More Great Writing From The Economist's Obituary Columnist

The obituary column in The Economist continues to feature some of the best writing of our time (here are some previous Slog references, and here's an index of recent columns).

This week's piece is about the magazine's retired foreign editor, Brian Beedham, a craggy, obstinately brilliant fellow who married a Swiss aristocrat. It's actually one of their weaker offerings (too close to home, I suppose; the column's best when it delves into obscure and far-flung personalities like Natalia Revuelta Clews, a Cuban aristocrat who fell in love with Fidel, helped bankroll his revolution, and spent decades faithfully loving him from afar), but there was one paragraph good enough to send me into a reverie. Read it a few times - suck on it like a lozenge - to extract all the goodness:

Away from work, the world he was analysing weekly was kept at bay. He did not own a television set, and found the best use of computers was to listen to American civil-war songs. Some of his pieces were pounded out on an ancient Olivetti in a turret of Barbara’s family castle in the Alps, surrounded by peaks and clouds.

Death and Magic

I hope you won't think me macabre for once again directing you to the Economist's obituary column. It's one of my favorite sources of great reading, fascinating information, and skillful writing.

This week, the dead guy is Alan Peters, a renowned British furniture maker. Whoever writes the column takes special pleasure in eulogizing lesser-known, almost banal-seeming people, and coaxing the reader to deem them as fascinating and noble as the great figures more often appearing on this page.

Note how your attention is captured and your mood's altered by the following paragraph:

"Smoothness was essential. He could not understand people who made drawers, or any other piece of furniture, with sharp edges. They had to be planed, rubbed with fine sandpaper, polished with paste wax, to a soft and glowing evenness. He himself could not keep his hands off wood. Reading a book, he would stroke the table beside it. Looking at a chair, his hands would be all over the rails and the struts. Picking up some stray offcut, he would begin to smile. Wood, like a warm and living thing, had to be respected and loved."

I love to dissect evocative, transportive passages like this and pinpoint the word choices underpinning the magic. Take a look for yourself; I'll wait!


It's "begin to smile". There's no reason, per se, for the construction. "He would smile" would have been far more economical, and express the gist of the point. But the rhythm, the elegantly flipped direction of narrative motion, the carefully placed bit of indulgence by an otherwise succinct writer all create an effect. Most of all, there's such emotional intimacy conjured up from the image of Rose languidly beginning to smile! We are suddenly witnesses to a dynamic, living scene rather than a flat portrait.

We come away feeling that we've shared a subtle, secret truth - one which is, ironically, mere whimsical conjecture on the writer's part. A lie! But as Werner Herzog often says, sometimes only lying can convey the greatest truth.

Lies or no, tiny decisions like this, and the care behind them, are what invest writing - or any other creative pursuit - with magic.

Safire Obit

The obituary column at The Economist, always a highlight, really outdid itself with this William Safire eulogy, bursting with clever language tricks in tribute to Safire.

Read more terrific Economist obituaries here, and order a best-of compilation from Amazon here.