Final Chapters

by Jim Bernhard

  Medical records released after Hemingway’s death disclosed that he suffered from hemochromatosis, an inability to metabolize iron. Among its symptoms are liver disease and diabetes, as well as some mental deterioration. It is a genetic disorder and, left untreated as it was, may have been a contributing factor in the suicides not only of Hemingway, but also his father, his brother, his sister, and a granddaughter.

  Hemingway’s funeral at the Ketchum Cemetery was private, with only Mary, Hemingway’s three sons, and a few other family members and close friends. Hemingway’s body was dressed casually in a sport coat and slacks. The Reverend Robert J. Waldemann, pastor of Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Church in Ketchum, offered prayers at the gravesite as an altar boy, overcome by heat or emotion, fainted and fell on the coffin.

  HART CRANE

  Poet Harold Hart Crane might well have been a fabulously wealthy heir to a candy fortune had it not been for one fateful business transaction. His father, Clarence Crane, invented Life Savers mints, but sold the patent for the popular circular sweet to a couple of advertising men for the grand sum of $2,900. Although the elder Crane continued to do well enough financially with chocolate bars, he and his wife, a Christian Scientist, were constantly bickering, and Harold, born July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio—the same day as Ernest Hemingway—grew up in a troubled household. He dropped out of high school and moved to Cleveland, where he worked as an ad copywriter, then to New York, then back to Ohio to work in his father’s chocolate factory.

  Dropping his first name and going by Hart, Crane published a volume of enigmatic lyrical verses called White Buildings, which attracted favorable attention from Eugene O’Neill, Randall Jarrell, and Allen Tate. Back in New York, where he felt at home, Crane moved in with his lover, a young Danish merchant sailor, whose father had a home in Brooklyn Heights. From there, Crane could see the Brooklyn Bridge, which was the inspiration for his epic The Bridge, “a mystical synthesis of America,” which he was sure would rival T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in poetic significance.

  Crane moved to Paris in 1929 to continue his work on the poem, but spent much of his time getting drunk and carousing with sailors. After a brawl in a Paris bar, he was fined and jailed in La Santé, the reassuringly named “Prison of Good Health.” A friend bailed him out and gave him money to return to the United States, where he finished The Bridge. It was savaged by critics, and Crane felt that his life was pointless.

  Influenced in his youth by his mother’s Christian Science, Crane employed many Christian symbols in his poetry, although in such an opaquely symbolic way that his beliefs are difficult to discern. The critic Harold Bloom characterizes Crane’s personal religion as an “inchoate mixture of a Christian Science background, an immersion in Ouspensky [the Russian scholar of esoteric religion], and an all but Catholic yearning.”

  With a Guggenheim fellowship, Crane went to Mexico in 1931, intending to write an epic about the Aztecs, but it was not completed, and his major accomplishment was a love poem called “The Broken Tower.” He was accompanied to Mexico by his only known heterosexual romantic interest, Peggy Cowley, recently divorced from writer Malcolm Cowley.

  But Crane just couldn’t leave the sailors alone, and on the steamer Orizaba, en route from Mexico back to New York, he made sexual advances to a young crew member who didn’t take kindly to Crane’s attention and beat him severely, leaving him bruised and bloody with a black eye.

  Crane, whose body and mind were already damaged by years of heavy drinking, administered first aid to himself with copious amounts of alcohol, internally applied. In a whisky-soaked daze just before noon on April 27, 1932, he approached the ship’s rail, removed and neatly folded the light topcoat he wore over pajamas, waved to several onlookers, cried, “Goodbye, everybody!” and threw himself overboard into the Atlantic Ocean, some 250 miles north of Havana and ten miles east of Florida. Someone shouted, “Man overboard!” Lifeboats were dispatched for about two hours, but his body was never recovered, and it was speculated that a shark might have devoured him. Crane was thirty-two years old.

