Adam Mars-Jones observes in this memoir of his late father, the redoubtable high court judge Sir William Mars-Jones, that when writing about the dead, “the writer, the survivor, has all the power”. As a novelist trained in the shady arts of fiction, Mars-Jones is well aware of the loaded nature of this exercise in turning the tables on authority. In the courtroom of biography the dead have “no redress against caricature or cheap insight” – and, just to raise the stakes, “feelings about parents are such primal things that it’s safer to assume you harbour any and every disreputable emotion”. Proceedings could get ugly.
Except that in Mars-Jones’s hands, the arraignment is somehow not just scrupulously fair but tender. The kid gloves of the title are an allusion to “the pair of white kid gloves trimmed with gold braid” traditionally presented to assize judges when there was no criminal case to be heard on a circuit, and Mars-Jones dons them with a delicate sense of filial irony. Mars-Jones Senior – ex-treasurer and bencher of Gray’s Inn – emerges as a bracingly complex figure, the son of a Welsh farmer who blended effortlessly into the ranks of the establishment; a temperamental conservative who could also take a defiantly liberal stance when the occasion demanded; an old fogey who played the guitar and loved the Beatles; an independent thinker who set great store by the baubles of conformism. (The son recalls the father doing battle with American Express about “how many of his honorifics – MBE, LLB – could be crammed on to his Gold Card”. After “tough negotiation” he finally settles for ‘Sir Wm’”).
In 1998, Mars-Jones’s mother, Sheila (who was the subject of an equally poignant, if briefer, reminiscence by him in Sons and Mothers, which Virago published in 1996), died of lung cancer. His father, aged 82, was by then suffering from mild dementia, and as “an underemployed freelance” and the only one of his three sons with time to spare, Mars-Jones elected to become his carer. Their vexed relationship, rich in vulnerability, frustration and farce, is unpacked for us with grace and subtle wit.
Mars-Jones is keenly, indeed forensically, alive to the paradoxes in his father’s character. While Sir William was doggedly pro-censorship (his involvement in the Moors murders trial in 1965 as a junior counsel convinced him of the corrupting influence of pornography and made him a lifelong believer in state interventionism), he surprised everyone, when he was appointed four years later to preside over the ABC trial – at which the government brought charges against two journalists and their source under the Official Secrets Act – by dismissing the case on the grounds that the act had never been intended to be used to suppress freedom of speech.
Similarly, while routinely irritating Mars-Jones fils by displaying the unthinking racism of many of his generation, Sir William on another occasion awarded a Jamaican couple exemplary damages against the police “for assault, wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution”, slamming the conduct of the force as “monstrous, wicked and shameful”. Mars-Jones says ruefully that, in the same way that no man is a hero to his valet, “no judge is a libertarian to his son”.
In argument, the father was “a driven athlete”, “a chess grandmaster”. Such stamina allowed Mars-Jones QC to romp home to victory as prosecuting counsel in a plagiarism suit against Ian Fleming: “A full performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen lasts 15 hours, just over half the length of Dad’s opening speech in the Thunderball case.” His operatic sense of his own importance – what the son teasingly calls “judge-itis” or “elephantiasis of the self-esteem” – could be both absurd and cruel. At his retirement bash a shy family friend asked “Uncle Bill” an innocent question about the extent to which the judiciary had kept up with social change. He promptly turned on the young woman and ordered her to leave, saying that she had spoiled his party. Mortified, she stammered that she had never meant to give offence. “That,” he snapped, “is something you will have to live with for the rest of your life.”
Bigoted, clever, irascible and unyielding, Mars-Jones père was never going to be a pushover when the moment came for his son to tell him that he was gay. Mars-Jones notes wryly that his father was “a homophobe’s homophobe” – “if there were Annual General Meetings of the Homophobia League then he would be an honoured guest if not a keynote speaker”. The moment of truth comes during a New Year’s Eve tete-a-tete. Dad’s response to his son’s revelation is to try to argue him out of it, as if he were “his client, someone to be got off the hook however strong the evidence against him, however stubbornly he incriminated himself”. His lawyerly refutations of Adam’s sexual orientation include The Princely Parallel (“he assured me … that the older woman procedure had done the trick for Prince Charles”) and the Bisset Surprise, according to which Adam cannot be gay because Dad alleges that he once played with himself during a Jacqueline Bisset film.
It takes a finely honed sense of the comic value of the everyday to survive these wounds. Mars-Jones concedes with magnificent understatement that “the dynamics between homophobic judge and publicly gay writer son, tolerating each other at least to the extent of sharing a roof, are probably not standard”. When The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse is published in 1983, Sir William asks pointedly if Adam has edited it. Mars-Jones sniffs: “If I did decide to use a pseudonym, I would try to do better than the name on the book’s cover, Stephen Coote.” Ouch. He observes that, even after he formed a civil partnership with his long-term lover, and well before his father’s dementia set in, Sir William “had perfected a frown of absent puzzlement (who could this be?) to use when not-quite-greeting Keith”. Ouch again.
And yet, in spite of these provocations, the overwhelming tone of his memoir is one of deep affection and forbearance. As Mars-Jones jokes, in a tongue-in-cheek dig at those assize gloves, it’s “kid gloves all round, some of them elbow-length, in the debutante or drag-queen manner”. But you sense that his lightness of touch is the product of more than mere civility. Tellingly, he remarks that his father had once encouraged him to think of himself as a potential lawyer. “It isn’t so. My wheels grind differently, and my ego is hungry for a different food.” Ego? What ego? Kid Gloves is a remarkable work of sympathetic imagination, the output of a fully formed personality that has weighed all the evidence and wisely decided to reserve judgment.
Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father by Adam Mars-Jones (Penguin Group, £16.99). To order a copy for £12.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
