by Ann Wroe
Some of Mr Kujau’s work may continue to be admired only, as it were, by proxy. After his release from jail he opened a gallery in Stuttgart specialising in fakes, many of them painted by him. His fakes were also on sale in Majorca, and much in demand by tourists. The work of many modern painters is easy to forge and while they may be sold originally as “honest” fakes, they can pass into the market and be taken as originals. Hitler’s paintings have growing value as curiosities, but it is difficult to tell which are his and which are Konrad Kujau’s. But perhaps Mr Kujau’s life will be remembered chiefly as a cautionary tale. No one offered such fool’s gold would be likely to be taken in again. Would they?
Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz, American poet, died on May 14th 2006, aged 100
IN A very long life, Stanley Kunitz did not seem to move around much. Apart from a spell in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and a lecture tour of the Soviet Union in 1967, he spent almost all his days in New York or New England, and most of those in Massachusetts. A line drawn through Worcester, Cambridge and Provincetown, in Cape Cod, where he grew roses in the Atlantic blasts, could neatly contain his world.
Yet Mr Kunitz was a poet, one of America’s best of the past century, and therefore travelled incessantly. Much of the time he was on the sea, voyaging to the ends of the earth. In imagination he “strode years; stretched into bird;/ Raced though the sleeping country where I was young.” He could sink deep into his own mind, through gorges and ravines, “from the known to the unknown to the unknowable”. Or he could coil through life like a fish in a river.
If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
This transformation happened as he read about the Pacific salmon in Time. The words began to flow, and he followed them. His sense of poetry-making – and few could explain so well the mysteries of it – was an almost animal instinct. As soon as he could feel his own “interior rhythm” in what he observed, whether slithering fish or falling leaf, he knew the poem would work.
His own rhythm took time to discover. Robert Herrick’s songs, recited unexpectedly by a teacher at high school, first drew him into poetry; but it was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”, pulled down by chance from a shelf in a Harvard library, that showed Mr Kunitz the scope of what he could write. Over the years he moved from Elizabethan high style to simple, almost conversational free verse, “wringing out the water”, as he put it, and aiming for a poetry that was natural, luminous, deep and spare.
That was difficult, because Mr Kunitz felt his human heaviness so intensely. When a whale beached itself at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, he made it a metaphor of himself, “crushed by your own weight,/ collapsing into yourself ... disgraced and mortal.” In his first collection, “Intellectual Things” (1930), he dreamed of stripping “The tender blanket from my bone” and rising “like a skeleton in the sun”, but did not have much faith he would.
Nor, despite Hopkins, did he write about God. The “Father” he invoked in his poems was his own, who had killed himself before he was born. He had drunk carbolic acid in a park in Worcester, leaving Stanley’s mother to support her children by dressmaking. Mr Kunitz followed this ghost obsessively: across the bloody grass, through plum orchards, to the edge of a river, where
Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me
The white ignorant hollow of his face.
He wrote frequently of family, but almost never of his Jewishness. When rebuked for that, Mr Kunitz, who had been barred as a Jew from teaching at Harvard in 1927, made a sharp reply: “I am an American free-thinker, a damn stubborn one, and my poetry is not hyphenated.” His rebelliousness showed again when he insisted on being a conscientious objector during the second world war; it showed, too, in his refusal to write fashionable stuff. To be a metaphysical poet entranced with nature, rather than a cynical observer of men and cities, was the wrong flavour for the mid-20th century. Mr Kunitz paid for his contrarian streak by being dismissed as too abstract and ignored by the critics. Had Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell not befriended him, he might have stayed as sunk in pastoral obscurity as John Clare, and perhaps as mad.
Loneliness seemed engrained in him. Out of school, his childhood was spent by himself in the woods throwing stones at a tree (two hits, he would be a poet), or testing how far he could climb up a perpendicular cliff. Later in life he kept the usual poet’s habits, shut up by himself, writing in scrupulously neat longhand with no deletions. Every decade or so, a book of poems would appear. Very gradually, out of this slim oeuvre, a reputation grew and prizes came. In 2000, at the age of 95, he was made poet
laureate of the United States.