  NOËL COWARD

  Celebrated as “the Master” for his frivolous wit, stylish stage presence, and prodigious output of sophisticated plays, musicals, and songs, Noël Coward was also an unlikely wartime spy. Born in the London suburb of Teddington on December 16, 1899, Coward made his professional stage debut at age eleven, playing Prince Mussel in “The Goldfish.”

  Coward’s path to success was primarily through his plays, beginning in 1924 with his first big hit, The Vortex, and continuing with some fifty more, mostly comedies of upper-class manners, including Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Tonight at 8:30, Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit, and Nude with Violin. He also composed hundreds of songs for revues and his own cabaret performances; wrote poetry and short stories; created a dozen musical theatre pieces, notably Bitter Sweet and Sail Away!; and acted and directed on stage and in films. Among his most enduring songs are “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “I Went to a Marvellous Party, “Mad About the Boy,” “I’ll See You Again,” “Someday I’ll Find You,” “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” “The Stately Homes of England,” “The Party’s Over,” “Poor Little Rich Girl,” “London Pride,” and his satirical war song, “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans.”

  Coward always insisted on using the diaeresis, the two dots over the “e” in “Noël,” claiming that without it, his name would be pronounced something like “Nool.”

  In World War II, Coward volunteered to work with the British secret service, collecting information and influencing public opinion during his overseas travel. He also headed the British propaganda office in Paris.

  Coward was always reticent about sex, partly because homosexual activity was in violation of British law until six years before his death. He had affairs with several men, including actors Louis Hayward and Alan Webb, producer-director John C. Wilson, and composer Ned Rorem. (Rorem told an interviewer that sleeping with Coward was unexciting, since they were both unadventurous in bed.) Coward’s longest lasting relationship was with the actor Graham Payn, from the 1940s until Coward’s death. Although his sexual orientation was an open secret, Coward never acknowledged it, noting drolly, “There are still one or two old ladies in Worthing who don’t know.” Coward was denied a knighthood by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, partly owing to his homosexuality and partly because of his violation of some post-war currency regulations. The sexual issue arose again in 1969—along with Coward’s avoidance of British taxes by maintaining homes in Switzerland and Jamaica—when Prime Minister Harold Wilson also objected to a knighthood. The royal family, who were close friends of Coward’s, overruled that decision, and he was finally knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1969.

  An avowed agnostic, Coward wrote a poem called “Do I Believe in God?” in which his answer was that he couldn’t say yes, and he couldn’t say no. In various diary notations, he expressed his disbelief in an afterlife and his wish that death would bring “ultimate oblivion.” When he was sixty-six and feared he might have cancer, Coward stoically wrote in his diary, “I don’t relish prolonged illness . . . and attenuated death. But I suppose I shall have to cope with it as well as I can.”

  Beset by debilitating arthritis, pleurisy, and advancing arteriosclerosis during the last three years of his life, Coward suffered memory loss and lack of mobility that made acting and writing impossible. In a 1971 letter, he complained that his doctor had ordered him to walk every day to maintain circulation in his legs, and he confessed that he hoped he wouldn’t live too long, asking that Fate “let me go to sleep when it’s my proper bedtime.” On a wall at Firefly Estate, his home in Jamaica, is Coward’s last poem, which comments wistfully on his approaching end. It echoes Keats’ “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” but unlike Keats, Coward finds consolation in his memories and in the peaceful sea.

  Coward made his last public appearance on January 14, 1973, at a New York performance of Oh
, Coward!, a revue of his songs—on the arm of his close friend, Marlene Dietrich. Bent nearly double, he painfully made his way with her up three flights to reach their seats. The next day he, Payn, and his secretary, Cole Lesley, returned to Firefly, where he spent his evenings sipping brandy and ginger ale and watching the birds around his swimming pool.

  On Sunday evening, March 25, he told Payn and Lesley, “Good night, my darlings, I’ll see you tomorrow,” and retired to his second-floor bedroom. Early the next morning, the housekeeper, Imogene Graves, heard him moaning in his room and called the butler, Miguel Fraser. The two tried unsuccessfully to gain entry through the locked bedroom door, and Fraser then brought a ladder to the outside window and climbed in. He found Coward facedown on the bathroom floor, moved him to the bed, and called a doctor. Gentlemanly to the end, Coward insisted that the household not be disturbed until morning. He died of a coronary thrombosis just before dawn at the age of seventy-three.

