Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  It wasn’t a bad journalistic idea: the outsider taking on the professional, and showing that being a pro takes more skill than is often realised. Other writers have done the same. But the public, uninterested that Mr Plimpton might have a serious motive for his jaunts, took the view that he was simply a moneyed idiot looking for ways to pass the time. He persuaded Leonard Bernstein to let him join an orchestra he was conducting, and was allowed to help out with the percussion. But even playing the triangle is a skill. He missed his cue in a Mahler symphony. Determined not to miss out next time, he prepared to strike the gong softly in a Tchaikovsky piece. But, in a state of nerves, he bashed it with all his strength, bringing the performance abruptly to a premature end. Mr Plimpton’s oeuvre includes a number of movies, but his parts tended to be brief. He was an Arab in “Lawrence of Arabia” and was beaten to the draw by John Wayne in a western.

  He was much liked by those who knew him well. “Friends were almost always happy to see him because you knew he was bound to improve your mood,” said Norman Mailer. “Few could tell a story with equal humour.” Cheered-up friends seemed always ready to chip in to keep the Paris Review going. George Plimpton said that some people called him a dilettante who was “having too much fun”. But there was nothing “inherently wrong in having fun”. And he gave a lot of people fun too.

  Anna Politkovskaya

  Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, was shot dead on October 7th 2006, aged 48

  SHE was brave beyond belief, reporting a gruesome war and a creeping dictatorship with a sharp pen and steel nerves. It may be a chilling coincidence that Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, but her friends and supporters are in little doubt that her dogged, gloomy reporting of the sinister turn Russia has taken under what she called his “bloody” leadership was what led to her body being dumped in the lift of her Moscow apartment block.

  Miss Politkovskaya’s journalism was distinctive. Not for her the waffly, fawning and self-satisfied essays of the Moscow commentariat, nor the pervasive well-paid advertorials. Austere and a touch obsessive, she reported from the wrecked villages and shattered towns of Chechnya, talking to those on all sides and none, with endless patience and gritty determination.

  She neither sentimentalised the Chechen rebels nor demonised the Russian conscripts – ill-armed, ill-fed and ill-led – who have crushed the Chechens’ half-baked independence. She talked to soldiers’ mothers trying to find their sons’ corpses in military morgues where mangled bodies lay unnamed and unclaimed – the result of the Russian army’s unique mixture of callousness and incompetence. And she talked to Chechens whose friends and relatives had disappeared into the notorious “filtration camps” to suffer torture, mutilation, rape and death.

  Few journalists, from any country, did that. The second Chechen war, which started in 1999 and still fizzles on now, made that mountainous sliver of territory in the northern Caucasus the most dangerous place on the planet for a journalist. Most Moscow-based reporters went seldom, if at all, and then only in daylight and well-guarded. Ms Politkovskaya was unfazed, making around 50 trips there, often for days at a time.

  Ordinary Chechens, and many Russians, adored her. Piles of post and incessant phone calls came, some offering information, more often wanting her help. Could she intercede with a kidnapper? Trace a loved one? She always tried, she said, to do what she could.

  She loathed the warlords who had misruled Chechnya during its brief spells of semi-independence; the Islamic extremists who exploited the conflict; the Russian goons and generals, and their local collaborators. She despised the Chechen leaders installed by Russia: they looted reconstruction money, she said, using torture and kidnapping as a weapon. She was due to file a story on this the day she died.

  The worst effect of the Chechen wars, she reckoned, was on Russia itself. Her reporting from all over her native country made her see it in what many regarded as an unfairly bleak light. Mr Putin’s regime was utterly brutal and corrupt, she would say in her soft, matter-of-fact voice. He represented the worst demons of the Soviet past, revived in modern form. Hundreds had died to bring him to power, and that was just a foretaste of the fascism and war that was to come. Now her pessimism seems less extreme.

