The fine art of Obituary (book review)
Hyfler/Rosner
Keith Thomas
Ian Brunskill, editor
GREAT LIVES
A century in obituaries
684pp. Times Books. £20.
Neither a memorial address nor a full-scale
biography, the obituary notice is an underrated literary
genre. To narrate the life, evoke the personality and assess
the historical significance of someone who died only a day
or so previously is no trivial task. Obituarists have to
work quickly. They should avoid causing unnecessary pain to
the living, but they must also be candid. They have to
hazard an instant judgement, while recognizing that it may
be overturned by later revelations. If they make mistakes,
they will provoke a barrage of protest. But a life story
well told, and a personality felicitously evoked, can give
enormous pleasure.
Curiously, the history of this highly
sophisticated art form has never been written. When did it
become customary for newspapers to supplement the simple
announcement of a notable person's death with a biography
and a critical assessment? When did editors begin the
practice of laying down draft obituaries in advance, so
that, with a little updating, they would be ready for
publication when the moment came? How have the conventions
of obituary-writing changed over the years? And what is the
value of obituaries to posterity? Literary historians have
yet to give adequate answers to any of these questions.
In Britain, it seems to have been the Gentleman's
Magazine which first developed the genre, particularly under
the Editorship of John Nichols in the last two decades of
the eighteenth century. Thereafter, other publishers tried
to launch regular collections of obituaries. The Annual
Necrology published one volume for 1797-8, then stopped. The
Annual Biography and Obituary ran for ten years between 1817
and 1826. It offered brief biographies of the moderately
famous and long entries for "Celebrated Persons" (Napoleon
got 220 pages). Another short-lived venture, Charles R. Dodd's
The Annual Biography, resulted in only one volume, covering
deaths for 1842. It too combined long memoirs of
"Distinguished or Remarkable Persons" with short notes on
"Persons of Less Importance".
The Times was relatively slow to develop its
obituary column. The current Obituaries Editor, Ian
Brunskill, tells us in his brief but informative
introduction to Great Lives that it was not until the
Editorship of John Thadeus Delane (1841-79) that the paper
began to prepare long notices of prominent figures while
they were still alive; and it had no separate Obituary
Editor until 1920. With the appointment to that post of
Colin Watson in 1956, the number of notices prepared in
advance was increased to about 5,000, the level at which it
has been subsequently maintained.
By laying down obituaries in this way, The Times
quickly gained an advantage over other newspapers,
particularly when a prominent person died unexpectedly. Its
closely guarded archive of future notices remains an object
of macabre fascination, and somehow manages to escape
exposure under the Data Protection Act. The disadvantage of
obituaries which have been long in gestation is that they
have a patchwork quality, being the work of several hands,
the original author having sometimes predeceased the
long-lived subject. One admires the candour of the Times
obituarist who began his notice in 1873 by observing that
"our readers will not so much be surprised at hearing that
Alessandro Manzoni, the veteran novelist and poet of Italy,
has at last died at the ripe age of 89, as that he was still
alive".
In recent decades, competition from other
newspapers has been severe. The signed obituaries of the
Independent and Guardian give them an interest which the
strictly anonymous notices in The Times cannot possess
(though speculation about their authorship can rival Su Doku
as an intellectual sport). The Independent pioneered the
imaginative use of pictorial illustrations; it was also the
first to devote much space to circus artists, rock musicians
and similar figures. The Daily Telegraph has always given
closer attention to army officers and
Masters of Foxhounds, while the Guardian finds
more room for radical feminists, Labour activists and the
sandal-wearing classes.
The Times has had to adopt some of its rivals'
tricks in order to keep up, but its obituary coverage
remains wider and more dependable than that of any other
newspaper. In the offices of the old Dictionary of National
Biography, there used to be shoeboxes of dog-eared Times
obituaries, to be consulted as a guide in the choice of
subjects for the next supplementary volume. Many public
persons would deem their life a failure if they knew that
they were not going to get their obituary in The Times. We
learn in Great Lives that Spike Milligan wrote in 1990 to
ask the paper to make sure that his notice was ready ("as I
have not been feeling well lately"). Today, the obituaries,
along with the letters and the crossword, help to retain The
Times's traditional readers when the changing character of
its other contents threatens to lose them.
