Morning:
8°c
It is to the obituary columns that I turn first in daily papers - an age thing, I suppose. I have little interest in the sometime great and good and note their passing with, if anything, a grunt or snort and sometimes a sense of "at last; why not before?" leaving unread the de mortuis nil nisi bonum approvals of those who guard their reputations. Occasionally, however, I yelp with pain or moan with sorrow, and so it was when I read of the death of Yonty Solomon the yelp rather than the moan.
For perhaps a decade, long ago when I was a young man who drove fast and beautiful open Daimlers, I knocked about with painters, poets and musicians. It was then that I met Yonty Solomon, talented young pianist from South Africa, here in 1959 to study with the deeply revered Dame Myra Hess, the Richard Clayderman of her day. Shy and elusive, he was beautiful in an ascetic, bony, Jewish way and the right company could bring him out and make him sparkle. He gave piano lessons to John Vere Brown, a now forgotten portrait photographer of some brilliance (though he'd prefer to be remembered as the brilliant painter of austere landscapes who was compelled to pay his bills with the commercial business of photography), and it was through John that I met him. He even gave me lessons, but I had no aptitude.
Though never close, it seemed a long acquaintance at the time; each of us flitted in and out of the other's life, exchanging friends and glad to meet at parties, concerts, the opera and exhibitions. John's paintings roused something in him that had been dormant in Cape Town, and I took him to galleries and exhibitions that built on this excitement, but he had not even two pence to rub together and it never occurred to me that he would become a collector. And that, of course, is the point of obituaries they fill the gaps.
The gap in my case lasted decades; after three years Yonty returned to South Africa. Three years? Was it quite so short a time? The break, though it left a faint sense of yearning, was terminal. Yonty was back within a year or so, a new fire in his belly, at 26 an utterly convincing musician about to make his professional debut at the Wigmore Hall. John Vere Brown formed an unnecessary claque for him and I was part of it, but after that we went our very different ways and I saw no more of the young genius. I have occasionally thought of him and asked myself "I wonder what happened to Yonty Solomon?" and now, too late and only through an anonymous obituarist, I know. At 71, he died a month ago, after a life well worth the living.
Wisdom is rare in women, but Virginia Woolf was wise when she opined that we lose friends through "sheer inability to cross the street". We are all guilty of that laziness.
