The debt of autobiography to the antics of extraordinary fathers as they appear to their sons is native to English comedy. In "Clinging to the Wreckage" …, Mr. John Mortimer, who is equally distinguished as a lawyer and as a playwright, draws on this powerful source. His discursive narrative is often as hilarious, if not as innocent, as early Wodehouse; it is also often touching, warm, and wise. When he is combative, he is also tolerant of his bizarre of dubious characters. He is as tender with his pugnacious father as he is cheerfully candid about himself. The title of the book is dead right: both parties, in their differing ways, had to cling to wreckage; they did not sink, but, with dogged good humor, they clung. The stoical father's case was more desperate than the son's. A formidable barrister, the father went blind in middle age yet tapped his way to court and argued his cases to the end of his life. He was determined not to be a pitiable figure. On the contrary, he was alert; he used his blindness resourcefully…. A father who on his deathbed can cry out "I'm always angry when I'm dying" is a man of parts.

So is the son, in another way. He is myopic, which enables him to see things in a cheering mist. He wanted to be a poet and novelist, and turned to the law to earn his bread and butter. Very slowly, distracted eventually by a large family, he found his way to the theatre and films—scriptwriting…. The difficulty of reconciling a literary mind and the practices of advocacy often crops up in this book. (p. 166)

[As] a barrister-would-be-writer Mr. Mortimer faced a dilemma: "The writer cannot help exposing himself, however indecently. Every performance he gives, although cloaked in fiction, reveals his secret identity." The distinction seems to have puzzled judges in the well-known English obscenity cases of the last twenty years—such as the attempt to ban the novel "Last Exit to Brooklyn," in which Mr. Mortimer appeared for the defense…. In his own passionate hostility to censorship, however, Mr. Mortimer found himself in a dangerous situation as a lawyer. He had come, he says, to believe in the truth of what he was saying. He was failing to suspend disbelief.

All that he has to say about the peculiar habits of British law is amusing, and particularly the shoptalk, though it must be said that lawyers' conversation often degenerates into anecdotage. (pp. 166, 69)

After the usual public-school roughhouse at Harrow, which demanded dandified clothes, Mr. Mortimer caught Byronic notions, but at first the only girls who could attract him were boyish. At Oxford, he was the puzzled heterosexual when homosexuality was the fashion…. He came down during the war to dismal London to live among pacifists who had noncombatant jobs, and began his struggles to get his start at the bar, wrote a novel, and floated from pubs to bed-sitters in the gray period when sex seemed to come in like the first sight of scampi on restaurant menus, happily "off-ration."… Mr. Mortimer writes well of this drab bohemia. Then, suddenly, the would-be Byron turns into the family man with a vengeance. The young hack in the divorce courts and the rising dramatist becomes, perhaps by contagion, a co-respondent himself and marries a talented young novelist with four daughters. It seems that the lonely child longed for a real, ready-made family, to which he could adoringly add. (p. 170)

The marriage lasted for years. Why it broke up (though without acrimony) is not clear. There is no reason that it should be. Mr. Mortimer's narrative simply dodges into impressionistic scenes. One suspects that the classic farces of Feydeau, so intricately boxed together—and which he has translated—came to replace the cult of Byron's blend of puritan romanticism and robust common sense. In Feydeau, farce is Greek tragedy turned upside down. But, pausing for an introspective moment, Mr. Mortimer writes of the stunning sense of loneliness he felt when his father died; then of a "flight" like Gauguin's, from family life to an emotional Tahiti and in search of an adolescence he had "never enjoyed." Had he been under an arresting spell in his father's company? We must make what we can of this part of Mr. Mortimer's plea in the court of private life. (pp. 170-71)