Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Reg Smythe

  Reg Smythe, creator of Andy Capp, died on June 13th 1998, aged 80

  Although this is an obituary of Reg Smythe, it may turn out to be more about Andy Capp, the cartoon character he created. For the benefit of anyone who has never noticed Andy Capp’s appearance in some 700 newspapers around the world, it may be worth explaining that he is … well, what exactly? When Hugh Cudlipp was editor of the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid which first published the cartoon in 1957, he said that Andy Capp was a “work-shy, beer-swilling, rent-dodging, wife-bashing, pigeon-fancying, soccer-playing, uncouth cadger, setting an appalling example to the youth of Britain”.

  He was, therefore, good for a smile among the beer swillers of Britain, but to the continuing surprise of Mr Smythe he crossed the English Channel and took up residence in France as André Chapeau and in Germany as Willi Wacker. America quickly fell to his charms. Pick up the Denver Post and a dozen other newspapers and there he is, Andy the pioneer male chauvinist pig.

  What do the non-Brits make of him? For France and Germany Andy Capp is the Britain they can happily sneer at, just as British cartoonists waspishly portray the French as frog-eating wimps and the Germans as humourless automatons. Now, doubtless, he is welcomed as an antidote to “cool Britannia”, a pose fostered by British government publicists that irritates its European partners as the old enemies and allies move inexorably and suspiciously closer together.

  America has no such fun with its neighbours. Perhaps, rather alarmingly, Andy Capp is sometimes seen by Americans as part of a real Britain. In this country of thatched cottages and Big Ben, there is a place called Hartlepool in the north of England where, according to an American guide, the people are friendly and “will reply to a ‘good evening’ or ‘good afternoon’ even if you don’t know them”. Among its famous people, the guide notes, are Ridley Scott, a film director (Blade Runner), and Andy Capp. He has been adopted by American academe. “Andy Capps”, explains a sociologist on the internet, are “long-term unemployed males who are registered for unemployment compensation but not really willing to work at the going wage.” Just fancy, his long-suffering wife Flo might have said, it makes him sound almost respectable.

  Flo, short for Florence, was also the name of Reg Smythe’s mother. “Flo’s the sort of woman I admire,” he said of the cartoon character. “Stalwart, sleeves rolled up, prepared to put up with her man and get on with what has to be done. She should have been in the title. Never mind, she knows she holds the cartoon together, and that’s enough for her.”

  Various writers about the Andy Capp phenomenon have made the obvious link to Flo the mum, and Mr Smythe did not argue about it. In industrial Britain, the mother was often the real boss, managing the home, minding the money and sometimes having an outside job as well, just as Flo Capp does. Some students of the shirking-class hero (thanks, Mirror) believe he was based on Mr Smythe’s father. Reg Smythe would not confirm this, but there have been dark rumours.

  Like Andy Capp, Mr Smythe came from Hartlepool. He was born about the time the town was beginning to decline as a centre of shipbuilding and steel-making. In 1936, when Britain and much of the rest of the world were in depression, Mr Smythe joined the army in desperation. Three years later war broke out and he was stuck with soldiering until it ended in 1945. Then he had a number of dead-end jobs, drawing cartoons in his spare time and eventually making enough from them to live on.

  Later, when the money rolled in, he, like Andy Capp, never had more than a pound or two in his pocket. During his 48-year marriage Mr Smythe was content for his wife Vera to handle the bills, getting pocket money as he needed it (but he had a Mercedes in the garage).

  Reg Smythe never had any formal art training. His figures are crudely simple. But you could say the same about Peanuts and Garfield, two of his rivals for popularity. Character is what matters. Andy Capp is reassuringly unchanging, living in a grimy north of England that no longer exists, wearing the sort of flat hat that is no longer common. His only concession to social pressures is to give up smoking, at least in public. He is one of a number of outrageous fictional characters that Britain has let loose on the world during the past few decades. Another is Alf Garnett, a racist and general bigot who commanded huge audiences on television. Such characters are so appalling

  as to be beyond criticism. They are part of the grand march of British culture, of tatty fashions, improbable art, ear-damaging pop music, distrust of foreigners and politically-incorrect opinions. Reg Smythe worked to his dying day to keep it going and left behind a big pile of cartoons. He is gone, but Andy Capp has at least another year to live.

