by Jim Bernhard
Dahl went to work for Disney in Hollywood, where he wrote an RAF story called The Gremlins. It attracted the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dahl became a frequent visitor at the White House. At a dinner party hosted by Lillian Hellman, Dahl met Neal, on the rebound from ending an affair with Gary Cooper, her co-star in The Fountainhead. Neal, who would go on to win an Oscar in Hud, accepted Dahl’s proposal. The pair had five children before she suffered a series of debilitating strokes in 1965. Dahl spent months overseeing her recovery, but despite this tender devotion, the couple divorced bitterly in 1983. Dahl then married Felicity Crosland, a close friend of Neal’s—at least until then.
Among Dahl’s best known works, mostly darkly humorous stories ostensibly for children, are James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (also known as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda, The Minpins, and The Vicar of Nibbleswicke. He also wrote novels and short stories aimed at an adult audience.
Dahl’s interests were wide-ranging and, according to his widow, included greyhound racing, breeding budgerigars, medical inventions, orchids, onions, gambling, golf, fine wine, music, art, and antiques. In 1986, he turned down the honor of an OBE, hoping (in vain, as it turned out) to achieve a knighthood instead.
In 1990, Dahl was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder called myelodysplastic syndrome, in which inadequate blood cells are produced, often resulting in severe anemia, internal bleeding, susceptibility to infection, and bone-marrow failure. Shortly before his death, Dahl wrote in a newsletter to his fans: “I’ve been a bit off colour these last few months, feeling sleepy when I shouldn’t have been and without that lovely old bubbly energy that drives one to write books and drink gin and chase after girls.” He died on November 23, 1990, in Oxford, at the age of seventy-four.
Dahl was given what his family called a “sort of Viking funeral,” and was buried in the cemetery of St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, along with his snooker cues, a bottle of fine burgundy, chocolates, pencils, and a power saw.
HAROLD PINTER
Master of the pregnant pause, Harold Pinter was a Nobel Prize-winning playwright and also an actor, director, and screenwriter. Born October 10, 1930, to a Jewish tailor and his wife, and raised in Hackney in the East End of London, Pinter received a grammar-school education, then briefly attended drama schools before embarking on a career as an actor. He was fined for refusing military service as a conscientious objector. Anti-war activism, much of it directed bitterly against the United States, played a prominent role throughout Pinter’s life.
His career as a playwright began in 1957 with a one-act play called The Room. This was followed by a West End production of The Birthday Party, which closed after only eight performances. In 1960, The Caretaker was an enormous hit, establishing his reputation as a major playwright. Pinter’s thirty-odd plays, noted for their economical use of language, naturalistic dialogue with poetic qualities, abundant pauses, and a sense of mystery with menace lurking beneath the surface, include The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, The Homecoming, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, Old Times, Landscape, and Silence. Among his screenplay adaptations are The Servant, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Trial, The Last Tycoon, The Pumpkin Eater, and Sleuth. He continued to work as an actor on stage, and in film and television.
In 1956, Pinter married the actress Vivien Merchant, with whom he had a son, Daniel. After affairs with journalist Joan Bakewell and author Antonia Fraser, Pinter left Merchant in 1975 and married Fraser five years later. Merchant died of alcoholism in 1982. Daniel, who had changed his name from Pinter to Brand, was estranged from his father from 1993 until Pinter’s death.
Pinter was awarded the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1966, but declined a knighthood offered in 1996 by the government of Conservative Prime Minister John Major. Although he regarded Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair as a “war criminal,” Pinter did accept the award of Companion of Honour in 2002, saying “I do not regard it as having any political connotations at all.”
During the last eight years of his life Pinter fought a range of diseases, including esophageal cancer, leukemia, septicemia, an auto-immune disease known as pemphigus, and liver cancer, from which he died. A onetime heavy smoker, he was diagnosed in 2001 with cancer of the throat and esophagus, for which he received surgery and chemotherapy and recovered fully. In 2002, he learned of the leukemia and pemphigus, which caused frequent coughing fits, loss of appetite, muscular weakness and frequent falls.
In 2005, Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but was too ill to attend the ceremony in Oslo, sending a recorded video message instead. While working on the speech, he received a call with blood test results and was told to go immediately to the hospital, where he was placed in intensive care. Doctors told him that his autoimmune disease was rapidly shutting down his breathing. “I then realised, for the only time in my life actually, that I was on the point of death,” he later told an interviewer in The Guardian. “You don’t think at all. You just experience it. What you do, in my case, is that you fight and fight to stay alive.” Doctors managed to pull him through on this occasion, but Pinter remained frail.
In a memoir called Must You Go?, published two years after his death, Pinter’s wife, Antonia, recounted his final weeks. In November of 2008, Pinter learned he had a cancerous tumor on his liver and was told he would have to give up alcohol. He did so, “heroically,” until December 17, when his doctor told him the cancer was so far advanced that there was no point in avoiding drink. When they got home, Pinter asked Antonia to fetch a bottle of champagne, and as he sipped it, he said, “Oh, the enjoyment of this glass! I had forgotten how absolutely lovely champagne was.”
