A Positively Final Appearance

There is something wonderfully perverse about Alec Guinness publishing his diaries. He is, after all, one of those actors who made his mark precisely by obliterating his own personality in favour of conjuring up, chameleon-like, a host of vivid characters on film, stage and television. Asked what Alec Guinness is like in real life, most people would not dare venture an opinion. But with his journal My Name Escapes Me (and it's a telling title), Guinness has found new fame at 82, with his lucid, mild-mannered yet often insightful ponderings on his own life (failing eyesight, well, failing everything, really), unselfconsciously woven with more national and universal concerns. Now, with A Positively Final Appearance, we get a second instalment, covering the years 1996 to 1998, which saw personal triumphs over that eye trouble and political upheaval with the death of Diana and the birth of Blair. We're drawn into a gentler, more refined world, where teasing and sardonic appraisals of the arts, past and present, are interlaced with memories of old friends (and when they include Garbo, Noel Coward and Wallis Windsor, why not?) Guinness is well cast as the seasoned, genial raconteur looking back at the end of a long life. But A Positively Final Appearance? Somehow, I doubt it.--Alan Stewart

The charming cover shows Sir Alec in one of his Stan Laurel moods and poses, this time in executing an especially commissioned dance on stage, with careful chorography he says, for the more infirm and elderly performer. The book is a sort of journal, a valid form of biography, and covers his closing years ending shortly before his death in 2000. By now Sir Alec Guinness in his late eighties is rather frail, considers himself ‘elderly and rather infirm’ as is aware of the dangers of becoming a curmudgeon – but despite his watchfulness he still embarrasses himself by catching himself peevishly growling at modern youth, and the lowering of standards (particularly when his beloved Connaught Hotel decides to become “popular”).

The first chapter, ”Men as trees, walking” opens the book in an eye clinic surgical ward – it proves to be one of a series of continual doctor’s visits in an ever increasing go-round that most of his more senior readers will know all too well. He retains his ability to enchant and entertain however, and his mischievous wit is once more peeping at us over the top of the page – among those he thanks for help in writing this book (and it really was his last) are his dogs, “who instinctively knew the right moments to interrupt me”!

Amazingly he foretells of his own death, awaking one morning he says, thinking “You only have another seven hundred days to live”. He estimates that made the time of his passing as “November 2000. Not bad I thought…” In fact he died a little earlier, in the August and his beloved, life-long wife Merula confirmed the rightness of their companionship by dying in October.

Given advanced age and health problems this is a far darker tale than the other two books in his series of biography (Blessings in Disguise http://www.librarything.com/work/126013 and My Names Escapes Me http://www.librarything.com/work/185580) but it is still a delightful read.

Since Sir Alec is telling the truth, this memoir is somewhat darker than My Name Escapes Me. Illness and the funerals of friends are part of any older persons life. But this is still very enjoyable as he shares with us glimpses of a life extraordinarily well lived. Highly recommended. ( )