A spiralling murder mystery and a top-rated podcast were not what Saul Wordsworth had in mind when he set out to transcribe the largely illegible diaries of his late father, Christopher Wordsworth, an Observer chief literary critic and sports writer. Yet this is what he has had on his hands since his show, Devil in the Wilderness, found a wide audience last year.
And now Michael Frayn and Blake Morrison, acclaimed writers and former colleagues of Wordsworth on this newspaper, have joined him in a fresh attempt to solve the dark riddle of his father’s life.
Wordsworth senior was born in India and died in 1998, at 83, leaving behind a spectacularly troubled personal and professional track record. The most unsettling mystery, however, surrounds a suggestion in a diary entry that the source of his persistent depression was an enduring guilt over the violent death of a man called Spratt, with whom he served in the army in the Middle East. Wordsworth wrote of his inner torture about whether he had committed “murder”. “I am faced with the law, if I tell the truth,” he wrote. This week Saul Wordsworth is to visit the military records office, where he will finally try to uncover the truth about Spratt’s death.
Further question marks hang over the dwindling of Wordsworth’s early literary promise. He had blazed a trail at Rugby School and then at Oxford, and later earned a prestigious book contract after writing for the Guardian about his time living alone in abject poverty in the Welsh mountains in the essay “The Self-Inflicted Wound”. It was later published in the anthology Underdogs, serialised in the Observer, earning him much praise. But after that he was plagued by unproductive melancholy.
Frayn, 90, remembers Wordsworth well from their Fridays together in the Observer office, when he sometimes joined other writers for a drink. “He was a very literary man. I mean, he had plainly read everything … I never felt part of that bookish world,” said the playwright and author, best known for the stage hit Noises Off and for the enduringly popular 1967 newspaper novel Towards the End of the Morning.
But Frayn confessed he did not much like Wordsworth – and had some reason for harbouring a grudge. Tamara Salaman, Wordsworth’s last wife, had been Frayn’s first serious girlfriend when they studied together at Cambridge. “I was very attached to her, though I’m not sure she ever had much feeling for me,” Frayn admitted in an upcoming bonus episode of the podcast.
Devil in the Wilderness was the first podcast Frayn had heard, and he initially contacted Wordsworth to compliment him on it. Before recording the new episode, launched today, Frayn handed over a hefty file of love letters from his student correspondence with Tamara. So, as Frayn admitted, for him the real mystery of the podcast is not so much Spratt’s fate as why she ever went on to marry Wordsworth.
Morrison, a poet and memoirist, edited Wordsworth’s reviews at the Observer in the 1980s and remembers the critic as “grumpy”. “He used to come in on a Wednesday to think of alternative headlines for the book review … And you felt he slightly resented this menial task and the only [consolation] being lunch in the pub round the corner when he was done … So I saw a very different man from the one in his diaries,” he recalled in the new episode.
The two writers looked back on their days at the Observer with fondness, mainly because of the roster of talent on the payroll, including influential critics and writers Kenneth Tynan and Anthony Burgess, the fabled literary editor Terence Kilmartin and, latterly, Clive James. “For me, it was the one paper I read – it was the one paper we all read,” said Frayn. “So I was extremely keen to get on to the Observer.”
Morrison and Frayn have both written, to acclaim, about the influence of their late fathers.
Frayn wrote the 2010 award-nominated memoir My Father’s Fortune many years after his father’s death, while Morrison picked up his pen to write his 1993 bestseller, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, straight after his loss.
“Michael was able to think about his father as an independent man, whereas I saw mine mostly in relation to me in the year after his death,” said Morrison. “We both had fathers who smiled a lot and believed in humour.”
Frayn, who lost his mother when he was young, pondered whether a good author must have undergone some trauma: “Writers are supposed to have some painful thing in their past. There’s the idea that you can’t be a proper writer if you haven’t got some tragedy in your past.” Christopher Wordsworth, in contrast, appears to have been paralysed, rather than motivated, by his own, still secret trauma.
