It's October, and that requires obligatory Halloween-inspired posts. And nothing is more obligatorily macabre than looking at the tombstones of those who have died.
Every year we do this. Now through Halloween we'll occasionally post collections of tombstones to see where famous writers are hanging out today.
Today: Samuel Beckett, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anne Sexton, Albert Camus
Samuel Beckett:
The Irish Beckett loved living in France, famously saying he preferred "France at war to Ireland at peace." Beckett must have really loved France, because in 1938 he was stabbed in the chest by a pimp--yes, a pimp, who went by the name Prudent--after Beckett refused the pimp's solicitations. Maybe Prudent was living up to his name and just being cautious, who knows? Beckett was scary looking after all.
He would later drop the charges against Prudent, partly because he said he liked the pimp's personality. Because if you can't like a mentally unstable pimp, who can you like?
In the 1950s, Beckett bought some rural land in France, and locals helped him build a cottage. One such local was a Bulgarian-born farmer who had an abnormally large son. Beckett volunteered to drive the large boy to school in his truck, as the huge child didn't fit on the bus. The boy? He would grow up--really grow up--and be better known as WWF wrestling superstar
Andre the Giant. That's right. A Nobel Prize winner was a taxi service to a future WWF wrestler. Bet you didn't see that one coming.
Winning the Nobel Prize in 1969, Beckett donated all of his prize winnings to charity. He lived for another twenty years, eventually finding himself stuck in a nursing home, slowly dying of emphysema and potentially Parkinson's disease. Since 1989, he has been residing with his wife at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris under a simple gravestone.
Tombstone Notes:
Beckett had a basic request for his gravestone. It could be "any color, so long as it's gray." As opposed to all those neon orange gravestones you typically see.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Besides his writing, Emerson was known for his speeches. But by 1872, at 69 years of age, he started having memory problems and began showing signs of aphasia (an affliction that affects speech). Not the best of combinations for someone who gives speeches.
1872 was not a good year for Emerson, as his house in Concord, MA, caught fire. Flames can be hypnotizing apparently, and no one worked to extinguish the flames except a one-armed local named Ephraim Bull, Jr., who eventually put the fire out, although the house was lost. Ephraim Bull, Jr. was the son of Ephraim Wales Bull, who was the creator of the Concord grape. The Bulls lived next door to the Alcotts. Yes, of Louisa May Alcott fame. It might not be the magnitude of living near Andre the Giant, but it's not shabby.
By 1879, Emerson's lack of memory was embarrassing to him, and he ceased all public speaking and appearances. Three years later, in 1882, he was found to have pneumonia, and died in April of that year. He was buried in a white robe given to him by David Chester French, better known as the sculptor who designed the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Sing it with me:
"It's a small world after all...It's a small world after all..."
Tombstone Notes:
Emerson is buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA, on a hillside referred to as "Author's Ridge," beneath a gigantic boulder. The epitaph reads, "The passive master lent his hand / to the vast soul that o'er him planned." A little dry for an epitaph, but this is Emerson we're talking about. Not a live wire of excitement.
Anne Sexton:
You know those deaths that are happily casual, where the person lived a generally pleasant and long life and dies in their sleep? (I'm looking at you,
Nadine Gordimer!) Anne Sexton didn't have that sort of life or death.
If you're looking for some light beach reading, you probably want to avoid Sexton. She was known for her confessional poetry, which focused heavily on suicide, mania, and depression--a what's what of sadness--yet her skill as a poet was never doubted. It led to her winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for her book of poetry titled
Live or Die. The collection details struggles with her mother and daughters, and includes one of her more famous poems, "Wanting to Die." Picking up on a theme yet?
Sexton was admitted to psychiatric wards routinely. Her therapist had originally encouraged her to take up poetry as an outlet for her mental illness. That led her to eventually studying under poet Robert Lowell at Boston University, where another famous female poet also studied alongside her: Sylvia Plath. Between Sexton, Plath, and Lowell, Boston University was pumping out some of the saddest poetry in the 1950s and '60s. It's a wonder the city of Boston wasn't collectively depressed at that point.
Strangely enough, Sexton would go down the same path as her classmate Plath and commit suicide. After a lunch with an editor friend, Sexton went home, drank a glass of vodka, put on her mother's fur coat, removed any jewelry on her hands, locked herself in the garage, started the car, and killed herself via carbon monoxide poisoning.
I warned you it wasn't a pleasant life or death.
Tombstone Notes:
Sexton is buried at Boston's Forest Hills Cemetery beneath a small, inconspicuous gravestone with two other relatives. It's in the same vein of humble headstones like
John Steinbeck's and
Charles Chesnutt's.
Albert Camus:
The Nobel-winning writer known for his Absurdist writings died under absurd claims...or were they?
On January 4, 1960, Camus was going to head back to Paris after vacationing with his wife and children south of the city. He bought a train ticket--but at the last minute changed his mind and decided to hitch a ride with his publisher and friend, Michel Gallimard. Sometimes we make bad choices in life. For Camus, this was the ultimate one.
The official story is that Gallimard drove over some ice, lost control, and wrapped the car around a tree--killing Camus instantly. (Gallimard would die a few days later.)
The unofficial story that has conspiracy theorists salivating? You might want to grab a drink and a pen and paper to keep track.
The theory was instigated by Italian poet Giovanni Catelli, who says that he read a passage from the diary of a Czech poet named Jan Zábrana--I assume because he's nosy. Zábrana allegedly wrote in his diary that he overheard a very well-informed (nameless) man with upper-level sources that Soviet KGB operatives rigged a tire on Gallimard's car to rupture at higher speeds. This was done in anticipation of causing an accident that the KGB hoped would kill Camus.
Why kill Camus? Because the Frenchman supported Boris Pasternak, writer of
Doctor Zhivago, a book which Joseph Stalin had banned. The book still managed to be smuggled out of the country and find itself published regardless. Pasternak won his own Nobel prize a year later, which infuriated the Soviets.
Camus also insulted the Soviet foreign minister, Dmitri Trofimovic, over Moscow's decision to enter Hungary to stop an uprising.
For both these reasons, Zábrana allegedly wrote--and Catelli asserts--the KGB took a very roundabout way to kill Camus. Because poison is too quick and simple?
Tombstone Notes:
Camus is buried in the cemetery of the small French village of Lourmarin, a plot adorned with an absurd level of various flora.
Do you really want to cover the burial plot with Mother Nature when a tree took him out?
