Book of Obituaries Read online

  Yet the songs were already tipping over into chaos, and by January 1968 Mr Barrett was unable to compose or, almost, to function. Dope, LSD and pills, consumed by the fistful, overwhelmed a psyche that was already fragile and could not bear the pressures of success. At concerts he would simply play the same note over and over, or stand still in a trance. If he played, no one knew where he was going, least of all himself. The band did not want to part with him, but could not cope with him; so he was left behind, or left them, enduring drug terrors in a cupboard under the stairs in his London flat. Casualties of “bad trips” usually recovered, with stark warnings for the unwary. Mr Barrett, famously, went on too many and never came back.

  Friends, especially his Pink Floyd colleagues, tried to encourage him to resurrect his career. Their attempts were heartbreaking. At various times in 1968 and 1969 microphones were put in front of him and he was persuaded to sing and play. Cruelly, the recordings of his solo efforts, “The Madcap Laughs” and “Barrett” (both

  1970), caught everything: the nervous coughs, the desperate riffling of pages, the cries of frustration (“Again? I’ll do it again now?”), the numbers of takes. The sleeve of “Madcap” showed a naked girl in attendance – there had been any number of those – but Mr Barrett oblivious to her, his face masked by long hair and mascara, crouched shivering on the floor.

  Cambridge, where he had learned to play banjo and had proudly covered his first guitar with mirror-discs, seemed the best place to retreat to. He went back to live in his mother’s cellar, boarding up the windows, and returned to the painting for which he had trained at Camberwell School of Art. Ambushing journalists were told that his head was “irregular”, and that he was “full of dust and guitars”.

  Mr Barrett was now the most famous recluse in British rock. Slight as his oeuvre had been, it proved impossible to forget. His death, from complications of diabetes,brought an outburst of regret from rock stars and fans who were still following him. Tom Stoppard’s play “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, which was playing at the Royal Court when he died, made him a metaphor for revolutionary music: in 1968 a Pan-figure piping liberation, in the 1990s a tired, grey man spotted in a supermarket.

  His band last saw him in 1975 as they recorded, in “Shine on you Crazy Diamond”, a tribute to him that sounded like yet more encouragement. (“Come on you raver, you seer of visions/Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine.”) Mr Barrett wandered in, fat and shaven-headed and hardly recognisable. As his friends sang “You shone like the sun”, he seemed to laugh sarcastically. He stayed a while in the studio, and then went away.

  On the recording, a guitar player drifting in space walks through a door and finds himself in a loud cocktail party. Managers and promoters come up and flatter him, cajole him into working for them, but at last he escapes again. This time, nobody can catch him.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Jean Baudrillard, philosopher of consumerism, died on March 6th 2007, aged 77

  AT SOME point in his career – neither date nor time being important – Jean Baudrillard took a large red cloth, draped it over a chair in his apartment, and sat on it. He may have smoked or thought for a while, or scratched his nose; a large, doughlike nose, supporting glasses. He then got up, leaving an impression of his body behind. The image pleased him: so much so, that he took a photograph.

  Since he made no comment on the event (beyond the fact that the chair was later broken), the exact details are conjectural. But by putting the cloth on the chair, and sitting on it, Mr Baudrillard added to the plethora of signs, objects and symbolic acts that made up, in his philosophical system, the whole woof and warp of the 20th century. By getting up, he left behind a “simulacrum” of himself: the truth, as he teasingly put it, that hid the fact that there was no truth there. And by photographing the chair he made it “hyperreal”: an image, which could be reproduced unendingly, of an object that claimed to have meaning and, in fact, had none.

  Then he went to lunch.

  Pourquoi pas? When a simulacrum is also a French philosophe, perhaps the most popular of recent decades, he needs a bottle of Merlot from time to time. And since he spent his days considering the seductive power of images and objects, it was fun to observe that he himself had such a power over the woman in the butcher’s who wrapped up his foie de veau, just because she had seen him on television.

