Working the Dead Beat (27 page)

The obituary upheavals of 1986 remain legendary. At the
Times
, acting obituaries editor John Grigg — noted historian, author of a celebrated three-volume biography of David Lloyd George, former Lord Altrincham, and failed Conservative candidate — emphatically put paid to the tradition of
de mortuis nil nisi bonum
in a sexually explicit beyond-the-grave condemnation of Sir Robert Helpmann, the Australian dancer, choreographer, and director who played the child-catcher in the film
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. After Helpmann died at age seventy-seven on September 28, 1986, the
Times
ran an unsigned obituary that described him as “a homosexual of the proselytising kind, [who] could turn young men on the borderline his way.”

The
Daily Telegraph
topped that less than five months later when they published a derisive (if hilarious) obituary of Liberace, the flamboyant American pianist and entertainer, who died at sixty-seven in February 1987, after a precipitous weight loss. His long-time manager, Seymour Heller, blamed a watermelon-only diet for Liberace's alarmingly gaunt appearance before he disappeared from public view. But other sources, including the pianist's biographer, Darden Asbury Pyron, say he died of complications from
HIV/AIDS
. (Incidentally, one of the big differences between British and North American obits is cause of death. The Brits often ignore it; the Americans dwell on it. It is said that when Massingberd, who resisted putting death details in obits — including Liberace's — was finally forced to comply, he retaliated with the tale of a man who died when his penile implant exploded.)

The
Daily Telegraph
obituary quotes liberally from a “particularly venomous” review of a performance Liberace gave in 1956 at the London Palladium. “He reeks with emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief, and the old heave-ho,” was one of the milder comments. “He is the summit of sex, the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter, and everything that he, she, and it can ever want.” After denying his homosexuality in the High Court in London — at a time when consensual sex between adult males was a crime — Liberace won damages in a libel suit in 1959.

By the time Liberace died, three decades later, the law and sexual mores had changed. Besides, Liberace and his beloved mother were no longer around to be offended, so repeating the once libellous review, although hardly respectful, was fair game. The final line of the obituary was a typically coded message to readers of the
Daily Telegraph
. It consisted of a one-sentence paragraph: “He was unmarried.”

Massingberd was inordinately fond of rogues. Here is a passage from the obituary for Ronnie Kray, who with his twin brother, Reggie, “formed one of the most notorious criminal partnerships of modern times.” Describing them as “criminal entrepreneurs,” the obituarist wrote: “Amateur boxing champions, they eschewed the traditional razor as ineffective and, besides employing the knife, cutlass, and broken bottle, developed an early affection for guns.”

Ronnie Kray, a “paranoid schizophrenic” and “compulsive fantasist” who loved his nickname “the Colonel” and behaved as if he “were directing a film of his own life,” was “in thrall to his twin, who was drawn to violence and saw killing as the ultimate proof of manhood.” As Kray himself once said, “We never hurt innocent people. The men we killed were other villains,” as though that made it all right. The obituary recounts a long list of blood-curdling crimes before concluding: “While in Broadmoor, Ronnie Kray married twice; neither marriage was consummated.”

Of course, obituarists were in anecdote heaven when Massingberd himself died from cancer at age sixty on Christmas Day 2007. The
Guardian
quoted him as saying that the best remedy for depression was the thought of singing “patriotic songs in drag before an appreciative audience.” The
New York Times
offered a short lexicon of his prize euphemisms, such as “gave colourful accounts of his exploits” for a habitual liar, and included quotes from pet obituaries, including the 1988 notice for London restaurateur Peter Langan. “Often he would pass out amid the cutlery before doing any damage, but occasionally he would cruise menacingly beneath the tables, biting unwary customers' ankles.”

True to the style Massingberd had made famous, the
Daily Telegraph
described its “invariably strapped for cash” former obituaries editor as “a valiant trencherman.” Over the years this “tall, slim and notably handsome youth with hollowed-out cheeks” had transmogrified into an “impressively corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence.” Along with the biographical details about his several books on subjects ranging from country houses to the genealogy of the landed gentry to his self-effacing memoir,
Daydream Believer
, the obituary incorporated several oft-repeated gems from the half-dozen anthologies that Massingberd had edited, including a reference to the sixth Earl of Carnarvon as a “relentless raconteur and most uncompromisingly direct ladies' man.”

