freud, but was still ravenous. He went through terrible bouts of mourning for some satisfaction he couldn't remember or had never known and during these attacks the house would be chock-a-block with gloom, it was hard to find a breathing space. I inhaled his misery by the lungful, just as I did his tobacco smoke. My mother carried her own supply of wintry air. She and my father never shared a bedroom and I remember witnessing only one occasion when she didn't move away from his touch.

Now that's incisive writing.

I already knew, from studying a section of Mrs. Mortimer's family tree at the beginning of the book, that she had two children by her first husband and one child each by two other men (neither of whom she married) before her two children with Mortimer. But only minutes ago, in checking the dates of her marriages for this post, did I realize that she wed Mortimer the same year she divorced her first husband. When did she have those two middle children? Answer: 1945 and 1948, while she was still married to Dimont. (Actually, the family tree gives the year of the divorce from Dimont and the marriage to Mortimer as 1947, so for a few minutes it looked to me as though the second child was born after their marriage! Apparently not. After discovering that MSN Encarta—see the footnote—says she and Mortimer were married in 1949, I checked her index and found this on p. 39: "John and I were married at Chelsea Register Office on 27th August 1949, the day my divorce to Charles was made Absolute." A significant error in that published family tree! Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1993.)

There was something incisive, too, about the person the writer was, if that's quite the word.
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1. MSN Encarta does say that the "unhappy experience of [her] marriage [to Mortimer] was reflected in her best-known novel The Pumpkin Eater, the story of a woman who seeks validation through repeatedly having children, and who having been persuaded by her husband to undergo sterilization discovers that he has been unfaithful."

Wet and wildness

Titmuss Regained, John Mortimer's 1990 sequel to Paradise Postpone [1985], begins with the concluding lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "Inversnaid":

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

And in her way, Lady Grace Fanner had been a wet and wild thing in her younger days [see the prequel], but in Chapter 2 of Titmuss Regained she's

a woman of eighty, her legs and arms shrunk as though from enforced starvation [and she] lay waiting, with growing impatience, for death. Grace Fanner was unaccustomed to being kept waiting for anything...She lay now, an unpaid-for and half-drunk bottle of champagne beside her, her diminutive body scarcely swelling the coverlet on the bed in which her husband Nicholas, over a decade before, had met death with the polite but puzzled smile with which he had greeted all his visitors.
    "I've been reading the Bible."
    The Rector of Rapstone, Kevin Bulstrode, known to many of his parishioners as Kev the Rev., looked at her as though this activity were a sign of mental weakness, like astrology or studying the measurements of the Great Pyramid.
    "Not the Old Testament?" he asked nervously.
    "Particularly the Old Testament. What a swine God was, most of the time." Lady Fanner said this with a tight smile of admiration. "Smiting people in a way I've hardly ever done. Right, left, and center...I read the Book of Job." She lifted the great weight of a half-filled glass to her lips and pecked at it in the manner of a blue tit at a bird-bath. "God certainly gave that poor bugger a hard time. Boils!"
    "I think you'll find that He has grown a little more civilized down the centuries. As, perhaps, we all have." Kevin Bulstrode did his best to sound reassuring. "I don't think the Old Testament God should be taken as a model of behaviour."
    "Oh, I do. I quite definitely do. I'd love to see my son-in-law afflicted with boils. That is, if the Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss hasn't got plenty of them already...." [pp. 9-11]

"Don't ever marry a man with bishop potential...."

I've just read another John Mortimer. You know, the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, the author of the 2003 memoir, Where's There's A Will, in which he acknowledges his atheistic tendencies. In Quite Honestly, his 2005 "comic novel of middle-class do-gooding gone awry" (as the dust jacket has it), Lucy Purefoy is assigned by Social Carers, Reformers, and Praeceptors (SCRAP) to reform Terry Keegan, a career burglar recently released from prison. Lucy's father (Robert) is a bishop of the Church of England and her mother (Sylvia) an addict to G&T's (gin and tonics).

Lucy and Terry tell the story in alternating chapters. I won't spoil the story for you by saying why Lucy herself is in prison in the following scene, but I will share this snippet of conversation from when her mother comes to visit Lucy there:

