Clinging to the Wreckage

"Oh I love that book! And that’s more than his childhood, he at least gets up to when he’s working for the BBC. I just thought it was a great example of graceful writing, not just the right words, but the right number of words. He just picked out things from his life. And I know he wrote about this in several places, but I believe that was the first portrait of his father. I read it years ago, but the picture of his father is still in my mind. His father was a blind matrimonial lawyer. Oh. I knew Mortimer slightly, I rather enjoyed him! I thought he was an enormously gifted speaker. I heard him speak once here. He had a good memory of his childhood and he talked about leaving prep school. And the headmaster had all the leavers, the people who were ready to go out into the world at age 12 or 13, into his study at the end and said to them all: “You’ll have dreams! You’ll have dreams and you’ll wake up and say “You rotter!”” I loved that. Mortimer was a very witty writer and I like almost everything he wrote. Yes. He doesn’t tell you a lot of things. That’s one of the differences between memoirs and autobiography and particularly biography. Most memoirs are short, while recent biographers have felt that they have to write the last biography, they want to take up the whole road so there’s no room for anybody else. So they write these biographies that are 600-800 pages long. Literally. I don’t know of anyone whose life is that interesting in detail. Then he got into fourth grade and so on. I find these huge doorstops just impossible. Picking out a few themes and writing about them is what I prefer to read. I read it so many years ago that I don’t remember it that well. As I say, I still have the picture of the father in my mind and I still remember the great title. The guy who told him in a bar that he had survived years of sailing by taking to heart the advice that if the boat ever over-turned, what you should do is cling to the wreckage rather than swim to shore."