Massingberd deserves full credit for turning obituaries into entertainment. The competition that ensued among obit editors in the quality British papers was a bonanza for readers, who delighted in comparing notes about the meanings of coy or barbed references and in guessing which anonymous friend was sending up a recently departed worthy. The best obituaries had always been informative and thought-provoking, but suddenly they had become fun, even outrageous reading, especially if it wasn't your loved one who was being skewered.

Irreverent send-offs created a new audience: obituary groupies. American journalist Marilyn Johnson wrote a bestselling book in 2006 called
The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries,
not as a writer of obits but as a fan. In a chapter titled “I Walk the Dead Beat,” she describes the thrill she felt when she read obituaries on two successive days of Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger, and John Fiedler, the voice of Piglet, in the Disney cartoon
Winnie the Pooh
, noting as she clipped that “the two had gone silent a day apart.” It reminded her of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: “the second and third presidents of the United States died in harmony on July 4, exactly fifty years after they adopted the Declaration of Independence.” I don't know what you do with curious coincidences like these, but people have collected much stranger things than obituaries, so go for it, I say.

Bismarck supposedly said people should never watch the making of laws or of sausages. Believe me, the same is true of conferences. A few years ago I joined the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (
SPOW
) and went to its founding workshop in Portland, Oregon. The first time I googled the society's acronym, I came up with “Sex Position of the Week,” but the back story of
SPOW
is almost as spicy; it is a tale of rivalry, power struggles, and journalistic standards that began in the late 1990s in a north Dallas bar.

Carolyn Gilbert, a high school English teacher turned consultant, was tossing back a few with a group of friends who, like her, were obit junkies, when it suddenly occurred to her that she should convene the first Great Obituary Writers' Conference. (“I just said it as a lark,” she later told the
New Yorker
. “I'm not even sure what I meant — whether I meant great obituaries, great writers, or great conference.”)

The inaugural conference was held in Archer City, the hometown of Texas writer Larry McMurtry and the setting for his novel
The Last Picture Show
. Two years later, Gilbert expanded the group, forming the International Association of Obituarists and soliciting dues to support www.obitpage.com, a compendium of memorable obituaries, book reviews, and blurbs about upcoming conferences. She also found a new venue for the third
GOWC
: the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas — New Mexico, not Nevada — a restored Wild West saloon and hostelry that has provided locations for many films, including
No Country for Old Men
.

After that she attracted the weird, the wannabes, the professionals, and the curious to gatherings in places as diverse as Bath, England, and tiny Arthur, New York. In the early years, Australian obituary expert Nigel Starck was a mainstay, and American writer Marilyn Johnson came to conduct research for
The Dead Beat.
But there were also some arcane participants, such as EllynAnne Geisel, an “apron archeologist” and the author of
Apronisms: Pocket Wisdom for Every Day
, who talked — a lot — about the more than four hundred aprons she had collected.

Conference events featured gatherings in cemeteries, appearances by creatures dressed as the Grim Reaper, much quaffing of martinis, ritualized recitals of obit highlights, and even some transatlantic rivalry between Americans, who love to celebrate the quirks of ordinary people, and Brits, who specialize in mocking the foibles of outlandish aristocrats. The fourth conference ended with a metaphorical drum roll. The news flash that Ronald Reagan had died of Alzheimer's disease had obituary writers scrambling for their cellphones and laptops.

Zany and eccentric began to pale when the closing speaker at the conference in Alfred, in June 2007, was somebody Gilbert had met at the bar the night before. Tensions between professional journalists and obit junkies led to such radical notions as inviting celebrity speakers rather than oddballs, producing an agenda in advance of the gathering and sending out a call for papers. In other words, more like an academic conference than a backroom chat.

In the end, plans to hold the tenth
GOWC
in Toronto fell apart following a clash of wills and standards between Gilbert and the local convener, Colin Haskin, then obituaries editor of the
Globe and Mail.
The contretemps got so heated it actually became fodder for a column by journalist Alex Beam in the
Boston Globe
— a first for scribes on the dead beat.