Yet the lonely, searching poet could also be almost gregarious. He loved teaching, at Bennington, Yale and elsewhere, persuading his students, he said once, that every one of them could be a poet. He set up two centres, in Provincetown and New York, where writers could live and work in company with other artists, discussing their explorations.
As for his own endless travelling, each poem hinted at an end to it. “I have the sense”, he said, “of swimming underwater towards some kind of light and open air that will be saving.” Or,
Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.
Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa, emperor of Japanese films, died on September 6th 1998, aged 88
Watching a film made by Akira Kurosawa is not always fun. “Rashomon” is set in medieval Japan. A murder has taken place, and probably a rape. Four witnesses to the events describe what they have seen. Their accounts are contradictory. The message of the film appears to be that truth is elusive.
The film had an indifferent reception when first shown in Japan. Reviewers judged, no doubt correctly, that Japanese moviegoers were not keen on messages. Soft porn and simple stories are what pack the cinemas of Tokyo. The critics at the Venice film festival in 1951 were made of sterner stuff. Rashomon gained their top award. They had taken their seats expecting to see a cliché Japan of geishas and cherry blossom. They emerged in the grip of a subtle mind. The film has gained a kind of immortality in the phrase “Rashomon-like”, meaning uncertainty. For the first time a Japanese director won international recognition. The Japanese became proud of their world-beater. Mr Kurosawa was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, the first film director to receive it. But, for choice, most Japanese have continued to feel there is nothing to beat a spicy boy-meets-girl story.
For all the critical praise heaped upon him, Mr Kurosawa never found it easy to raise money for his films. In 1971, when he was 61, his spirits were so low that he attempted suicide; presumably a cry for help as Japanese suicide attempts tend to be final. At other times he tried to make films with an obvious popular appeal, which are best forgotten. Orson Welles had a similar experience. “Citizen Kane”, made when he was young, is considered by some to be the best film ever, but for the rest of his career he only scraped a living as a director.
Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles were innovators in an industry that mostly prefers tried and tested formulae. There are of course other directors whose talents are argued over by the minority who see film as an art as well as mass entertainment. But the list is fairly small, and belongs to no one country. In the 1920s, the most critically admired films were German and Russian, in the 1930s they were French, in the 1940s British and Italian. As in a great painting, there is always something new to see in, say, “The Bicycle Thieves” (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) or “La Grande Illusion” (Jean Renoir, 1937). Mr Kurosawa saw these and many other films made in the West. As a child he had had a free pass to a cinema where his brother was a narrator of silent movies. At a time when Japan was a
uthoritarian and fiercely nationalistic, Mr Kurosawa became an admirer of western ideas. Shakespeare was an obvious master, but so was John Ford, the maker of American westerns of pace and atmosphere. “The Seven Samurai”, perhaps Mr Kurosawa’s best-known film, is a sort of Japanese western, in which poor villagers hire a group of unemployed warriors to protect them from bandits. Hollywood remade it as “The Magnificent Seven”, which has some of the shine of the original. “Yojimbo” was remade as “A Fistful of Dollars”, starring Clint Eastwood. Hollywood was grateful. It awarded Mr Kurosawa three Oscars.
When in 1970 Hollywood decided to make “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, an epic about the attack on Pearl Harbor which brought America into the second world war, MrKurosawa seemed just the man to direct the Japanese scenes. He was enthusiastic, but pulled out long before the film was completed. One story told at the time was that he wanted the Japanese in the cast to have military training to ensure authenticity. Whether that is true or not is unclear; it doesn’t seem a bad idea. What is clear is that Mr Kurosawa insisted on absolute control of the Japanese scenes.
