by Ann Wroe
In his researches in the Vatican’s and other archives Mr Graham came across many an embarrassing skeleton, not directly connected with the war. In a file he labelled “hoaxes, howlers and humbug” there is an account of an American spy planted in the Vatican who filed colourful, and entirely imaginary, reports of chats with the pope. Robert Graham “unloaded all my stuff before I pop off”, and told his colleagues in the Vatican that it was time for him to return home to his native California. In a few months he was dead.
Paolo Gucci
Paolo Gucci, designer of fashionable goods, and black sheep of his family, died on October 10th 1995, aged 64
The famous families of Italy have had mixed fortunes. “I can find no one who can definitely suggest a basis for agreement among them,” observed Machiavelli, normally a cool customer, trying to keep his temper in his dealings with Cesare Borgia, the head of the nastiest family in Italian history. Machiavelli might have been equally at a loss had he had to deal with the Guccis. This is one of the industrious families that have been the driving force of Italy’s economy. But the family ended up by destroying itself. Simple quarrels led to assault, litigation and betrayals. Paolo Gucci has been mostly blamed for the destruction of the family. He was said to be the black sheep. His defenders say that at least he was a designer of brilliance and had vision.
Italy’s talent for creating agreeable things has been a redeeming feature in a century that otherwise has not treated the country well. Its most famous politician, Mussolini, was the mentor of Hitler. Italy chose the losing side in the second world war, and its post-war politics have been steeped in corruption on a massive scale. But it has produced great film-makers, such as De Sica, great novelists, such as Moravia, and at least one key group of artists, the Futurists. For Paolo Gucci this was the real Italy, creative and civilised. And, because he was born into a rich family, he could indulge himself in its pleasures.
Grandpa Guccio Gucci had founded the family fortunes in the early years of the 20th century with a leather goods shop in Florence. By the 1950s there were shops in posh districts of other cities, including New York. Paolo Gucci, the designer of nearly all the delectable Gucci products, then proposed to sell them to a wider market than that provided by the family shops.
These days this seems an obvious idea, with such firms as Armani and Cartier cultivating a mass-market while still suggesting exclusivity. As far back as 1899, Thorstein Veblen, an American economist (whose pioneering book on consumerism Mr Gucci probably read), had predicted that, as wealth spread, people would buy things that enhanced “their esteem and envy” among their fellows. But Mr Gucci’s father, Aldo, and an uncle, Rodolfo, wanted to continue to produce items only for the select few. Eventually they were persuaded, though reluctantly, by Paolo’s promise of untold riches.
He was spectacularly successful, particularly in America. His designs, bearing the Gucci logo and a band of green, red and black, became a mark of personal affluence. So many political lobbyists wore his shoes in Washington that their favourite stamping ground became known as Gucci Gulch. At one time around 14,000 items carried the Gucci logo, not just handbags, headscarves and scent, but coffee mugs and key-rings. It may be a sort of compliment that in Asia they were the most pirated of western products.
Despite the profits involved, Mr Gucci’s father and other members of the family turned on him for popularising, and, worse, Americanising, the family name. In their view he had turned his back on Italy. Even his private life was seen as more American than Italian. He had been divorced, had abandoned a second wife and lived openly with a third woman. TraditionalistItalians are supposed to stay married, with mistresses a tolerated secret. Once Mr Gucci emerged from a board meeting with blood pouring from a gash in his face. “You see what happens when the Gucci board of directors meets,” he shouted to delighted reporters. He claimed his attackers had included his father and others in the family. He sued them, and the case drifted on expensively for years. Whatever the provocation, Italy was shocked when, as a result of information provided by Mr Gucci, his 81-year-old father, Aldo, was jailed in America for tax dodging. Mr Gucci was sacked by the family firm, but ran his own business for a time, trading, not very successfully, as “Paolo Gucci”. Then there was Maurizio, a cousin who ran part of the Gucci empire. He was accused by Aldo Gucci of falsifying his father’s will. An unknown gunman killed him in Milan in April.
The Gucci business no longer belongs to the family. In the 1980s sales slipped, possibly because of a general dip in the fashion business, possibly because the family lost heart. The family sold out to an investment group. The Gucci company has now been granted a listing on the New York stock exchange. On October 24th, the first day of trading, the company was in demand.
Aldo, Rodolfo, Maurizio and now Paolo are dead. But the Gucci quarrels may not yet have subsided. Mr Gucci is believed to have left property worth about £3m ($4.7m), including a country house in England and a number of racehorses. His will, if he left one, could be of interest to two brothers, one wife, one ex-wife, a mistress and five children.
Thom Gunn
Thomson William Gunn, poet and rebel, died on April 25th 2004, aged 74
SOMETIME in the late 1950s, in northern California, Thom Gunn came across a roaring company of bikers in their leather gear. The sight was not unusual in those days, but it was strange for that particular place, in open fields that had been haunted until then only by blue jays and swallows. Mr Gunn began to muse on the natural instinct of the birds and the crowd-compulsion of the bikers, both flocking noisily, and wrote what was to become his best-known poem, “On the Move”:
Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes.
