by Jim Bernhard
Copyright © 2015 by Jim Bernhard
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Tom Lau
Cover photo credit: Thinkstock
Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-241-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0061-1
Printed in the United States of America
For Ginger
Contents
Last Words First: An Introduction
The Classical Age
AESCHYLUS (525–456 BC)
SOPHOCLES (497–406/5 BC)
EURIPIDES (485/480–406 BC)
SOCRATES (469–399 BC)
PLATO (428–347 BC)
ARISTOTLE (384–322 BC)
VIRGIL (70–19 BC)
HORACE (65–8 BC)
OVID (43 BC–17 AD)
MARCUS AURELIUS (121–180 AD)
The Middle Ages
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (354–430)
THOMAS AQUINAS (1225–1274)
DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321)
GEOFFREY CHAUCER (1343–1400)
The Renaissance
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547–1616)
WALTER RALEIGH (1552–1618)
FRANCIS BACON (1561–1626)
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564–1593)
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)
JOHN DONNE (1572–1631)
BEN JONSON (1572–1637)
JOHN MILTON (1608–1674)
MOLIÈRE (1622–1673)
BLAISE PASCAL (1623–1662)
The Enlightenment
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745)
ALEXANDER POPE (1688–1744)
VOLTAIRE (1694–1778)
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706–1790)
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–1784)
THOMAS PAINE (1737–1809)
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749–1832)
The Romantic Era
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770–1850)
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772–1834)
JANE AUSTEN (1775–1817)
LORD BYRON (1788–1824)
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792–1822)
JOHN KEATS (1795–1821)
MARY SHELLEY (1797–1851)
The Victorian Era
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801–1890)
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804–1864)
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806–1861)
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807–1882)
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809–1892)
MARGARET FULLER (1810–1850)
CHARLES DICKENS (1812–1870)
ROBERT BROWNING (1812–1889)
CHARLOTTE BRONTË (1816–1855)
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817–1862)
WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)
HERMAN MELVILLE (1819–1891)
GEORGE ELIOT (1819–1880)
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY (1821–1881)
LEO TOLSTOY (1828–1910)
EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886)
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832–1888)
MARK TWAIN (1835–1910)
THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850–1894)
OSCAR WILDE (1854–1900)
The Modern Era
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856–1950)
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859–1930)
ANTON CHEKHOV (1860–1904)
RUDYARD KIPLING (1865–1936)
ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)
JACK LONDON (1876–1916)
SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876–1941)
CARL SANDBURG (1878–1967)
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941)
JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941)
FRANZ KAFKA (1883–1924)
EZRA POUND (1885–1972)
T. S. ELIOT (1888–1965)
EUGENE O’NEILL (1888–1953)
ROBERT BENCHLEY (1889–1945)
AGATHA CHRISTIE (1890–1976)
DOROTHY L. SAYERS (1893–1957)
DOROTHY PARKER (1893–1967)
JAMES THURBER (1894–1961)
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II (1895–1960)
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896–1940)
WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897–1962)
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1898–1936)
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899–1961)
HART CRANE (1899–1932)
NOËL COWARD (1899–1973)
EVELYN WAUGH (1903–1966)
GRAHAM GREENE (1904–1991)
SAMUEL BECKETT (1906–1989)
W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973)
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911–1983)
DYLAN THOMAS (1914–1953)
THOMAS MERTON (1915–1968)
ARTHUR MILLER (1915–2005)
ROALD DAHL (1916–1990)
HAROLD PINTER (1930–2008)
JOHN UPDIKE (1932–2009)
SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963)
JOE ORTON (1933–1967)
SUSAN SONTAG (1933–2004)
NORA EPHRON (1941–2012)
ROGER EBERT (1942–2013)
Image Credits
Last Words First: An Introduction
WHEN WE HEAR that anyone has died, one of the first things we ask is: “What did he (or she) die of?” And then: “How old was he (or she)?” Such personal details of death are a source of fascination to most people. Dorothy L. Sayers, who killed off a good many folks in her murder mysteries, said, “Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.” But she didn’t go far enough in her assessment. It’s not just Anglo-Saxons who are stuck on death; it’s the whole human race.
Death has several characteristics that may explain the attention that we lavish on it. It is both inevitable (so far as we know) and unpredictable (in most circumstances). People who estimate such things tell us that since the beginning of the world, about 107 billion people have been born. Of that total, only a little more than 7 billion are alive today. If you do the math, you’ll find that means that out of everyone who has ever lived, 93 percent of them have died. The odds are not in favor of the remaining 7 percent of us.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer William Saroyan once said, “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Unfortunately for him, no exception was made, and he died of prostate cancer in 1981. He was seventy-two.
