Rumpole’s Guide to Life
By Kelly Jane Torrance

Advice books are a dime a dozen—in the bargain section, sometimes literally. There is no end to the number of writers who believe they know something about life that the rest of us don’t. But have we gotten any slimmer, smarter, or more satisfied as a result of all this publication?

 

Perhaps we’ve been listening to the wrong “experts.” Psychologists and doctors haven’t proven successful. But how about a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, memoirist, and former barrister?

 

John Mortimer’s Where There’s a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life isn’t the usual how-to book. Mortimer isn’t a therapist with a television show, but the creator of the quirky but loveable fictional barrister, Rumpole of the Bailey.

 

Where There’s a Will finds the 82-year-old British writer reflecting on what he’s learned and what he’d like to pass on to his grandchildren. It’s not the furniture or even the house that’s most important (despite the squabbling that often accompanies a last will and testament). One’s approach to life is the most valuable bequest. And so, in 32 short chapters, Mortimer gives his opinions on such crucial subjects in the art of living as “Lying,” “Law or Justice,” “Looking after Your Health,” “Giving Money to Beggars,” and “Outdoor Sex.”

 

That last topic isn’t as frivolous as you might think. The often wheelchair-bound Mortimer heartily recommends passion al fresco, not just for its cheering qualities, but as an excuse to rail (rightfully) against a New Labour proposal to make it illegal.

 

Mortimer is very much a liberal of the old variety, whose chief inspiration is John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” that liberty can only be inhibited for self-protection. Not that Mortimer celebrates our capitalist, consumer-focused culture: “The greatest painters, composers and writers don't offer you choices, they present you with what only they can do, and you must take it or leave it.”

 

He may not have many kind words for the market, but Mortimer believes passionately in the marketplace of ideas. “A political or religious belief which can’t stand up to insult, mockery and abuse is not worth having,” he writes in dismissing the Left’s “intolerably patronizing” desire to eradicate “offensive” speech. Mortimer has clearly taken his own advice: “Avoid those whose views on every subject can be confidently predicted after you have discovered what they think about one.” One of his chapters on politics focuses not on Mill but on the poet Lord Byron.

 

Mortimer was a trial lawyer for 30 years, but literature has been his life’s real passion. When he left the courts behind at night, he writes, “I seemed to step from the world of make-believe and ‘let’s pretend’ to the harsh reality of the theatre, where an attempt, at any rate, is being made to say something truthful about the human condition.” Artists, not lawyers or politicians, are the real truth-tellers.

 

Our love of self-help books might imply that modern man has more answers, but Mortimer knows better: “It can be argued that no writer had a clearer insight than Shakespeare, and he managed to achieve this in a world without refrigeration.” Where There’s a Will is filled with references to Bard, Byron, Shelley, Yeats, and Montaigne. Mortimer can jump from Lorenzo Da Ponte, librettist of three Mozart operas, to a businessman son of Jamaican immigrants, to North by Northwest, in the span of a couple pages—and is always amusing while doing so.

 

But the book isn’t a mere flight of fancy. Much of Mortimer’s advice is eminently practical: “T-shirts are unflattering to aged and scrawny necks, shoulder-length hair seems unsuitable when it’s grey and ponytails trapped in an elastic band are always a danger,” he writes. The man labeled a “champagne socialist” also notes, “There is something strangely depressing about lunch with people who drink nothing but water.”

 

Mortimer, in the end, is a font of common sense. When one disagrees with him, one can’t help but wonder why. Where There’s a Will is an old-fashioned, folksy book on how to live the good life—but from someone who lunched with Graham Greene and whose daughter is a movie star. We could do worse than take advice from this charming tome: “I can only suggest you do your best to banish anxiety, preferably with a glass of champagne, and lay yourself open to the moment when happiness becomes irresistible.”

 

*****

 

Every author lives in fear of the bad review. Few publicly self-destruct over one. After receiving a harsh review from the New York Times’ chief literary critic, Michiko Kakutani, Norman Mailer called her a “one-woman kamikaze” who “disdains white male writers” and only has her job because she’s an “Asiatic feminist.” Kakutani, of course, is well known as one of the toughest critics in the country.

 

The Times of London collects a touching series of comments from other writers on their bad reviews. John Mortimer can still recall, word for word, a particularly harsh sentence written on his first novel 60 years ago.

 

Kelly Jane Torrance is TAE Online's books columnist.