“You must take a backseat entirely and allow us to run everything,” Haskin wrote to Gilbert. “You must give up all control, including the website, finances, attendance, fees, list of speakers,” he continued. “The tenth anniversary conference cannot proceed in the same manner as those in the past.” To which Gilbert retorted: “I am gobsmacked with your comments and innuendo . . . I am bewildered by your repeated demand for ‘control.'” As in a marriage gone sour, the two eventually began haggling over money and possessions, with Gilbert offering to sell Haskin the rights to the conference and its website for $200,000, an offer she later told Alex Beam was not “serious.” For his part, Haskin concluded that he “just didn't trust Gilbert.”

Personally, as a lover of eccentrics, I'm all for letting scribes and fans share the same conference. By concentrating on credentials, especially in recessionary times, the professional obituary writers in
SPOW
tolled their own death knell. After a hiatus, some stalwarts are planning a conference in Toronto for 2013.

As for the ten rogues, rascals, and romantics I have gathered here, their lives can't be separated from their achievements or, in some cases, their notoriety. To say they were colourful is too pallid a descriptor: they were cosmic singularities, in good ways and bad. That's why I've written about them in all their livid outrageousness. They deserve nothing less.

 

Irving Layton

Poet

March 12, 1912 – January 4, 2006

S
TOCKY, WITH AN
unruly mane and a ferocious glare, Irving Layton was fond of referring to himself in the same breath as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Keats. Despite his bombast, he was a grand and glorious poet. In March 2012, celebrations were held across the country on the centen­ary of his birth to remember the man and to read from his work. Tales of his hyperbolic self-importance abounded, of course, but the poems themselves reminded listeners of Layton's discerning eye, lyrical ear, and, above all, the virtuosity with which he used the English language. Nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981 — he lost out to Gabriel García Márquez — he was also a mentor to generations of younger poets, including Leonard Cohen and Al Purdy, and a proselytizer who brought urgency and passion to Canadian life and letters.

“There was Irving Layton, and then there was the rest of us. He is our greatest poet, our greatest champion of poetry. Alzheimer's could not silence him, and neither will death,” a grieving Leonard Cohen said after Layton died in Montreal, at age ninety-three, on January 4, 2006. “I taught him how to dress. He taught me how to live forever,” Cohen once said of his mentor and father figure.

Years earlier, the late Al Purdy had described Layton's personality as a fusion of opposites, saying he “was the Montreal magnet for me . . . I felt about him as I had not about any other Canadian writer, a kind of awe and surprise that such magical things should pour from an egotistical clown, a charismatic poseur. And I forgive myself for saying these things, which are both true and untrue.”

Whenever he could afford it, and often when he couldn't, Layton lived the overblown life of a poet, producing more than forty books. He made poetry important, wrenching it from pretty verse into raw, sensual, visual, and aural imagery. Believing he was one of the elect, Layton felt his poems would, “like the severed head of Orpheus, sing for all eternity,” as his son David Layton wrote in a biographical essay, “Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen and Other Recurring Nightmares” in
Saturday Night
magazine.

He delighted in furious debate, defying authority, undermining conservatism, and ridiculing cant. He prided himself on his classical sensibility, and his writing was more orderly and rhythmical than his savage personal style suggested. But he hated to be tied down, in poetry or in marriage: “I am a Romantic with a sense of irony,” he once told a student.

He loved women — their pursuit, their bodies, and their company. He had three wives and two partners, including Aviva Cantor Layton, who lived with him for more than twenty years and bore his second son, David. Describing the poet's death as a “body blow,” she said his real wife was his muse.

The stories about Layton, beginning with his claim that he was born circumcised, are legendary. “Who knows,” Aviva Layton responded when the question was put to her directly. “It is like asking whether Achilles or Zeus ever existed.” Everybody mythologizes his or her life to a certain extent, she said, adding that his mother certainly believed he had been born without a foreskin, the sign of the Messiah.

In the early 1960s, the couple was in Rome and wanted to visit St. Peter's Basilica. The guards barred her because she was wearing a mini-dress. Without pause, Layton opened his wallet, pulled out all his lira, pinned some to the bottom of her skirt to make a hem, then slipped the rest under the straps of her dress to fashion sleeves. “Now,” he demanded, “is she respectable?” The guards, seemingly oblivious to the poet's eloquent deriding of mammon, made no objection as the couple swept past the barrier and into the holiest of Catholic churches.

