Working the Dead Beat (26 page)

Rogues, Rascals, and Romantics

 

 

 

Obituaries as Entertainment and the Rise of Dead-Beat Groupies

E
CCENTRICITY COURSES LIKE
a river through the lives of the ten people I have written about in “Rogues, Rascals, and Romantics.” They are all large personalities who in various ways made their mark on Canadian society.

They include a hapless spy, a self-promoting saxophonist, an ingenious crook whose disguises duped police on both sides of the border, an inspired graphic designer who was felled by his addiction to cocaine, the establishment scourge and author of Canada's first significant gay novel, and the inventor of Trivial Pursuit, one of the most successful board games of all time. Some, such as actor Jackie Burroughs, poet Irving Layton, writer Lindalee Tracey, and singer Denny Doherty, had talents that will guarantee their cultural legacies, but all of them will be remembered as characters who lived at full tilt, whatever the consequences.

I used to be stunned when grieving friends and family were outraged that I would write about peccadilloes as well as triumphs. Over the years I came to realize that blaming me — the messenger — was really an indication of their mixed emotions about the departed. They couldn't get mad at their loved one for having the effrontery to die or for exhibiting embarrassing character traits, so they transferred their anger to me instead.

In October 2008 I wrote the obituary of Connie Rooke, a woman I had known and admired. She was a friend, but that is not why I wrote about her. She was a well-published literary critic, a former editor of the
Malahat Review
, a co-founder of the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, a former president of the University of Winnipeg, and a champion of Canadian writers and writing — among other coups she was the first person to publish short stories by Yann Martel and Rohinton Mistry. She also had a dramatic life, as the wife of writer Leon Rooke and as a well-connected literary force. Besides, she had turned her own dying into a “best practices” lesson about how to grab hold of every moment that remained.

There's nothing uplifting about a terminal cancer diagnosis. For most people it is the beginning of an increasingly solitary journey into the unknown. But Rooke approached her own death at sixty-five with such an openness (and that did include railing against the fading light) and an intellectual curiosity that her hospital bed — set up in a bright, sunny room in the front of her downtown Toronto house with an “Obama for President” poster on the footboard — became a salon where family, friends, neighbours, and colleagues gathered to gossip, debate, and share the company of an always stimulating and generous woman.

Some of Rooke's friends wanted me to ignore her blustery tenure at the University of Winnipeg, which ended abruptly when in 2002 the Board of Regents bought out the remaining two years of her contract. That was impossible, for it was on the public record. Even more contentious, apparently, was a rupture in her long marriage. That too was well-known in literary and academic communities, and it had a significant impact on her decision to leave the University of Victoria and relocate to the University of Guelph, where she and her husband co-founded the Eden Mills Writers' Festival.

After checking the details with Rooke's widower, I wrote: “The Rookes' marriage, which had always been a volatile mix of hard work, partying, and the occasional indiscretion — on his part — burst its seams in the eighties after she became passionately involved with poet George Bowering, although he now denies that they had an affair. As for [Leon] Rooke, he admits that he strong-armed the king-sized marital mattress down the stairs and threw it on to the front lawn — although he refutes reports that he set it on fire. ‘Everything eventually settled down and returned to the way it should have been,' he said. ‘Friends said things would never be the same, but that wasn't true. They were better. Maybe it is necessary sometimes for marriages to go through those brittle break-up things. It was always an exciting marriage, but after that, it just got better.'”

Those details, amounting to one paragraph in an almost 2,500-word obit, caused me to be whispered about, shunned at social gatherings, and publicly criticized for telling the truth. More than fifteen months later, in the question period following a public lecture I had given in Victoria, a freelance documentary filmmaker demanded to know why I hadn't sought the permission and approval of Rooke's husband and grown son before publishing the obituary — a breach of fundamental journalistic ethics. The furor eventually passed, but it was an ugly example of how mourners can try to hijack obituaries.

In the fall of 2011 I reluctantly wrote about another friend, Richard Landon, the director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. I wasn't prepared to sanitize the facts of his personal life while paying tribute to his professional accomplishments. “Even in his younger years, Landon had the appearance of a man who had been up far too late the night before, doing things that were probably best forgotten,” I wrote. “His sartorial style was ramshackle, but his conversation was discursive and replete with fascinating tales of his exploits as a collector of literary treasures. He loved to smoke and drink, especially at the same time, although he rarely had a drink before noon. His capacity, which was prodigious, was exceeded only by the strength of his friendship with colleagues, competitors, collectors, patrons, researchers, and booksellers.

“On the personal front, he was uncommonly successful with women, even to the surprise of his own mother. He was married twice and had a long-time relationship with a British antiquarian bookseller that was as good as a marriage. His soulmate, however, both romantically and intellectually, was Marie Korey, the rare books librarian he met at a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1976, and married in 1990. They shared a passion for books and a mutual appreciation that extended to completing each other's sentences.”

This time, though, friends and family recognized the man they knew in the portrait I had drawn in the obituary. How to explain the radically different reactions five years apart? Time and gender are insufficient. It all comes down, I think, to grief and how it affects different mourners. I can empathize with their outrage, but I can't muffle what I write in anticipation of hurt feelings. I'm writing for readers, not the family.

