Two 'berds in the hand.(books by Hugh Massingberd)

Hugh Massingberd, editor The Very Best of The Daily Telegraph Books of Obituaries. Pan Books, 407 pages, 9.99 [pounds sterling]

Hugh Massingberd Daydream Believer. Macmillan, 310 pages, 16.99 [pounds sterling]

"Are you familiar with the work of the Master?" was the first question Hugh Massingberd used to ask aspiring obituarists, by which he meant not Henry James but P. G. Wodehouse. I can think of no more congenial or reassuring inquiry from a prospective employer. In the context of death notices, though, it isn't quite what one expects to hear. And yet Massingberd, during his 1986-1994 tenure as obituaries editor for The Daily Telegraph, applied a Wodehousian aesthetic--call it the Blandings sublime--to such good effect that the once-ignored column attracted a cult following and spawned no less than five bestselling anthologies, of which the current volume purportedly represents la creme de la creme.

What then, in obituary terms, does the lesson of the Master dictate? Above all, a preponderance of subjects who are--to use Massingberd's habitual epithet--fruity. Not fame or accomplishment but rampant eccentricity is the chief criterion for inclusion. So we are treated to a colorful succession of potty minor peers, "bristling brigadiers" (as Massingberd labels them), and other quintessential English types, all embalmed in equal parts affection and irreverence.

Some of my own favorite obits here, however, are of a different stripe, more roundly mocking and even downright venomous. The one for Billy Carter begins:

 
   Billy Carter, who has died age 51, was President Jimmy Carter's 
   hard-drinking roly-poly brother whose bibulous verandah-chair comments from 
   the peanut township of Plains, Georgia, caused periodic embarrassment at 
   the White House. 

What adjectives! One can almost hear the (anonymous) writer smacking his lips with cruel delectation. Similarly, the notorious vixen Barbara Skelton--who has often been proposed as a model for Pamela Flitton in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time--is described as having enjoyed a "career of petulant promiscuity." Skelton achieved a sort of exquisite marital chiasmus: her first husband, Cyril Connolly, divorced her on grounds of adultery with George Weidenfeld, who, having become her second husband, divorced her in turn on grounds of adultery with ... Cyril Connolly. Of her third marriage, to the physicist Derek Jackson, the obituarist comments: "The union, dominated by Skelton's menagerie of small violent mammals, was of brief duration." I'm not quite sure what the middle part of that sentence means, but I shall never cease to savor it.