  Helen Snow

  Helen Foster Snow, a long marcher for China, died on January 11th 1997, aged 89

  Clever women run the risk of being overshadowed by clever men who happen to be close to them. Zelda Fitzgerald comes to mind. A writer of talent, she had the misfortune, professionally, to be married to Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps the finest American writer of this century. Gwen John was probably a better artist than Augustus John, but her brother was the celebrity. However the coin spins, a woman may feel she is the loser. Helen Snow certainly felt that.

  In 1938 her husband, Edgar Snow, made his name with “Red Star over China”, the first substantial account of what the Chinese communists were up to. It brought Mao Zedong to the attention of the outside world. A year later Helen Snow published her own account of meetings with Mao, “Inside Red China”. She had sought out Mao on her own in Hunan, his home province, after the communists had ended their extraordinary 6,000-mile “long march” for survival. She had spent four months with him, a whole summer, much longer than Edgar had managed. But her book was little noticed. Edgar had got the scoop. Just in case anyone linked his wife with him, he persuaded her to publish her book under a pseudonym, Nym (Greek for name) Wales (Utah-born Helen had Welsh relations).

  Mrs Snow’s book and the 40 or so other books and papers she wrote, mainly about China, are thought these days to be superior to her husband’s work. Edgar Snow was a journalist. As journalists do, he endeavoured to write entertainingly, offering quick judgments that pass muster at the time but, in some cases, turn out to be facile, or indeed wrong. Mrs Snow declined simply to pick out the busy bits from the mound of original information she collected on the Chinese communists and their leaders, and throw the rest away. History was so important, she said, she could not trust herself to make selections. Her archive, in numerous boxes of documents which she “dragged halfway round the world”, is now pored over by researchers at the Hoover Institution, a think-tank analysing the events of this century.

  The China where Helen arrived in 1931, aged 24, was attractive to adventurous young Americans. Europe, with Paris and all that, had been the place of the 1920s. China seemed new, and was cheap, for those with dollars. A bestseller in America was “The Good Earth”, written by Pearl Buck, a missionary who was later to receive the Nobel prize for literature. Helen was going to become “a great author”. She took a slow boat to China, steaming up the Whangpoo river to Shanghai. Her father, a lawyer with a mining company that had connections in China, had set up a secretarial job for her in Shanghai. In the evenings she met other Americans in a place called the Chocolate Shop, favoured for its ice-cream. One of them was Edgar Snow. They were married 18 months later. What Mrs Snow called “the boiler of marriage” multiplied “all their powers manyfold”. The boiler blew up in 1949, when the Snows were divorced. Their experience was worthy of a better ending, she said, with its “struggle between good and evil” in China.

  The evil was the Japanese invaders. By 1937, when Japan launched a full-scale attack on China, America was already anti-Japanese. The Flying Tigers, a squadron of American pilots, was fighting for China. Both the Snows forsook their neutrality and marched in patriotic parades mostly composed of students. Their home became a refuge for anyone hiding from not only the Japanese but also Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. And the “good”? Mrs Snow came to the c
onclusion that socialism offered a good future for China, guided by what she called “its historically high ethics”. She and her husband were never communists, but were content to be of the left. Joe McCarthy, the scourge of American radicals, never touched them.The Soviet Union was his black beast. The “loss” of China saddened and puzzled many Americans, but China, until recently, never seemed a threat, but more a part of the mystery of the East.

