by Jim Bernhard
By now an international celebrity, he was earning the equivalent of $250,000 a month from his writing and endorsements of clothing and grape juice—but he squandered his fortune on a yacht; a money-draining ranch in Sonoma County, where he pioneered sustainable agriculture; and a mansion that cost two million dollars in today’s money, but burned down just before it was finished.
London married twice, first to Bess Maddern, with whom he had two daughters before divorcing her to marry Charmian Kittredge, who remained his wife, his muse, and his editor for the rest of his life.
Major influences on London’s thought and writing were Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietszche, from whom he acquired a fierce anti-religious bent. He identified himself as an atheist and was sometimes quoted as saying, “I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.”
Never in good health since the ailments he contracted in the Klondike, London suffered in his later years from gout, pyorrhea, and severe and painful chronic kidney disease, which might have been caused by heavy drinking and a weird diet filled with raw fish and nearly raw duck. In addition to a reliance on alcohol for relief, he also took strong opiates. He died on his ranch near Glen Ellen, California, on November 22, 1916, and his death certificate attributed the cause to “uraemia following renal colic,” complicated by “chronic interstitial nephritis.” He was forty years old.
His good friend George Sterling claimed that London committed suicide, but solid evidence is lacking. It is certainly possible that London, mortally ill and in chronic pain, may have taken an overdose of morphine either accidentally or purposely. London’s ashes are buried on his ranch, now known as Jack London State Historic Park, under a red boulder on a knoll that overlooks his ranch house.
In his handwritten will, London left his whole estate and all rights to his works to his wife, Charmian, except for monthly allowances of $45 to his mother, $35 to his sister, $25 to each of his two daughters, and $15 to his “old mammy,” Jennie Prentiss—and a one-time payment of $5 to his former wife, Bessie.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Death by toothpick was the sad fate of American writer Sherwood Anderson, best known for his story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. A true son of Ohio, Anderson was the third of seven children, born in Camden on September 13, 1876, to a harness-maker who moved around frequently to avoid debt collectors. Anderson quit school at age fourteen (though he later attended classes at Wittenberg College in Springfield). He worked for a while as an advertising salesman for a Chicago magazine publisher. During this period, he began to write character sketches that were published in some of the magazines.
Anderson then moved to Cleveland to run his own mail-order business. One of the products he sold was a defective incubator, and hundreds of complaints from angry customers drove him to a nervous breakdown. He regrouped and started another business in Elyria, Ohio, selling a preservative paint called Roof-Fix, but again suffered a mental breakdown. He walked thirty miles to Cleveland, where after three days he was found, delirious, in a drug store.
That experience was evidently an epiphany of sorts: Anderson left his wife and three children, moved to Chicago, took up a bohemian lifestyle, met young Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg, and devoted himself fulltime to the literary life. He spent some time in New Orleans, where he hobnobbed with William Faulkner. During a stay in Paris Anderson became close friends with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and on his return to New York socialized with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though he fared reasonably well as a writer of novels, essays, poetry, and especially short stories, his novel Dark Laughter, inspired by his New Orleans days, was the only bestseller of his career.
Although raised in a home with a devoutly Presbyterian mother, Anderson evidenced scant interest in formal religion. He was far more interested as a writer in how people lived their lives than in what happened to them after they were dead. In one short story from Winesburg, Ohio, which Anderson called “Death,” he romanticizes the figure of the Grim Reaper:
The sick woman spent the last few months of her life hungering for death. Along the road of death she went, seeking, hungering. She personified the figure of death and made him now a strong black-haired youth running over hills, now a stern quiet man marked and scarred by the business of living. In the darkness of her room she put out her hand, thrusting it from under the covers of her bed, and she thought that death like a living thing put out his hand to her. “Be patient, lover,” she whispered. “Keep yourself young and beautiful and be patient.”
By 1941, Anderson’s works had faded from popularity, and he and his fourth wife went on a South American cruise with playwright Thornton Wilder aboard the liner Santa Lucia. Anderson was fond of martinis, a drink that is often served with an olive speared on a toothpick. Somehow or other Anderson managed to swallow a toothpick while imbibing, and the next day he fell ill. After suffering abdominal pains for several days, he was diagnosed with peritonitis by the ship’s doctor, and the captain made port in Colón, Panama, where Anderson was taken to a hospital. He died there on March 8, at the age of sixty-four, of the massive infection caused when the toothpick perforated his intestine.
Anderson’s body was returned to the United States, where he was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, “Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure.” His obituary in the Elyria, Ohio, paper gave little notice of his literary career; it was headed “Former Elyria Manufacturer Dies.”
CARL SANDBURG
Carl Sandburg, American poet, journalist, biographer, film critic, and three-time Pulitzer Prize–winner, was concerned less about the afterlife than the present lives of common people, especially in the Midwest.
