Books: Review - Life is a Joke: A Writer’s Memoir by Rosemary Friedman

Published: 6 January, 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN

Both funny and heartbreaking, life’s vagaries are grist to the mill for author and scriptwriter Rosemary Friedman

LIFE is a joke that’s just begun, according to WS Gilbert. And anyone brought up on the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan will undoubtedly agree, their audacious satires of Britain at the end of the 19th century still bringing forth laughter decades later.

Gilbert certainly enjoyed himself as he poked delightful fun at the hypocritical Victorian world of politics and power. 

And he would be a welcome visitor to today’s much more confused confrontations, now on an international level, their global exposure leaving us hating all the lies we have been told by governments and MPs we wanted to trust.

And Gilbert, like modern celebrities, enjoyed the company of women, drowning in his swimming pool as he attempted to save a pretty lady in trouble. 

Yet it is his words, his wise and witty writing that remain with us. For writing is indeed a disease, something that once you are addicted to you can’t stop.

Ideas just multiply the moment you awake, forming plots that, in Rosemary Friedman’s case have resulted in 24 published novels and collections of short stories, television scripts for UK and American screens, plus three notable stage plays that deserve West End audiences.

They are the outcome of her escape from the drudgery of working in the surgery of 

her doctor husband – she married first when she was just 19 – while bringing up four talented daughters. Once she became infected with words she hasn’t been able to stop.

And all the more so as she has amassed a huge library of more than 3,500 quotations from all sorts of sources that have their own in-built truth, their lessons of life and love and death, creating her own Commonplace Book into which she can dive for either inspiration or cover.

They form a formidable part of her latest offering, a memoir of a writer’s life that is equally poignant and funny, heart-breaking and rewarding as she still battles on trying to find a major producer for her last play, An Elig­ible Man, which had its premiere at Hamp­stead’s tiny New End Theatre in May 2008 but has never progressed further.

She still sits daily at her compu­ter desk overlook­ing Regent’s Park, her home in Cambridge Gate, itself playing an upsetting part in her career, as she recalls the quip of 

her psychi­atrist husband as they returned from a rain-soaked holiday in Sicily. 

“I hope the house hasn’t burned down,” he joked as they walked out of customs.

But it had – almost.  An arsonist had entered the flat below and the smoke damage to their penthouse was so extensive that they had to move out while the loss adjusters and decorators took over.

It caused a rift in her home life that others have suffered from, due to the dilemmas many families face. But with one significant and important difference: it is on direct experience – as well as creative imagination – that writers depend for their work. So it stays with you, essential to your existence.

Her exhaustive interest remains whether, as a once-sickly child, she reveals her own battles with illness or the joy of cooking. Indeed, as she points out, artists, musicians and writers are equally prone to a cascade of troubles, from mental illness to heart troubles.

With customary diligence, she points out: “Leo Tolstoy suffered variously from rheumatism, enteritis, toothaches, fainting spells, malaria, phlebitis, typhoid fever and several small strokes, while Lewis Carroll had to contend with ague, cystitis, lumbago, boils, eczema, synovitis, rheumatism, neuralgia, insomnia and toothaches, a troublesome stammer and partial deafness.”

She points out: “All art, by its very nature, is imperfect and no artist is ever completely fulfilled. 

“Seeking immortality through her work, the film actress, like the writer and the artist, is doomed to disappoint­ment.” 

And she adds, philosophically: “As you get older you might as well come to terms with the fact that there’s no way you’re going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (described by TS Eliot as a ‘ticket to one’s own funeral, because nobody has ever done anything after he got it!’), that your French will never be fluent and – clearly as you might picture yourself cutting a dash in the swimming pool – you’re not going to master a halfway decent crawl.

“In the country of the old some of us have it better than others and we are lucky that although we have our Freed­om passes there is as yet no compul­sory retirement age for writers and artists.”

It is Rosemary Friedman’s empathy and her exuber­ance for life, for all its traumas and follies, that makes her memoir so worthwhile. 

She quotes George Orwell as saying: “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

It is worth remembering that forever pessimistic George Orwell also got it wrong – sometimes!

• Life is a Joke: A Writer’s Memoir. By Rosemary Friedman. Arcadia Books £11.99