Last word
As Wini said
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Oral history is notoriously unreliable and deceiving. Everyone's memory plays tricks. The more are the memories involved, the 100 re does truth become distorted — as in the children's game of Chinese Whispers— or the is an more firmly original error established. Mien I last wrote a short, informal obituary Oa friend I telephoned one or two fill __ people to In gaps in y m knowledge. After the piece had appeared I received several letters telling Me—good-naturedly enough—that I had got things wrong. The curious thing was not that I had made a mistake, or mistakes (nothing curious at all about that!), but that these letters contradicted one another. In more than one detail I was left with at least three versions of the story: what I had Written —as I had been told it — and two other versions, both different. I felt rather like the reporter in Citizen Kane, threading through a maze of turnabouts and dead ends. Another friend, Willi Fischauer, died a iiiWeek ago. As I write I assume that he died by I: own hand; more of that in a moment. 'nost of what I shall say belongs to the land not of assumption and speculation but of conversation and memory, or, if you like, of gt'ssiP. That was the land that Willi properly inhabited. Recorded facts about him are uncommon and unreliable. The newspapers couldn't even agree on his age: one gave seventy-two , It as another as seventy-five. He Was not in Who's Who, though he was a good aeal more interesting than many who are. at I know about him, then, is what I reniernber of what he had told me over the nearly eight years of our friendship. Don't bOther to correct me if I am wrong. With was Viennese, born in the first years
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the century in the extraordinary city of aliler and Freud and Schiele and Kraus. at society was partly Jewish: so was Willi. , ere were very rare occasions when I heard nim speak entirely without levity. One was When he described how his gentile father had o to stay and die with his Jewish mother Under the National Socialists. THe worked for a family newspaper in the 'the wenties and Thirties, and became involved .complex political world of republican 'Iustna. At one time and another he was an ociate
a
mkit of both Dolfuss and Schussrugg may not seem likely; it was what he told _.,e.) He came to London more and more u, nen during the Thirties. On the day of the _kusehluss' he flew into Vienna, heard the news, and immediately flew out again (his st orY' again). During the war he undertook \v▪ arious tasks for the British authorities. One O ther to use his knowledge of Vienna and ner Austrian cities to help Bomber Command plan its attacks. This made him unPnpular in his former country, and the curious not to say risible — title of 'Professor' later bestowed on him by the Austrian government marked a reconciliation.
He subsequently worked for the News Chronicle and later wrote books. Willi once said, 'I've been practising English for years and now I speak it without the trace of an accent — an English accent, that is.' His accent was certainly thick, though never impenetrable. There was a suspicion that he kept it as a gimmick — a Viennese Maurice Chevalier, as it were — but, in fact, he never fully mastered English as either a spoken or a written language, unlike many other refugees. Perhaps, migrating in his thirties, it was too late.
As a writer, both of journalism and of books, Willi was an indefatigable hack. I use the phrase deliberately (and I hope I don't betray unconscious hostility; we are all familiar with what Private Eye once called the 'obitchery'.) He did not follow Pushkin's maxim: write for pleasure and publish for money, He did both for money, and if it was necessary to write biographies of the Aga Khan, Onassis, Jackie Kennedy and David Frost to make a living then he wrote them. He wasn't exactly ashamed of those books, nor exactly proud of them; he became irritable if he was teased for the uncritical treatment of his illustrious subjects. Perhaps at the back of his mind, as of one's own, was the idea that something better might have been — might yet be — written by a man who could still quote reams of Schiller or Grillparzer at the drop of a glass, ancl was a fathomless well of anecdote, printable and unprintable, about a European era.
Nicki Frischauer, Willi's beloved wife, and incidentally an incomparable cook, died last summer. Since then he had ailked more than once about suicide. He even suggested to me that he should write an article about his half-hearted attempts. We facetiously discussed methods — he didn't know Dorothy Parker's poem: 'Gas smells awful. . . and wrote it down on a packet of cheroots. Despite the jokes he was truly depressed. It was a sign of his melancholy that he began to lose weight very rapidly — he had been the fattest man I knew, with an Edwardian appetite. In the circumstances his death is not so much tragic as very sad, and moving, for it is touching when someone finds that he cannot live without another.
I shall remember Willi not as a writer but as a talker: talking when we first met in Wheeler's (I was working for his publisher but with characteristically endearing generosity he tookme to lunch); talking in El Vino, where not long ago he capped Philip Hope-Wallace, who said he had seen Cosima Wagner in Bayreuth in 1924 (old men remember, indeed!), by saying that he had heard Caruso sing at the Vienna Opera in 1913. That was what Willi said. I shall remember the endless stories about London and Vienna and places in between. And I shall remember with gratitude the pleasant irony that it was this lovable journalist who introduced me to Karl Kraus.
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