Famous last words

THE first thing you need to know about “The Dead Beat” is that it’s not about dead people. (Not that there’s anything wrong with books on dead people.) This delightful quirk of a book is not dark or morose; it’s an uplifting, joyous, life-affirming read for people who ordinarily steer clear of uplifting, joyous, life-affirming reads.

Obits are not about death; they are merely occasioned by death. Indeed, British obituaries often leave out the cause, particularly when it’s one of, as author Marilyn Johnson puts it, “the usual pack of wolves” (cancer, heart attack). They are a celebration of a life well -- or at least interestingly -- lived, a “reminder,” she says, “of the possibilities in life.” Hail to the British comedian who impersonated Charles de Gaulle with his penis (“He was said to be huge in Germany and Sweden,” deadpanned the much-lauded British obit writer Andrew McKie). God love the historian of Indian sari draping. Viva the longest-working vendor at Yankee Stadium. As Johnson puts it, “The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.”

Of all the personalities captured in “The Dead Beat,” few are more endearing than Johnson, a former obituary writer. Her enthusiasm is infectious. (I had to set the book down at one point and grab the newspaper to read the day’s quota of obits.) Her ability to bask in the small joys of life -- hers and those of fellow scribes of death, as well as the lives of the no longer living -- is inspiring and never maudlin. Here she is in her budget hotel on her first-ever trip to London, having flown there to meet the masters of the art, obituarists at four London newspapers: “I ... spread out the four obit sections side by side [and] devoured them while the sounds of the London streets blared through the open window. They covered all the surfaces in my tiny room -- and they were beautiful.” The happiness she feels is as palpable as her disappointment, chapters later, over an Internet celebrity death alert service: “Between the ‘Hi Marilyn Any Pills You Want’ and the ‘word of the day,’ (‘verjuice,’ the sour juice of unripe fruit, or acidity of disposition), was the email I’d been waiting for from Celebrity Death Beeper.... How deflating ... [to discover] what ... death-beeper.com considered a celebrity: Lygia Pape, seventy-five, ‘a ... founding member of Brazil’s vanguard Neoconcrete movement.’ May the survivors of Lygia Pape forgive me, but I’d been oversold.” (Though the reader senses her verjuice is largely feigned, it’s also clear that Johnson is thrilled to learn of an art movement known as Neoconcrete.)

Though chunks of obits flavor “The Dead Beat” like mussels in cioppino, the book is far more than an anthology. It’s a fond profile of the modern obituarist: an under-sung, overworked professional who deftly employs a combination of “empathy and detachment; sensitivity and bluntness.” It’s a musing on history and the everyday lives that comprise it. Johnson quotes writer Gay Talese on the quiet elitism that suffused the obit pages until the arrival, a decade or two back, of the “everyman” obituary: “[W]omen and Negroes hardly ever seemed to die.”

“The Dead Beat” also is a primer on good writing. Of the great New York Times obituarist Alden Whitman, Johnson writes: “He savored the delicious detail, the ashtrays shaped like pianos in Liberace’s mansion, Elizabeth Arden’s horses in their ‘fly-free’ stalls.” Detail does not merely make for more interesting writing. It has the power to make the abstract real. Of the 2004 tsunami, she writes: “Its dimensions would be measured in height of waves and number of deaths, but it was only in the particulars, the mother who clung to one child while another washed away, that I could grasp any of it.”

With obituary writing, it is -- as it must be in so short a form -- the small touches that matter. The zinger: a Mormon polygamist’s wife described as “his better eighth.” The non sequitur: “He had the digestive juices of a shark.” The classic closing line: “Charlie did it all with one eye.” Or, of a Manhattan store owner with a talent for fitting women for bras: “She was 95 and a 34B.”

Great obits stand on the planks of even greater reporting. The best obituarists spend days on the phone, interviewing dozens of family members and friends, in pursuit of the pithy anecdote or quote that says it all. “There aren’t any boring people,” says Jim Nicholson, for years a gifted chronicler of the everyday man at Philadelphia’s Daily News. “There are just boring questions.”

At one point, Johnson attempts to deconstruct the perfect obituary. She uses as her example not an actual obit but a short news story about a beheaded Los Angeles screenwriter. We read that the killer was finally apprehended while sitting on a wall, the victim’s head tucked under his arm, beneath a row of ficus trees on Melrose Avenue. “[T]he specifics, the deadpan delivery, the ficus tree shading the beheader as the police make their capture.... It’s almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, ‘Inhale these.’ ”

Writers interested in honing the craft should inhale this book. Who else might profit or delight from reading about obituaries? Just about anyone who’s not yet in one, I’d wager. *