  Just before she died, China named Helen Snow a “friendship ambassador”, about the highest compliment it can pay to a foreigner. The Chinese had in mind her pioneering of the “gung-ho” movement. Gung-ho, from the Chinese gonghe, meaning working together, came to be shorthand for the industrial co-operatives set up in China to fight the Japanese invasion. A number of westerners in China pushed for the idea, which seems originally to have come from Sweden, and Mrs Snow was the most vigorous pusher.

  The co-operatives were supported by Mao, and by Chiang Kai-shek when he joined with the communists to fight the Japanese. After the communists took power it was the communes that were gung-ho. The name was given to co-operative movements in Japan and elsewhere, most notably in India. And Helen Snow, the middle-class girl from America’s west, took pleasure from the knowledge that gung-ho was the slogan of the marines in the second world war.

  Muriel Spark

  Dame Muriel Spark, novelist, died on April 13th 2006, aged 88

  AS SHE lay on the divan in her flat in Queen’s Gate, Caroline Rose suddenly heard the sound of a typewriter. Tap-tappity-tap.

  It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.

  Caroline, on another plane of existence, was Muriel Spark. She was trying to scrape a living by writing in London in the mid-1950s, divorced, with a small son. Coffee and diet pills kept her going, but also gave her hallucinations. Because “if you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly”, she had converted in 1954 from vague Christianity to Roman Catholicism. In her first published novel, “The Comforters” (1957), she was both Caroline and God, or fate, or that ubiquitous typewriter, tapping out behind the wall page after page of Caroline’s life.

  God loomed large in Ms Spark’s dark, biting, witty novels. In the early years of her career it was the vogue for Catholic converts to be obsessed with Him, sin, and themselves. But unlike Evelyn Waugh, who warmly praised her, or Graham Greene, who kept her going with a monthly allowance and cases of wine, Ms Spark preferred to leave aside the heavier, guilt-ridden aspects of the faith. Her newly-made Catholics were comic and somewhat tentative. They did not agonise much. But, like her, they were perplexed that a divine Creator should allow evil in the world, and especially intrigued by the permutations of free will and fate.

  Fate had taken Ms Spark to Africa in 1937, to a miserable marriage from which she escaped six years later. But Africa also gave her the material for a short story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi”, with which she won the Observer’s Christmas short story competition in 1951. After this, gradually, she became famous. She wrote 23 novels, mostly daring, usually surprising and impossible, as she proudly said, to classify. Anything, it seemed, might inspire a burst of that needle-sharp pen, from Watergate (“The Abbess of Crewe”, 1974) to the disappearance of Lord Lucan (“Aiding and Abetting”, 2000). Her works were short, tight and beautifully constructed, hinting perhaps at the poet she would slightly have preferred to be.

  Dabblings on the dark side held a particular fascination. “The Ballad of Peckham Rye” (1960) satirised Satanism in south London, while “The Bachelors” (1960) anatomised spiritualism in Victoria. (“The Interior Spiral ... That’s a make of mattress, isn’t it?”) Her light touch still managed to carry maximum disapproval. A phrase, too, could pin down more or less anything she spotted. “The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter box and there was suddenly a six-o’clock feeling in the house.” “She yawned with her mouth all over her face.” Bathos was a speciality: “Human nature is apt to fail in spite of regular prayer and deep breathing”.

  By birth and childhood formation Ms Spark was a Scottish writer, and always acknowledged it. Like freckles, as she said, her Scottishness could never be lost, though in her later Italian exile she revelled at being European. She wrote of Edinburgh

  with a child’s intensity: the “amazingly terrible” smells of the Old Town, the sight of the unemployed fighting, spitting and cursing, but also the way it might become “a floating city when the light was a special pearly white”.

  Her own neighbourhood, Bruntsfield, was middle-class, and her parents Jewish-Episcopalian. But she became gradually aware of the Calvinism around her, symbolised by the frightening blackened stone of the city’s churches. The God of Calvin, as she wrote in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, her small autobiographical masterpiece of Edinburgh public-school life, “sees the beginning and the end”.