One of the common people himself, Sandburg was born January 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Illinois, to a Swedish immigrant railroad worker who changed his name to August Sandburg from August Johnson, because there were too many other August Johnsons at the railyard. Young Carl had to start work at age thirteen, and he found employment as a porter in a barber shop, a milk delivery man, a bricklayer, a farm laborer, and a hotel servant.
After a stint in the Army during the Spanish-American War, he attended Lombard College in Galesburg and then went to work for the Chicago Daily News as a film critic. He became an organizer for the Social Democratic Party in Milwaukee, where he met fellow organizer Lillian Steichen, known as Paula, sister of the photographer Edward Steichen. They married in 1908 and raised a family of three daughters, whom he whimsically nicknamed his “homeyglomeys.”
Sandburg began to write poetry, inspired both by Walt Whitman and by his own rough-and-tumble Midwestern life. Most of it was free verse, nonmetrical and nonrhyming, a form that his contemporary Robert Frost disdained as “playing tennis without a net.” Sandburg’s first volume was Chicago Poems; followed by Cornhuskers, which won a Pulitzer Prize; then Smoke and Steel; and Slabs of the Sunburnt West. Despite poetic fame, a notoriously ill-compensated distinction, he didn’t have financial success until the publication of the first in his three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. Among his later works are “Good Morning, America,” The People, Yes, and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, which won him another Pulitzer Prize. His Complete Poems won him a third Pulitzer in 1951.
Sandburg was raised a Lutheran, but according to his biographer Harry Golden, after his confirmation at age thirteen, he was never a member of any church. Golden once asked him directly what his religion was, and Sandburg replied: “I am a Christian, a Quaker, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Shintoist, a Confucian, and maybe a Catholic pantheist or a Joan of Arc who hears voices. I am all of these and more. Definitely I have more religions than I have time or zeal to practice in true faith.”
“Death Snips Proud Men,” published in 1920, is a memorable Sandburg commentary on the end of life:
Death is stronger than all the governments because the governments
are men and men die and then death laughs: Now you see ’em, now you don’t.
Death is stronger than all proud men and so death snips proud men on the nose, throws a pair of dice and says: Read ’em and weep.
Death sends a radiogram every day: When I want you I’ll drop in—and then one day he comes with a master-key and lets himself in and says: We’ll go now.
Death is a nurse mother with big arms: ’Twon’t hurt you at all; it’s your time now; you just need a long sleep, child; what have you had anyhow better than sleep?
In one of his last poems, “Timesweep,” Sandburg accepts the inevitability of his own mortality, which he calls “the final announcement from the Black Void,” with quiet resignation.
The last twenty-two years of Sandburg’s life were spent with Paula on their 245-acre farm, called Connemara, in Flat Rock, North Carolina. He enjoyed a nip of whisky or cognac, and he smoked cigars—although he was known to limit his intake by cutting them into thirds. He continued to work; writing poetry, traveling to speaking engagements, even spending time in Hollywood to work on the screenplay of The Greatest Story Ever Told. But his age eventually caught up with him. Sandburg began to have frequent attacks of bronchitis and pneumonia, and suffered increasing memory loss. When he was eighty-seven, he was hospitalized with diverticulitis.
In June of 1967, Sandburg had two heart attacks, and by mid-July, he was bedridden. As he lay dying, he asked to hear a recording by classical guitarist Andrés Segovia, who years earlier had written a piece in Sandburg’s honor. Sandburg died of heart failure about nine o’clock in the morning on July 22, at the age of eighty-nine. His last word was his wife’s name, “Paula.”
Nearly six thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington for a memorial service on September 17, and Sandburg’s ashes were buried on October 1 under “Remembrance Rock” at his Galesburg birthplace.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
What was Virginia Woolf afraid of? On the day of her death, the author of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse left a note for her husband that read in part: “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”
A victim of mental disorders for much of her life, Woolf was born in London on January 25, 1882, to Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and his wife, Julia. Virginia received all of her schooling at home. She had several breakdowns and bouts of depression, some requiring hospitalization. The first was after the death of her mother when Virginia was thirteen, and another occurred when her father died nine years later. Between 1910 and 1913, she had three stays in nursing homes.
In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a novelist and political theorist, and they eventually settled in a house on Tavistock Square in the Bloomsbury section of London. This was one of the meeting places of the literary circle known as the Bloomsbury Group, which included the Woolfs, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Rupert Brooke, Desmond McCarthy, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, and others.
The Woolfs acquired a small hand printing press as a hobby for Virginia, and from this activity grew the Hogarth Press, which the couple managed for more than twenty years and which published most of her works, including Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, Flush, Roger Fry: A Biography, and Between the Acts, which she finished shortly before her death and which was published posthumously.
During the blitz of World War II, the Woolfs’ London flat was destroyed, and they went to live in Sussex. Both of them had suffered depression and contemplated suicide, and they had stockpiled morphine and petrol for just such a purpose. These proved unnecessary. At 11:30 a.m. on March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf put on her hat and coat, filled her pockets with rocks, took her walking stick, and went to the Ouse River near her home. She removed her hat, laid down her cane, and jumped into the river. Her body, weighted by the stones, was recovered April 18. She was fifty-nine years old.
