Mortal combat
Sir: While I agree with most of my friend Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd's enthu- siaslic article about the Telegraph's obi- tuaries CA brief life but a merry one', 15 July), which, whatever they aren't, are always wonderfully entertaining, I sense a small jibe in his reference to those of his (equally enthusiastic) opposite numbers at the Independent. He characterises our col- umns not as obituaries but as 'apprecia- tions', as though appreciations were some- thing quite else. But what is an apprecia- tion if not an assessment, a critical summing-up? And is this not the primary function of the obituary? Massingberd is himself on record as equating obituaries with book-reviews, and that is in part what they are: a last review.
When we started obituaries at the Inde- pendent, I was determined that ours should avoid the doldrums into which the other obituaries sections had, at that time, fallen. Somewhere the tradition of prepared ex- cellence had been lost; obituaries were sad, mechanical things, a mixture of dreary dates and dim euphemism, for the most part fluffed out curricula vitae from Who's Who. With leading articles, they were the last vestige of antique unsigned journalism. We decided that our pieces should be signed and that they should be different. Since one can't say everything about a subject in the narrow confines of a news- paper obituary, one should try at least to say something authentic. The signed piece is accountable, has historic veracity which is totally denied the anonymous obituary (it is a nonsense to suggest that the unsigned piece is of itself objective); signed pieces offer first-person witness and they make for variety.
Of course the risk of signing is, as Massingberd says, that the author may, if not kept in hand, write about himself instead; but there are many risks, perhaps less obvious, in the alternative. The un- signed obituary has a giant carpet of tradition under which all sorts of odd stuff can be concealed, where pre-written notes, agency stories and telephone gossip may be muddled into a generic whole by a hapha- zard sub-editor in a hurry.
Besides, does one want a single editor, even a latter-day Aubrey, to impose his stylistic will on a generation of the news- paper dead? The great leveller is death and not, though I love it, the Daily Telegraph. James Fergusson
Obituaries Editor, The Independent, 40 City Road, London EC1
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