Answer Yes or No” by John Mortimer

This is a curiosity that I enjoyed reading recently. Back in 1950, seventy-five years ago this summer, a young barrister called John Mortimer (1923 -2009) published this little novel drawing on his experience representing clients in the UK divorce courts. He would later go on to create Horace Rumpole ‘of the Bailey’ and enjoy huge success as a novelist, dramatist and particularly as a writer of short stories. This is an early effort and it is well-worth reading if you can get hold of a copy.

The central character is a barrister in his twenties called Ransom who is beginning to establish himself while living on a low income in ‘digs’ in a depressing, bombed-out post-war London. There are two linked narratives running through the novel. One concerns a middle aged couple who are in the process of divorcing, Ransom representing the wife and her new man. The other is more personal and focuses on his relationship with a married woman who would like to divorce her husband but can not persuade him to permit this. The novel is interesting to read not least because it shows how hugely conceptions of public morality have changed since 1950, along with the divorce laws of course. It seems extraordinary now, but for reasons of public decency and the potential for a book considered obscene to be censored, D.H. Lawrence-style out of existence. John Mortimer was obliged to write about a sexual encounter as follows:

The wind shook the curtain, the white stains spread over the sky, in time a cock ripped the silence and the birds clattered in the trees over the cold fields. All the while they lay locked together as if they were cut off on a remote island and the tide was rising around them, and that morning was the last they would ever have.

Why bother writing such passages at all and leave things at the bedroom door? I guess the answer was that is was just great fun not to and to amuse the reader with these metaphorical constructions. Censorship of this kind was gradually dismantled in the 1960s and 1970s following a series of obscenity trials, many of which John Mortimer was himself involved in as a barrister. Writers were then free to offend as much as they liked. Personally I rather miss the rather coyer approach. But on this as on pretty well every other issue it would seem, I increasingly find myself to be sadly marooned in a party of one.