Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  war, of the need for peace, of the idiocy of politicians, they were the casual views of an ordinary man. He was admired partly because he was so ordinary, an accidental hero.

  Alec Campbell made a return visit to Gallipoli in later life and found a trench used by the Anzacs, now overgrown by wild flowers. He said, “It was a lovely place, you know, if conditions had been better …”

  Marcel Carné

  Marcel Carné, whose “Paradis” turned to pain, died on October 31st 1996, aged 90

  While in his thirties Marcel Carné made “Les Enfants du Paradis”, considered by some critics to be the world’s best film. Although the film was a triumph, it came to be a personal burden. For ever after, at festivals and other gatherings, people would come up to Mr Carné and praise “Paradis”. He would smile courteously and seek to move the conversation to his latest project. But nothing Mr Carné made in the 50 years of his life after “Paradis” was judged to be in the same class.

  Critics said he had lost his touch, or belonged to a bygone era, or whatever. Orson Welles (1915–85) suffered similarly. Anything he did was liable to be measured, adversely, against “Citizen Kane”, regarded as his masterpiece, and made when he was 25. Like Orson Welles, Marcel Carné never lost his enthusiasm for film. He turned up at the Cannes film festival as recently as 1992. But, like Welles, he was edged to the periphery of the business, when once he had occupied the centre.

  Was “Paradis” the best film ever made? The critics who voted it number one were French. But less nationalistic critics elsewhere have consistently put it in their “ten best” list. The film is shown every Saturday in one Paris cinema, and presumably this will continue for as long as the building stands. (Paris likes this agreeable type of memorial: for the past 40 years the Théâtre de la Huchette has been putting on for six nights a week two plays by Eugène Ionesco.) More generally, the film is revived from time to time, but usually in cinemas known in the trade as “art houses”. Variety, an American showbusiness newspaper, once called the film “beautiful” but, perhaps reflecting a Hollywood view, said it was “downright dull”. There are no car chases, no shoot-outs, no violent language. Take your seat for three hours and a quarter and immerse yourself in improbable love stories set in theatrical Paris of the 19th century.

  However it looks now, when “Paradis” was released at the end of the second world war, it came as a total surprise. Mr Carné’s pre-war films had tended to be pessimistic. “Paradis”, made in Paris during the German occupation, was a sumptuous fantasy. What had been going on in wartime France?

  After France surrendered, Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s propaganda chief, saw the French as “sick and worm-eaten” and a market for cheap “corny pictures” made by German-run companies. French directors had to endure the presence of Gestapo officers in their studios. Some collaborated, some escaped abroad, usually to America. Those that resisted did so by trying to make films of the highest quality. “Les Visiteurs du Soir”, made by Mr Carné in 1942 (and which some saw as a symbol of occupied France), is a meticulously crafted film. “Paradis” has sets and costumes created regardless of cost: at the time it was the most expensive film made in France. Throughout, Mr Carné was anxious for the safety of the Jews he employed on the film; while Arletty, one of his stars, was having an affair with a German officer. An extra was arrested in the studio and never seen again. Mr Carné said he would relive that scene for ever.

  While Mr Carné survived the war, a more dangerous threat to his career lay ahead in peacetime. This was the emergence of a “new wave” of French film-makers such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. They made films on small budgets, shot on location to cut costs, and used non-professional actors who made up their own lines, all features that were anathema to Mr Carné. “The new wave assassinated me,” he recalled. “But then it assassinated the cinema too.”

  Mr Carné was not killed off. He made more than a dozen films after “Paradis”, but most were either dismissed by critics or, perhaps worse, received token praise from those reluctant to knock him. As a film-maker he came to be thought of as a poorfinancial risk. The backers of “Mouche”, promised as a new “Paradis”, withdrew after shooting started, and the film was never made.

  He was further wounded when critics turned to his early career in the 1930s. This period is regarded as a golden age of French cinema. Mr Carné worked as an assistant to two of the most gilded directors, René Clair and Jacques Feyder, and then made a number of much-praised pictures of his own, among them “Le Jour se Lève” (also on some “best” lists). Mr Carné’s detractors now suggested that his films of this period owed more to the scriptwriter, Jacques Prévert, than to the director. Prévert, a poet as well as a scriptwriter, did make his own mark on Mr Carné’s films. His dialogue captured the drifting hopelessness of France in the 1930s. “Cinema and poetry are almost the same thing,” he said. But he thought of himself as simply one of the large team assembled by Mr Carné. “He is a great director,” Prévert said, “and an extraordinarily modest man.” The modest Marcel Carné never claimed for “Paradis” that it was the world’s best. It was enough to have made a good film, he said. “Too much praise only creates enemies for you.”

  Barbara Cartland

  Barbara Hamilton Cartland, a romantic, died on May 21st 2000, aged 98

  Over the past year or two the name Barbara Cartland has been mentioned by writers in The Economist at least six times, usually as a synonym for romanticism of one sort or another. No doubt other publications have found it equally useful. Perhaps the adjective Cartlandish may even creep into the dictionaries. Barbara Cartland would have approved of that. She was worried about her prospects for immortality, as indeed she had reason to be. Some time ago she sent to the editors of London newspapers a thick folder containing “The History of Barbara Cartland”, and subtitled “How I want to be remembered.”

