A smart ex-girlfriend of mine always started her matutinal
Times reading with the obituaries. At the time, this struck me as peculiar:
what kind of spiritual necrophilia induced a vivacious, with-it young woman to
evince such retrograde interest? Wasn’t there enough news from the quick to
supersede that about the dead?
Well, I was wrong. Obituaries are easily as fascinating as
anything else in the morning paper. An obit is really a miniature biography, a
life rendered as a short-short story, breakfast food quite as nutritive as
Cheerios. But does short-short story, vignette, anecdote or whatever you want
to call it do justice to what is essentially stranger than fiction? And please
don’t accuse me of peddling platitudes; the phrase “stranger than fiction” has
been slathered on any number of lives and become worn as thin as the slice of
meat in a bargain ham sandwich.
Stranger than fiction, why not? Many, if not most, lives are
that—can’t help being that. Fiction, however avant-garde or post-modern, must
play by some rules, if only those circumscribing a lone writer’s imagination.
But life, which shuffles events more thoroughly than a professional gambler
does cards, is under no obligation to obey any rules. Otherwise would my vita
be what it is?
When I was sick as a little boy, I would want my favorite
movie star, Jeanette MacDonald to come to my bedside and nurse me back to
health. Responding to my urging, my parents assured me that they had wired her,
and that most likely come she would. Alas, not even life was quite that
strange. But it was when the little boy from Yugoslavia (which no longer
exists) came unaccountably to America, and actually could turn on his radio to
hear his other favorite, Loretta Young, as it were live on the air waves.
Stranger yet, could he have dreamed that someday he would be
married to a girl from Ohio? Not that fiction I had read wasn’t strange enough.
As a boy, I devoured the books of Karl May, the German young-adult novelist who
had never set foot in America, but made the Wild West as real as possible in
his many novels, about, among other things, the blood brotherhood between the
magnificent Indian chief Winnetou and the great white hunter, trapper,
adventurer (or whatever he was) Old Shatterhand, who turned out to be, of all
things, German.
Even stranger than the Apache chieftain were some of the
white characters, who went by names like Old Firehand and Old Surehand (which
in those days I mispronounced as trisyllabic), but were small potatoes compared
to Old Shatterhand, whose very stallion was smarter than some of these Old This
and Thats.
How strange was it that, besides loving Erich Kastner (add
umlaut on the a) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (for the Martian novels, not the
Tarzan ones), I shared the beloved Karl May with another May enthusiast, Adolf
Hitler. (No snide comparisons, please.) Later I got to James Fenimore Cooper,
Jack London and Mark Twain, but could they really compare with Kastner’s “Emil
and the Detectives” and the May novels, including his equally great ones about
the Beduins of North Africa and the Incas of South America?
Strange that only the French made a movie based on May,
entitled “Winnetou” (played by a French actor), a flop. What could the French
know about the German Wild West? They even made the noble savage the
protagonist (shades of Rousseau?) rather than the matchless, omniscient German
American, Old Shatterhand.
You don’t think life is that strange? Then how about that
party at the Persian Shah’s ambassador to the U.N.? One attended those parties
mostly for the abundant caviar, and it was there that I encountered a bright
young Iranian, Farhad Diba, who had briefly attended M.I.T., where I, equally
briefly, had taught Humanities.
Diba said he had had only one good teacher at M.I.T, and I
responded that, similarly, I had only one really good student, an Iranian. Did
you guess it? I turned out to have been that teacher, and Farhad, that student.
A good thing, too, because he was a cousin of the queen, or empress, or
whatever the Shah’s royal spouse was known as. So when, later, I was a member
of a group of Americans invited to the Tehran Film Festival, it emerged that I
was the only one for whom a hotel room had not been reserved. Luckily, however,
there was one for Buster Keaton, who had been dead for many years, which I was
allowed to inherit.
Thanks to Farhad’s royal cousin, I was provided with a
limousine, which none of the others were, but which I generously shared with
them, who included Otto Preminger, Paul Mazursky, Sally Kellerman and Brenda
Vaccaro. I forgave Otto his cheekiness, when, upon arrival and no room for me,
he offered me the space underneath his bed.
But back to the strangeness of life per Times obituaries.
Where else would I have read about Anna Merz, guardian and champion of the
rhinoceros, “a species that is often misunderstood”? A photograph shows Anna
(born Florence Ann Hepburn in England and married successively in Ghana to two
husbands both Swiss) cheek to cheek with a hippo. Let me quote from her obit by
Douglas Martin.
“Anna Merz, who went to Kenya seeking a serene retirement
but became so appalled by the slaughter of black rhinoceroses that she helped
start a reserve to protect them, becoming a global leader in the fight against
their extinction. . . . She left no immediate survivors, but more than 70 black
rhinos, including one born the day she died, continue to thrive in the
sanctuary.”
Among other things, she hired, likewise mostly from her own
pockets, 100 guards for the expanded sanctuary and bought a surveillance plane,
as well as developing a network of
spy informants, all to protect against the numerous armed poachers killing the
hapless beasts for their horns, which, ground to a powder, are sold for prices
often higher than gold to Asiatics as a medicine or aphrodisiac, and to Arabs
whole, to be carved into dagger handles.
A law-school graduate, Mrs. Merz was previously saved as a
child during World War Two from attack by a German plane, when a stranger
covered her body with his own and paid for it with his life. This started her
on preservation, as did also, in Kenya, hearing the yelp from the next room of
her favorite dog being swallowed by a python. She grabbed her pistol and shot
the snake in the head, and gradually unraveled the dog from its maw.
