Biography:Funny and self-deprecating in that bumbling, endearing way of his, always primed with a quip or anecdote on any subject, John Mortimer gives good value in interviews.
The media never tires of him, nor does he ever tire of himself. Here he is again, at 84, trundling along the chat-show trail in his wheelchair, still as eager for exposure as any X Factor contestant. Despite decades of literary success, he's still engaged on a quest for approval and admiration that began in childhood.
Now here's a description of the main male character in the novel The Pumpkin Eater, written by his first wife, Penelope Mortimer, in 1962: "Jake is a violent man who wears a sluggard body for disguise. Sleepy, amiable, anxious to please, lazy, tolerant . . . this is the personality he wears as a man in this world. His indestructible energy, aggression, cruelty and ambition are well-protected".
The Pumpkin Eater is a barely-fictionalised account of the self-destructive behaviour and serial infidelities that wrecked their marriage, and Mortimer has conceded that there is much of himself in Jake. Both Mortimers plucked threads from their union to weave into novels: Penelope's knotty and black, John's brighter and more flimsy. As far as he is concerned everything that has ever happened to him, or anyone close to him, is material, and he makes no meaningful distinction between fiction and autobiography. When asked about whether a particular incident in one of his volumes of memoirs actually happened, he replied: "Whether that happened or whether that didn't happen, that's how I wanted to end that story. Because it's an unexpected ending. I was thinking of making the character of 'me' into a character who would be interesting to write about".
How Valerie Grove's biography came into being is a story in itself. In 2004, another writer, Graham Lord, was working on an unofficial biography and planned to reveal that Mortimer had unknowingly fathered a son by the actor Wendy Craig 40 years previously, whom Craig's husband agreed to bring up as his own. This prompted Craig to contact Mortimer and introduce his new-found, middle-aged child, Ross (after Mortimer's initial astonishment the two men got on famously and, happily, still do).
Mortimer then appointed Grove to write this authorised biography, perhaps hoping to forestall further embarrassing revelations, or to set the record straight. But Lord's hostile book, The Devil's Advocate, was published anyway, and although the existence of Ross was common knowledge when it came out, it caused dismay in the Mortimer household by detailing John's enthusiastic infidelity during his present marriage (to another Penelope, known as Penny).
Penny's pain was understandable, writes Grove. There had been years when he hadn't considered her happiness at all. "He tells me 'I've always loved you, you know that'," Penny told her. "But he admits he behaved in both marriages as if he wasn't married. In his first marriage he looked on his stepchildren as brothers and sisters. He was a big child, a big naughty boy."
THAT LAST SENTENCE is the key to John Mortimer and his prodigious appetites for fun, praise and physical gratification without regard to consequence.
In Grove's vastly entertaining and commendably impartial biography, she sometimes comes over as an exasperated mother dealing with a troublesome tot, for Mortimer's own published reminiscences have to be taken with a pinch of salt, marred as they are by a memory so selective it borders on self-deception, erasing all unpleasant or inconvenient things from his mind, and an eagerness to sacrifice anything to make a good story. After I'd finished this book I admired the subject as much as ever, but liked him rather less.
Mortimer's most prodigious appetite is for work. He has a new Rumpole book out this month. During his career as a full-time barrister, from which he retired in 1983, he produced a steady stream of novels, plays, short stories, film scripts, adaptations and journalism, often rising at 5am. Politically, he's seen as leftish, but it's a peculiar kind of socialism - he's more a fogeyish conservative at heart, nostalgic for the days of a more understandable social order. The late Auberon Waugh said he was "really a liberal, humane, bourgeois of the old guard".
As far as his attitude to his philandering is concerned, Grove has a telling story of Mortimer's reaction to the second volume of Penelope's memoirs, About Time Too, written six years before she died in 1999, in which she wrote searingly about the horrible matter-of-factness of sexual deceit.
Mortimer opened the book and "saw the bit about going into his chambers and his gown 'smelling of sweat, semen and eau de cologne' and I just threw the book on the fire. It's the only book I've ever burnt".
Grove's task wasn't easy. As she comments: "It was strange to confront a writer with no 'papers', just scrapbooks. He did not keep his reviews of others' work . . . but he kept every tiny snippety review of his books, including those from the Youngstown Ohio Vindicator or the Sacramento Bee. What mattered was the praise, not who bestowed it".
The naughty old boy is universally admired, and has earned his status as a British National Treasure. If he did nothing else - and he did plenty - he achieved the remarkable feat of creating, in Rumpole of the Bailey and himself, two lawyers the world could love.
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist
A Voyage Around John Mortimer: The Authorised Biography By Valerie Grove Viking, 542pp. £25