"You know I met your father in Ronnie Scott's?"
    "Yes, Mum. I did know."
    Whenever Dad was writing a sermon the palace [the bishop's residence] still echoed to Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Sidney Bechet and Muddy Waters. I knew he'd met Mum at a jazz club.
    "When I took him home my parents were so pleased because they'd found out he was a vicar with bishop potential. I only liked him because I found him sexually attractive."
    This was wonderful. The prison atmosphere was clearly bringing out the best in my mother. I had never thought that we would have this conversation.
    "So you had a great sex life, did you, Mum?" This question, which I wouldn't have dreamed of asking my mother before this prison visit, didn't seem to worry her at all.
    "Oh yes. Two or three times a night. Even more some Sundays! When he was a vicar. That was when you were conceived and all that sort of thing. It was when he was a bishop that the trouble started. I suppose I shouldn't be telling you all this."
    "What was the trouble then, Mum?" She really didn't seem to mind telling me.
    "God."
    I looked round the room. Children were bored, eating sweets from the prison shop. Couples could no longer think of anything to say to each other. The screws were looking on and Mum was unexpectedly pouring out her heart.
    "How did God come into it?"
    "Well, he didn't really. Not when Robert was a vicar. In those days he seemed to take God for granted. But as soon as he became a bishop—I don't know, I suppose because it was a step up and Robert felt responsible for God and treated him more as an equal. Anyway, he began to find fault with him or question anything he did. Of course, it's got a lot worse since President Bush. He can't understand how God would have anything to do with the man."
    "But how did this affect you?" I knew a lot about Robert's troubles, but now my mum was opening her heart to me.
    "Well, he seemed to think much more about God than he did about me. And then he got so keen on gay and lesbian marriages."
    "You think that was a bad thing?"
    "Not in itself. I mean, I don't give tuppence for what they do among themselves. It's their world and they're welcome to it. But Robert seemed so interested in their sex lives that he forgot all about ours."
    "I'm sorry."
    "So am I. And I'm afraid there's even worse news ahead. Will London's about to retire. He's got something wrong with his brain. Robert's been strongly recommended as his successor."
    "Bishop of London?"
    "Of course the idea's ridiculous, but Robert's enormously excited about it. It'll be very controversial and there are already letters about him in the Daily Telegraph. Robert likes that, having letters against him in the Daily Telegraph."
    "Well, who's for him then?"
    "The Prime Minister apparently thinks he's a 'modernizer' who's prepared to draw a line under the old conservative Church of England. Oh, I do so hope it never happens."
    "Why, exactly?"
    "I've got used to the palace at Aldershot. I know the stairs. I love the peculiar little scullery. I don't want to go to London, Lucy. I prayed to God it doesn't happen."
    "Well then..."
    "But I'm not sure he was listening. I'm not sure he listens to people's prayers any more. Perhaps he's had enough of it by now. All the same, Lucy, what I can say to you is, don't ever marry a man with bishop potential." [pp. 184-185]

A number of things about this passage appeal to me, not least the reference to Bush. For I've been thinking about just what it is I don't believe when it comes to god and religion. And one of the things I don't believe in is whatever god whose advice George W. Bush has been taking.

But more on that anon.

Interesting times

The ancient Chinese may have cautioned us to "avoid interesting times," but, as John Mortimer pointed out in his 2003 "last will and testament" (Where There's a Will), "there is nothing...to suggest that the times are likely to become less interesting." [p. 94]

Yes, these are interesting times. On page 13 of last Sunday's New York Times Book Review, for example, I see an advertisement for three books published by Houghton Mifflin, the first of which is Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, in recommendation of which Ian McEwan is quoted, "A magnificent book, lucid and wise." Interesting that I should not only currently be re-reading Dawkins's book (because it is lucid and wise) but also reading one after another of McEwan's novels.

And overleaf from the advertisement (on pages 14 and 15), I see reviews titled "Take It on Faith" (captioned "John Dilulio argues for government financing of social programs run by religious institutions") and "The Godless Delusion" ("A professor of philosophy thinks our era has been too quick to dismiss religious faith"). Hmm, interesting. I'm going to have to read these reviews....

It's interesting, too, to consider whether my recent dismissal of religious faith came as a result of my reading Dawkins and (before I took him up) Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and (again) Bertrand Russell, or my reading of these atheist authors proceeded from atheist tendencies of my own....

I think it was more the latter, for I remember reading another advertisement in the Book Review, sometime over a year ago, that described Harris's The End of Faith in terms that thrilled and excited me for revealing that there at last seemed to be an author who had articulated what I too was now thinking and feeling about religion. Indeed he had...and far more than that. He had read many books that I had not, looked at a lot of data I didn't even know existed. I had not only met a brother, but also met a teacher. And in Hitchens and Dawkins I met two more teachers, Dawkins the most mind-opening of them all.

"If we are to have a religion..."

In his 80's, John Mortimer (English barrister and creator of Horace Rumpole of the Old Bailey¹) published a sort of last will and testament, titled Where There's a Will. Montaignean² in its wry comment on life and culture, it reads as fresh as any of Mortimer's prose published over sixty years. Given my own current dominant theme, I was delighted by the things he had to say about religion, and I particularly liked this snippet from his final essay, "The Attestation Clause":

The meaningful and rewarding moments aren't waiting for us beyond the grave, or to be found on distant battlefields where history's made. They can happen quite unexpectedly, in a garden perhaps, or walking through a beech wood in the middle of the afternoon. If we are to have a religion, it should be one that recognizes the true importance of a single moment in time, the instant when you are fully and completely alive. [p. 180]

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1. Rumpole died with the passing of the actor Leo McKern (1920-2002), who brought him to life on British television and for me and many others will always be Rumpole.
2. Michel de Montaigne, by some credited with the invention of the essay, published his first collection in 1580.