On March 6, 1972, I found myself driving down to Norfolk. It was early spring in the Northern Hemisphere. “Come to lunch,” the invitation said. This was joyful news, for Mary Middleton Murry would have had every right to refuse me the time of day after the way I’d portrayed her late husband. But then Mary was John’s fourth wife. And the John Middleton Murry I had put in the script of my play, The Two Tigers, was a much younger and more vacillating figure than the conservative-leaning family man with a passion for farming and breeding bulls that Mary had come to know.
John had married
