Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  It’s only half-true to say that I became a seeker of graves because of AIDS. I grew up in a town pocked with graveyards, old church burial-grounds whose tilted slates have long since lost their graven names. Even then as a melancholy boy I’d sit on a stone, chin in hand, and contemplate the cosmos. Or these country graveyards fenced in iron staves and overhung with willows, the family plot no bigger than a farmhouse bedroom. If they were meant to be a memento mori, it was all unconscious to me. Though I daresay I looked like a spook out of Edward Gorey, I don’t remember ruminating on death exactly. Rather they constituted a sort of safety zone, where I could indulge my secret longing to be a poet, the chokeless kind.

  The first grave I ever tracked down for writerly reasons was Edmund Wilson’s. Nothing personal. I’d read an account of the woodland spot where he lay buried with all his honors. A discreet white marble slab two feet high, rounded at the top like the curve of grief itself, and bearing beneath the writer’s name three Hebrew letters, which, roughly translated, exhorted the scholar’s soul to Go on from strength to strength. I carried all of this on a tattered newspaper clipping in my wallet, waiting for the next trip Roger and I made to Provincetown.

  The village of Wellfleet is hardly even a detour, the Cape is so narrow beyond the elbow. We found the hillside graveyard without any map or questions asked. Wilson is off by himself under the trees, and it happened that a single daffodil bloomed yellow in front of the stone. It is a detail which at the time cheered me immensely, the opposite of a wilting bouquet, the widow’s work of planting a bulb like spitting in Death’s face. Mixed up in my head by then—stuffed as it was by overeducation—were fragments of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Lowell’s “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” But all of it was still in the realm of the picturesque, no muffled echo of a bell that tolled for me. If anything, this high literary take on darkness managed to push the thing itself away, an amulet of prettied-up quotes safely recorded in Bartlett’s.

  One visited such places politely, if not piously—like Harold and Maude attending the funerals of strangers, transported by the organ prelude and checking out everyone’s hat. Trying on other people’s survivors like so many veils, and underneath it all learning how to cry. The first public event I went to after moving to L.A. was Howard Hawks’s funeral. I didn’t know anyone there, couldn’t even have said what movies the man had directed. But I sat next to Angie Dickinson, feeling quite swank, and listened with rapt attention as John Wayne gave the eulogy. I felt faintly ashamed afterward, dissatisfied and incomplete, the way I used to feel in the closet. Thereafter I avoided the obsequies of stars.

  Then in the fall of ’83 Roger and I were in Rome, having wound our way through Tuscany, waiting overnight to catch a plane back to L.A. We only had a single free afternoon, and decided to track down the Keats-Shelley Memorial House, overlooking the Spanish Steps. A most fusty and eccentric place, chockablock with memorabilia in the Victorian manner, cut-paper silhouettes and locks of everyone’s hair. The whole presided over by a sunken-cheeked vicar who didn’t appear to want visitors at all.

  It took us a while to get our bearings, no help from the vicar. But soon we were reading Joseph Severn’s diary under glass, a rending account of the poet’s last days. We realized that the tiny room in the front corner was where Keats had actually died, with a window onto the Steps and the Bernini fountain in the piazza. Bernini’s conceit was a simple stone boat with gouts of water pouring from its sides, a leaky vessel the sound of whose plashing reached us in the death-room. By all accounts the poet in his final hours was calm and resigned, though agitated at the end by a letter from Fanny Brawne which he couldn’t bring himself to open, much less read. He asked that Severn place it in the folds of his winding sheet.

  And then that final night, Severn sketching beside the bed to keep himself from going mad with grief. 28 Janry 3 o’clock mng, he has scrawled in charcoal beneath the sketch of the poet’s head lolling on a pillow. Drawn to keep me awake, a deadly sweat was on him all this night. And framed above the glass cabinet of Severn’s memory, an artist’s ink drawing of the grave they bore him to. You couldn’t get through college English, in my time anyway, without some passing reference to the name that was writ in water. But somehow the full text had escaped me until now, and it brought me up extremely short.