The trend to unfettered obituaries can be attributed to yet another Canadian, Conrad Black, back in his media baron days. In 1985 Black bought the
Daily Telegraph
, among other papers. His main newspaper rival was Rupert Murdoch, who had acquired the
Times
in 1981 from another Canadian mogul, Ken Thomson, second Lord Thomson of Fleet. Thomson had put the paper up for sale after a disastrous strike that saw the
Times
shut down for nearly a calendar year — from December 1978 to November 1979.

During the strike, a deeply eccentric man named Hugh Massingberd, an editor at
Burke's Peerage
, the publication that keeps track of who has what title and has been awarded which gong — sort of like a manual for champion dog breeders — approached Bill Deedes, editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, and suggested he should hire him to improve its “cenotaph” obituaries while the
Times
was shut down. Massingberd's proposal was rejected on the grounds that it was “rather bad form” to exploit the absence of “Another Newspaper” in that way. Let me tell you, those old-boy rules no longer apply in today's cut-throat journalism.

So Massingberd stayed at
Burke's Peerage
, doing valuable genealogical research for the job that would eventually make him famous. After Black appointed the war correspondent and historian Max Hastings editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, he in turn hired Massingberd — or “Massivesnob,” as he was called in the satirical magazine
Private Eye
— as obituaries editor.

From his arrival in July 1986 until he had to resign the post in 1994 after a heart attack and a quadruple bypass, Massingberd “dedicated myself to the chronicling of what people were
really
like through informal anecdote, description and character sketch rather than merely trot[ting] out the bald
curriculum vitae
,” as he explained in the introduction to
The Daily Telegraph Book of Obituaries: A Celebration of Eccentric Lives.
In the process, Massingberd revolutionized the obituarist's craft.

Besides having worked at
Burke's Peerage
, Massingberd was an expert on country houses and a huge fan of John Aubrey, the gossipy seventeenth-century chronicler of the rich, the capricious, and the devious whom I talked about earlier in the “Builders” chapter. Aubrey's twentieth-century biographer and editor Anthony Powell aptly described his
Brief Lives
as “that extraordinary jumble of biography from which later historians have plundered so much of their picturesque detail.”

Unweighted by the cenotaph tradition so beloved by the
Times
, Massingberd was able to start afresh at the
Daily Telegraph
. He made the new obituary page much more egalitarian, eccentric, and lively. One of my favourites, from January 1987, was for a former car salesman named Charles Gordon, who had become the twelfth Marquess of Huntly on the death of his great-uncle in 1937. After the failure of his first marriage in 1965, Lord Huntly, then sixty-nine, married a nurse more than forty years his junior. When asked about his choice of a bride, he apparently replied: “I'm a very fit man. I walk my dog every day. I don't have to wear spectacles. I still have my own teeth. Why should I marry some dried-up old bag?”

Before the advent of blogs and online newspapers, Massingberd made obituaries interactive because he encouraged his contributors to write about a subject's less salubrious traits and escapades in a thinly veiled code that discerning readers could decipher to their private delectation. And since the obituaries were unsigned, obituarists could unsheathe their literary knives on friends, rivals, and foes without public accountability — although readers delighted in guessing who had written what.

Early on, Massingberd began gathering the best obituaries from the newspaper and publishing them in book form. That gave them a second life and a much wider readership. The series, which has carried on under Massingberd's successors, includes
A Celebration of Eccentric Lives: Rogues, Entertainers, Sports Figures
and even
Canada from Afar: The Telegraph Book of Canadian Obituaries
, edited by David Twiston Davies, with an introduction by Conrad Black.

The same month that Massingberd arrived at the
Daily Telegraph
, an Oxford antiquarian bookseller named James Fergusson was hired to be the obituaries editor of an about-to-be-launched newspaper called the
Independent
. Fergusson took his inspiration, or so he wrote in “Last Words” in the
London Library Magazine
in 2010, from the
Gentleman's Magazine,
which
“
with its
monthly lists of the interesting dead” was “a democratic calendar of curious anecdotes,” and from the “timeless authority” of
The
Dictionary of National Biography.
Founded in 1882 by Sir Leslie Stephen, father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, the
dnb
was “a monument of original scholarship” and “one of the great achievements of the Victorian age.”

Fergusson insisted that all obituaries in the
Independent
must carry bylines. Even now the argument rages between the “accountability” of signed obituaries in the
Independent
and the
Guardian
and the “objectivity” of anonymous ones in the
Times
, the
Daily Telegraph
, and the
Economist
. Unlike Massingberd, who loved military types — “the moustaches,” as he called them — eccentrics, and scoundrels, Fergusson wanted the obscure and the overlooked on his pages: “We relished difficult academics, untranslated poets, untranslatable graffiti artists, Aboriginal dream-painters, Scotland's greatest potato collector, Britain's oldest working ploughman; and we led the field in commemorating a generation scythed down by the
AIDS
epidemic of the late 1980s.” In a barely veiled swipe at Massingberd, Fergusson pointed out: “We aimed our obituaries not at the readership of clubby coevals, speakers of code, and partners in euphemism, but at a larger, younger audience.”

Besides bylines, Fergusson introduced two other innovations during his tenure (1986–2007) that are now standard on obituary pages: the use of archival and news photographs that illustrated the personality of the subject rather than the airbrushed head-and-shoulders coffin shots that were typical of the time, and a sidebar summarizing vital statistics, including birth and death dates.