  Whether Mr Baudrillard’s world was utter nonsense, or whether it was a profound critique of a consumerist civilisation drowning in its own meaninglessness, was a matter for lively debate. Many of his French colleagues found him too much: noisy, mischievous, attached to no school (though he had sat at the feet of both Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes in his feverish years at Nanterre, when teaching had been interrupted by clouds of tear-gas and cobblestone-throwing). He said things that got him into trouble. His enthusiasm for the événements of 1968 painted him as a man of the Left, where philosophes belonged as naturally as fish in water; but Mr Baudrillard later broke with Marx, and called him a conservative. What he meant was that both communism and capitalism made human existence a matter of production and exchange, while he preferred to stress its symbolic side.

  In any case, in his world, both the liberal and the communist narratives of history had collapsed. “The end of history” was no longer universal capitalism and democracy or the victory of the proletariat. It was summed up for Mr Baudrillard by a lone man jogging, oblivious to his surroundings, hearing only the music of his own sound-system and aware only of the statements he himself was making: health, fashion, endurance. He was running straight ahead, but with no end in view.

  Of all the people he offended, none took more umbrage than the Americans. This was interesting, for he was far more popular there than in France, lecturing on various campuses of the University of California and even appearing, at Whiskey Pete’s outside Las Vegas, as some sort of lounge lizard in a gold lamé jacket. In 1986 he got in a car and drove across the country, both hating and adoring it. He had never been so fully in a land of hyperreality, cluttered with meaningless symbols or, as in Disneyland, with garish synthetic versions of ordinary life. He looked for America, he wrote, in “motels and mineral surfaces ... in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space.” There he found himself, playing a Frenchphilosopher, roaring through “the desert of the real”.

  Americans did not like his book. They did not care to be called “the only remaining primitive society”. A few years later, they objected also to Mr Baudrillard’s contention that the first Gulf war of 1991 had never taken place. But, in his view, it had not. The media had created a picture of conflict; but Saddam had deployed his troops, and America had dropped its bombs, as pure statements of power in a vacuum, and the two forces had never met. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the “victor” (though with no victory) had celebrated with a party in Disneyland: QED.

  All this paled, however, beside Mr Baudrillard’s musings on the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. This was the “absolute event”, an inevitable reaction to “insufferable” American power. In the face of overweening globalisation, to destroy the twin towers was the only response. The symbol invited its destruction: “It was they who did it, but we who wished it.”

  Most Americans decided, at this point, that they did not understand Mr Baudrillard very well. But then few people did. Behind the panache of his ideas – often bunkum, yet sometimes catching acutely the media-dominated triviality of modern life – the man was hidden. “No background,” he would growl, if you asked. Somewhere, there was German-speaking peasant stock and suspicious parents who wondered what on earth they had produced in this plump and bookish boy. Or perhaps there was really none of that at all: just a photograph of a suggestion of a human shape, on a red cloth on a chair.

  Saul Bellow

  Saul Bellow, an American novelist, died on April 5th 2005, aged 89

  IN FORMAL pose, he was always fastidious
. Long before Tom Wolfe, Saul Bellow’s trouser creases were blade-sharp, his fingernails sheened, the brim of his fedora tipped just so. All of which was surprisingly fussy for a writer of such ebullient and Olympian reputation. Only when he broke into a grin did you realise that Mr Bellow was no mere dandy.

  He did not speak so much as spill with words: colloquial and mandarin, lofty, streetwise and intimate, all at once. “Humboldt’s Gift”, the 1975 novel that won Mr Bellow a Pulitzer prize and the Nobel prize for literature, began thus:

  He was a wonderful talker, a non-stop monologuist and improvisator, a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine.

  Ten years before Mr Bellow was born, Henry James returned to New York and heard “the hard glitter of Israel” in the street-chatter of the Lower East Side. He was revolted at having “to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism with the inconceivable alien.” Mr Bellow never pussyfooted about the sanctity of English; for him, the multiple ore of immigrant voices was there to be fired into a fiercer linguistic alloy. As Philip Roth wrote, his language alone closed the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon.