  Coward had frequently said he wished to be buried wherever he died, so Payn and Lesley arranged for interment at Firefly Hill. The British High Commissioner and an attaché from the Governor-General’s office attended the simple service conducted by the Bishop of Kingston and the local vicar, as Coward was laid to rest in a plain oak coffin placed in a concrete tomb in the garden near his house.

  Westminster Abbey refused to allow a London memorial service, since Coward “was not a church-goer,” so the church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square was the venue for an event on May 29 that included a poem written and read by Poet Laureate John Betjeman, Laurence Olivier’s reading of Psalm 100, John Gielgud’s reading of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet XXX,” and violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s playing of a Bach sonata. Mourners in attendance included Lord Mountbatten, the Duke of Kent, the Earl of Snowdon, David Niven, Ralph Richardson, Charlie Chaplin, Ava Gardner, Liza Minnelli, and Peter Sellers. Coward’s patriotic song “London Pride” concluded the service.

  Years later, Westminster Abbey deigned to allow a stone honoring Coward to be placed in Poets’ Corner. It was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, one of Coward’s closest friends.

  EVELYN WAUGH

  Imagine the confusion in the household of novelist Evelyn Waugh during the time that he was married to a woman whose name was also Evelyn. Friends even had to resort to calling them “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn.” Even though Evelyn (usually pronounced EE-vuh-lin) is a fairly common name in Britain for both men and women, to Waugh’s great annoyance, the Times Literary Supplement’s review of his first novel referred to him as “Miss Waugh.”

  Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, called Evelyn to distinguish him from his father, also named Arthur, was born on October 28, 1903, in West Hampstead in north London. Son of a publishing executive, he was the younger brother of Alec Waugh, who also became a novelist of note. Evelyn attended Lancing College, where he was said to be a belligerent boy who bullied younger students, among them Cecil Beaton, later a famous photographer and designer. At Hertford College in Oxford, Evelyn had a zesty social life and an undistinguished academic career, earning a third-class degree in history, sometimes known as a “gentleman’s third.” He taught school for a while, wrote a well-received biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and worked as a freelance journalist and reviewer.

  Waugh married Evelyn Gardner in 1928, the same year that Decline and Fall, the first of several savagely satirical novels skewering British society, made Waugh a celebrity. It was followed in the 1930s and 1940s by Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, Put Out More Flags, Brideshead Revisited, and The Loved One, in which he turned his mordant wit on the funeral industry in California.

  Waugh became a Roman Catholic in 1930 and remained a staunch traditionalist throughout his life, opposing changes made by the Second Vatican Council and championing the Latin mass. In 1934, he and Evelyn were divorced (a hard-won papal annulment followed), and three years later he married Laura Herbert, with whom he had six children, including the writer Auberon Waugh.

  During World War II, Waugh served as a captain in the Royal Marines, but saw very little combat. After the war, he suffered a mental breakdown, which he self-medicated for the rest of his life with ample quantities of liquor, cigars, and various opiates—which he reputedly gave up every year for Lent.

  More novels, travel books, and biographies flowed from his pen during the 1950s and early 1960s, as Waugh gained a reputation as an irascible, bigoted, embittered curmudgeon. He hated having visitors at his country home, disdained talking on the telephone, and refused to drive a car. His son Auberon said that if an afterlife existed, the last person he would wish to meet there was his father. The author Nancy Mitford once asked Waugh how he could behave so abominably to other people and yet still consider himself a practicing Catholic. “You have no idea,” Waugh replied, “how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

  On Easter Sunday, April 10, 1966, having attended mass—Latin, of course—at the nearby village of Wiveliscombe, Waugh was in the toilet at Combe Florey, his home in Somerset, when he collapsed of a heart attack. He was found with a gash on his head from having hit it on the door handle, and the family’s cook tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a vain attempt to revive him. When a doctor arrived, all he could do was pronounce Waugh dead, at the age of sixty-two.