  As a writer, she could see it too. In “Brodie”, which became both a play and a film, she ran dizzyingly forwards and backwards in time, revealing how her characters would turn out or how they would die. There was, it seemed, quite a streak of Ms Spark in the scatty, romantic Miss Brodie: “Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first.” But Ms Spark painted herself as Sandy Stranger, a clever, ugly girl with “small, almost non-existent” eyes. Sandy was the sly onlooker and chief teller of the tale, aswell as the puller of the strings. It was she, naturally, who betrayed Miss Brodie to the authorities and ended her teaching career. And Sandy, after one torrid affair and one acclaimed book on psychology, became an enclosed nun, Sister Helena of the Transfiguration.

  Nunnishness, it might be thought, figured little in Ms Spark’s real life. Instead there was fame, many prizes (though she missed out on the Booker, the biggest British fiction award), sleek clothes, and a fortune that drove her abroad to escape the taxman. Yet she lived for 27 years in a converted 13th-century church in Tuscany, happily eschewing the literary whirl, writing longhand in spiral-bound notebooks that were sent to her from Edinburgh. And she died in the Easter season, the best time for Catholics, in a way that might almost have been planned. Tap-tappity-tap.

  Stephen Spender

  Sir Stephen Harold Spender, British poet, novelist, playwright and critic, died on July 16th 1995, at the age of 86

  In 1933, when Stephen Spender was 24, he wrote the poem that came to be most closely associated with his name. In later life he confessed to worrying that he would be remembered, not by his numerous novels, plays, translations, essays and other poems, but by only this one poem with its first line, “I think continually of those who were truly great.” His heart would have sunk had he read this week’s voluminous words of praise, which were often accompanied, glutinously, by this work.

  Still, even with his one remembered poem, Stephen Spender has done better in a bid for immortality than most of his contemporaries. Christopher Isherwood, who also died in his 80s with millions of words behind him, is remembered mainly as the creator of the minx Sally Bowles, and that because his story of pre-war Berlin was turned into a musical, Cabaret. Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis, close friends of Spender, and themselves once famous poets, have sunk pretty well without trace.

  But, most important, Stephen Spender stood for an era, as distinctive as that of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsberries or of Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. Once it was royals who marked eras. Now it is writers. In the 1930s Spender, Isherwood and the others formed a circle of admiration around W. H. Auden, the 20th century poet most likely still to be read in 100 years’ time. Spender and Auden met at Oxford. Auden, slightly older than Spender, was haughty and self-possessed. Spender was awkward and affected. He had gained some notoriety by sitting on a cushion in a college quadrangle reading poetry. When unpoetical hearties burst into his room he read aloud from Blake as they broke up his furniture.

  Spender tentatively showed Auden some
of his poems. Auden’s cruel comment was, “You are infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation.” The unhumiliated Spender printed Auden’s first collection of poems, and remained his champion. Being a young and noticed poet was fun in the 1930s, with plenty of travel and the patronage of the famous, although Auden called it, accurately, a “low, dishonest decade”.

  Like Auden, Spender had homosexual affairs, but later said he was “not really happy” living with another man. “It was a sort of club, and if you forsook the club they got very annoyed.” His early homosexuality, he said, “just withered away”. He was married twice, since 1941 to Natasha Litvin, a pianist, and fathered two children.

  In company with many Oxbridge intellectuals, Spender flirted with communism. Some made a career of it and became Soviet spies. But Spender soon left the party. He decided that telling lies was incompatible with being an artist. He would have made a poor spy. Cyril Connolly called him “a great big silly goose”. Along with a number of other former sympathisers, among them Arthur Koestler, he confessed his sins in a recantation in “The God that Failed”, published in 1949. But unlike many who rejected that god, Spender never moved to the right. He resigned from the staff of Encounter, which he had helped to found, when it turned out the magazine was getting money from the CIA.