Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Any youthful transgressions were eventually forgiven or forgotten. At the safe age of 74 the “grand old man of letters”, as he had become, joined other entertainers who were by then being given knighthoods and he became Sir Stephen. Still, he never seemed entirely comfortable with the gifts of a middle-class life. In an interview in 1994 he agonised over a familiar moral dilemma: what to do if the television shows pictures of starving African children when the viewer is eating a meal. “Do you stop eating the lamb chop? Do you turn off the television?” he asked. “I think you somehow have to go on … facing the lamb chop and thinking, well, this is my life.”

  If Spender fell a little short of greatness in his writing, he was a delightful and indulgent person. But in the last decade of his life he surprised many of his admirers by reacting furiously to two attempts by others to write about him. He dismissed one unofficial biography as rubbish, and filed a 40-page rebuttal of it in the British Library. He went to court to secure the banning in Britain of a novel called While England Sleeps, based on a homosexual relationship Spender had already written about. Many people thought Spender was acting out of character. He was, after all, a campaigner

  Auden, Isherwood and Spender in 1938

  for freedom of speech, and a founder of a journal called Index on Censorship.

  But one of the penalties of Spender’s long life was his increasing concern with reputation. Last year he grumbled that obituaries about him were being prepared, and that they were “all about your sex life and things like that”. And don’t forget that poem.

  Dr Spock

  Benjamin McLane Spock, family doctor to the world, died on March 15th 1998, aged 94

  It was, on the face of it, an odd book to have become one of the bestsellers of the century. The one endeavour the human race was used to, and indeed had become quite good at, was having babies and bringing them to adulthood. Benjamin Spock, who seemed continually to be surprised, and perhaps disturbed, by his success, acknowledged that parents already knew, if instinctively, much of what he set down in his handbook, first published in 1946 under the title The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Although the title was changed from time to time as the book went through numerous editions, and its contents were updated to take note of single-parent families and other social developments, he retained the sentence that was the key to his teaching: “Trust yourself – you know more than you think you do.”

  It is unlikely that many of the 50m copies said to have been sold around the world were ever read through from cover to cover. This was a book to be consulted if, say, Baby was reluctant to get to sleep or had kicked over its potty. The parent would consult the relevant page (helped by Dr Spock’s very detailed index), and, reassured by his words, do what she thought best anyway. Many parents gained from the book the comfort once provided by the family Bible. It was a rock to lean on; far too much, said Dr Spock’s critics.

  In the late 1940s, the memories of the recent war, and the threat of an even worse one, may have made parents feel especially protective; or, as the doctor’s critics put it, their children were indulged. “Spockmanship” was denounced by Spiro Agnew, vice-president from 1969 to 1973 (when he resigned over a corruption scandal). By then the post-war children had grown up and were credited, or discredited, with the permissive society. Blame the parents, said the Agnew camp, but particularly blame the sinister Dr Spock. The doctor insisted that his book, by then seen by some Americans as subversive as the works of Marx, had not encouraged permissiveness; it aimed rather to relax rigidity. But it wasn’t the book alone that drew fire. Dr Spock himself was now a political figure, an opponent of the Vietnam war.

  In 1968, after being arrested at various anti-war demonstrations, Dr Spock appeared before a Boston court accused of helping Americans to dodge the draft. The government regarded him as a formidable nuisance. He shone on television: clearly middle-class, the son of a lawyer, educated at Yale, with the warmth that you expected from a children’s doctor, and above all the author of this marvellous book. He could not even be called a coward: he had served in the American navy in the second world war, and had supported the Korean war. But the Vietnam war, he told the court, was “illegal, immoral” and “unwinnable”. It was certainly unwinnable, as the generals later acknowledged. But the court was unimpressed by the doctor’s words and gave him two years in prison, a sentence that was, however, quashed on appeal.

