The Magazine

Nil Nisi Bonum

Nov 19, 2007, Vol. 13, No. 10 • By ROBERT MESSENGER
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I have a thing for obituaries. At my age, it's not yet a matter of keeping score against my contemporaries. It's more a taste for the appreciative and anecdotal. Newspapers don't present much sweetness or humor, even on the review and feature pages. The obit, though, remains a sort of sociocultural petit-four.

Consider this specimen in the Guardian on October 18:

Stephen Medcalf, emeritus reader in English at Sussex University, who has died aged 70, had one of the finest minds I have ever known. Not only could he recite reams of poetry in Greek, Latin, English and Anglo-Saxon, and whole stories by Kipling and P.G. Wodehouse, but--and this is what really marked him out--whatever he said about literature immediately struck one as true, fresh and profound.

You must have lived your life rather well to get such a paragraph written about you. That its author is the formidably brilliant Gabriel Josipovici means you may have lived more than well. The full obituary was an utter delight and later that night I dug out Josipovici's anthology The Modern English Novel, which contained a lovely piece on Wodehouse--history's greatest spreader of sweetness and light--by Stephen Medcalf. When was the last time a book review in a newspaper sent you off to your shelves?

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