For some readers, however, these verses were less about instinct and will than about the thrill of leather, steel and muscle. By moving from England to America in 1954 to live with his male lover and to explore the California bath-house culture, Mr Gunn had acknowledged himself a homosexual, and he was to become perhaps the best gay poet writing in English. But it was many years before he dared to come out in his poetry. Had he done so, in the 1950s, he would never have got his teaching job at Berkeley.
Not merely the need for a job restrained him, but the forms and traditions of poetry itself. Mr Gunn, a fine and deliberate wordsmith, revered the rhythms of Spenser, Milton and Dante all through his writing career. Accordingly he also clung to the themes beloved by older poets, including heterosexual love. His first book of verse, “Fighting Terms”, published just after his graduation from Cambridge in 1953, opened with a battle poem based on Homer’s “Iliad”. It then moved on, via homage to Donne (“To his Cynical Mistress”) to coy games between men and women:
Even in bed I pose: desire may grow More circumstantial and less circumspect Each night, but an acute girl would suspect That my self is not like my body, bare.
The book also contained a poem to his lover, Mike Kitay. It was carefully disguised not only in Elizabethan stanzas but in an Elizabethan metaphor, of tamer and hawk:
Even in flight above
I am no longer free:
You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds –
The habit of your words
Has hooded me.
Mr Gunn’s self was not laid bare for a long time. He left England hoping, in his words, to be someone new. The English always wanted to categorise him, lumping him with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin as a “Movement” poet (though he had never met Larkin), and anthologising him with Ted Hughes because he was young and angry, though he had nothing of Mr Hughes’s primal violence. In fact, he was more often lyrical and tender: instead of scraggy crows, soft-footed cats.
America, however, quickly became a succession of masks and intense experimentation. In 1966 he gave up teaching, telling colleagues that he wished to devote himself to poetry. On the contrary he wanted to take drugs, pick
up lovers and listen to rock concerts in the park. In his verse, he took on the voices of drop-outs and speed-sellers. Formal metre (“filtering the infinite through the grid of
the finite”, as he once put it) remained a cover for him; even on lsd, he could still scan.
Landscape of acid:
Where on fern and mound
The lights fragmented by the roofing bough
Throbbed outward, joining over broken ground
To one long dazzling burst; as even now
Horn closes over horn into one sound.
As he grew older he relaxed, as poets tend to. He wrote a little more about his past: a childhood on the North Kent coast, lingering in the marshy graveyard of Dickens’s “Great Expectations”, and a bookish Hampstead boyhood, lying on Parliament Hill with Lamartine’s poems. In 2000 he managed at last to commemorate his mother’s suicide, which he had stumbled on at 15, by using the third person and “withdrawing” the first.
He also relaxed into his homosexuality, now serenely domesticated, and into free verse, shocking his readers far more with that. “Jack Straw’s Castle” (1976), a collection named after a gay cruising spot on Hampstead Heath, seemed to be a celebration of exuberantly broken rules. But times changed. As the aids epidemic began to kill his San Francisco friends in the 1980s, Mr Gunn turned backinstinctively to formal metre to mourn them, as in “The Man with Night Sweats”:
I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
As his friends died around him, Mr Gunn often questioned why he had been spared. Their deaths, he wrote, “have left me less defined/It was their pulsing presence made me clear.” Nor could he feel anything but emptiness beyond them. “On the Move” had ended with lines reminiscent of T.S. Eliot:
At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.
“I’m not sure that the last line means anything,” he told an interviewer in 1999. “Nearer to what?”
Kenneth Hale
Kenneth Locke Hale, a master of languages, died on October 8th 2001, aged 67
Sometimes Kenneth Hale was asked how long it would take him to learn a new language. He thought ten or 15 minutes would be enough to pick up the essentials if he were listening to a native speaker. After that he could probably converse; obviously not fluently, but enough to make himself understood. To those whose education, however admirable in other respects, had provided only rudimentary language skills, Mr Hale seemed a marvel.
And so he was. He had a gift. But he was also an academic, a teacher of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit). He was aware that many otherwise clever people are dunces at learning a second language. He sought to find laws and structures that could be applied to all languages. As well as studying the common languages, French, Spanish and so on, the search took him into many linguistic byways, to the languages of native Americans and Australian aborigines and the Celtic fringes of Europe. As many of these languages had no written grammar or vocabulary, and indeed were spoken by few people, Mr Hale picked them up orally. His tip for anyone who pressed him for advice on learning a language was to talk to a native speaker. Start with parts of the body, he said, then common objects.
After learning the nouns, you can start to make sentences and get attuned to the sounds. Still, there was much more to language than that. Noam Chomsky, like Mr Hale a teacher of linguistics at mit, wrote:
Language is really weird. Although speaking a language is for normal humans an effortless task, there is nothing else in the natural world that even approaches its complexity …. Although children receive no instruction in learning their native language, they are able to fully master it in less than five years. This is all the more confusing as language is much more computationally complex than, say, simple arithmetic, which often takes years to master … It is often hypothesised that language is an innate human faculty, with its own specialised system in our brain.
