For more than 150 years after its founding in 1843, The Economist had no Obituary page. Why this was so can only be a matter of conjecture. Perhaps, in a paper proudly founded on anonymity and chary of all cults of personality, it seemed improper to give so much attention to individuals. Perhaps, in a paper that boldly promoted progress, there was no natural place for valedictories. When I joined the paper (always “the paper”) in 1976, the cult of optimism was so rampant that I was discouraged from travelling anywhere that might produce downbeat stories. The grave, one imagines, is the ne plus ultra of that genre.
Yet not necessarily. And besides, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the British way with obituaries was becoming lively, literary and irreverent. The rivalries of Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and James Fergusson, the clever and relatively young obituary editors of the Daily Telegraph and the Independent respectively, had turned their obituary sections into some of the best read and most discussed pages of their respective newspapers. And it was from the Independent that Robert Cottrell came to The Economist in 1993.
Robert – one of our most stylish writers, and a man addicted to large dogs and satin waistcoats – suggested to The Economist’s then editor, Bill Emmott, that a single obituary each week could add zest to the paper’s back pages, and provide a way of looking at issues and achievements outside the usual scope of current events. He helped his case by commissioning a piece on the more striking and funny newspaper obituaries of recent years from Martin Weyer, a Telegraph contributor, for the Christmas issue in 1994. Delighted by Mr Weyer’s piece, and persuaded that obituaries would “add a sense of history and humanity to a paper often rather lacking in both”, Bill gave Robert the job of launching the new page.
Once it was launched, however, no one seemed particularly keen to take on the full-time job of being the paper’s undertaker – until Bill, by happy chance, asked Robert’s near-neighbour on the 13th floor, Keith Colquhoun. Keith was a writer of novels as well as a journalist; and his pen, apparently smooth as silk but in fact as sharp as a stiletto, took command of the page in 1995 and went on for eight years. I succeeded him – a hard act to follow – in November 2003.
When I took over, Keith and I had lunch in the local Italian dive. He had kept an enormous list of his subjects, collated by geography and gender, and told me that it was important to keep down the number of Americans (who would otherwise take over), to give a fair whack to the Asians, and to try my damnedest to get more women in. I’ve found all these precepts good advice, but hard to keep. Not many women feature in this book: a sobering reflection of the struggle they have had, even in the 20th century, to lead lives half as interesting as men’s. And there are an awful lot of Americans; but when a country is Top Nation, that becomes rather hard to avoid.
A ration of one candidate a week certainly concentrates the mind: the more so because the Obituaries Editor usually has no more than two days to research and write the piece. Speed reading becomes essential and the London Library, conveniently round the corner, a godsend. Google, of course, helps too; but there is no substitute, I still find, for books. They allow the total immersion in a character that is necessary.
The Economist’s stock of obituaries (sometimes irreverently called the “morgue”) is pitifully small. Some newspapers, I’m told, have hundreds of obituaries ready. There are ten obituaries in ours as I write, and I have never yet been able to pluck one out and use it. It is an unwritten law that the people in the morgue will never die. They achieve a kind of eternal life, getting wirier and stronger by the day.
The candidates’ criteria have, I think, stayed unchanged since the page was started. They must have led interesting and thought-provoking lives. Whether they have led good lives, in the usual meaning of “good”, couldn’t matter less. We are not in the business of eulogies, or even of appreciations. The bad, the immoral, or the flighty sometimes make the best copy. I took a good deal of flak for obituarising Anna Nicole Smith; but hers was a wonderful and poignant story of a doomed search for celebrity. We’ve obituarised monopolists and petty tyrants as well as modern-day saints. Keith always had a soft spot for the minor players, even if – perhaps especially if – a major player had died in the same week; he taught me that there is a story worth hearing in almost every life.
What makes an Economist obituary? No rules are laid down except the length, 132 lines or around 1,000 words, and the shape of the illustration (which, most perversely, in recent years has been not portrait, but landscape). The rest is left to the writer, a glorious freedom which the obituaries editor traditionally hogs almost entirely to himself. Colleagues often try to muscle in (and sometimes succeed, always to good effect); families of the dead, or their friends, often lobby us. But the editor refusesalmost all outside petitions, because he (or she) wants no one interfering with the sheer joy of the job.
Perhaps joy and death seem strange bedfellows. Not to me. Speaking now purely for myself, I see my obituaries as progress reports on a life that continues, somehow, elsewhere. My purpose is to try to distil the essence of that life as it passes, and to try to describe it as far as possible from the point of view of the subject. For what has gone away from the world, for better or worse, is that particular perspective and that particular voice.
When we were first discussing this book, Keith said that a good title for it might be “A Sparrow’s Flight”. The allusion, of course, is to Bede’s metaphor of human life as a sparrow flying through a banqueting hall, from darkness and out again to darkness, with one brightly lit moment in between. Of course, it is also possible that the banqueting hall is murkier than the before and after. But whichever is true, that moment of passage – that flickering of wings amid the hubbub of the Earth – is what we have to catch.
Ann Wroe
July 2008