A BEAUTIFUL CORPSE

Le tout Belfast turned out for Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins on Monday. The snooker player was found dead in his sheltered accommodation, aged 61. It was the biggest funeral in the city since that of five years ago for another self-destroyer, George Best, then two years younger than Higgins.


The Higgins funeral, an understated affair

I use the term “self-destroyer” advisedly. Higgins’ life was continuously chaotic. Frequently “of no fixed abode” – even at the time he first won the snooker title that is absurdly called “the World Championship” in 1972 – he was an alcoholic, a chain-smoker, frequently involved in fights and domestic violence, totally unreliable and self-centred. It’s a litany that makes Best’s “mere” alcoholism seem rather tame, though Best’s addiction undoubtedly killed him.


Higgins partakes

What is it that propels such a nightmare character into the affections of millions? Is it that we timid, “ordinary” people get a vicarious thrill from some “genius” making all the reckless moves that are ruled out for us by our humdrum circumstances, not least our sense of responsibility to those close to us? Certainly, in all the fields that produce so-called “stars”, the unstable, impossible ones attract a particularly fierce loyalty – Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Judy Garland, Lenny Bruce, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse. Maybe that is changing, though. Nobody seems to care much about the dreary and self-pitying Lindsay Lohan, while Mel Gibson has become so nasty in his seeming spiral into personality collapse that nobody extends him any sympathy. And Paul Gascoigne is just a pathetic bore.


Two Belfast bad boys

Back in 1992, a much respected political commentator, Peter Jenkins, died very suddenly. He was only 58. Several of the obituaries I read at the time referred to Jenkins’ liking for “the good life”. This teasing phrase was never explained. Was he a devoted exercise enthusiast who practised various nourishing mystical rituals and lived on a simple, organic diet, giving all his – no doubt substantial – income from journalism to the poor? I rather doubt it. I suspect what “the good life” meant was slap-up meals, fine wines and large cigars. Not a very good life at all, in truth.


Higgins: an example to us all

But self-destructive behaviour is readily mythologised. Two fine writers died recently – Alan Plater and Beryl Bainbridge. Neither was ever without a fag on the go – though Plater was smart at avoiding being photographed smoking – and both died of cancer in their 70s which, these days, you have to count as premature. I am not in a position to say if smoking was responsible for their respective deaths. According to a mutual friend, Plater made a typically wry remark to his doctor: “I bet you’re pissed off that my cancer isn’t smoking-related”. But in his Guardian obituary, Michael Coveney described Plater as “heroically cigarette-smoking”. I simultaneously do and don’t know what that means.


Plater, ciggies out of sight

Objectively, there’s nothing admirable about addictive self-abuse. God knows, we’ve been informed comprehensively enough about the many ways in which smoking can kill us. Of course, secondary smoke does harm too. The entertainer Roy Castle, a life-long non-smoker, died of lung cancer evidently contracted in the smoke-filled clubs where he worked. David Hockney, wholly admirable as a painter, is the most colossal pain in the arse when knocking on about his precious “right” to smoke wherever he likes, never mindful of how that smoking affects others.

Whether or not Alan Plater or Dame Beryl was carried off by their filthy habit, they will have obliged others to ingest their smoke. Alex Higgins was certainly killed by cigarettes and it took a hell of a time. He was diagnosed with throat cancer twelve years ago, having already had mouth cancer twice in the previous four years. His treatment deprived him of all his teeth and, living alone in a caravan, he was unused to looking after himself even in conducive circumstances. It was hardly a noble passing.


Bainbridge and the customary gasper

Death can certainly be romanticised. The most famous painting by Henry Wallis is also one of the most saccharine: The Death of Chatterton. You can bet that his passing looked nothing like that. Nicholas Ray’s movie Knock On Any Door of 1949 grotesquely romanticised juvenile delinquency and put a line into the language: “Live fast, die young and make a good-looking corpse” – it is usually misquoted as “a beautiful corpse”. The myth of the beautiful corpse persists. Five years later, Ray made one of the most mythologizing of all movies, Rebel Without a Cause. The leading young actors in that movie all died young but not beautifully – Natalie Wood drowned, Sal Mineo was murdered and of course James Dean crashed his automobile. Supporting players lived longer. In the last three months both Corey Allen and Dennis Hopper died, the latter one of American cinema’s most self-destructive characters.


The Death of Chatterton

I do not mean to be pious about all this. Disease and illness are lotteries. At any age and in any condition, anyone might contract cancer or indeed any other terminal condition. A much admired dentist in our town collapsed and died while road-running, “doing what he loved doing” in the customary phrase. He was barely 50. His brother and partner in the practice frequently disappears on holiday to pursue his particular passion, mountaineering. Is there a more dangerous hobby? Perhaps only smoking and drinking.


Dennis Hopper in custody

I had a great friend at university, a lovely man called John Furness. He too was a climber. By his early 20s, he had lost several climbing mates on mountain faces, including his best friend: this guy died in a fall while tied to John, who had to make a viciously difficult climb into a crevasse to free himself and retrieve the body. John survived all his climbing scares, only to die of a brain tumour. He was 33. There are no guarantees about our longevity, our survival or our luck.

But I do question the culture that elevates the roaring boy or the car-crash girl. Few of us would last very long in a family or friendship tie with Mickey Rourke or Britney Spears or Charlie Sheen or Joey Barton. Cracking them up as somehow “heroic” suggests that our sense of values is due for a reappraisal.