  THIS GRAVE

  CONTAINS ALL THAT WAS MORTAL

  OF A

  YOUNG ENGLISH POET,

  WHO,

  ON HIS DEATH BED,

  IN THE BITTERNESS OF HIS HEART,

  AT THE MALICIOUS POWER OF HIS ENEMIES,

  DESIRED

  THESE WORDS TO BE ENGRAVEN ON HIS TOMB STONE:

  “HERE LIES ONE

  WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.”

  FEB 21ST, 1821

  I turned to Roger and said with a kind of fevered resolve: “We have to go there. Right now.”

  But it was already growing dusk in the piazza below, nearly five o’clock and the vicar squirming to be rid of us. The Protestant Cemetery was too far away, its gates padlocked at nightfall. No time in the morning either, since we had to be up at dawn to make the airport. “Next trip,” I said to myself, dissatisfied and suddenly full of portent, a shiver of mortality and the roads that don’t lead back.

  At the time I was feeling not a little writ in water myself, a novel of mine having been savaged by a couple of reviewers in the gay press. One had called me up from Philadelphia and asked, “Is everyone in California as shallow as the characters in your books?” Another in the New York Native had opined that someone had to put a stop to dickless, no-talent writers like me, who were keeping good work from being published^wasting the trees, as it were. Since nobody in the “mainstream” press paid any attention to any of us, these scabrous remarks constituted the record regarding my work. Which was, in any case, completely out of print within another year. For a long while my confidence was shot, my next novel rejected by thirty publishers. I tended the bitterness of my heart. Worse, I was hip-deep in malarial waters on which I wrote my own name in the scum—Holly wood, I mean. Hardly a worthy comparison to the silencing of the finest lyric voice in English poetry, but there you are. Sometimes all you have left as an artist is histrionics.

  Somewhere in there, in the winter after Italy, I conceived the reckless scheme of writing a play about Keats’s final week. A nine-days’-wonder of a notion, to take place in that very apartment above the Spanish Steps. With Severn and a landlady to care for him, and the landlady’s ripe peasant daughter bringing up milk and hearty soups. My conceit was that the poet, delirious in the throes of fever, would come to think the landlady’s daughter was Fanny Brawne herself, to whom he would declare his undying love through the rattle of his drowning lungs. I imagined a visit by members of the Milton Society, lovers of Poesy, fawning at Keats’s bedside though managing all the while to cover their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs. I was going to have Keats cough desperately to scare them away. And to vary the setting I’d show the outing Keats and Severn made to the Protestant Cemetery, before the poet was too ill to leave his bed. The meadow was pocked with violets that day. Keats sighed when he saw them, expressing a longing to pull the cover of grass over him, so the violets would carpet his heart.

  But I only got as far as checking the books out of the library. By the time I’d read twenty pages of Walter Jackson Bates’s huge biography, weighty as a tombstone itself, my eyes had glazed over. I was never any good at research—not blessed with that punctilious turn of mind that orders the world on three-by-five cards. I couldn’t even say where the details come from here as I write them down, what’s “true” and what’s romantic license. I haven’t a footnote in my head. Besides, how had I ever expected to get away with writing proper English speech, let alone broken Italian, not to mention nineteenth-century voices that didn’t sound like community theater? I blew the whole thing off my desk. Let John Keats die in peace.

  Before another year was out, all my friends
were dying instead. But by some quirk of coincidence, none of them was buried in a cemetery. Scattered ashes and memorial services were the fashion, all too often without any reference to AIDS or even gay. We let loose our balloons and made a final circuit through the house of the deceased—where the final battle was already taking place between the “blood” family and the lover, fighting over the towels and the lamps and the bibelots.

  The morning after Roger died, his half-brother came bustling into my room and stirred me from my Dalmane twilight. “You’ve got work to do,” he said, and when I frowned in confusion, added, “Where’s he going? You’ve got to pick a place.”

