THERE IS a row going on over in England about a proposed memorial to Benjamin Britten in the cemetery of his adopted home town Aldeburgh. Some people want a statue, others a bird table, while many local people feel the composer is quite sufficiently celebrated in Aldeburgh already. The whole saga has assumed (there being no evidence to the contrary, I suppose) national proportions.
The London Times columnist Libby Purves is shocked to find this controversy in her home patch on getting back from holiday - "in, of all slyly ironic, self mocking places, West Cork."
That's the reputation West Cork has and well deserved too. Skibbereen, for example, never stops giving out about itself, Ballydehob is so far gone down the ironic road it meets itself coming back, Durrus is that sly you wouldn't be up to it and (the remote coastal area of) Ballyrisible beg pardon, Ballyrisode - has been practising self mockery for so long it is tipped as the venue for this year's national championships.
That is West Cork's glory and long may it live. It's a bit of a shock for the outsider but that is part of the charm.
Anyway. The Britten row brings up this business of properly commemorating dead celebrities. One lady has written to a paper to point out that the citizens of Aldeburgh were perfectly happy to immortalise Snooks, the dog owned by Robin and Nora Acheson, two doctors in the town who died in 1959 and 1981. A statue of this dog is apparently on public view in the town.
I have absolutely no idea what the point of this letter is. The medical profession, notes the writer, must take heart that its work is not considered to be "ephemeral". This is obviously a reference to the charge that Britten's work will not last, but it is hard to see how a dog's statue commemorates medical achievement or what it has to do with Britten.
Another letter writer champions the causes of former Aldeburgh notables Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (the women's suffrage campaigner) and her sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who not only became England's first woman doctor but was also the first lady mayor of an English town (Aldeburgh itself).
These arguments would not arise (at all) if people were properly commemorated while still alive. There is no reason why town celebrities, in their autumnal years, should not be ordained as national treasures and housed for example in small but attractively landscaped parks, with discreet security fencing, where visitors might view the creatures in their natural environs.
Ms Purves rightly complains about famous dead people overshadowing, in graveyards, those whose lives were just as real and who now share the equality of death.
Still, the shadows cast by the "great" over the graves of the ordinary are themselves only ephemeral (literally: try taking a gawk after dark). Observe too the progress of the visitor to the VIP grave. Inevitably, attention and the attender wander. Within a short time, the visitor is usually to be seen examining the inscriptions on nearby headstones. Those dead who have perhaps lived the most modest of lives, are thus touched by celebrity. Depending on proximity, of course. You won't get much of a look in, or look at, if you are stuck over in the corner away from the action.
But look. The character actress Virgina Christie died the other week. So does the monument in her home town perhaps commemorate her 1944 triumph in The Mummys Curse, when she played Egyptian Princess Ananka, a mummy who, restored to life, joined fellow mummy Lon Chaney Jnr in terrorising a small Louisiana community? Or recall her many parts in Mr Ed, The Lone Ranger, Perry Mason or Gunsmoke? Or any of her 50 odd films?
No. The citizens of Stanton, Iowa, have honoured her memory by converting a local water tower into a giant, ornately decorated coffee pot.
But why, you ask plaintively? Because Ms Christie's most lucrative television assignment was in a coffee commercial, where she played Mrs Olson, a kindly, Swedish accented housewife who kept solving domestic problems by recommending Folger's Mountain Grown Coffee to a succession of married couples. It became one of the longest running commercials in TV history.
The memorial has been described as "somewhat bizarre" but it makes good sense (to me).