Editing Layton was a fraught experience because “he did not believe he had ever written a bad poem,” said Anna Porter, who worked with him at McClelland and Stewart beginning in the late 1960s. “He was brilliant,” Porter said, “and when he viewed himself in the pantheon of great poets, he wasn't saying it lightly, he was saying it with some foreknowledge of the precedents.” She edited his
Collected
Poems
, which was to be his magnum opus. The problem was that it kept growing. They had a temporary falling out over the number of poems. He was so angry with her that he went to another publisher, who released the “uncollected” Irving Layton.

What made Layton special as a mentor and a teacher, according to Sam Solecki, who wrote the introduction to a selected edition of Layton's poetry,
A Wild Peculiar Joy
,
in 1982,
was the way he nurtured younger poets without trying to turn them into models of himself. He was like Nietzsche, who said the best student is the one who goes beyond the master. And he left behind stellar poems such as “A Tall Man Executes a Jig,” “The Swimmer,” “The Birth of Tragedy,” “Song for Naomi,” “The Cold Green Element,” “On Seeing the Statute of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Church of Notre Dame,” “Keine Lazarovitch 1870–1959,” “The Tightrope Dancer,” and “A Wild Peculiar Joy.”

IRVING LAYTON WAS
born Israel Lazarovitch in Târgu NeamÅ£, Romania, on March 12, 1912, two years before the onset of the war that would change the map of Europe. His father, Moses, was shy and religiously observant and his mother, Keine, was domineering, ferocious, and besotted with Layton, the youngest of her several children — he slept in her bed until long past childhood. After his mother's death, Layton wrote an elegy to her, “Keine Lazarovitch 1870–1959”: “O fierce she was, mean and unaccommodating; / But I think now of the toss of her gold earrings, / Their proud carnal assertion, and her youngest sings / While all the rivers of her red veins move into the sea.”

When Layton was about a year old, the family left Romania for Montreal, settling in the Jewish ghetto in Montreal's east end, later made famous by Mordecai Richler. He was a scrappy kid who learned to suppress his whimpering and keep on pounding in fistfights with local kids. His father died in 1925, the same year that Layton graduated from Alexandra Elementary School. He went to work as a peddler, selling dry goods on the streets of Montreal. But he longed for more, and he turned away from commerce and went to high school.

He discovered literature from his teachers at Baron Byng High School, political and social theory from his older friend David Lewis (future leader of the
NDP)
, and poetic cadence from Lewis's friend A. M. Klein. Listening to Klein the poet read Virgil's
Aeneid
made him realize, as he said later, “how very lovely and very moving the sound of poetry could be.”

It was Lewis, then a student at McGill, who signed Layton up as a member of the Young People's Socialist League, an association that administrators at Baron Byng found so threatening they expelled Layton in his final year of high school. Klein became Layton's tutor, Lewis provided the ten-dollar examination fee, and Layton supplied the intellect and effort to pass his high school matriculation.

Layton's older friend A. M. Klein had already published his first poem, in an underground campus journal called
The McGilliad
. However, McGill University rejected Layton, perhaps because of its infamous Jewish quota, perhaps because of his reputation as a rabble-rouser. The alternatives were few. In 1934 he went to Macdonald College, a McGill affiliate, to study agriculture, graduating in 1939.

By then he had met and married a woman named Faye Lynch. They moved to Halifax, where Layton worked as a door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. Discouraged by his occupation and aware that he felt more pity than love for his wife, Layton returned to Montreal. He resumed his literary friendships with poets Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster, and John Sutherland (the editor of two early and prestigious magazines,
Preview
and
First Statement
, which later merged to become
Northern Journey
) and earned a meagre living teaching English to recent Jewish immigrants at the public library.

Appalled by Hitler's warmongering, he enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1942 but got no further than training camp in Petawawa before being granted a discharge. Back in Montreal, he published his first book of poetry,
Here and Now
, in 1945. Having divorced Faye Lynch, he married Sutherland's sister, the painter and poet Betty Sutherland. They had two children, Max, who was born in 1946 — the same year Layton completed his MA thesis on Harold Laski, the English political theorist and politician — and Naomi, in 1950.

Writing poetry and the occasional manifesto was not lucrative. Layton self-published his poetry and took work teaching wherever he could find it, including lecturing part-time at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University while he dreamt of finishing a PhD and becoming a professor. This workload didn't keep him from writing, or from getting noticed, though his self-assertive style earned equal blame and praise. In 1951 Northrop Frye wrote of
The Black Huntsmen
that “the successes are quiet and the faults raucous. . . . One can get as tired of buttocks in Layton as buttercups in
Canadian Poetry Magazine
.”

