Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  In his first, he told weary Britons that even New York was a war casualty, driven to burning filthy soft coal and hoarding butter. In his last, delivered a month before his death, he reminded his audience that Bill Clinton might well have invaded Iraq but for the Monica Lewinsky affair. “By the time Clinton was ready to mobilise an American or allied force, he didn’t possess the moral authority to invade Long Island.” In the almost 3,000 letters in between – he missed only three broadcasts – he covered all the most important events in modern American history, from Watergate to September 11th, from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers, from Vietnam to the California recall.

  Mr Cooke was almost as influential in shaping America’s image of Britain. As the host of “Masterpiece Theatre” for two decades, he carefully nurtured the idea that Britain continued to play Greece to America’s Rome. He sat in his easy chair surrounded by books and enveloped by civilisation, but with no trace of that superiority that sometimes seems natural to Limeys. “As empires go,” he once told his American audience, “the British empire was a wink in the eye of history.”

  In 1976 his adopted country paid him the highest compliment imaginable, when Congress chose him to give the keynote address at its bicentennial celebration. It was all a very long way from Salford, near Manchester, where he had been born as plain Alfred Cooke, the son of a metalworker. His elder brother left school at 15 to become a butcher. But Alfred shinned up the scholarship ladder, togrammar school and Cambridge, before winning that fateful Harkness Fellowship.

  Though known mostly as a broadcaster after 1938, when the BBC made him its chief commentator on American affairs, Mr Cooke was also for 27 years the chief American correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. He short-changed neither employer, at one stage sending the newspaper 4,000 words a day. Yet, as he admitted, he was seldom present at “a single accidental convulsion of history”. The few exceptions became fodder for his most compelling letters, as when he found himself in the hotel pantry where Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968. That place, he told his audience, “I suppose will never be wiped out of my memory: a sinister alley, a Roman circus run amok, and a charnel house. It would be quite false to say, as I should truly like to say, that I’m sorry I was there.” For once, his journalistic instincts were trumping his good manners.

  The world that produced Mr Cooke has gone. Americans increasingly see British journalists not as civilised gentlemen but as drunken spongers, like Peter Fallow in Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities”. The Guardian, the descendant of Mr Cooke’s old paper, routinely presents Americans as bloodthirsty lard-arses. The two countries, ostensibly allies, too often view each other suspiciously and lovelessly. At Mr Cooke’s death, the special relationship had never needed him more.

  Maurice Couve de Murville

  Maurice Couve de Murville, a French patriot, died on December 24th 1999, aged 92

  During the 1960s France practised what are remembered as the “politics of grandeur”. They were the creation of Charles de Gaulle, the French president from 1959 to 1969, and his foreign minister, Maurice Couve de Murville. They sought to imbue in the minds of their countrymen a new and glorious France, untarnished by defeat. Historians are divided on whether they succeeded, and if they did whether their success has been lasting. What is clear is that in its pursuit of la gloire France managed to upset, and sometimes anger, its closest friends, notably Britain and the United States, creating distrust for French policies that persists to this day.

  One view of Mr Couve was that he was simply a servant, reporting to his master on Friday mornings and receiving his instructions for the following week. It was an excusable mistake. How could anyone be other than servile to the towering De Gaulle? But it is probably more accurate to think of Mr Couve as a Jeeves, the highly intelligent interpreter of his master’s wishes and the quiet dissuader of his eccentricities.

  But an unsmiling Jeeves. Mr Couve was known for his chilly silences. Ask him a question and he might simply look at you without speaking, undermining your confidence by the second. Was the question so idiotic? Eventually Mr Couve would pronounce. “Our thinking is different,” he replied to a journalist who asked about France’s differences with the United States. Different in what way? Another silence. The questioner found out in 1966 when, to show its independence from the “Anglo-Saxons”, France withdrew from the NATO command structure and expelled its American-led staff from Paris. For years Britain was made to look foolish trying to get into the Common Market, the forerunner of the European Union, when the De Gaulle−Couve partnership had decided its entry to the club would weaken French influence. Even the Germans and others in the club deferred to the French, who for months in 1965 boycotted all market affairs until their farmers could be assured of favoured treatment. For Mr Couve, De Gaulle wrote in his memoirs, “nothing in life” was more important than that France should “survive in the first rank of nations”.

  When France was defeated by Germany in 1940 Maurice Couve de Murville at first worked for the puppet government in Vichy. He had been a senior civil servant in the pre-war government, specialising in financial matters. In Vichy he was said to have done his best to stop the Germans seizing France’s gold reserves. He was then in his early 30s, married with a young family, and Hitler was the master of continental Europe. Like many Vichy officials who later had successful post-war careers, his time as a collaborator was not held against him.

  In 1943 he left France and eventually joined De Gaulle’s government in exile. The two men seemed immediately to hit it off. Apart from having a common purpose in liberating France, they saw themselves as near nobility with a duty to defend traditional values. Mr Couve’s father, a lawyer and later a judge, had added the aristocratic “de Murville” to the family name. De Gaulle claimed as an ancestor a

  knight who fought at Agincourt, although perhaps not hard enough as England won.