Over the years there have been fitful attempts
at reprinting Times obituaries. In the late nineteenth
century, a six-volume selection for the period 1870-1894 was
published under the title Eminent Persons (this was before
Lytton Strachey). Along with British celebrities, it
included foreign notables like Garibaldi,
Napoleon III and Pope Pius IX. In the 1970s,
there appeared three volumes of Obituaries from the Times,
containing a large selection of notices from 1950 to 1975,
with the (unfulfilled) promise of future instalments every
five years. Invaluable as a work of reference, their
triple-columned pages were presumably deemed too austere for
a general market.
Now, with Great Lives, we have a reversion to
the tradition of Eminent Persons, that is to say a small
selection of obituaries of the famous, though the studiously
ambiguous title suggests that the greatness is that of the
obituarists as well as of the persons commemorated. There
are 123 life histories, a majority being of non-British
subjects, with the USA particularly strongly represented.
The selection has fairly obviously been made with the North
American market in mind.
The earliest notice is of Lord Kitchener, who
died in 1915, the latest of Pope John Paul II, who died this
year. Over half are of persons who have died since 1970.
None is an individual who would have been forgotten were it
not for a Times obituary notice. There are world-
historical figures (Lenin, Churchill, Gandhi,
Stalin, Mao Tse-tung), immortals of stage and
screen (Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe,
Laurence Olivier), outstanding writers (D. H. Lawrence, T.
S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett), great composers
(Puccini, Elgar, Britten, Stravinsky), famous artists
(Monet, Picasso, Henry Moore), prominent scientists (Marie
Curie, Einstein, Francis Crick) and sporting figures (Don
Bradman, Sugar Ray Robinson, Stanley Matthews). There are
also generals, politicians, singers, dancers and royals,
plus a small sprinkling of those who are famous for having
been famous.
Authorship remains anonymous. In his excellent
sixth volume of the official history of The Times, John
Grigg identified a number of the regular obituarists in the
years of William Rees-Mogg's Editorship. But, unlike the
TLS, which now reveals the identity of its once anonymous
reviewers (on the online Centenary Archive), Great Lives
maintains secrecy, pleading, rather unconvincingly, that the
composite authorship of some contributions makes
identification unduly cumbersome.
Most of the entries follow a conventional
format. They begin with a few paragraphs of general
reflection on the subject's achievements, then switch to a
detailed life history, concluding with a brief overall
assessment, and a laconic tailpiece about any surviving
spouse(s), partners, or children. This relegation of the
subject's close family to a postscript is a reminder that
obituaries are essentially summaries of a public life.
Private concerns are not their business. Written without
access to letters and diaries or long conversations with
those with whom the subject's intimate life was intertwined,
they record and assess a life, rather than explain it.
Typically, they concentrate on external events, already in
the public domain.
At least since Freud, we have known that it is
impossible to separate public and private if we are to
understand the springs of human action. Yet many inhibitions
stand in the way of discussing the recently dead. One of
them is squeamishness about recording the medical causes of
their demise. It is said that The Times regards it as
superfluous to mention them if the subject is over seventy,
though may do so in the case of younger persons. In Great
Lives, accordingly, we learn that Rudolph Valentino died of
peritonitis, Jacqueline Onassis of lymphatic cancer and
Rudolf Nureyev of AIDS. But there is none of the clinical
detail often to be found in American newspapers, and not
unknown in
Victorian England. No modern obituarist would
describe their subject's last moments in the way The Times
in 1870 wrote of Charles Dickens: "The pupil of the right
eye was much dilated, that of the left contracted, the
breathing stertorous, the limbs flaccid until half an hour
before death, when some convulsion occurred".
Sex is another tricky area, though less so than
it used to be. In Great Lives we learn nothing whatsoever
about the private lives of John F. Kennedy, Noël Coward,
Alan Turing, Francis Bacon, or Sir Frederick Ashton.
