David Beresford
another country
John Diamond has finally died of his cancer, mourned by a nation. Which brings to mind the memory of a hilarious newspaper column, Time to Go, by Richard Geefe.
Diamond, who described himself as “an ordinary coward”, won fame in Britain for the “courage” with which he faced up to his terminal cancer, the progress of which he recorded in a column in The Times. When he died on Friday British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others, paid tribute to him.
Diamond and Ruth Picardie a young journalist and mother who recorded her comparatively brief battle with terminal cancer in The Observer were said to have overcome a taboo “in describing the minutiae of daily life with a terminal illness”. Some critics regarded their columns as “voyeuristic”, a reflection of a distasteful modern trend to “let it all hang out”.
Time to Go was a column written by a young man who had been through an aborted suicide and had determined to do it again, this time more successfully. The Observer persuaded him that, if he had to do it (and the editor made quite clear his disapproval), he should delay the final moment for six months and document his feelings waiting for death with a weekly column.
It was, of course a spoof, “Richard Geefe” being a nom de plume for Chris Morris, an English humourist.
The humour was intensely “black”; witness his indignation when he is told that what might be called his “deadline” has been moved forward from November 16: “It’s the bloody book that’s done it. The moment I croak, these columns will be on sale for 16,99 a pop to a lot of people who’ve already read them.
“But in order to catch the Christmas rush, the publisher needs all copy by the end of August. So I am having to write the end of my life now committing myself to what I’ll be doing, how I will feel about it and my exact method of blapping my lulu. It’s driving me nuts.
“Of course, I could make it up, but then I might as well lie about my suicide, too, and stay alive. What the hell would be the point of that? The whole idea of Time to Go is that I kill myself. Otherwise, all this writing will be quite valueless.
“I’ve also rejected the idea of giving scripts to friends to make them say what I’d said they said. So I’ve been trying to predict what my life will actually be like then … what if I’ve been run over, pierced by a spear of frozen piss from a passing airliner, or stabbed by one of The Observer weirdos who’ve set up a daily Geefe vigil in the pub on the corner? In turmoil, I faxed the editor a selection of starts for my column for 22 August. He hated them all …”
The spoof was met by much angry criticism, particularly from those who saw it as a satire on the Picardie and the Diamond columns, or who felt sensitive on the subject of suicide. Most people seem to feel uneasy when suicide is raised, perhaps in part because they have considered it as an option, or because a relative, or a friend has resorted to it.
The poet and divine, John Donne, made an admirable statement on suicide when he wrote nearly four centuries ago: “Whenever any affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so: and provoked me a little to watch and exagitate their reasons, which pronounce so peremptory judgements upon them.”
Donne’s observation is marked by compassion an understanding of the human predicament born of an understanding of himself. It is an understanding that is also fundamental to humour. Laughter, it is often said, results from the recognition (and release) of an audience’s insecurities, about such as the risk of making a fool of oneself in public, or on a solemn occasion.
The extract from Time to Go quoted above is funny to me, I suspect, because of a subconscious suspicion that my life is of little relevance to the world in general. The idea is to my mind exquisitely captured by the image of a man who takes himself so seriously that he is prepared not only to commit suicide, but to make a public performance of it … only to be told that the event is of such indifference to an uncaring world that the timing of it is subject to a publisher’s deadline.
Tributes paid to Diamond made much of his “courage”. It was a quality that, as mentioned earlier, he had already discounted in recognition that, in what he did, he had no alternative.
During the Vietnam conflict a British war correspondent was injured in a land-mine explosion. Taken for dead, he was hurriedly thrown on to the back of a truck with other bodies. Regaining consciousness to find himself surrounded by corpses he managed to prop himself up on one elbow and started taking pictures of them. In the sound of that shutter button one senses something of the tragedy and humour of life.