  De Gaulle was briefly the leader of post-war France before resigning in disgust over the country’s political system, which he considered unworkable. In 1958, at a time of deep crisis for the country, he returned, first as prime minister and later, having changed the constitution, as president. By then Mr Couve had become ambassador to West Germany. De Gaulle made him foreign minister, a job he was to hold for ten years, longer than any other occupant of that post; longer even, he observed, than Talleyrand, the foreign minister under Napoleon, who was also ambitious for France.

  Although the 1960s might seem to have been an exhilarating time for France, there is little evidence that most ordinary French people shared the Gaullist view of history, destiny and all that. The tenth anniversary of De Gaulle’s rule in 1968 was marred by student riots and a general strike, ostensibly against the Vietnam war but which developed into a protest against authoritarian, centralist government in general.The French franc came under attack and a chastened government had to apply for an emergency loan to the International Monetary Fund, an organisation that De Gaulle had attacked as the villain of “dollar hegemony”. Mr Couve was made prime minister with a brief to sort out the mess and bring France to order. But the clever diplomat was no politician. His chilly silences might be a formidable weapon in the conference room, his cerebral qualities were undisputed, but to the voter he was seen as a cold fish. He was too old to learn populist tricks; and anyway would have regarded them as unprincipled. De Gaulle stood down in 1969 after losing a referendum on proposed reforms that had been drafted by Mr Couve. Georges Pompidou was elected president, and after a few months dropped Mr Couve as prime minister. It was time for France to repair its friendships.

  George Dawson

  George Dawson, who discovered literacy late in life, died on July 5th 2001, aged 103

  For the first 98 years of his life George Dawson could not read or write. He was persuaded that it was never too late to learn and turned out to be a remarkably able student. In his remaining five years he became a celebrity in the United States. Television programmes were made about his life. H
e was awarded honorary degrees by two universities. A school was named after him.

  Literacy, or rather the lack of it, can be a touchy subject in countries whose people are materially rich but may have difficulty in constructing a decent sentence. According to the World Bank, 99% of Americans can read and write. But a report by the OECD in April shattered any complacency about this figure for the world’s richest country by claiming that 60% of Americans aged 16 to 25 were “functionally illiterate”, meaning that when it came to, say, filling in a form they were stumped. A test of simple numeracy was included by the OECD, which involved the reading of a timetable, unfairly say some, realistically say others. The United States came top of the OECD’s list of shame. Finland and Denmark did best of the industrialised countries, each having only 10% of illiterate young dunces.

  So here was the improbably-aged Mr Dawson. If he could at least learn to stop signing his name with an X, surely those young slackers could make more of an effort to cope with the hard stuff. Such was the theme of Mr Dawson’s philosophising in his appearances at schools, universities and, most importantly, on television.

  “I am still learning,” he would say, in his rolling southern accent. He was born in Texas, whose rapid development as an agricultural state in the early 19th century had been based on slavery. George Dawson was the grandson of a slave. So, as well as becoming a teacher’s pet, Mr Dawson was taken under the wing of black reformists. He obliged them with tales of a harsh life. When he was ten, he said, a friend of his was lynched. You could not trust the white man, he said.

  Along with educationalists and reformists, George Dawson was adopted by what might be called the long-lifeists, an important group in the United States. To get to a great age is an accomplishment; to do so and remain clear minded is a bit of a marvel. The long-lifers’ heroes are the likes of John Glenn, who circled the earth at the age of 77, and Goya, who was still painting rather well at 80. One group names a “centenarian of the month”, who is closely questioned about how he or she made it.

  Mr Dawson, its choice for October 2000, catalogued a life of continuous manual labour, starting at the age of four as a farm hand. It had some variety. He had worked in the gangs that had laid railways in Texas; he once travelled to Canada to see what snow was like. He had tamed wild horses. He once played baseball professionally. He had outlived his four wives, his four siblings and two of his seven children. But his experiences did not offer a clue to a reliable elixir anxiously sought by long-lifeists. Even his diet was ordinary: a beef sandwich for lunch, fish for supper. He seemed to have reached a great age more by luck than scheming.

  The sight of Mr Dawson on television, looking fit and wise, aroused mixed feelings among Americans. For the rich, long life has come to be regarded as the new human right. The United Nations itself lists longevity as one of the criteria for determining quality of life. But what of those people who have outlasted their quota of threescore years and ten only to be kept in a state of half-life by the skills of medicine? Such questions have dimmed much of the sentimentality attached to America’s extraordinary number of centenarians – some 70,000 and rising. Awriter in the March issue of Psychological Science observed, “Our society is living longer, and the issue is, if you live longer, what are those last years like, and is length itself a good thing?”

