Final Chapters

by Jim Bernhard

  His body was returned to Prague and buried on June 11 in the New Jewish Cemetery. He achieved no recognition as a writer during his lifetime, since most of his works were published only after his death.

  EZRA POUND

  Genius, visionary, reformer, traitor, lunatic—these all describe Ezra Pound. Probably the most important influence on twentieth-century British-American literature, Pound befriended and offered assistance to a long list of writers that included T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Pound’s own major work was the epic Cantos, a sprawling and often opaque poem, which deals, so to speak, with the history of the world. Pound was accused of treason against the United States for his pro-Axis broadcasts during World War II, judged insane, and confined in a mental hospital.

  This poet-provocateur was born on October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho, the son of a federal official. He grew up near Philadelphia, attended Cheltenham Military Academy, the University of Pennsylvania, and Hamilton College, earning a B.A. in philosophy before taking a teaching job at Wabash College in Indiana. He was fired after an incident involving a young woman whom he allowed to sleep in his room at the college. With a nest egg of just eighty dollars, he sailed for Europe in 1908.

  After a brief stay in Venice, where he paid for the publication of his first book of verse, he settled in London, where he became an increasingly well-known part of the literary scene. He pioneered the school of Imagism, a poetic movement that stressed precision of language and a loose meter. His major works, besides the unfinished Cantos, include A Lume Spento (With Tapers Spent), Personae, Provenca, Homage to Sextus Propertius, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and numerous pieces of literary and social criticism.

  In 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, a British painter, and the couple lived in London and then Paris, where Pound met an American violinist named Olga Rudge, with whom he began a fifty-year affair. Tiring of Paris and ill with what his friend Hemingway called “a small nervous breakdown,” Pound took Dorothy in 1924 to Rapallo, Italy, followed shortly by Olga. An equal opportunity procreator, Pound sired a son by his wife and a daughter by his mistress.

  Pound and his good friend T. S. Eliot argued over the role of religion in civilization, Eliot maintaining that the evils of the world could be attributed to the decay of medieval Christianity, and Pound vigorously attacking organized religion of all kinds. Not precisely an atheist, Pound expressed a belief in a superior force that he called an “intimate essence” or “eternal state of mind,” but he was never specific in these beliefs, and was much influenced by Confucian humanism derived from his early interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry.

  Falling under the influence of Fascist politicians, Pound became an outspoken anti-Semitic and ardent supporter of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In 1939, Pound returned briefly to the United States to try to persuade the American government to stay out of the European war. Back in Italy, he made a series of propaganda broadcasts supporting Mussolini and condemning the United States.

  Following the war, Pound was imprisoned in Pisa by Italian partisans for six months, then was handed over to Allied authorities and returned to the United States to be tried for treason. Found insane, he was sent to St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for twelve years. The Library of Congress awarded him the Bollingen Prize for a section of the Cantos known as The Pisan Cantos, completed while he was held at Pisa after the war. The furor the award caused resulted in Congressional action to end the Library’s involvement in future prizes.

  Freed from St. Elizabeth’s in 1958 through the efforts of Archibald MacLeish, Robert Frost, and other writers, Pound returned to Italy, where he lived out his life in Venice with Olga, working on the Cantos, while his wife, Dorothy, lived for a time at Merano, about a hundred miles away, before retreating to London. When asked by a friend in Venice on what date he had been released from the asylum, Pound replied, “I never was released. When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum.”

  During his last years, Pound and Olga lived in her small three-story house on Venice’s Calle Querini, one street away from the Giudecca Canal on the Rio della Fornace. Their daily routine consisted of early-morning shopping by Olga as Pound snoozed, followed by a leisurely breakfast, a late morning walk along the Giudecca Canal, lunch al fresco at the Pensione Cici, then another walk along the Grand Canal.

  Dorothy arranged for Olga to be paid $100 a month for her services—which an indignant Olga regarded as an insult. Olga had graduated from mistress and now served as nurse, housekeeper, secretary, and watchdog to screen the many visitors who came to pay homage. She complained especially about inquiries from so-called “biographers,” whom she called “hogs after truffles.”

  Details from Olga’s diary in Anne Conover’s Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound chronicle Pound’s last five days. On October 29, 1972, the day before his eighty-seventh birthday, Pound was plagued by an intestinal obstruction. He drank some hot water and a cup of coffee, then took a purgative called Guttalax, followed by vegetable and apple purees. On his birthday, there were no results from the Guttalax, and Pound, dressed in apricot pajamas, took only a demitasse of coffee and some broth with pasta at teatime. That evening, as well-wishers sipped champagne and visited Pound’s room two at a time, a cake with eighty-seven candles was brought in, and he blew them all out. Still suffering from unrelieved constipation on the night of October 31, Pound walked to a gondola ambulance summoned by Olga and was taken to Sts. Giovanni and Paolo Hospital. He died there in his sleep on November 1 of an intestinal obstruction with Olga at his side.