  The Protestant Cemetery in Rome, I thought irrelevantly, sitting slumped in the back of the car as we toured the city’s cemeteries. When we got to Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills division, the only thing left in my heart besides the grief was a horror of finding myself in The Loved One. For this was surely the very place envisioned by Waugh—the sweep of grass like a Palm Springs golf course, no gravestones permitted, only bronze plaques in the ground. Nothing to mar the founder’s vision of a Park of Death, joyous with children playing and family picnics, all the dead having gone to heaven. Anchored at one end by a white clapboard village church, or at least the Disney equivalent, and on the other by a half-scale replica of the Old North Church in Boston, of course with generous parking. Dotted about the landscape were white marble statues of stupefying vulgarity, Moms and Dads and kids in frozen groups, little tykes on their knees praying.

  But at least no Jesus shit that I could detect. And as it turned out, when we entered the Tara reception center, the theme of the Hollywood Hills division was God Bless America—a garden of patriots as its centerpiece, full-scale bronzes of Washington and Jefferson, and a huge outdoor mural of the signing of the Declaration. Hallmark meets My Weekly Reader. Our Comfort Counselor, Mr. Wheeler, was not quite Rod Steiger in a powdered wig, though his nails were lugubriously clean. He moved in a cloud of Aramis that stung the eyes within ten feet of him.

  Real estate came first, as it always does in California. Roger’s parents and I were driven about in Mr. Wheeler’s Cadillac, two miles an hour, as he pointed out each section from Heavenly Rest to Resurrection. I directed him up the winding hill to the highest plots, where the lawn verged on undeveloped chaparral. Atheists all, we abandoned the car and trudged uphill in Mr. Wheeler’s wake, the hillside shaded by umbrella pines and with a view across the valley to the San Bernardinos if the smog was light. Wheeler carried a big book like a survey map, the whole acreage divided into numbered plots.

  They were sold in pairs, side by side. Puffing from the climb, we decided we liked where we were. A deal: Plot 3275, Spaces 1 and 2, on the hill called Revelation. Delicately Wheeler inquired which space I wanted Roger in. I shrugged. What did it matter? Roger’s mother touched my arm and said, “He wants to know which side you boys slept on in bed.” Oh. As a matter of fact it went either way, depending on who needed to be closest to the alarm clock. Let Roger have the right side then. “Excellent,” said Mr. Wheeler, circling it on his chart. Then, offhandedly, “This section used to be reserved just for Mormons, but we’ve opened it up.”

  I looked around in dismay, only now picking out the Mormon Temple engraved on several bronzes. “Hey, this isn’t going to work, Mr. Wheeler. They don’t want us up here.”

  He was shocked. “We’re all one family in death,” I think he said, and I let it go for the parents’ sake. “One thing I should tell you, though,” he continued. “At night the deer come down and steal the flowers. We can’t stop them.” He pointed with dismay to the undeveloped scrub on the hillside above, clearly an affront to the manicured lawns of the dead. “Some people don’t like it, having their flowers scattered. Sometimes we have to move their loved ones further down the hill. The deer will only go so far.”

  Al and Bernice were sporting the same dreamy smile I was. “Don’t worry, Mr. Wheeler,” I assured him. “We like the deer just fine. What kind of flowers do they prefer?”

  He gave a bewildered shrug. His expertise lay elsewhere, in the coffin-and-hearse department. By week’s end we had buried Roger there, and I still didn’t understand that I’d bought the spot where I’d be spending most of the next year and a half.

  There was no place else to go, really. Friends would call with an invitation to lunch, or an extra ticket to the Philharmonic, in one ear and out the other. Not that I wasn’t grateful to pass the time, but I knew where I needed to be. Usually from three to five in the afternoon, till closing time. Mostly I sat on my own grave—my permanent side of the bed now—and mostly didn’t cry. Cried most of the day and night at home already, so this was my break. Seven days a week. On Saturdays I’d bring up café au lait and croissants at noon and read the paper, just as we always used to do. I’d talk out loud to Roger, reciting him poems. Or I’d lie down and fold my hands across my chest, looking up through the trees and trying to adjust to my last address.

  From my perch on the hill I could see the day’s funerals, straggling out of the churches. A line of slow cars to the gravesite, the mourners standing in a half circle as the coffin was laid on the lowering hoist, the mounded dirt on either side covered with sheets of Astroturf. They don’t do the filling in till after everyone’s gone. And I don’t know if this constitutes a statistical sample, but almost nobody seemed to wear black anymore. Pastels, a lot of lilac and lavender.

