A good innings
Have you noticed how life seems to go in phases?
In our twenties we get invited to engagement parties and weddings; in our thirties it’s christenings and naming ceremonies. Then there’s a lull until the kids graduate; or maybe it’s a different kind of phase which entails ferrying them to their friends’ revels, right up to eighteenth birthdays, after which with luck they can transport themselves.
And then it’s funerals.
His name was Emanuel, and in June this year I attended his hundredth birthday party. Reaching that grand and venerable age was the latest – though not the last – in a series of small ambitions. I knew him for nearly eleven of those years, ever since he approached the appraisal service I ran – still run, in a small way – in one of my lives before Crème de la Crime.
He had written a collection of short stories, and he wanted advice on where to send them with a view to publication – the first of those ambitions in which I played a part. I looked them over, marvelled at the quality of the writing, and pondered for several hours how to tell him, tactfully and diplomatically, that for the kind of whimsical, lighthearted story he was clearly good at, the market had dried up about thirty years earlier.
He took it in good part, but still yearned to see his words in print, even if he had to pay for the privilege. I’m no great fan of self-publishing, but at least doing it himself meant he wouldn’t be ripped off by a vanity press, so I agreed to help, and a hundred copies of a slim volume duly landed on his doorstep.
It seemed to open up something in him. Over the next few years he produced poetry by the ream, three plays and a dozen or so more stories, all in a similar quirky vein. None of it was in tune with late 20th/early 21st century taste, but he found an outlet for the poems with the International Library of Poetry – and five years ago, at the age of 95, he travelled outside the UK for the first time to attend their annual convention in Washington DC, at which he was feted and applauded.
We met from time to time, sometimes when I was in London for another purpose and had a couple of hours to fill, other times for his birthday parties; he felt each year after his 90th was worth marking, and his neighbours and relations (a dwindling group – he outlived most of them) pulled out a few stops to make the occasions special. I also invited him to several events I was involved in, and he was as pleased as Punch to take part in what he called ‘literary occasions’.
When I set up Crème de la Crime in 2003, his enthusiasm was positively boyish. He wanted to buy shares (not practical, alas), and took an active interest in the enterprise right from the start.
His final big venture, three years ago, was his autobiography. His writing was always grammatically precise, well-constructed and fluent – but by then he stood in need of an editor to deal with repetitions and things in the wrong order; we had become good friends, and I was glad to perform that task for him, along with finding a printer to produce a hundred copies. It was another slim volume, and the life it portrayed was nothing out of the ordinary, but it was packed with anecdotes and details which charted a lot of changes in the way the world worked over almost a century.
I was last in touch with him about a month before he died; he had asked me to arrange for his short story collection to be reprinted in large, black type as an aid for his failing eyesight. Some of his almost as elderly neighbours had expressed an interest in his writing, and he was planning to invite them to form a reading group. But he was growing increasingly frail; the large-print copies happened, but the years caught up with him before the reading group got under way.
I didn’t get to his funeral: a tedious saga of car breakdown, and a source of great regret, but I have the books we worked on together, which are the best possible legacy. I’ll miss him – but to say he had a good innings is this week’s prize understatement.