  Waugh’s daughter Margaret wrote to a friend: “You know how he longed to die and dying as he did on Easter Sunday, when all the liturgy is about death and resurrection, after a Latin mass and holy communion, would be exactly what he wanted. I am sure he had prayed for death at Mass.”

  The novelist Graham Greene, a fellow Catholic, commented on Waugh’s passing in a radio broadcast: “It was Easter Sunday, symbolizing his religion, and he died . . . on the lavatory . . . symbolizing his humor.” It was Greene who also maintained, perhaps with more than a touch of facetiousness, that Waugh had killed himself by drowning in the toilet bowl.

  Waugh was buried on a snowy day in a plot consecrated by a Catholic priest just outside the Anglican churchyard in Combe Florey. Only family and close friends attended. A Latin requiem mass on April 21 was celebrated before a packed congregation at London’s Westminster Cathedral.

  GRAHAM GREENE

  “I suppose I’d call myself a Catholic atheist,” the novelist Graham Greene once said. “I don’t like conventional religious piety. I’ve always found it difficult to believe in God.” A convert in 1926 so that he could marry devout Catholic Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, Greene took the confirmation name of St. Thomas—the Doubter. His work is infused with theological questions, but always with morally ambiguous answers. In an interview in his eighties, he amended his self-description to “Catholic agnostic.”

  Denied a Nobel Prize (it was rumored that the left-wing judges considered him too Catholic, and the right-wing judges thought him too much a Communist), he nonetheless received Britain’s highest honors from Queen Elizabeth II—the exclusive Order of Merit and elevation as a Companion of Honour.

  Greene was born October 2, 1904, at St. John’s House, a faculty house at Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, England, where his father taught and later was headmaster. The fourth of six children, he had an older brother, Raymond, who became a noted physician, and a younger brother, Hugh, who rose to the post of director-general of the BBC. Greene attended Berkhamsted School and then Balliol College, Oxford. Bipolar from an early age, he attempted suicide several times—by Russian roulette, overdosing on aspirins, and swallowing eyedrops, hay fever lotion, and deadly nightshade. His Oxford contemporary Evelyn Waugh said of him, “He looked down on the rest of us as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry.”

  After taking a second-class degree in history, Greene worked briefly as a tutor, then became a journalist, first with the Nottingham Journal and then with the Times in London. The success in 1929 of his first novel, The Man Within, enabled him to quit his day job
and devote himself to fiction, travel books, and film reviewing.

  One of his reviews—of Wee Willie Winkie starring Shirley Temple—provoked a libel suit by Twentieth Century Fox on behalf of its wee star. The studio alleged that Greene had implied that Temple deliberately played to “a public of licentious old men, ready to enjoy the fine flavour of such an unripe, charming little creature.” In his review, Greene commented on the eight-year-old Shirley’s “neat and well-developed rump,” “agile studio eyes,” and “dimpled depravity.” Infuriated by the lawsuit, Greene complained, “The little bitch is going to cost me £250—if I’m lucky.” In fact, the suit was settled for £500, and Shirley Temple later said she forgave him for what he wrote.

  Greene divided his fiction into two categories: thrillers of a sort, which he called “entertainments,” and serious novels. The entertainments included Stamboul Train, A Gun for Sale, The Confidential Agent, The Ministry of Fear, The Third Man, and Our Man in Havana, and notable among the novels are Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, A Burnt-Out Case, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, and The Human Factor. Many of them were made into successful movies. Greene also wrote travel books about his sojourns in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, and several plays that were hits on the West End and on Broadway.

  In 1953, the Holy Office of the Catholic Church put The Power and the Glory on its index of forbidden books, owing to its anti-clerical theme. Greene later had a private audience with Pope Paul VI, who told him he had read and enjoyed the book, and Greene should pay no attention to the critics.