Ian Brunskill, editor
GREAT LIVES
A century in obituaries
684pp. Times Books. £20.
0 00 720168 0
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”.
