NIL NISI BONUM
Messenger, Robert
Casual NIL NISI BONUM I have a thing for obituaries. At my age, it’s not yet a matter of keeping score against my contemporaries. It’s more a taste for the appreciative and anecdotal....
...That its author is the formidably brilliant Gabriel Josipovici means you may have lived more than well...
...Consider this specimen in the Guardian on October 18: Stephen Medcalf, emeritus reader in English at Sussex University, who has died aged 70, had one of the fi nest minds I have ever known...
...You’ll have noted that these extracts are British in origin...
...This extended to her philandering fi rst husband, with whom she remained both friendly and on good business terms...
...But they publish fi rst-rate critical essays, which tend to the very serious, with the author intent on establishing the subject’s canonical place...
...Which is not to deprecate reporting: Where, but in the obits—in this case Robert Goulet’s in the Independent— would you learn that, to her credit, Julie Andrews fought off the advances of both Richard Burton and Goulet while performing in Camelot...
...As Josipovici noted: “Though his friends and students knew that he had for years been working on a book on the development of Eliot’s thought, we all sensed that he preferred to read and think and teach rather than to write, and, like his tutor Hugo Dyson, ended his career without a single major book to his name...
...I couldn’t get anywhere, either...
...The modern obituary was born there just over 20 years ago when Max Hastings put Hugh MontgomeryMassingberd in charge of the obits columns at the Daily Telegraph...
...This is news that stays news...
...After a while the cleaners went on strike and refused to enter his room...
...He can appreciate the man for who he was and lay on a few delightful details: “The chaos of Stephen’s room was legendary...
...We still have fi ne cultural reviews going in this country—the New Criterion, the Yale Review, the Hudson Review, to name just three...
...Not only could he recite reams of poetry in Greek, Latin, English and Anglo-Saxon, and whole stories by Kipling and P.G...
...Asked by reporters for her views on the 88year-old Castelli’s last marriage, to a woman 50 years his junior, Sonnabend discreetly answered, “I have many thoughts, but no statement...
...The full obituary was an utter delight and later that night I dug out Josipo vici’s anthology The Modern English Novel, which contained a lovely piece on Wodehouse— history’s greatest spreader of sweetness and light—by Stephen Medcalf...
...Lyricist Alan Jay] Lerner later reported that Goulet had ‘a severe crush’ on Julie Andrews, who was happily married...
...Tiny, plump and sporting an unconvincing wig, her reticence was legendary...
...Such are the plums that make me an obits man...
...A steady fl ow of entertaining lives are related in the Telegraph, Times, Guardian, and Independent, and they bond a certain type of reader to these papers far more than any original reporting could...
...Such treatment is not what Stephen Medcalf needed...
...The obit, though, remains a sort of sociocultural petit-four...
...You must have lived your life rather well to get such a paragraph written about you...
...The obituarist doesn’t need Medcalf to have set Eliot studies on its head...
...ROBERT MESSENGER...
...In came elegant writing and an emphasis on humor and interesting lives—rather than just famous ones—and a preference for candor over tact...
...students had to sweep books and papers off chairs to sit down, and received essays back with footprints on...
...Newspapers don’t present much sweetness or humor, even on the review and feature pages...
...Consider the domestic arrangements of the New York gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend, famous for showing all the excesses of Pop Art and the worse that followed, from the Independent on October 27: Through all of this, Sonnabend herself remained an enigma...
...When was the last time a book review in a newspaper sent you off to your shelves...
...Goulet reputedly asked Burton for advice, and Burton told Lerner, “Why did he come to me...
...The competitiveness of the London newspapers extends even to death, with large obituary pages that aim to entertain (and attract) readers...
...Wodehouse, but—and this is what really marked him out—whatever he said about literature immediately struck one as true, fresh and profound...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 10