  A friend described Pound’s funeral at the church of San Giorgio Maggiore as “grim,” with no flowers and only a single candle. A Roman Catholic mass was followed by an Anglican benediction.

  Pound was buried in San Michele Cemetery in the Protestant section beneath a simple marble tombstone engraved with his name by Venetian sculptor Joan Fitzgerald, a close friend. Twenty-four years later, Olga was buried next to him.

  T. S. ELIOT

  Uneasy for most of a life spent wearing the crown of the twentieth century’s leading poet, Thomas Stearns Eliot was also a whiz-bang at literary and social criticism, playwriting, book publishing, and prize-winning—a Nobel and three Broadway Tony Awards, two of them after he had been dead for eighteen years. American by birth, British by temperament and choice, Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888, youngest of six children in a middle-class family that sent him to Harvard University, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature.

  Just before the outbreak of World War I, he decided to pull up stakes and move to London, where he went to work as a clerk at Lloyds Bank and met the eccentric and influential poet Ezra Pound, who helped him find publishers for his verse—notably the iconic poem that every college freshman knows, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which established Eliot’s reputation.

  In 1915, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a would-be writer whom he met at a tea dance, and after a wedding night on which they found they were sexually incompatible, they spent a miserable eighteen years together before separating. Their friend Virginia Woolf referred to Vivienne as “a bag of ferrets” around Eliot’s neck. To escape the anguish, Eliot relied on alcohol—to the extent that novelist Anthony Powell noted in his diary: “Eliot always drunk these days.” In 1938, after having an affair with Eliot’s friend and mentor Bertrand Russell, Vivienne was committed to a mental institution, where she stayed until her death in 1947. Though they remained married, Eliot never visited her.

  Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank for eight years and continued to turn out acclaimed modernist poems that included The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Men, and Four Quartets. When a woman asked him where he got his inspiration, Eliot replied, “Gin and drugs, dear lady, gin and drugs.” His manner and a
ppearance were more like a banker than a poet—“very yellow and glum,” according to diplomat and author Harold Nicolson. After a nervous breakdown, Eliot joined the publishing house of Faber & Faber, of which he eventually became a major editor and co-owner.

  Eliot became a British subject and also converted from Unitarianism to Anglo-Catholicism, joining the parish of St. Stephen’s in Gloucester Road, where he served as a warden. Years after his conversion, Eliot characterized his religious beliefs as “a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament.”

  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, the same year King George VI named him to the exclusive Order of Merit, limited to twenty-four living members. He captured his first Tony Award in 1950 for the Broadway production of The Cocktail Party. His other major plays include Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion. Posthumous Tony Awards were in 1983 for the musical Cats, based on his children’s poems in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which earned him double honors for best book and best lyrics.

  After Vivienne’s death, Eliot was wooed by two women: Emily Hale, an old flame from his Harvard days, and Mary Trevelyan, his constant companion in London. But the efforts of both were in vain, and Eliot married his longtime secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in 1957, when he was sixty-eight and she was thirty. The ceremony at St. Barnabas Church in north London at 6:15 a.m. was attended only by the bride’s parents and one friend of Valerie’s.

  No children issued from either of Eliot’s marriages. He was reputed to have a distaste for sex of any kind, at least until his second marriage, which was a very happy one. Basking in its glow, he called himself “the luckiest man in the world,” and told an interviewer, “I am thinking of taking up dancing lessons again.”

  A heavy smoker most of his life, Eliot suffered from chronic lung problems, including bronchitis and emphysema, and a pathologically rapid heartbeat known as tachycardia. According to newspaper accounts, he was hospitalized on oxygen for five weeks in January of 1963, then returned to his ground-floor flat in Kensington Court Gardens for two more years, being “coddled,” as he called it, by Valerie. In October of 1964, he lapsed into a coma and was hospitalized again, but Valerie nursed him through this illness and he returned home once more. By Christmas, however, his heart was failing, and on January 4, 1965, at the age of seventy-six, he awoke from a final coma, uttered Valerie’s name, and died.

  Eliot was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes interred at the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in East Coker, the Somerset village from which his ancestors had come, and the title of one of the poems in Four Quartets. A commemorative plaque quotes that poem: “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.” There is also a memorial stone in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

  EUGENE O’NEILL

  “I knew it, I knew it—born in a hotel room and, goddammit, died in a hotel room.” These were the last words of playwright Eugene O’Neill, whispered before he died in Suite 401 of the Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston on November 27, 1953. He was born on October 16, 1888, in a room in the Barrett House hotel on Longacre Square (now Times Square) in New York City.

  His father, James O’Neill, was an Irish immigrant actor, famous for barnstorming in the title role in The Count of Monte Cristo. Eugene’s itinerant parents sent him to a Catholic boarding school in the Bronx, and he spent his summers in New London, Connecticut, at Monte Cristo Cottage, his parents’ summer home. He was expelled after a year at Princeton University, allegedly for throwing a beer bottle through the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson, the future U.S. president.

