by Jim Bernhard
When he was seventy, Conan Doyle began to experience frequent chest pain, which was diagnosed as acute angina pectoris. Seriously ailing, he made a visit to psychics in Holland and Scandinavia, but was so ill that he had to be carried ashore on his return home. As death approached, he observed, “I have had many adventures. The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now.”
He embarked upon that great and glorious adventure on July 7, 1930, when he was found gasping and clutching his chest in the hallway of Windlesham Manor, his country home in Crowborough, East Sussex. As his son Adrian told an Associated Press reporter: “My mother’s and father’s devotion to each other at all times was one of the most wonderful things I have ever known. His last words were to her, and they show just how much he thought of her. He simply smiled up at her and said, ‘You are wonderful.’ He was in too much pain to say a lot. His breathing was very bad, and what he said was during a brief flash of consciousness.”
Conan Doyle, surrounded by his wife, two sons, and a daughter, died at the age of seventy-one.
At his memorial service the following week at Royal Albert Hall, attended by six thousand mourners, an empty chair was placed next to that of his wife. A medium named Estelle Roberts tried to summon Conan Doyle’s spirit, and after half an hour, pointed to the empty chair and announced, “He is here!” No one except her, however, was able to see him. She whispered a message from him to the widow, but what he said was never revealed—except that the medium did report that Sir Arthur had congratulated her on her superb performance.
Conan Doyle was first buried in the rose garden at Windlesham, but was later reinterred in Minstead Churchyard, New Forest, Hampshire. The epitaph on his gravestone reads:
Steel True
Blade Straight
Arthur Conan Doyle
Knight
Patriot, Physician & Man of Letters.
ANTON CHEKHOV
Anton Chekhov was both a writer and a physician, but like an earlier poet-doctor, John Keats, he found his medical skills could not spare him an early death from a dreaded disease. On the bright side, only moments before he died, Chekhov was sipping champagne.
Born in Taganrog, in southern Russia, on January 29, 1860, the son of a grocer who was a religious fanatic, Anton attended local schools. When he was sixteen, he was left in his hometown to fend for himself while the family relocated in Moscow after his father’s bankruptcy. After finishing school, he rejoined his family and enrolled in Moscow University Medical School, where he graduated when he was twenty-four.
During this time, he began to publish short stories, which received considerable acclaim. He maintained a dual career for eight years, practicing medicine and continuing his writing, winning the Pushkin Prize for literary excellence. “Medicine is my lawful wife,” he said, “and literature is my mistress.” After his play The Wood Demon flopped, he quit writing for several years and embarked upon medical research among prisoners in a Siberian penal colony. He then decided to see the world, traveling to Asia, India, and the Middle East.
He returned to Russia, bought a country estate near Moscow, and devoted himself full-time to writing. He turned out dozens of short stories and began to write plays again, notably his four supreme achievements: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. At first they were not successful, but a revival of The Seagull by Konstantin Stanislavsky was a huge hit.
The actress who played Nina in that production was Olga Knipper, with whom Chekhov began an affair, culminating in their marriage. Unfortunately, Chekhov’s health began to deteriorate rapidly at that time. Since leaving medical school, he had suffered from tuberculosis, an illness that ran in his family, and his tempestuous marriage to Olga weakened him further. He spent most of his time in Yalta by the sea while Olga was performing in Moscow.
As a boy, Chekhov was dominated by his father’s religious fervor, and he dutifully attended Russian Orthodox services. As he grew older, his religious views became more humanist, but he never lost an underlying affinity for the doctrines and rituals of Orthodoxy. While not specifically advocating Christian concepts in his works, Chekhov let his characters embrace them, with his seeming approval. In Uncle Vanya, for example, Sonia talks of an afterlife with this vision of Heaven as a welcome rest from this life’s vicissitudes:
And when our final hour comes, we shall meet it humbly, and there beyond the grave, we shall say that we have known suffering and tears, that our life was bitter. And God will pity us. Ah, then, dear, dear Uncle, we shall enter on a bright and beautiful life. We shall rejoice and look back upon our grief here. A tender smile—and—we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see evil and all our pain disappear in the great mercy that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith. My poor, poor Uncle Vanya, you are crying! [Weeping] You have never known what it is to be happy, but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait! We shall rest. We shall rest.
In the summer of 1901 at Yalta, Chekhov was coughing blood, but steeled himself to return to Moscow for rehearsals of The Three Sisters. The following year, he finished his final play, The Cherry Orchard, and against doctors’ orders returned to Moscow for rehearsals with Stanislavsky’s company. It was not a happy experience: As with most of the Chekhov-Stanislavsky collaborations, the two were at cross purposes; Stanislavsky saw the plays as stark tragedies, and Chekhov thought they were amusing comedies. “He turned my characters into crybabies,” the playwright complained.