Inevitable as it may be, death is also unpredictable for most of us as to precisely when we might expect it. This quality infuses it with a suspenseful frisson, guaranteeing that we will think about it from time to time.
Nobody has expressed the inevitability of death better than William Shakespeare. Hamlet, who pondered the subject more than was good for him, put it this way: “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow; if it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, y
et it will come. The readiness is all.”
One other quality that gives death a healthy dose of gravitas is its finality. No matter what one’s views are about the possibility of an afterlife, there’s no getting around the fact that death permanently ends the life we’re in now—the only one we really know anything about. The “lane to the land of the dead,” as W. H. Auden called it, is a one-way street. And its destination, as Hamlet puts it, is “the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
The lives and deaths of the world’s poets, dramatists, and novelists are ideal for studying how humans approach dying. The various ways they shuffled off this mortal coil could fill an encyclopedia of disease and mishap. They were snuffed out by infections (especially in the days before antibiotics); by frequent lung disease (particularly in the nineteenth century, when tuberculosis and pneumonia were rampant); by the expected quotient of heart attacks, strokes, and cancer; by stomach and kidney disorders and a few rare and unknown diseases; plus a fair number of suicides, murders, assassinations, and bizarre accidents. Alcohol, tobacco, and narcotics played leading roles in many cases.
Death came to some in startling ways. The Greek playwright Aeschylus had a fatal encounter with a turtle that fell from the sky. Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas was knocked off a donkey by a tree branch and never recovered. French dramatist Molière was mortally stricken while playing the part of a hypochondriac in one of his own plays. The corpse of the philosophe Voltaire was transported to his funeral dressed in finery and propped up as if he were still alive.
American poet Emily Dickinson’s final illness was difficult to diagnose—because rather than allowing her doctor to examine her, all she would consent to was to walk slowly past the open door of his examining room while he observed her from inside. Writer Sherwood Anderson was felled by an errant toothpick in a martini. Trappist monk Thomas Merton was killed by a fan—an electric one. Did poet Dylan Thomas really die of eighteen straight whiskeys? And was it a stray bottle cap, too many pills and too much liquor, or murder most foul that did in playwright Tennessee Williams?
Ages of authors at the time of death have also varied widely. Curiously, even though average life expectancies have substantially lengthened in modern times, writers do not seem to have benefited from the improvement. The average age at death of the classical Greek and Roman subjects in this book was about seventy. Oddly enough, for the authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it was earlier—about sixty-five. Ages at death range from Sophocles at ninety-one and George Bernard Shaw at ninety-four, to Percy Bysshe Shelley at twenty-nine and John Keats at only twenty-five.
This book explores not only the individual causes of death and the circumstances surrounding it, but also what each author might have thought about the end of life. Being writers, most have left at least some clues, if not specific exposition, about their attitudes toward death in their poems, plays, novels, diaries, letters, and interviews. They exhibit a wide range of opinions.
Few if any of these famous authors have had the kind of “near-death” experiences that have spawned many recent sensational books that often climb to the top of bestseller lists. The array of such alluring titles is dizzying: Proof of Heaven, Return from Tomorrow, My Descent into Death, 90 Minutes in Heaven, Life on the Other Side, Waking Up in Heaven, and Heaven Is For Real are a few of them. One classic author who stands out as an anomaly for his unwavering certainty about the existence of an afterlife is Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes’s creator, who insisted that he was able to converse with folks who had passed over to the other side.
For the most part, however, the creators of our literature, from the classical era to modern times, have expressed the same kind of uncertainty the rest of us feel about what to expect from a visit by the Grim Reaper. Like anyone else’s, the authors’ views about death are shaped by their religious and philosophical beliefs, which span the gamut from polytheism and Stoicism in the classical Greco-Roman period; to Christianity, prevalent in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance; to Deist and Transcendental thought, developed in France and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; to the questioning agnosticism or blatant atheism that pervades the contemporary “Age of Anxiety.” Attitudes toward death differ widely, ranging from fear to acceptance to indifference.
The selection of authors may strike some readers as arbitrary, and it is. It is based on purely personal preferences, appearing in a chronological sequence by date of birth. Despite glaring omissions or idiosyncratic inclusions, the list does represent an approximation of what might be found in a history of Western Lit. The historical arrangement of the authors is purely for the convenience of the reader. The periods have been divided into Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern, generally following the usual pattern of literature courses.