This was his way. He was tenno, the emperor, of his world. One of his actors recalled that he would scream, “The rain isn’t falling like I want it to.” He was a perfectionist, but necessarily a frugal one. His most expensive film was “Ran”, made in 1985, and based on the story of “King Lear”. It cost $10m, a lot of money for a Japanese film but trifling by Hollywood standards. He kept costs down by working fast. In many of his films he used the same team of reliable actors, headed by Toshiro Mifune, who died last year. Each scene was filmed by three cameras in different positions. Each night Mr Kurosawa would edit the day’s filming, so that when the filming was finally finished he had a rough draft of the movie.
He left an oeuvre of 30 films produced over a period of about 50 years, the final one, “Madadayo”, about an elderly academic, as recently as 1993. Although no one questioned that he was world class as an artist, some Japanese, still among the most nationalistic of people, wondered whether he was too fond of western ideas. Mr Kurosawa would point to his collection of antiques. Alongside Japanese lacquerware was French glass. Both were beautiful. Japan and the West, he said, lived side-by-side in his mind.
Freddie Laker
Sir Freddie Laker, airline pioneer, died on February 9th 2006, aged 83
IN A lifetime dedicated to piloting and managing aircraft of all sorts, Freddie Laker rarely felt scared. But there were exceptions. In the winter of 1948–49 he found himself flying old Halifax bombers over Germany, going to the relief of Berlin after it had been blockaded by the Russians. Ice coated his windscreen. More ice would have clogged his wings, had he not smeared thick grease over them. Russian planes buzzed him and, unable to get much height, he could watch Russian guns firing at him from the ground.
In these planes – “deathtraps” and “junk” as he thought of them – he and his team flew 4,700 sorties in 54 weeks. Under each plane, roughly in place of the bomb chamber, hung a pannier containing oil, coal and potatoes. Though the oil added to the hazard, the coal was worse, covering him with black dust as though he had been down a mine. But Mr Laker could not have cared less. “It was all about freedom,” he said later.
Flying and freedom were inseparable in his mind. They had been so ever since, as a yobbish teenager eating fish and chips in the street with his mates, he had looked up to see the German airship Hindenburg and a Handley Page biplane flying at the same moment over Canterbury Cathedral. Home life was a struggle in a cold-water flat, school a dead end, but up there was limitless. For the rest of his life, whenever high spirits seized him, the big, ebullient, grinning Mr Laker would spread out his arms and mimic a plane.
Yet the sky, he was soon to find, was not as open as all that. Commercial air routes had been neatly divided up between big carriers and, after the war, the Labour government nationalised the industry. On both sides of the Atlantic, politicians and national airlines colluded with each other to keep ticket prices high. The ordinary man could only dream of flying. The wide blue yonder was out of his reach.
That it is not so these days is largely due to Mr Laker. Any passenger who now jets to Italy or Greece for the price of a train fare to the suburbs is following the trail he blazed. Mr Laker in 1977 introduced the first outrageous discounts, £118 ($206) to fly the Laker Skytrain from London to New York, and the first taste of no frills: if staff were scarce, he sometimes loaded bags himself. And he offered these benefits on long-haul flights, something his brash young acolytes – from Southwest Airlines to Ryanair to easyJet – have yet to attempt.
The public loved it. By the end of its first year, Skytrain had made profits of £3m and the number of passengers from Britain to America had shot up by 30%. Within five years, it had 20 aircraft. Then, inexorably, the big carriers closed in. Since restrictive trade agreements, underpinned by legislation, could not keep Mr Laker out, they slashed their own prices to undercut him. This, and the world recession of 1980–81, drove Laker Airways into bankruptcy. Only when the creditors sued did the airlines plead guilty to predatory pricing. Mr Laker’s best advice to his disciple and friend Richard Branson, when Mr Branson was setting up cut-price Virgin Atlantic, was to sue the bastards before, not after, going belly-up.
Up until 1982, Mr Laker had thrived on luck
and opportunism. By meeting a useful man in 1941, he learned from scratch to fly four-engine aircraft. His first enterprise was to sell aeronautical spare parts out of the boot of a car, his second to strip the platinum points off the spark-plugs of Bristol Hercules engines. The Berlin airlift (“the best piece of luck I ever had”, since he just happened to have bought 12 of those second-hand bombers) got him easily and profitably into the cargo-delivery business. This led him to think of ways to wriggle into the commercial passenger trade.