Even so, Frye drew a line between Layton's “serious” poetry and his “stage personality.” In his seminal work,
The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination
, Frye called Layton “the most considerable poet of his generation.” Robert Weaver and William Toye praised him even more lavishly in
The
Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature
, saying that he was “perhaps the best poet we have in Canada.”

By the late 1950s he had made the leap from small literary presses to McClelland & Stewart, which published his selected poems,
A
Red Carpet for the Sun
, in 1959. The volume, which was the only one of his books to win a Governor General's Literary Award, included poems from a dozen previous collections. Showcasing some of his best work, the collection was packaged with a brooding photograph of the author on the cover and a polemical essay, disguised as a foreword, in which Layton dismissed his contemporaries as “insufferable blabbermouths” while extolling his own “impeccable ear for rhythm.” With this book, Layton the swaggering and defiant poet came down from the garret and stomped into mainstream society.

By then he had met Aviva Cantor, the partner of his most prolific and celebrated years. She had arrived in Montreal from her native Australia in 1955 with a list of names and addresses of people to look up in Montreal, including the poets Frank Scott, A. M. Klein, and Irving Layton. For some reason she phoned Layton. He invited her to a party at the house he shared with Betty and their children in Côte Saint-Luc — and that was that.

They never wed, although they came close. One day in the early 1960s Layton announced he was going to marry her; he summoned his metaphorical son Leonard Cohen, and the three of them trooped down to a jewellery shop in Old Montreal. There the poet became distracted and, instead of buying his lover a ring, he purchased a silver clasp for his estranged wife Betty and sauntered out of the store. The ever-debonair Cohen bought the ring that Aviva desired, slipped it on her finger, and pronounced her married.

Aviva Cantor changed her name to Layton after their son, David, was born in 1964. They moved to Toronto at the end of the decade after the poet Eli Mandel engineered a teaching job for Layton at York University. These were the years of his greatest literary and public success. He published a volume of poetry almost every year into the 1980s, and began winning over enough doubters to get Canada Council grants that allowed him to roam the world, spending several summers in Greece, Italy, India, and Marrakesh.

As his fame and his vanity grew, he liked to pretend that there was some sort of conspiracy against him in Canada. But he was a successful poet and a household name from his appearances on a
CBC
debate show that could have been named for him:
Fighting Words
. The late Hugh MacLennan declared him to be the best poet in Canada, a compliment that soothed Layton's ego but did nothing to rein in his embattled nature or make him more self-critical.

He objected strenuously to a biography written by Elspeth Cameron in the mid-1970s, igniting a high-octane vendetta against the literary biographer, and later wrote his own, self-serving memoirs,
Waiting for the Messiah
. After Aviva Layton left him for the writer Leon Whiteson in the late 1970s, he became captivated by Harriet Bernstein, one of his students at York University. They married after he finally divorced Betty Sutherland, and had a daughter, Samantha, in 1981, when Layton was almost seventy. Like so many of his closest relationships, this one ended badly. Bernstein took custody of the child and charged him with harassment when he unleashed his verbal dexterity to deride her.

Layton the poet started to slow down at this point, but Layton the lover was still going strong. He soon took up with twenty-two-year-old Annette Pottier, changing her name to Anna. She left him in 1995 after his creeping Alzheimer's was finally diagnosed. When his money ran out in 2000, leaving him as impoverished as he had been in his immigrant childhood, he was moved to the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Montreal's Côte Saint-Luc district, the same area where he was living when he met Aviva Cantor in the 1950s.

Among his visitors was his former protegé and brother-in-arms Leonard Cohen. Cohen's early poem “Last Dance at the Four Penny,” from
The Spice-Box of Earth
(1961), was written as a tribute to his mentor. It begins “Layton, when we dance our freilach / under the ghostly handkerchief,” and ends “I say no Jew was ever lost / while we weave and billow the handkerchief / into a burning cloud, / measuring all of heaven / with our stitching thumbs.”

When combined with another poem, “Irving and Me at the Hospital,” from
Book of Longing
(2006), that early poem forms one of a set of elegiac bookends to their long friendship and love of poetry.