  In 1972 Dr Spock ran for president as candidate for the People’s Party, a mildly socialist group more European than American in feeling. Even now its platform looks improbable: free medical care, legal

  abortion and marijuana, a guaranteed minimum income for a family, and the withdrawal of American troops from abroad. He received a pretty modest 75,000 votes. He seemed not to be discouraged. Into his 80s he was being arrested in anti-nuclear demos that stretched the limits of American tolerance. His view of nuclear war was simple, if conventional: “There’s no point in raising children if they’re going to be burned alive.”

  He wrote 13 books, some in collaboration with other writers, but only a few remain in print. All are distinguished by the clear writing of the baby book, but these days probably no one cares to read Dr Spock on Vietnam, published in 1968.

  It would be nice to say that domestically, anyway, Dr Spock’s life wentsmoothly. But he dumped his first wife, Jane, after 49 years of marriage, and then married a woman 40 years his junior. Jane grumbled that she helped a lot with the baby book and should have been credited as co-author. They had two sons, who in Dr Spock’s autobiography are rather shadowy figures, perhaps because, sensibly, he tried to keep them out of the limelight. But his stepdaughter, by his second wife, seems to have been a terror unresponsive to every trick in his book. “‘Ginger,’ I said one day, ‘in my 75 years I’ve been acquainted with thousands of people, but not one of them has been as rude as you.’ I thought I saw a faint smile of triumph.”

  Although the two made peace as Ginger grew up, Dr Spock never found an easy answer for society’s increasing problem of what he called “naturally accursed, naturally poisonous” step relations. But in the vast child-care literature that has grown up since Dr Spock opened up this profitable marketplace, there is probably a book about it. Or if not, somebody no doubt will soon write one.

  Irving Stevens

  Irving Stevens, America’s king of the hobos, died on May 4th 1999, aged 88

  The first thing you should know about hobos, Irving Stevens would say, is that they are not tramps. If you are a tramp you are content to live by begging, with perhaps a bit of stealing to help things along. Hobos are wandering workers, prepared to go anywhere in search of a job, and when that job runs out to move on to somewhere else more promising. Being a hobo, self-sufficient, despising welfare, is thus acceptably American, and probably more than that.

  When Mr Stevens was elected king of the hobos at the hobos’ convention in Iowa in 1988 he became nationally famous. His homely wisdom dispensed on television programmes formed the subject of numerous newspaper articles extolling the merits of the hobo philosophy. Perhaps only a country as rich and secure as America could get irrepressibly sentimental about what is, in essence, casual labour. If there are hobos in Japan, they keep quiet about it. In Europe, the remaining gypsies have largely lost what romance they had and are mostly regarded as a nuisance.

  American hobos, though, are associated with two powerful sources of myth: freight trains and cowboys. The great ranches of the west were a reliable source of seasonal work, either herding cattle or, less glamorously, doing farm work: hobo is probably a corruption of “hoe boy”. Some hobos carried their personal hoes from job to job, like old-time shepherds with their crooks.

  The railroads got you there. Many hobos were known by names derived from their prowess at riding the rails. Steamtrain Maury and Choo-Choo Johnson were two of the most famous. Mr Stevens already had a nickname, Fishbones. “Everyone called him that, he was so thin,” his sister recalled this week. “You coul
d see his bones through his skin.” It wasn’t so much the romance that sent Fishbones in his early 20s on his travels from his home in Maine. He was simply poor and hungry and America was in depression. The story-telling came later.

  Irving Stevens wrote two books about his experiences, “Dear Fishbones” and “Hoboing in the 1930s”. His stories have charm, and usually end with a moral point. Kind reviewers have said that they are a bit like Aesop’s fables. But distance may have lent enchantment to what must have been a life of hardship. Other hobos who have put their memories into words tell of the “bulls”, the railway police who would beat up the boxcar riders, or shoot them; and of life in the “jungle”, the name given to a community of hobos who had pooled their resources.

  Mr Stevens was most famous for inventing a fly repellent that he refined, and seemingly perfected, over many years. It smelt abominably, but it kept the biting things away. “Well, I thought, if the stuff works so well, I can probably sell it.” Mr Stevens enhanced his American credentials by becoming an entrepreneur, if in a small way. Irving’s Fly Dope, bought by grateful fishermen and campers, provided Mr Stevens with a regular income in his later life, when he had given up hoboing. He kept the formula as secret as Coca-Cola’s.

