My Obituary Poem by gershon hepner

The term for drunks is “most convivial, ”
“relished contact” is the one for bashers
and as for men who are lascivial,
the term is “ladies men, ” not “flashers”.
“Incorrigible windbags” are
the ones who relish English cadence,
“colorful accounts” are par
for liars who defy all credence.
John Allegro, he declared
the Liberace of the Dead
Sea Scrolls. I do not feel prepared
for such fine language to be said
in my obituary, and since
they’ve written one for Massingberd,
when I die nobody will wince
because there’s no Hugh now knows the word
to sum me up as wittily
as I would like in my obit,
unless interned in Italy,
antiqued, but hardly counterfeit.

Margalit Fox writes about the death of Hugh Massingberd, who wrote the obituary column in The Telegraph of London (“Hugh Massingberd, Laureate for the Departed, Dies, ” NYT, December 30,2007) :
Hugh Massingberd, a celebrated former obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London who made a once-dreary page required reading by speaking frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead, became the recipient of his own services after dying in West London on Christmas Day. He was 60 and lived in London. The cause was cancer, according to The Telegraph. The newspaper announced Mr. Massingberd’s death in an expansive obituary that described, not unkindly, his being “invariably strapped for cash” and the “gourmandism” and “bingeing” that had turned him “into an impressively corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence.” Sometimes called the father of the modern British obituary, Mr. Massingberd was The Telegraph’s obituaries editor from 1986 to 1994. He was also a shy autodidact who had never been to college; a past editor of Burke’s Peerage, the venerable record book of the titled families of Britain and Ireland; the author of dozens of books on the English aristocracy; a recognized authority on the country homes of England, stately and moldy alike; and a rabid theatergoer whose enthusiasm for “Phantom of the Opera” was undimmed by the fact that he had seen it more than 50 times and knew every word and every note by heart. In 2002 The Spectator, a British weekly magazine, described Mr. Massingberd as “an English eccentric of the sort Hollywood imagines shoot snipe in their underpants.” Mr. Massingberd did not actually shoot snipe in his underpants, but he did once pose for a photograph dressed as a Roman emperor garlanded with sausages, as his obituary in The Telegraph helpfully reminded readers on Thursday…
And there was this much-quoted line, also from 1988, which appeared in The Telegraph’s obituary of John Allegro. A once-renowned scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Mr. Allegro later advanced a theory that Judaism and Christianity were the products of an ancient cult that worshiped sex and mushrooms. His obit in The Telegraph pronounced him “the Liberace of biblical scholarship.” To dispatch his subjects, Mr. Massingberd used the thinnest of rapiers, but also the sharpest. Cataclysmic understatement and carefully coded euphemism were the stylistic hallmarks of his page. Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:
¶“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.
¶“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.
¶“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.
¶“A man of simple tastes”:
A complete vulgarian.
¶“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.
¶“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.
¶“Relished physical contact”:
A sadist.
¶“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.


12/30/07