It’s been going on far too long” – doesn’t put one off. Charmingly too, the private passions and secret griefs of our author are movingly illuminated in the refractory light of his subjects.Įven Dorothea Tanning’s last, haunting cris de coeur to Dannatt – “I’m too old to talk to anyone.
Surprisingly, given that everybody is journeying in one direction, and, as the late, great Bette Davies said, “growing old ain’t for cissies”, it’s all done with compassion and an enviable zest for life. These lives will amuse and captivate you by turns, long into the dark night. Or what about Alexander Iolas, dancer turned “the most famous art dealer in the world who no one knows,” who magically emerged from “a rich Eastern Mediterranean stew of merchants and story-tellers.” They all demand our attention.
Then there’s Stuart Sherman, whose five-minute performance of Faust became a legend in avant-garde circles he locked himself in Carson McCullers’ shuttered house in upstate New York and read to her – Gone with the Wind, Le Rouge et le Noir and A Handful of Dust – in the last year of her life. There is Rockets Redglare, born to a heroin-addicted fifteen-year-old, who supposedly delivered drugs to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen on the night she died, and also appeared in movies such as Big, After Hours and Trees Lounge.
We may only dimly recognise some of the names included but all of them will have had some sort of indirect influence or impact on our lives. A collection of obituaries mainly (but not always) of men, whose unusual lives Dannatt documents with a zealous commitment to the brief, the suicidal, the addicted, the long-lived, the extraordinarily rich, the flamboyant, the insouciantly poor, the innately glamorous and the artistic.
However, instead of killing his victims and mounting them on a wall he immortalises them for ever, beautifully, in print.ĭoomed and Famous is a rare pleasure. He has a lepidopterist’s eye for flair and aesthetics combined with unfaltering, nineteenth-century levels of stamina for stalking his prey through the cafes and cemeteries of Paris, the nightclubs of London and Manhattan and the mysterious towers of Zembla. What makes a great obituarist as opposed to a successful biographer? If it is an instinct for obscure but telling detail, a sense of joie de vivre against all odds and a propensity for laughter in the dark, then the Nabokovian figure of Adrian Dannatt fits the bill.
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