  Such an offering was bound to be treated with suspicion by the media’s guardians of truth, even though, as in Barbara Cartland’s case, it was bound with pink ribbon and smelt of scent. Those who actually read it were intrigued with its detail. Being made a dame (a knighthood for a woman) was recorded, of course. But so was being honoured by the National Home Furnishing Association of Colorado Springs. Her entries in reference books show the same anxious attention to detail. For the benefit of scholars delving into her oeuvre she notes helpfully that “Cupid Rides Pillion”, one of her 723 novels, is also known as “Dangerous Love”. Her entry in “Who’s Who” is the longest in the book.

  There might indeed be a doctorate awaiting someone brave enough to read through her millions of words and offer plausible conclusions about why she became a household name. An early surprise might be that as a young woman Barbara Cartland showed signs of being a gifted writer. In those days she took a year over a book, not the couple of weeks she gave to her later work. She worked too for the Daily Express, which under Beaverbrook never allowed a sentence of sloppy writing. But she was perpetually hard up, a grave inhibition for a pretty woman who wanted to enjoy the high life of London. She decided that the quickest way to get rich was to write trash. Lots of writers do that, but she was among the best, becoming a power in the vast trash industry that envelops popular culture, in pop music, films, television and in the arts.

  Respectability was important to Barbara Cartland. No one “rolls around naked in my books”, she said. “I do allow them to go to bed together if they’re married, but it’s all very wonderful and the moon beams.” She said she was born into a more innocent age than today’s. She claimed that Muslims appreciated the moral tone of her books. Colonel Qaddafi of Libya was said to be a fan.

  But the Cartland novels have their own artful form of foreplay, extended over the first 100 pages or so, with relief finally provided by the sanction of marriage. Just as the routine of courtship is constantly renewed in humans, so the Cartland stories are served by a simple plot in which only the scenery and the characters are changed. She liked histor
ical settings. She wrote a biography of Metternich, though academics were discouraged by its title, “The Passionate Diplomat”. Her quickie method of dictating a book to a team of secretaries resembled that of Edgar Wallace, a thriller writer famous in the 1920s, although he managed a mere 175 novels.

  Wallace’s name never made it into a dictionary, but some of his quotable remarks have survived. A highbrow, he said, is a man who has found something more interesting than women. If beingquotable is the way to be remembered, Barbara Cartland did her very best. She was asked in a radio interview whether she thought that British class barriers had broken down. “Of course they have,” she said, “or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to someone like you.”

  She came from a middle-class family, but had aristocratic yearnings. Her daughter, Raine, married the father of Princess Diana. Barbara Cartland thus became Diana’s step-grandmother, and was fiercely defensive of her against other members of the royal family. “This royal family are Germans,” she said. “The princess is English.” Like many of her generation in Britain, she found it difficult to regard Germany as other than an enemy. Her father was killed in the first world war and her two brothers in the second.

  She lived in a statelyish house in Hertfordshire, where journalists were always welcome, and they usually came away with the material for a readable article. Sometimes she would abandon her prudish public mask and talk about sex with remarkable candour. Yes, she believed that a woman should remain a virgin until she was married, but that a man should be experienced, so that one of the partners would know what to do. How would the man get experience if all women were virgins? He would go to a brothel, of course, she said.

  She told a photographer, “I have the body of a young girl, without a line in it.” By then she was an old old lady, and looked it, despite the layers of make-up. He declined her offer to be photographed in the nude. Perhaps, despite her strong will and intelligence, Barbara Cartland’s human weakness was to see herself as eternally young.

  Bonnie Cashin

  Bonnie Cashin, designer of America’s new look, died on February 3rd 2000, aged 84

  On a visit to Japan in the 1950s Bonnie Cashin was told that if the weather was chilly, Japanese talked of a “nine-layer day”. That is, they wore numerous light garments against the cold, instead of a single heavy one. Miss Cashin was shown how to wear a kimono, an artfully structured garment of many layers. Back in New York she introduced the idea of layering into western fashion. Quite likely, people throughout the world, and not just in Japan, had for centuries wrapped themselves in whatever was available to face the rigours of a bitter day. But fashion writers are ever grateful for something that looks new, and for a while layering was praised as the big new idea.

  American fashion was in dire need of new ideas. Its designers were little known outside the United States, and not much there. Americans had all the money, but Paris, irritatingly, seemed to have all the business. American painters were doing their best for their country. Was not New York the art capital of the world? Now it was time to show those uppity Europeans the American way of dress.

  “Fashion evolves from need,” Miss Cashin told a reporter. What did Europeans need? Not an American version of the kimono, a garment which took half an hour to put on (with assistance), was rather stuffy, and was falling into disuse even in Japan. Miss Cashin turned to another source for inspiration. During the second world war she had designed uniforms for women in the armed forces. The mass-produced uniforms were comfortable, protective and allowed freedom of movement. The clothes she now designed had these practical qualities. They were made of hard-wearing materials, including canvas and leather, had useful pockets, toggle fastenings and industrial-size zips. If Miss Cashin’s clothes had the look of a tunic, they were done with a civilian casualness. In the fashion lexicon her clothes are said to have the sportswear look, but this is the look of most women’s clothes today. When some of her clothes were exhibited in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1997, the catalogue said they reflected “democracy’s magnitude and the consequence of independent and intrepid women”. Despite that, European women loved them.