  Mr Putin, condemning her murder four days late, said she had “minimal

  influence”. Yet Miss Politkovskaya was often threatened with death. Once Russian special forces held her captive and threatened to leave her dead body in a ditch. She talked them out of it. In 2001, she fled briefly to Austria after a particularly vivid death threat scared not her, but her editors at Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s few remaining independent papers. In 2004, on her way to the siege of a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, where she hoped to mediate between the Chechen hostage-takers and the Russian army, she was poisoned and nearly died.

  This time there was no mistake. She was shot in the body and the head. A pistol was left by her side – the blatant hallmark of a contract killing. She was well aware that the authorities might have her murdered, but in conversation she would brush this aside, saying that her sources were in much more danger than she was. Journalists had a duty to report on the subject that mattered, she said, just as singers had to sing and doctors had to heal.

  Much of her life mirrored the changes in her country. She was born in New York, the child of Soviet diplomats. That gilded upbringing gave her access to a world of ideas and knowledge denied to mostSoviet citizens. Her university dissertation was on Marina Tsvetaeva, a poet then in deep official disfavour. She had good jobs too, first on Izvestia, the government paper, then on Aeroflot’s in-flight magazine.

  Having discovered democracy and the free press as Soviet power collapsed, her faith was uncompromising and sometimes uncomfortable. Nor was she always easy company. A fondness for both sweeping statements and intricate details sometimes made conversation heavy-going. She was both disorganised and single-minded; that could be unnerving, too. But she enjoyed life. She often said that with a KGB officer as president, the least you could do was to smile sometimes, to show the difference between him and you.

  It would be nice to think that Russians will find her example inspiring. Sadly, they may conclude that brave work on hot topics is a bad idea.

  Lazare Ponticelli

  Lazare Ponticelli, the last French foot-soldier of the first world war, died on March 12th 2008, aged 110

  THE business of memory is a solid and solemn thing. Plaques are unveiled on the wall; stone memorials are built in the square; the domed mausoleum rises brick by brick over the city. But the business of memory is also as elusive as water or mist. The yellowing photographs slide to the back of the drawer; the voices fade; and the last rememberers of the dead die in their turn, leaving only what Thomas Hardy called “oblivion’s swallowing sea”.

  The approach of the death of Lazare Ponticelli therefore caused something of a panic in France. This derdesders, “the last of the last”, was for a while the only man in the country who remembered the first world war because he had fought in it. The suburb of Kremlin-Bicetre, where he lived, had like most other communities in France a memorial to the war dead. But, more important, it had Mr Ponticelli, who up to his 111th year appeared every November 11th in his flat cap and brown coat, lean and bright-eyed, gamely managing the few steps required to lay his small bunch of carnations there. The most astonished and serious observers were always children, to whom – if they wanted – he would tell his stories.

  Successive presidents of France strove to honour Mr Ponticelli. It was a way of detaining all the other shadows he represented: the 8.4m workmen, peasants and common folk who, in pointed steel helmets and flapping greatcoats, had gloriously defended the fatherland as poilus, or foot-soldiers, between 1914 and 1918. Jacques Chirac suggested a state funeral for him and perhaps interment in the Panthéon, alongside Rousseau and Voltaire. Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a mass at Les Invalides. Mr Ponticelli wanted none of that: no procession, no racket,
pas de tapage important. He was grateful for his belated Légion d’Honneur, which he kept with his other medals in a shoe-box. But he was keenly aware that he drew such attention only because he was the last.

  What had become of the others? The stretcher-bearers in the Argonne, for example, who had told him they didn’t dare leave the trench for fear of German fire. The man he had heard from no-man’s land, caught in the barbed wire and with his leg severed, screaming to be rescued, until Mr Ponticelli ran out to him with wire-cutters and dragged him back to the lines. The German soldier he tripped over in the dark, already wounded and expecting to be killed, who mutely held up his fingers to show him that he had two children. The comrades who helped him, because he could not read or write, to keep in touch by letter with the milkmaid he had met before the war. Or the four colleagues who held him down when, after the battle of Pal Piccolo, the army surgeon gouged out of his cheek a piece of shrapnel already lodged in gangrene.