  At the age of 102 Mr Dawson the scholar gained fresh attention by relaunching himself as an author. He published a book of memoirs, albeit written in collaboration with a schoolteacher. Some people were surprised by the book’s Panglossian title, Life Is So Good, when previously Mr Dawson had given the impression that much of his life had been pretty awful. Like many biographies some bits ring truer than others. This is one of the truer-sounding bits:

  I kept it a secret that I couldn’t read … When I travelled somewhere I could never read a sign. I had to ask people things and had to remember. I could never let my mind forget anything. I listened to the news and had to trust what I heard. I never read it for myself. My wife read the mail and paid our bills … People wonder why I didn’t go to school earlier. But when I was young I had missed my turn to go. One day, out of the blue, a man came to the door. He handed me a piece of paper which I couldn’t read. He said there were some classes for adults. My turn had come. I always thought I could drive a spike as good as any man and cook as good as any woman. I just figured if everybody else can learn to read, I could too.

  A quite complex man had discovered happiness in an unconsidered pleasure. For nearly 100 years, George Dawson said, his name was X. “Writing my real name was one of the greatest things in my life.”

  Magda Denes

  Magda Denes, a hidden child in the second world war, died on December 28th 1996, aged 62

  For most of her life Magda Denes preferred not to talk of her experiences as a child in the second world war, which she spent in hiding. In later life Dr Denes rose to eminence in her profession of psychoanalysis, both in private practice in New York and in academic posts, but interviewers who sought to delve deeply into her own psyche for early recollections drew a blank. “Hidden children try to forget what happened to them,” she said.

  The number of children who were confined to secret places for long periods to escape the concentration camp appalled her: perhaps as many as 100,000 in Germany and the territories it occupied. And these were only a fraction of the million or more children who were caught and died in captivity, the best known of whom was Anne Frank, a Dutch girl who has come to exemplify the fate of Jewish children in the war.

  Many victims of that time have tried, but with only limited success, to overcome the privations of their early years. Two of the more famous were Primo Levi, a scientist and writer who was interned in concentration camps, and Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist who later used his experience in the camps to treat disturbed children in America. Both committed suicide.

  From her work in psychology, Dr Denes may have decided that the hidden portion of her life should best be faced. Whatever the reason, she did eventually feel compelled to write of her childhood and did so at length. It was almost the last thing she did. Her book, Castles Burning: A Child’s Life in War, is published this month in America (W. W. Norton).

  Dr Denes had planned to tour the United States and Europe in connection with the book. Her death at this moment might have seemed to her typical of the kicks from a brutal world. For age did not mellow her. Anne Frank’s memorialists in films and books have tended to avoid arousing hate against her oppressors. But Dr Denes never stopped loathing the Germans and their wartime surrogates in her native Hungary.

  Magda Denes was born into a privileged household. Hungary was poor. It had been on the losing side in the first world war and the victors had awarded two-thirds of its territory to Yugoslavia and other neighbours (creating problems that still exist). But the Denes family was well off. Magda’s father was a successful publisher in Budapest. There were servants and other luxuries. Magda does not seem to have been an appealing child. In her mother’s eyes, Magda said, she was “impossibly sarcastic, big-mouthed, insolent and far too smart”. Still, at five, she must have had some charm. Magda recalled stories being read to her “in the dark of night, when I couldn’t sleep”, about Hungary’s magical castles, stories that always had a happy ending. The castles in the title of her book started burning in her imagination in 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war, when Magda’s father abandoned his family and left for America.

  The bitterness Magda felt towards her father persisted throughout her life. Indignantly, she listed the luggage he took with him, including 12 suits and 45 shirts. No doubt her father had his reasons

  for leaving. He had been critical of the Hungarian dictator, Admiral Horthy. Jews in Hungary were already coming under threat from Arrow-Cross, the local Nazis. Parts of Budapest were barred to Jews. Denes père may have thought that, by leaving, he would make his family safe.

  What happened was that for years Magda, her brother Ivan and their mother were co
nstantly on the move. Once Magda had to hide in an oven. Ivan was caught and shot.

  After the war Hungary became a Soviet satellite. Magda experienced “a deep rot” that “ate away” her life. She got to America by way of Austria and Cuba. Meeting her father again was not a happy reunion. He thought her a rather unpleasant girl. She said that starving, while being eaten by lice, “tends to corrode one’s pleasant side”.Her life in New York was almost conventional. She had an education, rose in her career, got married and had two children. She became a psychologist, she said, because of her early experiences. “Survivors identify with the damaged. To help is a self-healing process.” She was drawn into feminist issues. One was abortion, or, as euphemists like to term it, being “pro-life” or “pro-choice”. How did Dr Denes feel about the unborn child in its “hiding place”? She spent two years interviewing staff in abortion clinics, and her report, published as a book that has become a classic of its type, reflected the mental agonies she had undergone. Abortion, she said, was murder, whatever it was called. “No physician involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that.” That sounds like an anti-abortion message, and some of the detail in her report has been used by “pro-life” campaigners. This upset her, for her conclusion, after considering the many reasons for abortion, was that it was killing “of a very special and necessary sort”. Any distracting sentiment in Magda Denes was crushed from the age of five.

  Jacques Derrida