When The Cherry Orchard opened in January of 1904, the tuberculosis had become terminal, and Chekhov’s friends and family knew the end was near. By this time, as one friend observed, he could hardly walk and “noises were coming from his chest.” Opening night was a farewell tribute to Russia’s greatest playwright.
Chekhov held on until June. Then, accompanied by Olga, he went to the German spa of Badenweiler, seeking some relief. On the night of July 14, he stayed up late to work on a story. After going to bed, he woke up feeling ill, sat up straight, and said, “Ich sterbe” (German for “I am dying”)—which was surprising, since he knew only a little German. Olga summoned a physician, who calmed him, gave him an injection of camphor (used to treat minor heart symptoms), and offered him a glass of champagne—an incongruously festive custom of German doctors when attending a fellow doctor on his deathbed. Chekhov drained the glass, smiled at Olga, and said, “It’s a long time since I drank champagne.” He then lay down on his left side and died. He was forty-four years old.
Chekhov’s body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car marked “FOR OYSTERS,” a perceived indignity that outraged Chekhov’s friend Maxim Gorky. Chekhov was buried in Novdevichy Cemetery, next to his father, after a four-mile funeral procession of four thousand mourners. During the procession, some of the Chekhov crowd became confused by the cortege of another funeral and marched off by mistake to the martial strains of an army band to services for General Fyodor Keller.
RUDYARD KIPLING
Although he hated receiving honors and turned down many, including the Poet Laureateship, a knighthood, and the Order of Merit, Rudyard Kipling did accept the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, becoming the first English-speaking writer to win it. An Anglo-Indian, he was born December 30, 1865, in Bombay, where his father headed an art school. Named Rudyard after an English lake where his parents had courted, he had an idyllic early childhood, which ended abruptly at age five when his lackadaisical parents sent him and his younger sister to England for an education, in the care of total strangers whose names they got from an advertisement.
When he was sixteen, Ruddy returned to India and began to write for English-language newspapers, but after a dispute with one of his editors, he was fired and departed India for a visit to the United States. He saw such American locales as Seattle, Salt Lake City, Yellowstone National Park,
Omaha, Chicago, Boston, and Elmira, New York, where he met and favorably impressed Mark Twain. Twain said of Kipling, who was only twenty-three at the time, but looked much older: “He is a most remarkable man—and I am the other one. . . . he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”
Kipling wound up back in England and embarked upon his literary career. In short order, he published a novel, The Light That Failed, suffered a nervous breakdown, recuperated on a whirlwind tour of India and South Africa, returned to London, and became friendly with Wolcott Balestier, an American writer and agent, whose younger sister Carrie became Kipling’s wife. They settled in America, which is how Kipling came to write Captains Courageous and The Jungle Book, in Brattleboro, Vermont, of all places. A son and a daughter were also born there, and Kipling completed a new version of Barrack-Room Ballads, which contained the famous “Gunga Din” (“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din”) and “Mandalay” (“On the road to Mandalay, / Where the flyin’-fishes play”).
A long-running feud over property and money with his wife’s younger brother, who threatened either to blow Kipling’s brains out or to give him the worst hiding he had ever had (not surprisingly, their accounts differed), persuaded Kipling to move his family back to England. By this time, his writing had made him famous and wealthy—he was reputedly the highest paid writer in the world—and the family settled into the first of two stately homes in Sussex.
Kipling’s other most famous works of fiction (all of them later notable movies or TV series) were Kim, The Man Who Would Be King, and Just So Stories. Oft-quoted poems are “The Ballad of East and West,” (“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”), “Danny Deever,” (“An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’”), “Recessional” (“Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, / Lest we forget, lest we forget”), “The Female of the Species” (“. . . is more deadly than the male”), “The Betrothed” (“A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke”), and “If” (“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”).
Although his personal religious views were unclear—probably a Deist; he once called himself a “God-fearing Christian atheist”—he could write in the vernacular of sentimental orthodoxy about a future life, as he did in an 1892 poem some may regard as more than a wee bit treacly:
When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy; they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from—Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!
And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!
Kipling got to try out his golden chair in 1936, when an ulcer from which he had suffered for many years proved his final undoing. A magazine’s earlier erroneous report of his death prompted Kipling to write to the offending publication: “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.” This time, however, his demise was real. He and his wife were stopping over in London en route to a vacation in the south of France, when he became ill and was transported to Middlesex Hospital. That old ulcer had perforated and hemorrhaged in his small intestine, and he underwent seemingly successful surgery—but after twenty-four hours, peritonitis set in. Kipling survived four more days, receiving frequent oxygen and blood transfusions, but at 12:10 a.m. on Saturday, January 18, he died at the age of seventy.
Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, and his cremains were buried beneath a simple stone in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, next to Charles Dickens. T. S. Eliot’s memorial stone later found a space on Kipling’s other side.