  With each new round of shelling, he said, they all expected the worst. They would reassure each other by saying, “If I die, you’ll remember me, won’t you?” Mr Ponticelli felt he had a duty to try, but struggled. These were mes camarades, les gars, un type: faces, not names. And as he faded, even those faces lost their last hold on the living.

  In many ways Mr Ponticelli was not typical of the poilus. He was an Italian, from dirt-poor Emilia-Romagna, who followed his family to France to find work. Some of his childhood, peacetime memories were perhaps as rare as his wartime ones: catching thrushes by hand in the rocky fields, hand-stitching his own shoes, setting up a chimney-sweep business in Nogent-sur-Marne. He thought France “paradise”, and enlisted in the Foreign Legion at 16, under-age, by way of thanks. When Italy joined the war in 1915 heswitched to an Italian Alpine regiment, but only because two policemen marched him bodily to Turin; and he kept his French military passbook carefully on him through three years as a machine-gunner, until he was able to return to paradise again. In 1939 he became a French citizen, and the rest of his life was spent setting up Ponticelli frères, a company that still builds and takes down chimneys and makes industrial piping.

  Increasingly, however, people wanted to talk to him about the war. He always courteously obliged them, though by the end his thin, scratchy voice came out in gasps. It was as important to him as it was to them to underscore the horror and futility of it. More than anything, he was appalled that he had been made to fire on people he didn’t know and to whom he, too, was a stranger. These were fathers of children. He had no quarrel with them. C’est complètement idiot la guerre. His Italian Alpine regiment had once stopped firing for three weeks on the Austrians, whose language many of them spoke; they had swapped loaves of bread for tobacco and taken pictures of each other. To the end of his life, Mr Ponticelli showed no interest in labelling anyone his enemy. He said he did not understand why on earth he, or they, had been fighting.

  On March 17th he had his wish, or most of it: a state funeral for all the poilus at Les Invalides, and then a simple family burial. The government badly wanted this last foot-soldier to be memorialised; but he preferred to be uncelebrated and ordinary, even in some sense forgotten, and thus the more symbolic of all the rest.

  Anthony Powell

  Anthony Dymoke Powell, English satirist, died on March 28th 2000, aged 94

  When Anthony Powell was the literary editor of a magazine, he told his book reviewers to write concisely, “say what it’s about, what you think of it”, and perhaps make a joke. This admirable instruction naturally warms The Economist to Mr Powell, as it is not very different from that given to its own writers. He was also clearly his own man, undaunted by the corruption of friendship or popular taste. W. H. Auden, he said, was overrated, Graham Greene “absurdly overrated”, Laurie Lee “utterly unreadable”. Vladimir Nabokov writes “third-rate tinsel stuff’; Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes “pretentious middlebrow verbiage of the worst kind”. You might not agree with his judgments, but they were distinctive.

  However, it is not as a literary critic that Mr Powell may be remembered. The yards and yards of obsequies that followed his death last week sought to honour him as one of the great novelists of the 20th century, a match for Marcel Proust. He certainly had admiration for Proust, who he considered not at all like those nonentities Greene and Nabokov. It is understandable to see similarities between “A Dance to the Music of Time”, Mr Powell’s sequence of 12 novels, and “Remembrance of Things Past”. Both are concerned with exotic upper middle-class behaviour, and both novelists wrote at great length, but that’s about all they have in common. One reason why Mr Powell’s admirers sought to place him among the elect may be that he had endured in the literary life more than any other writer. At Eton he was a fellow pupil with George Orwell. At Oxford he knew Evelyn Waugh. In Hollywood in the 1930s he had lunch with Scott Fitzgerald. And so on. He was still crafting words in his 90s, beginning, as he put it, with a paragraph of 30 words, turning them into 50, then 80, and revising all the time. Best to forget about Proust, and Dostoevsky, also sometimes linked to Anthony Powell, and appreciate him for what he was: a clever story-teller, with a quiet turn of wit.