Some students of linguistics believe that such a system, if it exists, is normally shut down in the brain at the age of 12. But for Mr Hale it was around this age that his interest in language was just starting.
Kenneth Hale’s childhood was on a ranch in Arizona and he started his education in a one-roomed school in the desert. Many years later, lecturing at mit, he still felt most comfortable in cowboy boots. On his belt was a buckle he had won at a rodeo by riding bulls, and he had the slightly bowed legs of a horseman. His students were impressed that he could light a match with his thumbnail.
Mr Hale had discovered his talent for language when playing with Indian friends who taught him Hopi and Navajo. Learning languages became an obsession. Wherever he travelled he picked up a new tongue. In Spain he learnt Basque; in Ireland he spoke Gaelic so convincingly that an immigration officer asked if he knew English. He apologised to the Dutch for taking a whole week to master their somewhat complex language. He picked up the rudiments of Japanese after watching a Japanese film with subtitles. He sought to rescue languages that were dying out. One Indian language at its last gasp was spoken by the Wopanaak, the tribe that greeted the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. It is now spoken again by several thousand people around Cape Cod. A Wopanaak who studied under Mr Hale is preparing a dictionary of her language. “Ken was a voice for the voiceless,” said Noam Chomsky.
Mr Hale could converse in about 50 languages, perhaps a world record, although he was too modest to claim one. But some tongues, such as Australia’s Lardil, died with its last seven speakers. Mr Hale was the last person on earth to speak some languages. Hundreds are disappearing, he said. “They became extinct, and I had no one to speak them with.”
How much did Kenneth Hale contribute to an understanding of the apparently innate human capacity for speech? He made a number of what he called “neat” discoveries about the structure of language, and had an instinctive sense of what all languages had in common. After his retirement from mit in 1999, he said he would “really get down to work”, an ambition he was unable to achieve. And linguistics itself is a fairly recent discipline.
He is likely to be remembered by The Green Book of Language Revitalisation, which he helped to edit and which was published shortly before he died. It was warmly welcomed, especially by those who may be a touch aggrieved by the spread of English, which is blamed for brutally sweeping other languages aside.
A scholarly argument surfaces from time to time about the desirability of keeping alive languages that, in medical parlance, are brain dead. Occasionally the argument turns nationalistic. For example, is what Mr Hale called the “revitalisation” of Welsh merely a nuisance in Britain where, obviously, English is the working language? Kenneth Hale had an indignant answer to that question. “When you lose a language,” he told a reporter, “you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It’s like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre.”
Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton, jazz musician, died on August 31st 2002, aged 94
Had this newspaper been running an obituary page at the time, Louis Armstrong, who died in 1971, would have been a natural choice. Duke Ellington (died 1974) and Bessie Smith (died 1937) are among others who would have made it. Lionel Hampton was of that flowering, and had the good grace to live to 94.
Until a few years ago he would still take to the stage with a band. Once at the piano or vibraphone, an electronic instrument he introduced to jazz, the marks of age would fall away and the sweaty passion that he had first brought to jazz back in the 1930s would be relived; and “Flying Home”, his most famous composition, would soar for the hundredth, or perhaps the thousandth, time. Among the legends attached to “Flying Home” is that it depicts an American Flying Fortress bomber, damaged in a raid over Germany, with its crew urging on the aircraft as it strives to reach its base in eastern England. Listening to a recording of the number made during t
he second world war, with Mr Hampton’s driving solos and his grunts of excitement as the pace quickens, it does seem to convey a will to win.
Never mind that “Flying Home” was written before the Americans went to war in 1941; Lionel Hampton, like Glenn Miller, provided much of the background music to the war. The young men and women who danced to his music until the floor creaked danced just as energetically when they went into uniform. Their children and grandchildren are still dancing to the derivative music of bands such as the Rolling Stones. Who invented rock and roll is an unsettled argument, but Mr Hampton had a hand in it. Perhaps because of his association with one of the more limited offshoots of jazz, the range of his gifts may have been overlooked.
At the age of six Lionel Hampton discovered what he called the “beat in me” while attending church in Alabama, where the congregation clapped along with a guitarist and other performers. What distinguishes the beat in jazz is that it is slightly delayed. It makes jazz sound relaxed. However many decibels Mr Hampton produced, however much excitement he generated, however much pandemonium he created on the dance floor, there was always in his music the delayed beat that underpins much of great jazz.
It is especially distinctive in a number of records he made with Benny Goodman. Although Goodman ran a successful swing band, he is remembered by connoisseurs for his quartet in which Mr Hampton played the vibraphone with melodic simplicity. Remarkably for the time, the group was racially mixed: Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson, the pianist in the quartet, were black. As his fame grew Mr Hampton was courted by politicians after the black vote. Harry Truman, a Democrat, was a fan and got Mr Hampton to play at his presidential inauguration. But Mr Hampton favoured the Republicans: unlike the Democrats, he said, Republicans helped blacks “without ballyhoo”.