  The second world war (in which Mr Stevens served in the air force) ended America’s Great Depression, and ended the need to look far and wide for work. There was plenty nearer home. Mr Stevens settled down, got married and had six children. There were now fewer hobos trailing across America but the breed was not extinct. There was still casual work to be had, the amount influenced by the booms and busts of the American economy.

  Even now, with the economy roaring ahead and seemingly unstoppable, some hobos still feel a need to roam. “Hoboing gives you an absolute peace and freedom,” recalled one addict. “There’s nothing better than riding the rails in a clean boxcar and watching the world go by.” This idyllic picture has helped to give birth to a new type of American hobo: young, often well-educated but not poor, not in need of work, unlikely to carry a hoe, and only a phone call away from anxious, supportive parents. The Hobo Times is full of fatherly advice to the innocent: don’t travel alone; keep a supply of one dollar bills handy so you are not seen changing a big one; best to light a fire only in the daytime because at night it might attract unwelcome strangers; remember that there are serial murderers roaming the “high iron”.

  The railway companies have put up posters aimed at deterring hobos and others from riding freight trains. In 1997, 529 people died as a result of trespassing on the railways. Even experienced rail-riders find it difficult to get aboard modern trains driven by diesel engines which

  gather speed more rapidly than the steam trains of the old days.

  The history of hoboing, ancient and modern, has become a respectable academic discipline. As his fame grew, Mr Stevens saw himself as the head of American hobos’ first family. In 1993 he crowned one of his daughters, Connie Hall, queen of the hobos. They are together in our picture. More than 30,000 people watched the ceremony. Yes, Mr Stevens said, there were female hobos, like Boxcar Bertha of Iowa, who died about five years ago. They were treated as equals by the men and never harmed. Irving Stevens thought they might be called early feminists. But that’s another story.

  Chidambaram Subramaniam

  Chidambaram Subramaniam, a “green” leader, died on November 7th 2000, aged 90

  Most of the garden around Chidambaram Subramaniam’s house in Delhi was taken up by a cricket pitch, where he entertained friends to a game at weekends. One day in 1966 he gave orders for the garden to be dug up, cricket pitch and all, and planted with wheat seed.

  Mr Subramaniam, India’s agriculture minister, believed that the seed, a new variety, would transform Indian farming. Not everyone was convinced. This imported seed, critics said, could introduce foreign pests and diseases, ruining the already impoverished Indian farmer. Nationalists noted that the seed had been developed by an American scientist, Norman Borlaug, and everyone knew that Americans were no friends of India.

  Opposition politicians saw the issue as a way of getting at the Congress government. Bureaucrats gave them their tacit support, fearing that the dangerous Mr Subramaniam was pushing ahead too fast, undermining their authority.

  The real fear for India, Mr Subramaniam said, was that it faced severe famine unless more grain was produced. Look, he would plant the seed in his own garden, on his cricket pitch. The dramatic gesture in cricket-mad India did not wholly end the opposition to the seed but it was dented. The seed was sown throughout India, in around 1,000 “demonstration” sites, as well as in the Delhi garden. The resulting wheat yield, double that of previous sowings, astonished even Mr Subramaniam.

  The pariah seed was suddenly in demand. Some farmers who could not buy the seed stole it. The next year, 1967, India harvested 17m tons of wheat grain. Never before had the harvest been greater than 12m tons. Schools were closed and their classrooms were used to store the extra bounty. Its immediate effect was to have saved many thousands of Indians from starvation. Today India harvests about 70m tons of wheat grain a year, more than enough for self-sufficiency in an ever-expanding population, with some left over for export. This was what came to be called India’s green revolution, a rare example of a discovery delivering even more than it had promised.

