British Forthrightness

I get the Telegraph (U.K.) obituaries in my Google Reader feed, and I laughed out loud today when I spotted this:

Charles Higham

Bitchy biographer who tarnished the names of Errol Flynn and the Duchess of Windsor, among many others 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9250507/Charles-Higham.html

Looking at the obit itself after that memorable tag, one sees:

His most sensational work was Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (1980), in which he alleged that the swashbuckling matinee idol was an unscrupulous Nazi spy and rampant bisexual whose appetites led him to Mexico for the procurement of young boys and who had affairs with Truman Capote, Howard Hughes and Tyrone Power — to name only a few.... 

The Flynn biography was a fairly typical example of Higham’s approach, and much of what he wrote about the rich and famous (particularly those who were no longer alive to sue) was regarded by many critics as the product of an overactive and self-serving imagination.

In his unashamedly self-promoting memoir, In and Out of Hollywood (2009), Higham presented himself as a sort of Chandleresque figure, dedicated to sniffing out other people’s darkest secrets. Yet as he admitted, he hated interviewing people for his books, and critics remarked on how much of his work was based on the testimony of anonymous witnesses.

....His Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life (1988) might have been more aptly titled “Fascist, Lesbian Harlots at the Court of St James”, suggested one reviewer, who went on to observe that for the Duchess to have been guilty of even half the peccadilloes attributed to her, “early on she would have succumbed to exhaustion”.

....Higham was not pleasant company. He had an irritating habit of insulting waiters in restaurants, and often sat at the table for 45 minutes before deigning to consult the menu.

Can you imagine this appearing in a U.S. newspaper equal in stature to The Telegraph, which is not some rag (they have those too)? Sacre bleu! Equally good is another fresh obit:

Angelica Garnett

Artist and writer who was brought up in the Bloomsbury Group and married her father's lover

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/9250509/Angelica-Garnett.html

The illegitimate daughter of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (conceived when Grant decided to take a rare break from his usual rampant homosexuality), Angelica grew up thinking that the art critic Clive Bell was her father (although her true parentage was an open secret among her parents’ friends). When she was 17 she was informed by her mother that Grant was her father, and then told never to mention the subject.

At the age of 24 Angelica married the writer and publisher David Garnett (known to everyone as “Bunny”), 50 years old and one of Grant’s former lovers. A serial philanderer, Bunny had lived with Grant and Vanessa Bell (whom he had also propositioned, though unsuccessfully) at Charleston, East Sussex....

Nobody told Angelica that she was about to marry one of her father’s former lovers....Their flirtation began while Garnett was still married to his first wife, and became “a courtship ... about which I had very ambivalent feelings” following his wife’s death from cancer. Angelica lost her virginity to Garnett in HG Wells’s spare room, and in 1942 they married. Vanessa, oddly, seemed to approve of her daughter having an affair with her husband’s ex-lover, but not of the marriage. Neither of Angelica’s parents was invited to the wedding.

Virginia Woolf was horrified, confiding to her diary the hope that Angelica would “tire of that rusty, surly old dog with his amorous ways and his primitive mind”. But no one supplied Angelica with the vital information that might have led her to call off the marriage.

The economist John Maynard Keynes made some sort of effort to warn her, but, like everyone else, failed to come clean about what the problem might be: “He sent for me or he had me to tea or something and he tried to talk about it, and warn me that it might not be a very good idea. And I wish I’d listened to him, really, but naturally I couldn’t because I was in love with Bunny.”

Love the specificity of "H.G. Wells's spare room"....I imagine that The Telegraph obituary desk must be a jolly place to hang out, not to mention going for pints afterwards and laughing uproariously well past midnight. Gotta love those Brits. I certainly do.