He made his play deviously and slowly. In the 1950s he converted a fleet of DC4s to take passengers and cars from Southend, which the big carriers did not use, to Calais. Then in 1966 he observed that a loophole in the law allowed independents to take “affinity groups”, such as clubs, abroad. Immediately, his passengers were made members of the Right Wheel Group or the Left Wing Club, and Mr Laker would appear at Gatwick with a Bible on which they would swear club allegiance if the airline snoops were watching. Once the Department of Trade had rumbled him, in 1971, he began to think of a different ruse to break the cartel: running an air operation that passengers would treat likea train. The rest was history.
His adventure with Laker Airways earned him a knighthood from a red-faced Labour government and the devotion of Margaret Thatcher. He bought boats, Rolls Royces and race horses, and regularly changed wives. After the crash he left England, feeling unappreciated, to toy with low-cost airlines in Florida.
His last venture, in 1996, flew out of the Bahamas. This one was rather different to the others he had managed. There were leather seats and gilt-edged dinner plates; wines were served in crystal glasses. Mr Laker had made flying, once again, an occupation for the elite. Nonetheless, the man on the 9.30 from Stansted to Palma, crushed in a middle seat between crying children and with a home-made sandwich as his sustenance, should raise a plastic cup to freedom and to Freddie.
Alice Lakwena
Alice Auma Lakwena, warrior and spirit-channeller, died on January 17th 2007, aged 50
AT A place called Wang Jok, in Paraa National Park in northern Uganda, the Nile flows strongly among trees and over rapids. This is a magic spot: coins, pots and human figures sometimes mysteriously appear from the river. And if you had visited Wang Jok in May 1986 you might have seen, sitting beside the water, a young woman of 30 apparently talking to herself.
People from Opit, the railway town where she lived, knew her as Alice Auma. She sold fish and flour with another woman and had had two husbands, both of whom had deserted her because she was barren. But it was not Alice Auma who was sitting by the Nile. She was possessed by a spirit called Lakwena, and he was holding a consultation with all th
e animals of the park.
They swarmed round him in a huge bellowing crowd, elephants and hippopotami and crocodiles and giraffes, many of them holding up wounded limbs to be healed. Lakwena asked them who was responsible for the civil war in Uganda, in which the Acholi rebels of the north were fighting the troops of Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army. They replied that “the people with two legs” were the violators of peace and Nature. A waterfall and a mountain were interrogated too. They gave back the same answer.
Thus began Alice’s mission to purify first her native Acholi, then Uganda, then the world. Lakwena gave her stones and water, with which she went back to Opit and began to heal people. Beside the railway station she built a temple of mud-blocks and thatch in which, as Lakwena, she would sit on a throne and give instructions. When the men muttered that she was only a woman, Lakwena would announce in his commanding voice that he had possessed her precisely because she was a woman and a sinner, who had never got beyond seventh year in primary school; he was making an example of a hard case, saving her first, before he saved the wicked Acholi in general.
Lakwena also offered, in August 1986, to conduct the war for them. And when the rebel commanders ignored him, he and Alice formed their own army. The Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF) numbered at their peak around 10,000 souls, not a few of them abducted children; and for a brief spell they were the most successful of all the groups fighting the NRA, which was now the Ugandan government.
Their methods were unorthodox. Lakwena, giving orders that his soldiers wrote down neatly in school exercise books, forbade them to use weapons. They did not need to, because they were pure. Each man had burned his witchcraft charms, and had appeased the spirit of anyone he had killed previously; and as the army marched into battle, singing Catholic hymns and with their bare torsos smothered in shea-nut oil, the bullets of the enemy would bounce right off them. Nature, too, was on their side. Water, if they were polite to it and “bought” each river they crossed with coins and shells, would block the enemy or drown him. Stones, if they threw them, would explode like grenades.