As for historical documentation, this is not a textbook or a reference work and should not be held to strict academic standards. Other than quotations from the works of the authors themselves, sources include online and printed encyclopedias (including but not limited to the invaluable Wikipedia.org), literary web sites, biographies, biographical directories, diaries, news accounts (principally NYTimes.com, Telegraph.co.uk, Theguardian.com, Dailymail.co.uk, Bbc.co.uk), the especially useful web sites Nndb.com, Biography.com, Poets.org, Poetryfoundation.org, Poetsgraves.co.uk, Poemhunter.com, Books.google.com, Shmoop.com, and the always fascinating Findadeath.com and Findagrave.com. They Went That-A-Way by Malcolm Forbes also provided a number of informative tips.
While reasonable effort has been made to verify facts, details are nonetheless incomplete and should not be relied upon as having encyclopedic authority. Where there have been differing accounts of the circumstances of an author’s death, I have favored the most interesting (or lurid) version (but have also indicated that opinions vary).
As always, I am grateful for the encouragement and (almost all of) the criticism of my devoted wife, Virginia, a historian, whose suggestions have attempted, in vain, to disguise the inadequacies of this volume with a patina of scholarly methods. I must also acknowledge with gratitude the counsel and assistance of Julia Lord, my savvy, gracious, and indefatigable agent. My thanks also go to Nicole Frail, my editor at Skyhorse Publishing.
If there are lessons to be learned from the words of the authors in this book, the best one is probably that of Marcus Aurelius: “Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.”
The Classical Age
AESCHYLUS
If plays had been rated in ancient Athens as movies are today, the tragedies of Aeschylus would have earned an “R” for violence, incestuous sex, cannibalism, and gory deaths. You be the judge: In the Oresteia trilogy, lurid details tell of Agamemnon’s bloody murder of his own daughter while she is bound and gagged; the subsequent butchery and dismemberment of Agamemnon, along with his paramour, Cassandra, by his vengeful wife, Clytemnestra; more revenge perpetrated by their son, Orestes, who with the help of his sister, Electra, fatally stabs Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. Oh, and don’t forget Aegisthus’s father, Thyestes, who murdered his half-brother and slept with the wife of his brother, Atreus—who then got even by killing Thyestes’s sons, roasting them, and feeding them to their unwitting father. Thyestes then raped his own daughter, who gave birth to Aegisthus, who killed Atreus. Whew! And that’s only three of the ninety or so plays that Aeschylus wrote. It’s too bad for slasher fans that only seven of the ninety have been found.
First of the three great tragic Greek playwrights, Aeschylus himself was apparently a very gentle and scholarly fellow, born about 525 BC into a wealthy family in Eleusis, twenty-five miles northwest of Athens. He grew up devoutly religious, believing in the Greek pantheon of gods, who were often cruel and violent. He was initiated into the secret cult of Demeter, known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. With his brother, Aeschylus fought in the battle of Marathon, in which the Greeks defeated the invading Persians under King Darius.
His brother died in the battle, but Aeschylus lived to do military duty once again against the Persians, this time led by King Xerxes, at the battle of Salamis ten years later. This battle is memorialized in his play The Persians.
Murder may have been a horror to Aeschylus, but death itself was a natural and sometimes desirable culmination of life. “Death is a gentler fate than tyranny,” he wrote in Agamemnon. “There is fame for one who nobly meets his death with honor.” In that play the unfortunate Cassandra contemplates her brutal demise with equanimity:
I willingly endure my death,
And warmly greet the gates
Of Hades that open for me.
Grant me, you gods,
A clean blow and an easy fall,
Free from agony!
Let my blood
Flow smoothly from my veins,
So that I may close my eyes
In peaceful death.
Aeschylus’s own death was nothing he would have written a play about. He met his end unexpectedly in the year 456 BC, at the age of sixty-eight or sixty-nine, in a bizarre mishap while visiting the island of Sicily. According to Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, Aeschylus had been warned by an oracle that he would be killed by a house falling on him; accordingly, he spent as much time as possible in the open, far from any edifices that might collapse. He was taking an ostensibly healthful stroll in the fresh sea air when what was said to be an eagle (more likely a vulture) dropped a turtle on his glistening bald head, which the not-so-eagle-eyed bird mistook for a rock. Bearded vultures, or Lammergeier (Gypaetus barbatus), are known to pick up box turtles (Testudo graeca) and drop them from great heights onto large rocks with remarkable accuracy in order to get at the juicy meat and bones inside. The turtle “house” that was dropped on Aeschylus reportedly remained intact, but, alas, the old playwright’s head did not.
Aeschylus was buried on the island in a grave that bore an epitaph that he had composed for himself:
“In this tomb in the wheat fields of Gela lies Aeschylus of Athens, son of Euphorion. He fought in the hallowed precincts of Marathon, which can speak of his valor, which is remembered as well by the long-haired Persians.”