  I began to wonder which of the dead had died of AIDS. So I undertook a methodical survey of the whole acreage, moving row by row for the better part of a week, checking out every inscription. At the time there were eighty thousand in residence, with room for another fifty thousand. Here and there I’d find them, young men dead at thirty or thirty-five, with a stray quotation from Hamlet or Pooh. A silent scattered tribe, the first wave of the plague.

  Are you reeling from the mawkishness? Because it gets worse. I had almost made a full circuit by now, having come round again to the western ridge where Roger lay, but still two hundred yards to go. And I realized I had stumbled onto the babies’ section. Annabelle, two days old; William Jr., May 25—June 16, 1985. Acres of this, the bronze plaques carved with teddy bears and a lot of Christian singsong. Bronze is not an easy medium to write in, but curiously the cliches seem to help. You learn that it’s none of your business what other people choose to memorialize, the inadequate words that mark the scar in their heart.

  It takes about six weeks to order the bronze and set it in place. They send you a rubbing of the first casting (a hundred bucks extra), on which I made a myriad of fussy changes. It was finished mid-February and laid in place. I came that day nearly faint with trepidation, fearing somehow the finality, the want of exactly the right word. Or perhaps I’d tried to cram too much in. And still I couldn’t say whom it was meant to address, what sort of declaration to the future—as if anyone would even notice it except for an obsessive like me. But here it was, the final word on the final hill. I dropped to my knees and read it through over and over, making sure nothing was off.

  ROGER DAVID HORWITZ

  1941–1986

  MY LITTLE FRIEND

  WE SAIL TOGETHER

  IF WE SAIL AT ALL

  BELOVED SON AND BROTHER

  THE WISEST AND JUSTEST AND BEST

  The last phrase being Plato’s final words on Socrates—in his prison cell, the poison having done its work, history’s most compelling argument against capital punishment. But here I’m getting it out of sequence. First came the Christmas crisis, when Forest Lawn relaxes its rule against gaudy tributes and NO ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS. Suddenly the gravesites are decked with Christmas trees and tinsel and wreaths and even battery lights. I’d just begun to get used to the quiet of the place, even looked fondly now on the Old North Church, and here I was confronted by a Macy’s load of gewgaws.

  I wanted to hide somewhere till Christmas was removed. As it happened, Star and Craig flew out from New York to spend the holiday with me, to get me through it. St
ar convinced me to take a few days with her over New Year’s in New Mexico, where I had never been. “As long as we can visit Lawrence’s grave,” I replied, setting myself a pilgrimage. The second day we headed north of Taos, blinding sun on the snow, to Kiowa Ranch. Off the road on a rutted track, heading uphill and deep into the trees. To the modest cluster of ranch buildings, the whole of it deeded to David and Frieda Lawrence by Mabel Dodge, in exchange for the autograph manuscript of Sons and Lovers.

  You must climb a steep hill to reach the chapel, but it wasn’t the altitude pounding my heart. My first glimpse of it stung my eyes. Simple, more like a stuccoed shed than a church, because crafted by hand. The rose window above the door is the hub of a tractor’s tire, the one above the altar inside is a wagon wheel. The altar itself is painted silver, with just the letters DHL incised on the front. A few painted leaves and sunflowers by Dorothy Brett, the painter who was their boon companion, who had to put down her ear trumpet to pick up her brushes.

  But it’s so silent up there anyway, just the breeze through the piñon trees and my blubbering relief. I felt as if I were standing on the Everest of death. In the warped guestbook several pilgrims had scribbled notes beside their names: fellow pagan; a worshiper of the God of free love. Then you step out the door into the delirious vastness of the desert below, all ochre and streaks of purple, and yes the curve of the earth besides. I had managed to come to a new place where Roger and I had never been, without expiring of loneliness. And I had the peculiar feeling that Lawrence had given this view to me, sightless himself in the urn of ashes sealed in the altar.