  O’Neill spent several years as a merchant seaman before falling ill with tuberculosis. While recuperating, he decided to devote himself to playwriting. He enrolled in a drama course at Harvard, then took a “trunkful” of his plays to the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod. Several of his early plays, volubly tragic for the most part, were produced there and at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. One of them, Beyond the Horizon, went on to Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920. He had a major Broadway hit with The Emperor Jones the same year, followed by Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize), Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize), Mourning Becomes Electra, and Ah, Wilderness!, O’Neill’s only comedy. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.

  O’Neill married three times, first in 1909 to Kathleen Jenkins, with whom he had one son; in 1918 to novelist Agnes Boulton, with whom he had a son and a daughter; and finally, in 1929, to actress Carlotta Monterey. O’Neill was estranged from all three of his children. Both sons committed suicide, and his daughter, Oona, married the actor Charlie Chaplin, over O’Neill’s strong objection.

  As well as his early tuberculosis, depression and alcoholism haunted O’Neill for much of his life. After the Broadway success of his most highly regarded tragedy, The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill in his early fifties began to develop a palsy that made it difficult for him to write. Nonetheless, he was able to complete A Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day’s Journey into Night, although the latter was not produced until years after his death, as were the other plays he left only partly finished, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions.

  Educated in Catholic schools, O’Neill distanced himself from any religious observance, although many of his plays have theological themes, and O’Neill acknowledged that his work explores the relationship between man and God. The critic Robert Brustein has characterized O’Neill’s attitude as anguish at an inability to confirm or deny the existence of God. The playwright instructed Carlotta, “When I’m dying, don’t let a priest or Protestant minister or Salvation Army captain near me. Let me die in dignity. Keep it as simple and brief as possible. No fuss, no man of God there. If there is a God, I’ll see him and we’ll talk things over.”

  With worsening palsy, thought to be Parkinson’s disease, O’Neill went with Carlotta in 1953 to Boston, where he sought treatment. He rarely left the Sheraton suite, seeing only Carlotta; his physician, Dr. Harry Kozol; and a nurse. He died in his room on November 27, at the age of sixty-five. An autopsy disclosed that he did not suffer from Parkinson’s disease, but from a degenerative neurological disorder known as cerebellar cortical abiotrophy, which causes brain cells to die.

  O’Neill was privately buried in Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

  The hotel where O’Neill died is now a Boston University residence hall. The fourth floor frequently experiences unexplained knocks on doors, dimming lights, and random elevator stops. These phenomena are said to be caused by the playwright’s ghost.

  ROBERT BENCHLEY

  “Except for the occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did,” humorist Robert Benchley humorously quipped. It wasn’t a heart attack, however, but a cerebral hemorrhage, combined with cirrhosis of the liver after years of heavy drinking, that did him in. Benchley, the master of literary whimsy and a droll performer in many Hollywood films, was—by his own account—never quite a writer and never quite an actor.

  Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on September 15, 1889, he claimed in an autobiographical parody that he wrote A Tale of Two Cities and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; married Princess Anastacia of Portugal, with whom he had Prince Rupprecht and several little girls; and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In fact, he went to Harvard, worked on the college literary and humor magazines, married Gertrude Darling (whom he had known since he was eight years old), fathered two sons, wrote more than six hundred witty essays and countless reviews, appeared in goofy roles in at least fifty major movies and short films, and left a string of bons mots that inspired such humorists as James Thurber and Dave Barry.

  Benchley’s early career was checkered, as he bounced from one job to another, spending time as columnist, critic, and editor with the New York Tribune, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker before devoting himself primarily to film and radio. He was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of wags includ
ing Dorothy Parker, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, and Alexander Woollcott, who regularly lunched (and, even more regularly, drank) as they traded quotable quips at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in New York.

  A militant teetotaler until he was thirty-four, Benchley more than made up for his abstemiousness during the last twenty years of his life. “I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death,” he said, “but then I’m in no hurry.” He also observed, “The only cure for a real hangover is death.”

  In 1945, Benchley was in about a dozen films in Hollywood, including the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road to Utopia and Weekend at the Waldorf with Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon, and Van Johnson. In October of that year, he returned to his home in Scarsdale, New York, and was working on some radio shows when he suffered a stroke. Hospitalized at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, he died there a week later, on November 21, 1945, at the age of fifty-six, and his death was attributed to a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Benchley was cremated and the remains buried privately in a family plot on Nantucket Island. His family decided not to use an epitaph he had written for his gravestone: “This is all over my head.”

  AGATHA CHRISTIE

  Agatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, and the most translated author in world history, according to UNESCO—and that adds up to a lot of bodies in the library. Known primarily for her sixty-six murder mystery novels and numerous short stories, as well as six romances under the pen name Mary Westmacott, Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller to a wealthy family in Torquay, Devonshire, on September 15, 1890.