  In his writing style, Mr Powell was closer to Ernest Hemingway than Proust. A lot of his dialogue echoes Hemingway’s stripped-down mannerisms. Many Americans were among his fans. Just as they sought to master the language of the sea in the novels of Patrick O’Brian (Obituary, January 15th), so they patiently deciphered the fantastic world of Mr Powell’s England. (An American newspaper thoughtfully explained that he preferred to have his name pronounced to rhyme with Lowell.) Perhaps they took it seriously.

  This was the England of which there will always be one: class obsessed, snobby but, in its way, endearing. In his personal life, Mr Powell encouraged this misleading view. He was married to an aristocrat and much concerned with genealogy. He claimed to have discovered a 12th-century ancestor called Rhys the Hoarse. In his memoirs he describes a life not far removed from the fantasies of his novels, peopled by friends called Fluff, Bumble, Hilly, Fram, Monkey, Liddie, Pansy and a dentist called Sussman, who is for ever fixing Mr Powell’s teeth. His father was a professional soldier, and when Mr Powell was called up in the second world war he naturally joined his father’s regiment. He was, of course, a Tory. He declined a knighthood, but was happy to be made a Companion of Honour, a rarer distinction.

  Probably it is useful to be English to appreciate that much in Mr Powell’s writing is satire. But while the humour is a treat, it is the story that really matters. Anthony Powell was kind to his readers. In the 1m words or so in “A Dance to the Music of Time”, published between 1951 and 1975, several hundred characters make their distinctive entrances and exits. Some have walk-on parts, some disappear and then turn up surprisingly in later books in what he called “the inexorable law of coincidence”. A few dominate the action. Kenneth Widmerpool is present from his emergence in the first volume out of the mist on a school run to his bizarre death in the last volume. In between he serves a sinister capitalist, does well out of the war, marries a nymphomaniac and is made a lord. Widmerpool is always on the make, always pretending to be sympathetic to the latest political fad, the antithesis to the hopeless, if charming, losers of the upper class.

  It is tempting to say that Anthony Powell despised the upper class. Perhaps he did, in the sense that in every satirist there is a bit of loathing. But he saw himself simply as an observer. His writing, he said, “dealt with things as they are”. Nick Jenkins, his narrator in “Dance”, seeks to be coldly objective. Although Mr Powell’s upbringing was on upper class lines, he never had the prospect of being one of the idle rich. For years he worked as a hack

  in a publishing office. As a literary editor, he had “to read some frightfully boring book every fortnight”. In the early years his novels sold modestly. No wonder he was vitriolic about authors he considered had easy success. His urbane manner may have concealed an angry man. He grumbled about the “really terrible rubbish writt
en about people”, including himself. He would have hated his obituaries, picking over his life. Even this kindly article? Probably.

  Kukrit Pramoj

  Kukrit Pramoj, wit, aristocrat, actor, and fighter for democracy in Thailand, died on October 9th 1995, aged 84

  Being called Thailand’s “pillar of democracy” did not much appeal to Kukrit Pramoj. Not only was the title “boring”, there were times when, as Mr Kukrit put it, he began “to think that democracy is not suited for this country”. But “nor is dictatorship for that matter”.

  Stability or the people’s choice? In the West, where democracy was invented, the two are regarded as inseparable. In Asia, where democracy is a (sometimes unwelcome) newcomer, there may be a difficult choice to be made or, more commonly, a compromise to be reached. No government in Asia is wholly democratic in the western sense. Thailand comes as close as any to providing personal freedom. There is a civilian government, albeit one that came to power in July in an election marred by corruption. The army, the villain of numerous coups or attempted coups, the most recent in 1991, is at present keeping its distance. The newspapers are pleasantly unthreatened. Mr Kukrit, whatever his vacillations, has probably done more than any other politician to promote these blessings.

  Thais like to point out that, unlike the other countries of South-East Asia, theirs was never colonised. “And it only has itself to blame,” remarked Kukrit Pramoj. When he was born in 1911 Thailand was still an absolute monarchy. “The secret life of the court”, as described by Anna Loenowens, an English governess of the king’s children in the 1860s, was little changed. Indeed, to this day the king remains a power: “The King and I”, a film based on Anna’s experiences, is not shown in Thailand, where lèse-majesté is a crime.