Larger than death
Hilary Corke
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF OBITUARIES edited by Hugh Massingberd Macmillan, £14.99, pp. 338 Aone who failed to make the 1500- cut in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, I feel I can speak with complete freedom, if not felicity, upon this subject: I can be sure that my own necrology is not tucked away against the happy day in the Times obituaries, ultimate Hons Cupboard, that columbarium of pigeon-holes where not the ashes of the deceased are stacked in leaden caskets but their curricula vitarum in leaden prose. That is a deprivation rather easily to be borne. I am not so persuaded about that, though, in the case of the Telegraph, where inclusion depends not upon being Impor- tant but upon being Interesting.
Is one interesting? I doubt it; and with apologies I doubt it for 99 per cent of the readership of the Spectator too - We are such men, take us for all in all, They're sure to look upon our like again.
Or rather, one is exceedingly unlikely to be quite interesting enough to make the grade in the next instalment (for which all earnestly pray) of Hugh Massingberd's extraordinary herbarium — which embod- ies, if that's the right word, none of the `robustly nicknamed brigadiers and air marshals' whom his obit staff happily designate 'the moustaches', but just the one per cent of the new-defunct whose lives were, frankly, unbelievable.
Shall we say, 'Interesting to Beach- comber?' Surely he dreamed them all up. For all but a fraction of these subjects read as if they never drew breath in our real stale dull world at all: `Fellwalkee,
who as he strode along would regale the young boys who were his companions — he was homosexually inclined — with inter- minable but inspired monologues, often Esperanto;
the fourth Earl Russell (Bertie's lad) who delivered a speech in the Lords so outra- geously rambling that, printed, it
became a collector's item and essential read- ing for the psychedelic Left;
Denisa Lady Newborough who, in a career beginning as 'a nude dancer and mistress of boyars' and ending as the haute couturiere who designed and wore the cigarette- strewn Nicotine Hat, claimed that of all offered metiers she had only ever declined two, whore and spy. But the presence beside all these, shoulder to shoulder, of those of whom one has heard — the third Lord Moynihan; Sir Ranulph Bacon (`Rasher of the Yard'); Charlotte Bonham- Carter; Jock Murray (only a pseudo- eccentric surely?) — seems to cast a grate- ful glow of authenticity over the whole.
How then does one become Interesting? Best bet is to be anciently titled, sadly rich, and with (as Australians pleasingly put it) `a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock'. The truly interesting person will have importunate desires, material means to sat- isfy them, no bourgeois hesitations to inhibit them. He may be one of those gild- ed barflies thundered at from the manse or a canal-boat Viscount known to the Cam- den kids as 'Pegleg'; or either half of 'The Cavewoman', cohabitant Major Betty Cowan and Major Phyllis Heymann, who refused to observe that the Turks had taken over their half of Cyprus: but either way he or she is a paid-up (or subscription- owing) member, not so much of the Estab- lishment itself as of the flip-side of the Establishment: not of the great nave of the state but a lunatic side-chapel. Never a 'lit- tle man': not News of the World fodder nor even News of the Monde but of the demi- monde. As Massingberd remarks, 'Larger than life; or death either for that matter.'
Or alternatively he is of the ranks, a- twinkle with reflected eccentricity, of those who assiduously serve such persons: Teasie-Weasie Raymond; Arthur Lunn of Fortnums; 'Sadie' Barnett, that grand Cambridge lodgings-keeper who banished an undergraduate from her house not on the grounds that, poking a blanket with a broom-handle, she started from it a naked lady punk with bright green hair, but that the green hair was bi-locational.
I will put my money where my mouth is: I do not fret if I am one of those millions 'He's only had a couple of pints of shandy, so I nicked him for not drinking litres.' kept infinitesimally poorer in order, in an unequal society, to maintain a few conspic- uous airheads, rogues and spendthrifts; to enable Laura Corrigan to 'engage an aero- plane to fly her wig to Nairobi twice a week for a shampoo and set'. I revel in their ludi- crous antics, and think my pennies well sequestered. Much cheaper than a night at the opera. The grand ensemble of all these earthly pilgrimages makes obituaries essen- tial loading for the loo-library of Whites and the Athenaeum.
Each of these undemure Aubreyan 'Brief Lives' outrages all canons of literary art; the details all wildly over the top, the plots all worse than irresponsible. We see that it is not simply that truth is stranger than fic- tion, it is also even iller written. But how our dribbler-scribblers have been short- changing us! Issue by issue they decoy us, fobbing us off with dull sagas about Martin Amis's teeth or the tiresome sex-life of Rosemary West; when we could have been taking down our daily dose of 'Kim' de la Taste Tickell, Pannonica de Koenigswarter, `Cockle' Hoogterp. We should have been told.
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