On Sunday, December 21, the Pinters had lunch at Scott’s Restaurant in Mayfair, and Harold was in good spirits, although suffering some mental confusion. That night he watched a television play by David Hare and commented on Kate Winslet’s “vigorous, intelligent acting.” The next day, he was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital, and he died there on Christmas Eve at the age of seventy-eight, as his wife held his hand.
The funeral, on an icy New Year’s Eve, was a thirty-minute secular graveside ceremony at Kensal Green Cemetery with about fifty mourners, including Tom Stoppard, Edna O’Brien, and Ronald Harwood. Pinter’s son did not attend. A devout atheist, Pinter had planned the event to include no religious aspects. Actor Michael Gambon read passages from Pinter’s work, actress Penelope Wilton read from James Joyce’s “The Dead” and T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” actor Matthew Burton read a poem about Pinter’s beloved game of cricket, and Pinter’s step-granddaughter, Stella Powell-Jones, read a poem by Pinter dedicated to his wife. At the end of the readings, a teary Antonia Fraser advanced to the grave and, looking down at the coffin, quoted Horatio’s words over the body of Hamlet:
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet Prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Owing to Pinter’s anti-religious views, a senior church official objected to his being memorialized in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, according to an account in the Daily Telegraph. In an effort to overcome such objections, a family member cited a mildly pro-religious feeling once expressed by Pinter: “I derive something I can only call an actual aesthetic pleasure from certain ceremonies and a great deal of religious music, and even the physical presence of being in churches.” Pinter added that he sometimes accompanied his Roman Catholic wife to mass.
JOHN UPDIKE
Sex and religion were dual themes that pervaded the writing of John Updike. Sex scenes in his novel Rabbit, Run were so explicit that his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, insisted that they be expurgated. (They were restored in later editions.) Updike’s religious bent was evident in an early short story, Pigeon Feathers, about a boy who anguishes in fear over death. His dread is resolved after he shoots some pigeons, and as he admires the divine craftsmanship in the beauty of their
feathers, he has a sudden epiphany that God intends mankind to be immortal.
Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania, was raised as a Lutheran in nearby Shillington, and at thirteen was moved with his family to an eighty-acre farm near Plowville. He wanted to be a Disney cartoonist when he grew up, and after high school, where he was valedictorian and class president, he attended Harvard University, where he drew cartoons for the Lampoon. He married a Radcliffe student named Mary Pennington, with whom he had four children between 1955 and 1960. He studied drawing on a fellowship at Oxford University and also began to write short stories, one of which was accepted in the New Yorker. After the birth of his first child he accepted a staff position on the New Yorker and shifted his interests from cartoons to writing.
During the 1950s, Updike published dozens of essays, poems, and short stories. His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was followed by a steady stream of works, including more than fifty books over the next half century. Among them are The Centaur; On the Farm; Rabbit, Run; Couples; three Rabbit sequels; Bech: A Book (and two sequels); and The Witches of Eastwick. He is one of only three authors—the others being William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington—to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice (for Rabbit Is Rich in 1982 and Rabbit at Rest in 1991).
In 1974, Updike and Mary divorced, and in 1977, he married Martha Bernhard. They settled in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, where they lived until his death.
Updike remained an active churchgoer all his life, first as a Lutheran, then a Congregationalist, and later as an Episcopalian. He joked about his lifelong “tour of Protestantism,” but his stern search for religious truth is reflected in a passage from his 1989 memoir Self-Consciousness, in which he contemplates death and the impossibility of reaching any conclusions about the nature of an afterlife. “Every attempt to be specific about the afterlife,” he writes, “to conceive of it in even the most general detail, appalls us.”
A longtime cigarette smoker, Updike had health problems that included emphysema and bronchial asthma, as well as psoriasis, claustrophobia, and dental problems. In Self-Consciousness, he writes of what he calls “deference” to his various ailments, having given up smoking “in deference” to his emphysema, salt and coffee because of hypertension, and alcohol owing to adverse interaction with methotrexate, a medication for psoriasis. Alluding to the futility of trying to prolong life indefinitely, he quotes Frederick the Great’s exhortation to his reluctant troops before battle: “Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?” (“Dogs, do you wish to live forever?”)
Sadly, Updike was not destined to live forever, not on earth at any rate, but to succumb to lung cancer. In November of 2008, he was hospitalized at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and in the new year, he moved to a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, where he died on January 27 at the age of seventy-six. In “Requiem,” a poem he wrote about his impending death that was published posthumously, he referred to his “overdue demise,” adding that “death is real, and dark, and huge.”
Updike’s funeral was at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms, where three hundred mourners attended a simple service consisting of four hymns, some prayers, and several readings from Updike’s works—all selected by Updike before his death. There was no eulogy. The Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle reported that his wife, Martha, was in the first row of the church, and Mary, his ex, was a few rows back. Updike was cremated, and some of his ashes were buried in Manchester, Massachusetts, near his home, and some later interred at the Robeson Lutheran Church Cemetery near his boyhood home in Plowville, Pennsylvania, under a marker carved by his son Michael.
SYLVIA PLATH
Poet Sylvia Plath attempted suicide on three occasions; the third time was the charm. Born October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath had a history of mental illness and depression since childhood. She first attempted to end her life while she was a student at Smith College. On that occasion, she wrote a note saying she was going for a long walk, retrieved sleeping pills from the safe where her mother kept them, swallowed a good many of them, retreated to the cellar of her home, and fell into a coma. Family members heard a groan from the cellar and rushed Sylvia to a hospital, where she recovered. Two years later, she graduated summa cum laude from Smith.
Plath received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in England at Cambridge University, where she met fellow poet Ted Hughes. They were married in 1956. In 1960, Plath published Colossus, her only verse collection during her lifetime, and the same year gave birth to a daughter. A son followed in 1962, the same year that Hughes left Plath for aspiring poet Assia Gutmann Wevill, who was a tenant in the Hugheses’ London flat. His desertion prompted Plath’s apparent second suicide attempt, albeit a bit halfhearted, in which she ran her car off the road at a deserted airfield.
In January of the following year, using the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, Plath published her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. It received lackluster reviews, and thereupon she made her third suicide attempt, this one successful.
Plath and her two children, a two-year-old and an eight-month-old infant, had taken up residence at 23 Fitzroy Road in north London. In early February, she told her physician, Dr. John Horder, that she felt depressed, describing her feeling as “owls’ talons clenching my heart.” Dr. Horder prescribed antidepressants and visited her daily, while trying without success to have her admitted to a hospital. It has been suggested by friends that the medication prescribed for her had been known to worsen her condition in the United States, but in England it had a different brand name, which Plath did not recognize.
On Thursday, February 7, having fired her au pair, Plath went with the children to stay with friends, Jillian and Gerry Becker. As Plath’s biographer Carl Rollyson recounts in American Isis, Plath met Hughes on Friday evening at the Fitzroy Street flat after sending him what he called a “farewell love letter.” She told him she was leaving the country and would never see him again. When they met, she took the letter from him and burned it, then told him to leave.
On Sunday, February 10, Gerry Becker drove her and the children back to Fitzroy Street, leaving them there about seven o’clock in the evening. Dr. Horder called to check on her and told her that he would send a nurse to come and assist her at nine o’clock on Monday morning. Around midnight, Plath borrowed some stamps from her downstairs neighbor, Trevor Thomas, and asked him what time he would be going to work in the morning.
Sometime between four-thirty and five-thirty in the morning, Plath left water and food in her children’s room and opened their windows. She put a note with Dr. Horder’s contact information on the baby carriage. She then sealed the kitchen from the rest of the house with tape and wet towels under the door, turned on the gas jets on the kitchen stove, and put her head into the oven.
When the nurse arrived the next morning, she was able to get into the flat with the help of a workman. They found Plath dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. She was thirty years old.
Describing herself as a “pagan Unitarian, at best,” Plath attended both the Unitarian and Methodist churches in her youth, but strayed from religious belief after the death of her father when she was eight. In England, she occasionally attended the Anglican parish church, and she was buried in the churchyard of St. Thomas the Apostle in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire.
Hughes was devastated by her death and felt the sting of blame for the suicide from many of Plath’s admirers. Six years later, Hughes’s paramour, Assia Wevill, also committed suicide after killing the pair’s four-year-old daughter.
Hughes oversaw the posthumous publication of much of Plath’s work, including her highly regarded poem collection called Ariel. Hughes was married again in 1970, to a nurse named Carol Orchard. He was named Britain’s Poet Laureate in 1984, and he died of cancer in 1998. Plath and Hughes’s son, Nicholas, committed suicide in 2009. Their daughter, Frieda, a painter and poet, is also a trained bereavement counselor.
JOE ORTON
Joe Orton was the
bad boy of British theatre. Not only were his plays irreverent, iconoclastic, and bawdy (some would say obscene), but his off-stage pranks were equally outrageous. He and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, delighted in borrowing books from the public library and making outlandish alterations in the blurbs and illustrations before returning them. Among their capers were pasting a monkey’s face in the middle of a rose on the cover of a horticultural book, substituting David’s painting of Marat dead in his bath for a police photo of a contemporary murder site, and replacing a photograph of the distinguished Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman with a picture of a heavily tattooed, nearly naked man. Orton’s death, however, was not an occasion for mirth; it was like a scene from a horror movie.
This enfant terrible first saw the light of day on New Year’s Day in 1933 in Leicester, England. His family was of modest means, and Joe grew up in public housing on a council estate. He attended the local primary school, took a secretarial course when he was barely a teenager, and went to work as a clerk. He became interested in theatre, joined an amateur society, and then decided to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.