  Character, rather than plot, animated Mr Bellow’s novels and short stories. He disagreed with Virginia Woolf, who believed that, in the modern novel, character was dead. His works were dominated by “noticers” (hungry observers of the life around them), dreamers, seekers, men of the mind, not unlike Mr Bellow himself, who had grown up poor and were impatient to get out into the world.

  Round them, beautifully chronicled, were the “daily monkeyshines”, as well as “the cheapies, the stingies, the hypochondriacs, the family bores”. Mr Bellow’s heroes lived in a world of cranks, crooks and wide boys, about whom warnings were constantly issued by fearsome grandmothers. Yet they were filled with nobility of spirit and moral purpose. “What did Danton lose his head for,” asks Augie of his brother Simon in “The Adventures of Augie March”, “or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn’t to make a nobility of us all?” Neither of them amounted to much in the end, but the point of their lives was the quest. No one ever promised there would be gold at the end of their rainbows.

  Robert Penn Warren said of “Augie March”, which came out in 1953, that “from now on any discussion of fiction in America in our time will have to take account of it.” Steering clear of fads and fashions, Mr Bellow made his mark by revivifying realism, even though he wrote mostly from the viewpoint of impression and memory rather than contemporaneous action. Almost single-handedly, he extended the life of the novel, holding its neck, another critic ventured, “from the blade of the postmodern”.

  Like Dickens, Mr Bellow made a city his own: “clumsy, tender, stinking Chicago, dumped on its ancient lake bottom.” Living in the Russian Baths district in “Humboldt’s Gift” are “aged working stiffs, lone Ukrainian grandfathers, retired car-line

  employees, a pastry cook famous for his icings who had to quit because his hands became arthritic.” “Chicago was a place that loved irregular people,” Mr Bellow would say later.

  He was born in 1915, the last of Abraham Belo’s four children and the only one born in the New World. The family had come originally from Russia, via Quebec, with little Saul (then Solomon), smuggled across the American border. He learned both Hebrew and Yiddish, and his mother wanted him to be a Talmudic scholar or a rabbi. Often ill, he began to devour books – the Old Testament, Shakespeare, the great 19th-century Russians. This may be another reason why so many of his heroes came wrapped in a sense of their own mortality. Steering clear of Northwestern University’s tweedy English department, he graduated in 1937 in anthropology and sociology and later went to work for the Encyclopedia Britannica. He moved to New York and began writing, at first with little success.Only when he joined the merchant marine did he complete “Dangling Man”, about a Chicagoan waiting to be drafted.

  By the time “Augie” made his name, Mr Bellow was 38. Other great novels followed. “Henderson the Rain King”, about an American millionaire who travels to Africa, had an even more ambitious canvas. “Humboldt’s Gift” so impressed Samuel Beckett that it spurred him into arranging a meeting. He and Bellow shared a drink at the Pont Royal in Paris, but both men were shy and the encounter was awkward.

  With success came a stern commitment to writing that contributed to Mr Bellow’s four divorces. Term-time found him in Boston and Chicago, where he taught the European novel; summers took him to Vermont, where he lay in the bath and studied the stars through a skylight. In between he travelled – to Mexico, France and Israel – finding food for the business of writing.

  Towards the end, the mortality that had lurked at the edges of the early novels moved to the fore. Mr Bellow’s writing slowed, but the spring of words never failed him. Presented with a ridiculous dessert in a restaurant one night shortly before his last child was born, the 84-year-old Nobel laureate contemplated a circle of perfectly measured blobs of fruit coulis. “Ah,” he remarked, impishly and instantly, “Euclidian pimples!”

