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Daniel and David Bell

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from: Daniel Bell

Toast, Coffee, and the Obituaries

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 15, 1999, at 1:28 PM ET

Dear David,

At the Breakfast Table these days, quite literally, the first thing I turn to, after scanning the front page of the Times, is the obituaries. Years ago, some people had a prurient interest in these, such as those who went to the funeral of the thuggish Hollywood producer Harry Cohn to make sure that he was dead. But nowadays, so many of my contemporaries and colleagues are going--five at Harvard and MIT in the past months--that I turn to those pages with what Kierkegaard called "the concept of the Dread."

The other day I read in the Times of the death of Niccolo Tucci, at age 91. I had not thought of Tucci in years. He had come to the United States just before World War II as an Italian cultural attaché, and a fascist. A fascist? Yes. People forget, or most never knew, that in its early years, fascism was a powerful intellectual movement. Mussolini had been a prominent left-wing socialist and editor of the party's newspaper. Marinetti, the founder of Italian futurism, was a fascist. As were the modernist playwright Luigi Pirandello, the poet d'Annunzio, and the major Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who influenced Collingwood and was minister of education in Mussolini's government. Tucci had been a follower of Gentile, but broke with fascism during the war and became a member of Dwight Macdonald's circle around Politics, where I met him. He had a tart wit.

In 1945, when I was managing editor of the monthly magazine Common Sense (my editor was Varian Fry, who had returned to New York after saving countless lives of artists and writers by arranging for their exit from Vichy France to Spain and Portugal and then to safer havens), I had asked Tucci to write a monthly column. On what? He asked. Oh, I replied, on, say, "Travels to America." Strange country, he said. Why do they call this America? It was the first name of the man (Amerigo Vespucci). Why not Vespuccia? Fine, I said, we can call it "Travels in Vespuccia," and you can write about the Daughters of the Vespuccian Revolution, or the Vespuccian Legion march down the street. He did not. It reminded him too much of fascism.

There are, or have been, strong differences between obituaries in the American and in the English press. Those in the American press are usually dry and thin and fail to catch the personality of a man or woman. Those in the English press are often quite personal and written at times by a friend of the individual. This month, Hugh Massingberd published in England The Fifth Volume of Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph! Obituaries are history. Yet the times are changing. Witness the long obituary of Joseph Heller in the Times yesterday, beginning with two columns on the front page and continuing, after the jump, to almost a full page inside.

One of the older arts of homage has been poetry. Alfred Lord Tennyson published "In Memoriam AHH," more than a hundred verses of elegy and sorrow for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. And W.H. Auden published "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" (d. Jan., 1939):

He disappeared in the dead of winter;
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues; ...
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Yeats, of course, wrote his own "death poem":

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid ...
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut!

Cast a cold eye
On life, or death.
Horseman, pass by!

For us, as Jews, the eulogy is not literary but religious. In going each year to the cemetery, we place a stone on the monument, in commemoration of the acts of Joshua and Samuel in giving praise to the Lord. But the most affecting act is the kaddish, the statement of mourning that a son says on the death of his father. It is haunting its recurring refrain, and keeps pulsing through my mind, now, every day. I think of my close friends, Dick Hofstadter, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook ... They are now part of history.

But the breakfast is finished, and here is the rest of the cold day ahead ...

Love,
Dad

the breakfast table
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from: Daniel Bell

Toast, Coffee, and the Obituaries

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 15, 1999, at 1:28 PM ET
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Daniel Bell is professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard and the author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which was recently re-issued (click hereto buy it). David Bell, Daniel's son, teaches history at Johns Hopkins University, and is the author of the forthcoming The National and the Sacred: Religion and the Origins of Nationalism in France.
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