He was also charming helpful funny and kind Although far cleverer than most of his friends, he never seemed aware of it and unwittingly elevated us to his level. At a period when most of his colleagues considered aesthetics and psychoanalysis marginal or suspect, he made them central to his analytical investigations.He was also charming, helpful, funny and kind. Richard Arthur Wollheim, philosopher: born London 5 May 1923; Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy, University College London 1949-51, Lecturer 1951-60, Reader 1960-63, Honorary Fellow 1994; Grote Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic, London University 1963-82 (Emeritus); Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University 1982-85; Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley 1985-2003; Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities, University of California, Davis 1989-96; married 1950 Anne Powell (two sons; marriage dissolved 1967), 1969 Mary Day Lanier (one daughter); died London 4 November 2003.
Richard Wollheim was one of the most original and courageous philosophers of his time. Richard Wollheim was one of the most original and courageous philosophers of his time. Himself professional to the core, Giles Gordon had a talent for comic self-projection, an almost theatrical sense of self which suggested he was ad-libbing life as he went along. At social levels situations played into his hands, while slipping through his fingers, as in the brief interlude on the dark steps of the Garrick when his hero John Gielgud, whom he thought too lofty to be aware of his existence, boomed "Good night, Giles". Only in the nick of time did Giles realise that the farewell was addressed to another: the right name, so to speak, dropped to the wrong person.Meanwhile Gordon passes into final legend, as his friends and clients - from Sue Townsend and Barry Unsworth to John Fowles and the Duke of Edinburgh himself - move to other advisers, who are unlikely to compare in sheer goodness of heart and hardiness of loyalty.David Hughes. It was perhaps a vengeful conceit on his part - no, just fun - to compare the length of his entry, of which I shall divulge no ultimate measurement, to that of his male member.One of his later resolves, delivered as so often with wicked charm, was to run for the Scottish Parliament, politics being "too important to be left to the professionals". His "book collecting" built up fine if not complete assemblies of Oscar Wilde and, that subtler taste for us Celts, David Jones.I mention Who's Who more than once because it was the book Gordon most wished to collect him, an ambition accentuated by his father's annual nag about when he was going to make it. After many attempts in adolescence their second son Gareth died by his own hand, while Margaret contracted a rare terminal disease. In 1994, after an explosive quarrel with his former agency Sheil Land, who took out a court order forbidding him any contact with his clients (Gordon had to ring off when I called to wish him well in that futile fight) lest he poach them, he joined Curtis Brown and opened their Scotland office.His first family with Margaret Eastoe, who illustrated children's books including The Wombles, had suffered a double loss. Nor did anyone claim the pizza.Edinburgh was to bring Gordon's life full circle.
Educated at the Edinburgh Academy, where he was scorer for the First XI, son of an architect, he never found any city so beautiful or open-spaced, or so good for his second family of three (two girls and a boy) by the publisher Maggie McKernan to be educated. All weekend we were on agitated tenterhooks for fear of denying the world a masterpiece, not to mention looking idiotic But our bag was still there in the bar Nobody wanted our stories. He also leaked bookish scandal to Private Eye.Meanwhile he kept the fires stoked beneath up-and-coming writers when from 1986 to 1995 he and I edited an annual volume of Best Short Stories, a task he felt a service to the future, a pleasure in the present and an excuse for long lunches of high-octane high-jinks (he was all for launching on the political scene a Pro-Lunch Party).One year, suitably enough at Gordon's wine bar, in Villiers Street, WC2, having made our final choices, we stuffed the typescripts into a plastic bag, put it on the floor while toasting each other's speed of decision and efficiency, picked it up and went home rejoicing, only to find that the plastic bag now contained a frozen pizza and other junk. The name-dropping is weightily excused in the opening sentence: "this book is about anyone but myself" - a disingenuous approach to a veritable quagmire of gossip covering his encounters with Dame Edith Sitwell and Sir Bernard Ingham, Sir Kingsley Amis and Viscount Tonypandy, Charles Laughton and Captain Bob, MC.A stagestruck innocent carrying an autograph book whose margins he stuffed with his own acerbic commentary, he presented the world of books and theatre as his extended family. Their title, Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement?, derived from a phrase uttered by his client the Prince of Wales (who he said reduced him to "a gibbering wreck") at one of the royal functions Gordon delighted in attending with a self-amused snobbery rich in tale-telling opportunities.But his "stern account of literary, publishing and theatrical folk" (their subtitle) was much castigated for its tone, which the coarser judgement (Julie Burchill) thought facetious to the point of excruciation and the more refined (Patricia Beer) a Pooterish spoof. When he was commissioned by Carmen Callil on challenge to write a novel with a working title of The Obituarist for a rumoured £60,000, his muse failed every deadline and as a substitute he hustled off to a borrowed flat in Brighton to drum up his memoirs at speed. |
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