ROBERT FROST
Robert Frost’s religious sentiments seemed to swing like a pendulum. In a whimsical poem entitled “Not All There,” he laments about God’s absence when he tries to speak to him. But Frost sometimes referred to himself as an “Old Testament Christian,” and when it came to an afterlife, apparently he wasn’t sure. He left this piece of useful advice: “You ought to live so’s if there isn’t anything, it will be an awful shame.”
Named Robert Lee for the Confederate general, Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. He was the son of a hard-drinking newspaper editor and religious skeptic and his wife, who started as Presbyterian, but through the influence of reading Emerson, became a Unitarian and then a Swedenborgian. Young Robert was baptized in the Swedenborgian Church and remained influenced by its Christian mysticism throughout his life. When Frost was eleven, his father died, leaving the family with just eight dollars to its name, and Robert, his mother, and nine-year-old sister moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his father’s parents lived.
Robert attended public school and then went on to Dartmouth and Harvard, failing to graduate from either. He worked at various jobs: teaching, delivering newspapers, cobbling shoes, changing arclight carbon filaments, and editing the Lawrence Sentinel. In 1894, he had his first poem published in a New York newspaper. The following year, he married a high school classmate, Elinor Miriam White, with whom he had six children. He tried his hand at farming for several years on land inherited from his grandfather, but when the farm failed, he moved with his family to England. There he met a number of literary figures, including Ezra Pound, who took a liking to his work and helped him get two volumes of poetry published.
After World War I erupted, Frost returned to the United States, his reputation as a major poet secure. Thereafter he lived in Massachusetts and Vermont, teaching at Amherst College and Middlebury College and continuing to turn out poetry, which won a total of four Pulitzer Prizes. Among his most familiar poems, many of which use pastoral New England imagery to make philosophical comments, are “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Birches,” “Fire and Ice,” “Departmental,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “The Gift Outright,” which he recited at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
Frost’s family life was plagued by illness and premature deaths. His mother, his sister, his wife, some of his children, and Frost himself suffered bouts of depression, and Frost had to commit his sister to a mental institution. His daughter Irma was similarly institutionalized. Frost’s mother died of cancer when he was twenty-six, his son Eliot died four years later of cholera, his daughter Elinor died three days after her birth, and his daughter Marjorie died in childbirth. Frost’s wife developed breast cancer in 1937 and died of a heart ailment the following year. Two years later, their son Carol committed suicide.
Frost himself lived until 1963, when he died of an embolism at the age of eighty-eight. He had entered Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston for prostate cancer surgery on December 10. He then suffered a heart attack, and blood clots settled in his lungs. An operation in early January to tie the veins in both his legs attempted to ease the blockage, but shortly after midnight on January 29, Frost complained of shortness of breath and severe chest pains. He died at 1:50 a.m., “probably of a pulmonary embolism,” according to his death certificate.
A family service was conducted by a Unitarian minister in Appleton Chapel at Harvard University, and Frost was buried in a family plot in Old Bennington, Vermont. Beneath his name on the gravestone is a quotation from his poem “The Lesson for Today”: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the wor
ld.” Later, in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College, there was a public memorial service, at which President Kennedy delivered a eulogy.
JACK LONDON
When Jack London heard the call of the wild, he answered it. The man who would become the highest paid author in America was born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876, in modest circumstances to an unmarried mother named Flora Wellman. His father was probably William Chaney, an astrologist, and as an infant, Jack was handed over by his neurotic mother to a former slave named Jennie Prentiss, who raised him like one of her own children. Flora later married John London, a Civil War veteran, and Jack took his name.
The family settled in Oakland, where Jack finished grade school and then worked at various jobs, one of which was pirating oysters on San Francisco Bay in a sloop he purchased with money borrowed from his nanny. He decided to switch sides and worked for a while with the harbor patrol, catching poachers. An alcoholic by the time he was fifteen, he sailed the Pacific on a Scandinavian seal-catching boat, hoboed around the country, marched in Coxey’s army of the unemployed, got arrested in Niagara Falls and served jail time for vagrancy, then returned to Oakland to attend high school, work in a power plant, and engage in the political activism that made him famous as the “Boy Socialist of Oakland.”
London won a national short story contest, and then began to submit other stories and poems to magazines with little success, until he spent the winter of 1897 looking for gold in the Klondike. He experienced frostbite, scurvy, malaria, and dysentery, netted only $4.50 worth of gold dust, but came up with material that would set him up as a successful writer, beginning with stories such as “To Build A Fire,” and culminating with The Call of the Wild. Other books followed, including White Fang, The Sea-Wolf (which was the basis of Hollywood’s first full-length feature film), The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, The People and the Abyss (a critique of capitalism), John Barleycorn (a memoir of his alcoholism), and The Cruise of the Snark (an account of an abortive attempt to sail the Pacific in a ketch with his wife).