Her husband buried her ashes under am elm tree in the garden of their home, Monk’s House, in Rodmell, Sussex.
JAMES JOYCE
When asked to provide a guide to his riddle-strewn novel Ulysses, James Joyce demurred: “If I gave it all up immediately, I’d lose my immortality.” His bid for eternal life was to keep experts guessing forever about what his words meant. But, having cast off the Catholic teaching of his youth, a personal afterlife was probably not something Joyce would have expected.
Born in Rathgar, Ireland, on February 2, 1882, Joyce was the eldest of a large family described vaguely as “sixteen or seventeen children” by his father, an impecunious, heavy-drinking Irish tenor. One of only ten who survived past infancy, James was a precocious child who immersed himself in Aristotle, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, and Henrik Ibsen, while receiving a Jesuit education and then earning a degree at University College, Dublin.
He went to Paris and started writing, returning to Ireland for his mother’s funeral in 1903 and remaining there only long enough to meet and woo a chambermaid named Nora Barnacle, with whom he had two children and whom he finally married in 1931. James and Nora lived in various European cities, including Paris, Rome, Trieste, and Zurich. Able to speak seventeen languages, Joyce taught English to support the family as he continued writing.
Joyce published a volume of short stories, Dubliners, followed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1922, he published his controversial landmark novel Ulysses, whose obscurity did not prevent eager readers from gleefully trying to decipher its alleged obscenity. Not until 1934 in the United States and 1936 in Great Britain was the book allowed to circulate legally. The even more enigmatic Finnegans Wake came in 1939.
Despite his rejection of Christianity, Joyce often attended both Catholic and Orthodox services, especially during Holy Week. One friend called him “a believer at heart,” and T. S. Eliot, among others, regarded Joyce’s novels as fundamentally Christian in outlook.
Joyce, who had undergone numerous operations for eye ailments, had surgery again—this time for a perforated ulcer—in January of 1941 in Zurich, where the Joyces had settled at the outset of World War II. The day after surgery, he suffered a relapse and was given transfusions, but fell into a coma. He awoke at two o’clock in the morning on Monday, January 13, asked a nurse to call his wife and son, Giorgio, and then lapsed back into the coma. Fifteen minutes later he died, at the age of fifty-eight, before Nora and Giorgio reached the hospital. Joyce’s last words were, “Does nobody understand?” What he meant was not clear.
The funeral was Wednesday afternoon, January 15, in the Friedhof Chapel at Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich. A Catholic priest offered to officiate, but Nora declined, saying, “I couldn’t do that to him.” Instead, there were eulogies by Lord Derwent, the British minister to Bern, poet Max Gellinger, and Professor Heinrich Straumann. The tenor Max Meili sang an aria from Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Two Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, but neither attended the funeral, and a rather petulant Irish government refused Nora’s request to repatriate Joyce’s remains, which are still interred at Fluntern.
FRANZ KAFKA
If there are days when you feel squashed like a bug, remember that Franz Kafka felt that way first. “The meaning of life,” he said, “is that it stops.” Human beings in his most famous works are the helpless pawns of an unfeeling cosmos. Kafka is remembered for the novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, and for such stories as “The Hunger Artist” and, most of all, “The Metamorphosis”—which is memorable for its image of a man who wakes up and finds he has turned into a giant insect. “Kafkaesque” is a term that describes surreal, menacing situations, and this stark existentialism was a major influence on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
Kafka, eldest of six children in a middle-class, German-speaking, Jewish family, was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, the capital of Bohemia in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He
received his early education at a German boys’ school and at the local synagogue until his bar mitzvah. At Prague’s Charles University, he earned a law degree and then toiled several years at an insurance company at what he called his “bread work,” to earn money to live on while writing in his spare time.
Never married, Kafka had a series of lovers, but to satisfy his voracious sexual appetite, he consorted frequently with prostitutes and indulged his avid interest in pornography. Not an observant Jew, Kafka nonetheless had a lifelong interest in the Talmud and other Jewish traditions.
The notion of death, for Kafka, like most of life, was bleak, cold, and impersonal. In “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa, the protagonist who becomes a giant insect, is found dead, “dried up and flat,” by a housekeeper who pokes him with a broom to determine if there’s any life left. The housekeeper promises to get rid of the “thing,” and Gregor’s father, mother, and sister resume their lives with little more thought for “it.”
Always sickly, Kafka suffered from anorexia nervosa, migraine headaches, insomnia, constipation, and boils—all aggravated by acute hypochondria—for which he turned to various naturopathic remedies and a vegetarian diet. It was tuberculosis of the larynx that did him in. Diagnosed when he was thirty-four, it steadily worsened, and he sought treatment at a sanatorium near Vienna in April of 1924, where he died on June 3 at the age of forty. The actual cause of death was attributed to starvation, owing to the tubercular swelling in his throat that made it impossible for him to eat.