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Rosemary Friedman |
Rosemary’s secret words of wisdom
For years Rosemary Friedman has collected witty quotations, now they are collected in one book for our pleasure, writes Gerald Isaaman
THE blue, hard-backed notebooks have stood on a shelf, growing in numbers over the years. Inside them, like a Bible of Thoughts, are amassed some 3,500 quotations and words of wisdom that Rosemary Friedman has chosen to write down as soon as she spotted them.
“My husband and my four daughters didn’t know they existed,” she told me in her top floor eyrie overlooking Regent’s Park. “But it wasn’t because they were a secret in any way.
“I just used to write down these things as they struck me. It just came naturally to me. It could be when I was reading a book, a newspaper or magazine that I spotted something, often something I might like to have said myself.”
Then she thought the time had come to type out what she called her ‘Things’, perhaps to leave to her four daughters. But they were still in random form, some without dates or the places they came from, the sources of others still to be accurately identified.
And the eventual result is that some 1,200 of the fascinating collection of quotations with their own in-built truth have now been brilliantly edited and categorised and published in a delightful little tome called A Writer’s Commonplace Book.
It’s a throwback, of course, to the early Renaissance when people kept their own Commonplace notebooks of inspirational and motivating thoughts, a miscellany of meditations stamped with their own personality – and that of the collector.
Rosemary would have preferred her revamped version to have kept the random wickedness of the words but recognises the necessity to sort them out for the enjoyment of anyone, not just fellow writers, wanting to delve into the book.
Indeed, it is very much a legacy of her formidable career as the author of 19 novels, as well as short stories and TV and stage plays, that have been translated into foreign languages and published round the world.
And that success has pleased her. “I am very happy with what I have achieved,” she says with a quiet smile at her home in Cambridge Gate. “I enjoy it. And I know I have made a lot of people happy because I get a tremendous amount of fan mail from everywhere, people saying that I made them laugh, made them cry, cheered them up.”
Her books are very character-led and offer people and backgrounds comfortable for others to tune into. “One day I’m going to have a big party and invite all my fictional characters,” she muses. “I can see them physically coming into the room. And I would probably need the Albert Hall for the event.”
Her new book is itself a tribute to her own remarkable career.
Though she went to university to study law, she soon found herself the wife, aged 19, of a busy GP in Edgware with four daughters with their own careers as district judge in family law, a consultant radiologist, a bio-chemist and travel writer, who have blessed her with 10 grandchildren.
“I was the ancillary help, the secretary, the urine tester, the mopper-upper and with children to look after,” she recalls. “I had no ambition at school to be a writer. I just started writing in sef-defence.”
A busy life enabled her to learn how to snatch quiet moments at the dining room table as the growing list of novels that brought their own reward.
The time too, over the past 30 years, to collect her edifying ‘Things’ and tuck them away on a shelf.
They come from a vast variety of sources, from a Christmas cracker to the British Medical Journal, and, she admits, the majority are from fellow writers, Flaubert and Tolstoy the most prominent, along with the feminist writer Gloria Steinham. They have been an aide to her own creativity as well as her personal pleasure.
There’s the likes of Freud insisting: “It’s not a sin to be neurotic.” Kenneth Tynan defining a critic as “a person who knows the way but can’t drive,” and Proust maintaining: “What a bore it is to go out when one would much prefer to stay at home.”
Virginia Woolf warned: “Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.” And as Anthony Burgess bravely pointed out: “We don’t want literature, my friend: we want a bestseller.”
Rosemary Friedman’s Commonplace Book will fit the bill perfectly when you go in search of Christmas presents.
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