Making the dead live
Brian Masters
WELL-REMEMBERED FRIENDS: EULOGIES ON CELEBRATED LIVES collected by Angela Huth John Murray, £14.99, pp. 459, ISBN 0719564875 Z £12.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 An obituary can be put together by anyone with time and talent to swot up the facts; it is a record of achievement, a salute, and a résumé, and very often quite bloodless. The eulogist, on the other hand, has to be inspired. His task is to summon a presence, to assuage what John Sparrow calls that 'indefinable longing' for the dead person, wretchedly and incomprehensibly (reason has nothing to do with it) gone from among us. That is why, as Angela Huth writes in her preface to this motley collection, 'the nature of eulogies is to be emotionally charged'. The audience should be left giddy with affection and recognition.
The first rule is to avoid clichés, which serve only to sink the dead person into the general soup and make him sound like everyone else, when he should be isolated from the mass. Not many of those quoted here quite manage it, though Robert Runcie conquers the problem by confronting it head-on and forcing it to retreat. Talking of Robin Cavendish, he begins, `There was no one like him.' Pause for absorption and disappointment. Then,`I don't mean there was no one quite like him. I mean there was no one like him.' A little later he confides that when he learnt that Cavendish had insisted he should give the address, 'I felt more honoured than when Margaret Thatcher asked me to be Archbishop of Canterbury', adding the deliciously self-deprecating reflection that perhaps he was chosen because Cavendish did not want the service to get too religious. Those who knew the man loved Runcie for thus gently exalting him, and those who did not, and read the eulogy only now, will wish that they had. Some feel inclined to draw a vivid portrait of the deceased, as Isaiah Berlin on Maurice Bowra, or to evoke an impression of his company with a few deft strokes, as Nicholas Coleridge on John Morgan. Others distil the essence of their subject into one overriding characteristic, as Nigel Ryan does in identifying Diana Cooper's 'innocence of heart', in an address which cannot have taken more than a minute to deliver, and which passes over all her fame and fun, yet presents her beauty of personality as if nobody had noticed it before. Some rise to eloquence, passionate in the case of the Prince of Wales on Lord Mountbatten, simple in Margot Fonteyn's warm tribute to Freddie Ashton.
A different level of passion informs Alan Bennett's already published address on Russell Harty, for Bennett is manifestly, palpably contemptuous of the News of the World's pursuit of Harty during his last years, when they did their best to ruin his life and living, and poison his soul with their snickering intrusion, even focusing a camera on his hospital bed from across the road. Otherwise, Bennett conjures up the man with a few hilarious anecdotes, as only he can, but in the wrong hands a funny story can be embarrassing. The Edith Evans stories are still wonderful (I've played Lady Bracknell everywhere except on ice and under water'), and the image of Ann Fleming breaking into a remote railway station after it was closed and being 'posted through the window like a parcel' does indeed speak something of her maverick spirit. Coral Browne's description of being on stage with Donald Wolilt, 'like being a piece of fluff on the carpet at the approach of a vacuum-cleaner', and Peter Cook's sole regret in life 'having saved David Frost from drowning', may work as a touch of spice in the gigot.
Andrew Motion has said that a eulogy should be 'at once a greeting and a letting go', when the deceased is brought close, but then finally steps away. It must there fore be intimate, a verbal embrace with the hint of a break in the throat. Too much of this can be indigestible, of course. This is not a book to be read from beginning to end. It is ideal perhaps for the guest-room, with a scribbled note inside recommending page 442. There you will find Selina Hastings on Hardy Amies — affectionate, amusing, evocative, and above all true.
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