Benjamin Britten's relationship with Peter Pears is
delicately, though imprecisely, conveyed, while the notice
on T. S. Eliot remarks enigmatically that the
"long-drawn-out private tragedy which darkened his middle
years" accounted for "the rawness, the shuddering distaste,
the sense of contagion, the dry despair", to be found in
some of his writings. Margot Fonteyn's husband, we are told,
was shot by "an associate with a personal grudge". We have
to consult the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to
discover that the "associate" was someone he was alleged to
have cuckolded.
Physical attributes are only rarely described,
though two paragraphs of Barbara Cartland's obituary are
devoted to her extraordinary appearance; and we learn of
Herbert von Karajan that "in appearance he was spruce and
distinguished, with hard, light eyes like fissures in a
block of ice". The entry for Queen Elizabeth the Queen
Mother refers tactfully to "the slight amplification of
figure that came to her with middle age".
Euphemisms are also employed to convey defects
of character. Of Kitchener, we learn that "no man, not even
Wellington, ever less sought by arts and graces to cultivate
popularity among his men". J. M. Keynes "did not suffer
fools gladly", while Elizabeth David "did not suffer
incompetents and the dimwitted gladly, if at all, as
customers in her Elizabeth Street shop often found to their
discomfort".
For those whom the Victorians called Persons of
Less Importance, the newspaper obituary can be a unique and
indispensable source. The most informative obituaries are of
people whose names are unfamiliar. Great Lives, however, by
concentrating exclusively on the very famous, is untypical
of The Times's normal obituaries. Its entries are not only
longer (anything up to thirty pages); they are also of less
enduring value. Those wishing to find out about Hitler or
Stalin will not make the Times obituary column their first
port of call. Such figures are in the history books. Their
lives have been written many times over, by authors who have
the advantages of seeing their subjects in perspective and
having access to material unavailable to the obituarist. For
accurate biographical information, the Times obituaries
cannot compare with a scholarly work of reference like the
Oxford DNB. Their journalistic preoccupation with public
perceptions of their subject often results in a collage of
newspaper headlines, weak on motivation and the underlying
causes for behaviour. The enduring interest of these
obituaries of famous people does not lie in the information
they supply about them. It comes from what they reveal about
the way in which they were perceived by their
contemporaries.
Awareness of this limitation can sometimes
engender a proper sense of caution. Some obituarists hedge
their bets by describing their subjects (Aneurin Bevan, say,
or Robert Maxwell) as "controversial". Others are content to
await the judgement of posterity: "History will in time
deliver its verdict on Montgomery the soldier"; Franklin D.
Roosevelt's place in history "has yet to be decided"; and,
on Freud, "the time has not yet arrived when a just estimate
of psycho-analysis and its founder is possible".
Yet many of the boldest judgements expressed in
Great Lives stand the test of time extremely well. Samuel
Beckett was "one of the truly great literary figures of this
century". Laurence Olivier was "probably the greatest actor
of his generation and certainly the most handsome". Clement
Attlee was "one of the least colourful and most effective of
British Prime Ministers of this century". Frederick Ashton
was "equalled by few and excelled by none in the whole
history of the art he served". The obituarists are not
afraid to use the term "genius" when writing of Keynes,
Picasso, Churchill, Chaplin, Menuhin, P. G. Wodehouse and
Maria Callas.
Hostile judgements of varying severity are
passed upon Menachem Begin, Yassir Arafat, V. I. Lenin (who
"brought Russia to economic ruin, famine, and barbarism"),
Ayatollah Khomeini (who "led Iran into a decade of
revolutionary turmoil and economic mismanagement which has
set back its development
by many years" and bore "a disastrous
responsibility for inspiring and sanctioning state
terrorism") and Adolf Hitler (though with the caveat that
"if history judges to be greatest those who fill most of her
pages, Hitler was a very great man").
Many of these notices have the great merit of
expressing a clear opinion, while conceding that there are
other ways in which their subject might be viewed. Even so,
authorial prejudices frequently come through. We are told
that Kitchener in the Sudan "smote the great host of
barbarism", while the peace-loving Martin Luther King is
described as "a vitriolic champion of negro civil rights".