  Intrepid, though, is perhaps not a bad adjective for the long career of Bonnie Cashin. She had no formal training as a designer, just what she had picked up from her mother, a dressmaker. She reckoned that her father, a photographer, had given her an eye for a good design. While still at school, she persuaded a Los Angeles ballet company to give her a job as a dress designer. A year or two later she was designing the costumes for the troupe of dancing girls that gave performances between movies at the Roxy Theatre in New York. She took her needle and sketchbook to Hollywood. “Anna and the King of Siam” is probably the best known of the 60 or so films she designed costumes for.

  She had a reputation for generosity. Anyone who admired something of hers was quite likely to be given it. Whether she intended to or not, Miss Cashin seemed to mirror the disposable nature of fashion: that a product is almost out of date the moment it goes on sale. She was mildly surprised that some of her designs that had survived the dustbin had become collectors’ items. A Cashin leather shoulder bag of the 1960s fetches several hundred dollars, and the market is rising. Jackets in good condition with the Cashin label intact fetch much more. But she was not herself sentimental about the past. Museums and collectors’ pieces were not for the living. You must move on, she said. A cartoon in her New York flat shows a trapeze performer saying, “You’ve got to know when to let go.”

  This idea of constant change is nothing new, of course. “Woman is always fickle and changing,” Virgil complained. An exasperated Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, lamented “the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion”. But fashion has become a pacemaker of the throwaway society. In the cities of the rich world no woman is expected to wear a garment until it is worn out. (Men, unaccountably, tend to hold on to their clothes for years, but the industry is working on the problem.) The clothes industry would be in a pickle without a constant supply of clients dissatisfied with the contents of their wardrobes. The fashion round, what’s in, who’s out, is associated with the poise of Paris, the newness of New York. Without it, the fashion weeks in New York and London, this month’s boost to the clothes industry, would not last a day.

  There are no reliable figures for the phenomenal growth of the fashion

  industry, chiefly because its reach is so wide – not just clothes, but everything that goes with them, from buttons to scent. What can be said is that a single idea can give birth to a product worth infinite millions. What used to be called plimsolls have been transformed into vastly expensive trainers. Denim, a humble material whose virtue was its cheapness, became as valuable as satin when turned into jeans. Jeans and trainers are the foremost innovative fashions of recent decades. Bonnie Cashin’s “democratic look” is a reasonable runner-up.

  Charles Causley

  Charles Causley, a defiantly unmodern poet, died on November 4th 2003, aged 86

  THE purest poetry, it can be argued, springs not from urban angst or cloistered academies, nor even from the passionate contemplation of nature. It grows from the soil, and is best expressed in the simple songs of ordinary people. Just as a line of hills, or the edge of a wood, can move an English heart in inexplicable ways, so too can the plain, quiet words of “The Sally Gardens” or “Linden Lea”, even before a Benjamin Britten or a Ralph Vaughan Williams has added woodwinds to them.

  Yet for centuries, from the decorous Augustans through the blazing Romantics to the solid Victorians, no one paid much attention to the ballads of England’s drinking houses or the rhymes of its playgrounds. The odd little snatches chanted in Shakespeare’s plays by Puck or Ariel had a certain haunting power, but no poetic virtue. These were primitive

  things. Only poor half-mad William Blake, buffeting the wind on Hampstead Heath, gained some sort of audience for “songs” that deliberately confused the worlds of the adult and the child. And only Rudyard Kipling ga
ve soldiers’ slangy ballads an honoured place in his work.

  Charles Causley not only embraced this sort of poetry, but became its best modern practitioner. He called his poems ballads, carols, serenades, rondels and nursery rhymes, and wrote them as if they should be danced to. He delighted too, like Blake, in making poems that could be read by children and adults alike. He did not believe in the distinction, and in his work the observer always kept both perspectives. The world was disturbing as well as magical, and the eye that saw it both innocent and knowing. In “Timothy Winters”, he wrote of a wild schoolboy with the boy’s defiance and the teacher’s frustration:

  When teacher talks he won’t hear a word

  And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird

  He licks the patterns off his plate

  And he’s not even heard of the Welfare State.

  while in “Recruiting Drive”, one of many poems born out of his naval experiences in the second world war, the “lily-white boy” is both a pitiable piece of cannon-fodder and a character from a fairy tale:

  Under the willow the willow

  I heard the butcher bird sing,

  Come out you fine young fellow

  From under your mother’s wing ...

  You must take off your clothes for the doctor And stand as straight as a pin, His hand of stone on your white breastbone Where the bullets all go in.

  Even his rare non-ballads could not leave childhood songs aside, as in “Convoy”, about a drowned sailor in the Arctic: