Final Chapters

by Jim Bernhard

  During World War II, Greene was recruited into MI6, Britain’s spy agency, by his sister Elizabeth, and was posted to Sierra Leone. During his years in espionage, he befriended Kim Philby and spoke out for him when Philby was later charged with treason as a double agent.

  Greene and Vivienne had two children and separated in 1947. They never divorced, although Greene had dozens of affairs, including long-lasting ones with two mistresses, Catherine Walston (with whom he reportedly once had sex in the backseat of a car while her husband was driving) and Yvonne Cloetta, and flings with Australian artist Jocelyn Rickards and Swedish sexpot Anita Bjork. An opium smoker and an alcoholic, Greene had a seemingly insatiable sexual appetite, which he often satisfied with visits to brothels.

  In 1966, having lost a great deal of money in a swindle, Greene moved to Antibes in order to be near Yvonne Cloetta. In the 1970s, diagnosed with leukemia, he moved to Vevey, on Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, to be near his daughter. He often visited with his neighbor in Vevey, Charlie Chaplin.

  In March of 1991, Greene fell gravely ill with the leukemia he had managed for years. He was rushed to La Providence Hospital in Vevey. While he had ceased going to mass and confession almost forty years earlier, Greene had recently begun to receive communion again from the Reverend Leopoldo Durán, a Spanish priest who was the model for the protagonist of Greene’s novel Monsignor Quixote and with whom Greene liked to lift a glass or two. Durán was summoned from Madrid to the hospital, and at Greene’s funeral he gave this account of the dying man’s final moments:

  I told him most directly, “Graham, God is waiting for you just now—pray for us where you will be for ever in God’s blessing. I now give the last absolution.” This I did. He passed away in the most peaceful manner. Without a gesture, he fell asleep. My faith tells me that he is now with God or on the way there.

  Greene had refused to see his estranged wife, but was persuaded to allow his son, Francis, to visit. Just before lapsing into a coma, Greene cried, “Why must it take so long to come?” Death did come, just before noon on Wednesday, April 3. Greene was eighty-six years old.

  The funeral was held in the Church of St. Jean in Corseaux, attended by both Greene’s wife, Vivienne (now styled Vivien), and his latest mistress, Yvonne. His son, Francis, his daughter, Caroline Bourget, a grandson, and other family members were also there, as was the honorary British consul for Nice and Antibes. Burial was in the Cimetière des Monts-de-Corsier.

  A sung Latin requiem mass was offered for Greene the first week of June at London’s Westminster Cathedral. The homilist was the Reverend Roderick Strange, former chaplain of Oxford University. Two fellow Catholics, novelist Muriel Spark and actor Alec Guinness, also spoke. Greene’s niece, Louise Dennys, recalled some words her uncle had written a few days before he died: “Sometimes I pray not for dead friends but to dead friends, asking their help. I picture Paradise as a place of activity.”

  SAMUEL BECKETT

  Samuel Beckett liked to say that he was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, the day on which Christ’s crucifixion is commemorated, and to use that coincidence to draw parallels between the suffering of Christ and of the desperate characters who inhabited the bleak world of his plays and novels. One minor inconvenience, however, is that Beckett’s birth certificate insists that the date was Sunday, May 13. There is no dispute about the place—Foxrock, a well-to-do suburb of Dublin. A sickly child who constantly cried, Beckett later claimed to have vivid memories of his prenatal life in the womb—“an existence where no voice, no possible movement could free me from the agony and darkness I was subjected to.”

  Be that as it may, he grew up in the Protestant Church of Ireland, attended the Royal Portora School in County Fermanagh, where Oscar Wilde had also been a student, and then Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian, and excelled at cricket, earning a listing in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.

  After graduating from the university, he went to Paris to teach in the École Normale Supérieure, began publishing stories and essays, and rubbed elbows with expatriate Irish literati, including James Joyce, for whom he worked as an assistant on Finnegans Wake. Beckett returned to Trinity College for a year, but then settled more or less permanently in Paris, where he began to write in French because it made it easier for him to write “without style.” He published his first novel, Murphy, in 1938 and adopted a bohemian Parisian lifestyle, having an affair with socialite art collector Peggy Guggenheim. On one occasion, Beckett was nearly killed when he was stabbed for refusing the solicitation of a pimp. Joyce arranged a VIP hospital room for him, and he was looked after by a friend named Suzanne Decheveaux-Dumesnil, who became his lifelong companion and eventually his wife.

  During World War II, Beckett joined the French Resistance in occupied Paris as a courier. A French traitor revealed his identity to the Gestapo, and Beckett and Suzanne fled to the south of France, where he continued to aid the Resistance by storing munitions in his back garden. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance for bravery, but later downplayed his exploits as “boy scout stuff.”

  In the 1950s, he completed his trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, and turned his attention to dramas, in order to move out of Joyce’s shadow. He also began an affair with Barbara Bray, a BBC editor, whose affections he juggled with those of Suzanne for the rest of his life.

  Beckett’s most famous work, Waiting for Godot, premiered in 1953 before an audience of the playwright’s friends and a few high-brow theatre-goers at Paris’s 230-seat Théâtre de Babylone. As became his custom with all his plays, Beckett skipped the opening. The play puzzled critics and was followed by a London production, which was generally dismissed, except by Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times, who said it would “securely lodge in a corner of your mind as long as you live.” New York critics were equally unimpressed, and it was several years before Godot was recognized as one of the great works of twentieth-century theatre.

  Other plays—notably Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days—followed, and Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, an event that Suzanne regarded as a “catastrophe,” because it would make him a public figure and destroy the privacy he cherished.

  Beckett’s stark outlook on life is evident in the story told by a friend who was walking with him one fine spring morning in Paris. “Ahh,” said the friend, “doesn’t a day like this make you feel glad to be alive?” Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”

  Beckett used Christian symbolism throughout his work, acknowledging that it was natural for him to do so, since Christianity was a “mythology” with which he was perfectly familiar. One critic, Colin Duckworth, maintained that Beckett could not “make up his mind about God and His intentions toward His creatures. Hence, his attitude toward things divine varies from the scatological to the reverent.” “What do I know about man’s destiny?” Beckett said. “I could tell you more about radishes.”

  Devoted to thin, dark Gitanes cigarettes, bolstered by espresso and Irish whiskey, in which he indulged during late-night conversations in cafés, Beckett was diagnosed with emphysema when he turned eighty and began to use a portable oxygen machine.

  When he injured himself in a fall at his apartment, Beckett moved at the suggestion of his physician into Le Tiers Temps, a modest, public nursing home in the Montparnasse district of Paris. He had a sparsely furnished room, painted dark blue, with a bed, a wardrobe, an overhead light fixture with three bare bulbs, a small refrigerator, a borrowed television set on which he watched sports events, and a shelf on which he kept a few books, including Dante’s Divine Comedy and a biography of Oscar Wilde. He had no phone and took calls at the desk in the lobby. There was a tiny courtyard near his room where he liked to feed pigeons. Many of his friends thought it was not a suitable place for a wealthy Nobel Prize–winner, but Beckett loved the simple monastic quality of his lodgings and was perfectly content, as long as his accommod
ating doctor kept him supplied with newspapers, cigarettes, and Irish whiskey.

  Beckett’s health, however, continued to deteriorate, and he was plagued with psoriasis and what he called “disorders of the feet” and “trouble with the joints.” In July of 1989, his wife, Suzanne, died at the age of eighty-nine, and Beckett was well enough to attend her funeral. On December 6 of that year, a nurse found Beckett unconscious in his room and he was rushed to a hospital. As he was carried to an ambulance, he regained consciousness and called out to the bystanders, “I’ll be back!” Alas, he was not destined to leave the hospital alive, and on December 19, he lapsed into a coma and died of respiratory failure on December 22 at the age of eighty-three.

  He was buried in secrecy at eight-thirty in the morning of December 26 at the Montparnasse Cemetery. There were no speeches, no religious service, and no clergy. He and Suzanne share a simple gravestone that follows Beckett’s instruction: that it could be any color, “as long as it’s gray.”

  W. H. AUDEN

  “We must love one another or die” is one of the most famous lines of contemporary poetry. It appeared in W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which was published in The New Republic. Curiously, Auden came to loathe the poem, and he omitted the stanza containing that quote in his collected works. He permitted it to be reprinted in one anthology, with a note that said he considered it “to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.” It is difficult to understand why, since the line summarizes a theme that appears throughout Auden’s poems—the redemptive power of human love.

  Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in York, England. His father, a physician, took a post in Birmingham, the industrial Midlands city, which is where Auden grew up, wanting to be a mining engineer, before being sent off to boarding schools. At St. Edmund’s School in Surrey, he met Christopher Isherwood, the writer who would become his lifelong friend and, briefly, his lover. At Christ Church College, Oxford, Auden read English literature and began to publish poetry and criticism with a left-wing bent. He moved among a circle of future famous poets—C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, who became known, probably to their annoyance, as “the Auden Group.”

  Auden left Oxford with a third-class degree, spent some time in Berlin, returned to England to work as a schoolmaster and later a freelance film reviewer, and began to publish his poems, under the thrall of Isherwood and with the backing of T. S. Eliot. In 1939, Auden moved to New York and met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for a period of about two years, and thereafter was his lifelong live-in companion and collaborator, although no longer a romantic partner.

  When war broke out in Europe, Auden volunteered to join the British army—but at his age of thirty-two, the army said “no thanks,” and he was advised to stay in America, where he taught at the University of Michigan and at Swarthmore College. After the war, Auden taught at the New School for Social Research, Bennington College, and Smith College. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946.

  Auden grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household, but abandoned religion at the age of thirteen—only to take it up again at the age of thirty-three, when he joined the Episcopal Church. Thereafter, an existential Christianity became central to his work, under the influence of theologians Kierkegaard and Niebuhr.

  A heavy smoker—as his deeply wrinkled face would suggest—and an equally devoted martini drinker, Auden undoubtedly hastened his own premature death. His brother John described his habits during his years in New York: “Although strictly disciplined in regard to work every morning, and with only a beer or a plain martini [vermouth] at lunch, the evenings brought stiff vodkas and martinis from the freezer.” Auden’s seriousness about his martinis can be seen in fellow poet Richard Wilbur’s description of a conversation they once had: “Auden had ordered a martini and I had ordered a martini, and we talked about martinis, and we discussed the fact that if you are devoted to martinis, it’s very hard to get a good one away from home. I think that was the essence of our deep conversation, but it was heartfelt.”

  In 1972, his health failing, Auden moved from New York to Oxford for the winter months. He continued to spend summers in Austria, as he had done since buying a farmhouse in Kirchstetten in 1958. On the evening of September 28, 1973, Auden spoke and read poetry at the Austrian Society of Literature in Vienna. He stayed overnight in the modest Altenburger Hotel near the Staatsoper. Next morning he was found dead, victim of a heart attack. He was sixty-six.

  In keeping with Austrian custom, Auden’s body was laid out at his house for several days before the funeral, which was held at the white-walled, onion-domed Kirchstetten Catholic parish church of St. Vitus, where Auden had regularly danced attendance. Stephen Spender and Chester Kallman led the procession, which included a brass band. The church was packed with mourners for a service conducted jointly by two priests, one Anglican and one Roman Catholic.

  Auden is buried in the St. Vitus churchyard, and a plaque in his memory is in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.

  TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  Did a bottle cap cause the death of one of America’s leading playwrights? That was the opinion of some people when Tennessee Williams departed this life. Others concluded it was drink and drugs, while his brother hinted darkly that it was murder.

  Thomas Lanier Williams, as he was first known, was born March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, to a hard-drinking traveling shoe salesman and the puritanical daughter of an Episcopal clergyman. When he was eight, the family moved to St. Louis, where Tom attended high school. He showed an early aptitude for creative writing, and even as a teenager, began to win recognition for his stories and plays. After high school, he enrolled in journalism courses at the University of Missouri in Columbia. When a childhood girlfriend also enrolled there, his father broke up what he thought was a budding romance and pulled young Tom out of school.

  He went to work for his father’s shoe company, a job he called “a living death,” while writing plays in his spare time. He quit work when he had a mental breakdown and spent some time in Memphis, where he joined an amateur theatre group. Finally he settled at the University of Iowa, where he graduated with a B.A. in English, followed by study in dramatic arts at The New School in New York.

  Seeking a change in his lifestyle, Williams moved to New Orleans, where he began to call himself Tennessee, partly because it was his father’s birthplace. He also explained that it was a college nickname based on his Southern accent and that he liked its “distinctive” sound. He won a playwriting contest, which attracted the literary agent Audrey Wood. She got him a job writing screenplays in Hollywood, where he tinkered unsuccessfully on scripts for Lana Turner and Margaret O’Brien.

  He also finished a play called The Glass Menagerie in which the daughter, Laura, is based on his schizophrenic sister, Rose. Its Broadway production in 1945 brought Williams overnight fame as a playwright. This play was followed by a string of successes through the 1940s and 1950s: A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana.

  In 1948, Williams began a fourteen-year relationship with an actor named Frank Merlo, and the pair lived happily in New York and Key West. When Merlo died of lung cancer in 1963, Williams fell into a long period of severe depression. “I went to pieces,” he later said. “I retreated into a shell.”

  Williams was hospitalized repeatedly and began to rely on amphetamines, barbiturates, and frequent injections of drugs prescribed by physician Max Jacobson, known as “Doctor Feelgood,” whose patients also included Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Truman Capote, Nelson Rockefeller, and President John F. Kennedy. Increasingly reliant on a regimen of coffee, cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, Williams split bitterly with his longtime agent and mentor, Audrey Wood. But he continued to write, churning out a dreary procession of flop plays. He would rise at five o’clock in the morning and, during the course of a day’s
work at the typewriter, would consume dozens of pills, several quarts of strong coffee, and two or three bottles of wine.

  During the period of his depression, Williams’s brother, Dakin, a Catholic convert, urged Tennessee to join the Church. Whether the conversion was genuine is a matter of speculation. In a 1981 interview in the Paris Review, on his seventieth birthday, Williams claimed to be “a Catholic by nature,” based on his family’s high-Anglican background, but he called his “conversion” a “joke . . . while I was taking Dr. Jacobson’s miracle shots.” Williams went on to say that he believed that after death, humans were absorbed back into “the eternal flux.” He added that he was reconciled to the inevitability of his own death, but he hoped it would not be before his work was finished.

  Whether or not he thought his work was finished, it came to an end willy-nilly in 1983. Williams and his secretary, John Uecker, were staying in a two-bedroom suite in the Hotel Elysée on East 54th Street in New York. About eleven o’clock in the evening on Thursday, February 24, Uecker heard a noise from Williams’s room, but did not investigate. The next morning at 10:25, Ueckert went to Williams’s room and found him dead on the floor near his bed. Beneath the night table was an open bottle of Visine eye drops, its screw-on cap lodged in Williams’s throat, and two open wine bottles with their corks beside them. Williams was seventy-one.

  As John L. Sime recounts in American Funeral Director magazine (reprinted at the Sime Funeral Home’s web site), it was originally thought that Williams died when he choked on the Visine cap, which he was holding in his mouth as he put the drops in his eyes. Williams’s brother, Dakin, claimed that he was murdered, and he offered a $50,000 reward to find the killer. He maintained that a “strange, eerie man” forced his way onto the hotel elevator, got off on Williams’s floor, entered his suite, smothered him with a pillow, and then inserted the bottle cap in his throat as a ruse.