She revealed rhinos to be far from mean or stupid as
commonly held, and able to communicate by altering their breathing rhythms. She
read them Shakespeare to soothe them. It is just that they have poor eyesight,
“leading them to charge first and ask questions later.” More from the obit:
“Samia, an orphan rhino whom she raised from babyhood, even
crawled into bed with Mrs. Merz—not entirely to her delight. Samia would follow
her around like a dog, even after leaving Mrs. Merz’s immediate care and returning
to the reserve, where she mated and had her own calf. If Mrs. Merz fell, Samia
would extend her tail to help her up.
Not realizing how big she had grown, Samia once tried to
sneak back into the house where she had been nursed and became jammed in the
dining room door. Mrs. Merz had to pour a gallon of cooking oil on her rough
skin to ease her through.”
This April 22, 2013 obit (try to seek out the whole article)
brings me close to tears. Conversely, I smile at the one of June 10 for Paul
Soros, Hungarian-American billionaire shipping entrepreneur, philanthropist,
and older brother of the even richer and more famous George Soros. It ends by
quoting Paul, “My story is riches to rags to riches again. I was lucky to
survive. The rest was relatively easy.”
Not all that easy, what with imprisonment and near shipment
to a Nazi death camp. But what brings on the smile is Paul’s “losing a kidney
in a skiing accident in which a buried slalom pole popped up and speared him in
the back.” Later, in New Canaan, he “lost an eye while taking an indoor golf
lesson at a country club.” Is that something out of Monty Python or what?
Today, June 23, I read about the death of the French fashion
designer Jean-Louis Scherrer, whose clients included Jacqueline Kennedy, Sophia
Loren, Raquel Welch, and French first lady Anne-Aymone Giscard d’Estaing. Now
I, a collector of neckties from most of the famous Italian and French
couturiers, including Jean-Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana and, bought in Hong
Kong, Milla Schon (sorry I haven’t the umlaut for her), still lack any by
Thierry Mugler and Scherrer, assuming that Scherrer designed ties.
Anyway, my point is that Scherrer’s wife, whom he
subsequently divorced, was called Laurence, and that their daughters were
Laetitia and Leonor (sorry again for lacking an acute accent). Just think how
euphonious a house it was that resounded with calls for Laurence, Laetitia and
Leonor. Just read aloud those gorgeously alliterative names in L, and allow me
a distich: “Laurence, Laetitia, Leonor,/ Vocables sonnant comme de l’or.”
Strange that only the French made a movie based on May, entitled “Winnetou” (played by a French actor), a flop.
ReplyDeleteActually, there was a series of West German films based on the May novels. Most of the films were shot in what was once Yugoslavia and starred the likes of Stewart Granger, Karin Dor, Elke Sommer, Lex Barker.
I, too, am a devotee of the obituaries, a predilection inherited from my late mother, whose job it once was to comb the daily notices for Jewish names to be printed in the (Yiddish) Daily Forward. One of the better practitioners in the New York Times was McG (Robert McG. Thomas), whose obit is here: http://goo.gl/baC9n
ReplyDeleteThe talented Margalit Fox is a worthy heir. Her obit for porn star Harry Reems: http://goo.gl/PB0wL
Best to you, Mr. Simon.
Please forgive, this is off the point---
ReplyDeleteI don't want to put any noses out of joint,
But I wanted to share something that I found
After assiduous internet searching around:
Marcel Ophuls' documentary on Sarajevo
From 1993 is on DVD-R available---
The link below will take you to the site---
Now if only 'A Sense of Loss' was available, it would be a good night:
http://www.milestonefilms.com/products/troubles-weve-seen-the
The "stranger than fiction" motif reminds me of a couple of anecdotes the English writer H.E. Bates recounted in his autobiography. Early in his manhood, he cut his literary teeth on a thriving and serendipitous career writing short stories for the R.A.F. during World War Two -- stories meant to boost morale among the pilots as well as among the general British populace.
ReplyDeleteOne of them occurred when he was sitting in the mess hall early in the morning, and a pilot came in after a nightlong flight. The pilot sat down across the table from Bates, and after pleasantries, announced casually that he'd just seen "two sunrises". It turns out that sometimes when a pilot is coming in for a landing, he will see one sunrise at the top of his trajectory, and then a couple of minutes later on his descent, a second sunrise. To the pilot, this was unremarkable; but to Bates, it was solid gold material for a story.
At some other point, Bates wrote a story about a pilot who went down somewhere in the south of France. Parts of the story, as usual, were based on real people and events; while other parts he filled in with his imagination. One detail just came to him in a flash -- namely, that the pilot parachuted onto a rice field. When he'd finished the story and passed it around to friends and an editor, they all objected: "There are no rice fields in France!" Bates himself didn't know whether or not there were any, but he trusted his imagination, especially when it delivered details out of the blue that just felt right; like this one.
Some time later, someone who knew southern France very well told him that yes, there are rice fields there.
Erich Kästner.
ReplyDeleteMilla Schön.
On most Windows computers, with the exception of some laptops, an ä may be obtained with the keystroke Alt+0228 (hold down the 'Alt' key and type 0228), an ö with Alt+0246, and a ü with Alt+0252.
For additional special characters, or to obtain the foregoing if "Alt+" doesn't work, press the "Start" menu button, click on "All Programs", then on the folder labeled "Accessories". Find and click the subfolder "System Tools", click "Character Map", and behold your new toy.
ü ø Ĕ ô é ¿ ę
Happy hunting and pecking.