If written by other hands, the treatment of such figures as
Ronald Reagan, Mother Teresa, Queen Elizabeth the Queen
Mother and Pope John Paul II might well have been less
indulgent. But one can relish The Times's hauteur when
Princess Diana's obituarist identifies Andrew Morton as "a
journalist from the lower echelons of the trade".
A few entries have dated because of changing
literary or artistic taste. Not only do many of D. H.
Lawrence's works (Lady Chatterley included) go unmentioned,
but we are told that he could sometimes display "a delicacy
almost like that of Mr W. H. Davies". Other notices are
incomplete because they were unable to take account of
developments after their subject's death. The writer on
Agatha Christie, who commented in 1976 on The Mousetrap's
"fantastic London run", can hardly be blamed for not knowing
that the play would still be running thirty years later.
Neither can Princess Diana's obituarist be expected to have
foreseen the public
display of mourning which followed her death.
What has wrecked the (relatively few) notices
which now seem positively misleading has been the posthumous
revelation of facts unavailable in the subject's lifetime.
Outstanding examples are Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, both of
whom receive infinitely more reverential treatment than they
would get now, when the horrors of their respective regimes
have become common knowledge. (Stalin's obituarist does at
least concede that he "appeared to lack a certain element of
humanity".) Another instance is Alan Turing, whose brief and
highly inadequate notice says nothing about his decoding
work at Bletchley Park (presumably still an Official Secret
at the time of writing) and fails to foresee the future
importance of the electronic digital computer, whose
intellectual underpinnings he provided.
Worse still is the case of Robert Maxwell. The
Times had already distinguished itself on Tuesday, November
5, 1991, by reporting his presence at a dinner in London on
the previous evening. On the 6th, it announced that he had
left London for his yacht on the previous Thursday and that
his body had been recovered from the sea. The accompanying
obituary concluded that "though there were emerging doubts
about the fragility of his enterprises in view of the debts
he had accumulated, there was no doubt about the scale of
his success". Maxwell, it opined, had "created a substantial
business empire which will live on in various forms after
his death, although it will be run on very different lines
by his sons". Shortly afterwards, the empire collapsed,
owing about £2.7 billion, £429 million having been stolen
from employee pension funds. In the Oxford DNB, the
"turbulent and controversial entrepreneur" of The Times
obituary has become "Robert Maxwell, publisher and swindler".
This is an engrossing volume, full of lively
writing, and almost never boring. Bernard Shaw is described
as "a sort of intellectual Father Christmas"; Andy Warhol
"achieved more fame by what he refrained from doing than by
what he did"; and "if Puccini's was not the greatest music,
at least there could never be any doubt that it was music".
The description of Stanley Matthews's dribbling technique is
a tour de force.
There is also an abundance of inconsequential
but enjoyable detail. Great Lives tells us that Rudolf
Nureyev was born on a train; that Ronald Reagan fell asleep
during an audience with the Pope; and that, to stop a
telephone bell from ringing during a rehearsal with Menuhin,
Arturo Toscanini pulled the instrument from the wall,
plaster and all, and returned without a word to the piano.
We all know what Mae West replied to the hat-check girl who
said, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!" But not every one
will recall Alec Guinness's story of handing in his coat at
a hotel cloakroom. He offered to give his name, but was
rather pleased to be told that that would not be necessary.
The coat was later handed back with the ticket still
attached and on it the inscription, "bald with glasses".
marilyn...@aol.com
Marilyn
robertc...@yahoo.com
This is a book Amelia should have written herself!
Bob Feigel
proffered:
As I used to say when I worked in advertising, "I'm too busy writing
everything else to write a book."
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hyfler/Rosner
<robertc...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1134856494.2...@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
NO. This is (like) a book that Marilyn has actually written
and is about to come out! Marilyn, do you care if I post
links to the book?
marilyn...@aol.com
HarperCollins, and I give you all due credit for the thriving art of
obituaries...
Marilyn
Hyfler/Rosner
<marilyn...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1134869961.8...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse
Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson
http://www.harpercollins.com/firstlook/title.asp?titleid=430
and what little I've read is fantastic. Way to go, Marilyn,
and don't leave town without emailing your deadpool entry.