  Ingmar Bergman

  Ingmar Bergman, film and theatre director, died on July 30th 2007, aged 89

  WHEN he was filming “Winter Light”, in 1961, Ingmar Bergman made a tour of the churches of northern Sweden. He and his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, would sit in the hard pews from 11 in the morning till two in the afternoon, watching the light change. In the Swedish winter, there was no sun. A dim grey illumination came from the clouds, casting no shadows. The subtleties of the shifting light entranced Mr Bergman, who decided that his whole film should be lit that way.

  Strong sunlight, in contrast, filled his nightmares. A sudden lurid glare in his films – from a naked light, from an empty street – usually marked the entry into psychosis. That was why he never considered going to Hollywood to make movies, though by the 1950s his reputation as a film-maker was already impressive. He needed clouds, trees and net curtains veiling the light, softening it and making it

  move. He needed light in small increments: flaring and fading in a paraffin lamp, or dimming with extraordinary slowness on a face (as it dimmed on Liv Ullmann’s face in “Persona”) until only a silhouette was left. From childhood, he had got up at six and noted the track of light on the wall opposite his window. After two months of darkness, a thread would reappear in January.

  Lack of light was reinforced, for Mr Bergman, by the isolation of Swedish life: so few people scattered over a large country, in houses here and there in the forests and the fields where, round some dining table, decorous conversation hid the loneliness and tension that could not be expressed. In Mr Bergman’s films, characters would often be silent, or scenes would unroll with no sound but the whimper of wind, the drip of water or, especially, the tick and chime of watches and clocks. He saw people as puppets, controlled by some pitiless force much as he, in boyhood, had controlled his own marionettes in his toy theatre, making Mr Punch jibber and squawk in nonsense-language. Life decayed towards “a state of absolute nothingness”, while his characters, clinging on, tried urgently and clumsily to communicate their feelings to each other.

  He had been brought up with Lutheranism, a pastor’s son subjected to sermons, beatings and high piety, and for all his protestations his films were full of it. His trilogy of the 1960s, “Through a Glass Darkly”, “Winter Light” and “The Silence”, were described by him as a “metaphysical reduction” in which God’s absence was unmasked. Without God, he turned to self-examination. His characters saw themselves through windows and in mirrors, divided selves gazing on their darker aspects or their pasts. He let his camera rest unsparingly on faces until all masks dissolved, and the lips and the eyes seemed to express some unaffected truth.

  The man himself often lived up to his bleak dream-world: lean, intense, racked by stomach complaints, and with a special fondness for the rugged limestone island of Faro, off Swed
en’s east coast, where he built a low stone house on an empty sweep of rock. Though he adored film, and had done so ever since he had swapped half his tin soldiers for his big brother’s magic lantern, film-making made him “bleed too much”. Eight hours of waiting might be rewarded, he once said, with ten or 12 minutes of real creative work. He demanded total immersion both of his actors and of himself, and complete control of both the shoot and the script. He was sparing both with budgets and with film, and compulsively private.

  Lighter moments surfaced sometimes. His long, lesser-known career in theatre directing, in Gothenburg, Malmo andStockholm, included comedies alongside his favourite Strindberg. Explosions of directorial frustration were followed by gales of laughter. Pretty women surrounded him, several of whom he married and two of whom (Ms Ullmann and Bibi Andersson) starred in “Persona”, in 1966, as different aspects of the same self. He delighted in female subtlety, slyness and fecundity. Summer idylls in the woods featured milk and wild strawberries, as well as al fresco sex, to show the sweetness and brevity of passing time.

  On the edge, in the corners, darkness waited. Death loitered in many films – as a stranger, a crone, a ballet-master and, most memorably, as a cloaked and white-faced figure in “The Seventh Seal” of 1957, with whom the hero-knight plays a drawn-out game of chess. Mr Bergman admitted that death terrified him. And short of that he had “the demons” to contend with, anxiety, rage, regret and shame, which kept him company like “flocks of black birds”. Panic at his own dark aspects kept him alert and drove him on.