  Last year there was a lot of support for naming Mr Subramaniam India’s man of the century, even of the millennium. He was too modest, and too wise, to allow himself to be given the laurel for a discovery for which many claimed credit. Norman Borlaug had got a Nobel in 1970 for developing the high yielding wheat at the international Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico, and had been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Indian scientists adapted the seed to Indian conditions. Two of the prime ministers Mr Subramaniam had worked under, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi, had defended him against all the flak from his critics.

  All the same, it was Mr Subramaniam who got the wheat growing, skilfully guiding the project through India’s political and bureaucratic fog, Monkombu Swaminathan, an agricultural scientist who worked with Mr Subramaniam, said this week that the politician had helped farmers to achieve in four years as much progress as they had managed in the preceding 4,000 years.

  Perhaps because others sought to be acknowledged as “father” of the green revolution, India was slow to acknowledge officially what Mr Subramaniam had accomplished: he was awarded the country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India), in 1998, only some 30 years after the new seed had proved itself.Then, as in the obsequies since his death, much was said about his integrity. Nor was it flattery. Whatever the controversy over the seed, most people considered him a trustworthy minister, a quality not always evident in Indian politicians. He was born into a landowning family in what is now Tamil Nadu, in southern India. He practised law, but became increasingly involved with Mahatma Gandhi’s independence movement. In 1941 he was imprisoned by the British, who were desperately holding the Japanese at bay and had no time for agitators. His term in jail was a useful credential when he made politics his career, first at local level and then in the national parliament. In various Congress governments he had a variety of jobs other than agriculture. He had a go at finance and defence and was reckoned to do them ably, if not spectacularly. He said you could not be a hero all the time.

  His last job was as governor of the state of Maharashtra. He resigned in 1993 after some private remarks he had made criticising the Delhi government were printed in a newspaper. Perhaps by then, at 83, he was anyway tired of the political round. He gave his attention to the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, where each year young cricketers compete for a cup donated by him. He had long forgiven the British for jailing him in the fight for independence. The British had given to India “the graces of a great game”. Cricketers were a brotherhood of gentlemen sportsmen. “Do you remember,” he would reminisce to gentlemen as old as he was, “that time I had to dig up my lawn …”
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  Sue Sumii

  Sue Sumii, the champion of Japan’s untouchables, died on June 16th 1997, aged 95

  When Sue Sumii was six, the Emperor Meiji visited the village where she lived, near Nara. After he left, the villagers scrabbled for souvenirs: cigarette butts adorned with the imperial seal, anything that the god-king might have touched. One farmer went into the lavatory the emperor had used and reverentially scraped out a sample of sacred stool. For the child the incident was a revelation. “If the emperor shits,” Mrs Sumii wrote later, “it must mean he eats, too. In that case, he’s no different at all from me.” She spent most of her adult life exposing the idiocy of Japan’s class system, and inspiring sympathy for its most despised victims: the untouchable caste known as burakumin.

  The subject is avoided in polite society, but Japan has had untouchables – similar in some ways to the harijan of India or the paekchong of Korea – since at least the 13th century. Buddhism bars the killing of animals, and Japan’s native Shinto creed rules that contact with dead flesh is defiling; so butchers, leatherworkers and gravediggers have traditionally been confined to ghettoes and shunned. In feudal times, the eta (much filth), as they were called, were banned from socialising with other Japanese and sometimes forced to wear leather patches on their sleeves to mark them out as unclean. In 1859, when an untouchable was murdered in a brawl, the judge ruled that the murderer could not be punished unless he was allowed to kill six more untouchables: an eta life was worth a seventh of that of an “ordinary” Japanese.

  Although segregation was legally ended in 1871, discrimination persists. There are more than 1m burakumin (hamlet people) in Japan today, mostly concentrated in the Osaka region. They are distinguishable from other Japanese only as a result of where they (or their ancestors) live. Companies buy (illegal) lists of buraku addresses to avoid hiring them, and “respectable” families pay private detectives to check that potential in-laws do not come from untouchable stock. Buraku household income is perhaps 60% of the Japanese average.