Grave Tidings E-Book

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

"You see! This is how you die." - Coco Chanel "Shoot straight, you bastards! Don't make a mess of it!" - Breaker Morant "If any of you have a message for the devil, give it to me, for I am about to meet him!" - Lavinia Fisher "I am dying. Please… bring me a toothpick. " - Alfred Jarry Funny, reflective, scornful or delirious, we are fascinated by famous last words because, humanity in extremis, they seem to tell us something about ourselves. Featuring lovers, killers, artists, traitors, spies, rulers, poets and pariahs, this thoughtful volume brings together the hedonists and the fatalists, the pragmatists and the optimists in a collection of famous last utterances - and the stories behind them - from throughout history.

Leseprobe

Grave Tidings

An Anthology of Famous Last Words

PAUL BERRA

For James Stephens (il miglior fabbro), till death do us part.

‘WHAT is the meaning of it, Watson?’ said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. ‘What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must be to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.’

The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationEpigraphIntroduction1. The Hedonists: Drinkers, gourmands, libertines and the hopelessly entertainingfeaturing Dylan Thomas, Jack Daniel, Niccolò Machiavelli and Oscar Wilde2. Parting Shots: Saints, spies, kings, killers, heroes and the irremediably unluckyfeaturing Emperor Nero, Ethel Rosenberg, Giles Corey and Ned Kelly3. The Optimists: Dreamers, wishful thinkers and the terminally unpreparedfeaturing Charles Darwin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Seamus Heaney and Ayrton Senna4. The Pragmatists: Stoics, realists, fatalists and the incurably unimpressedfeaturing Captain Lawrence Oates, Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier and Alexander the Great5. The Visionaries: Mystics, thinkers, legends and the downright inspirationalfeaturing Amelia Earhart, Che Guevara, John Wayne and Leonardo da VinciCopyright

INTRODUCTION

In the midst of life, we are in death. Or, to paraphrase Jesus on the poor, the dead are always with us. They people our thoughts and memorials; they accumulate like dust behind locked doors and perch soberly atop bookshelves and mantelpieces.

They are, at the same time, intimately proximate and unfathomably distant. It is easy enough to join their ranks but to truly know them is not possible from our remove, despite the best guesses of priests, quacks, philosophers and the insane. At the heart of our relationship is a confounding and irresolvable ambiguity: we are them in the making.

But if sometimes they take up more space than we’d like, in other ways the dead can be very accommodating, allowing us to take tremendous liberties. Accordingly, we stand on their shoulders, walk in their shoes and hang on their every word.

Best of all, we make of them what we want, for they cannot be libelled and they never answer back.

Their parting words, in particular, hold an irresistible significance to us, spoken as they are in that liminal space between life and death. They seem to tell us something about ourselves, or, perhaps, something we would like to think about ourselves – that if we have no sway over death, we can at least control the way we leave this world. They teach us, rightly or wrongly, that death can be ameliorated by a sage word, its edge softened by a bluff joke. Often seeming to contain the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime’s experience, they console and reassure us, amuse or even frighten us. Last words can be funny, reflective, scornful and inspirational, often revealing fortitude in the face of great suffering, or simple contempt for those remaining behind.

They can also be contentious, or improbable, ascribed afterwards to propagate some cultural or political ideal sacred to a later age. Or even simply to tell a good story.

Take the case of Julius Caesar. As he was being butchered on that March day in 44bc, did he truly wheel around to face his senatorial assassins and, recognising his friend Marcus Brutus among them, pronounce the most famous last words in history? Caesar’s contemporaries have him dying silently, his cloak pulled over his head, yet William Shakespeare in Act III, Scene 1 of his eponymous play has Caesar address Brutus with, ‘Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!’

The familiar dying words of the Roman proto-emperor are the product of a playwright’s imagination, designed to inject pathos into a scene of horror and convey the hubris of an ambitious protagonist. And why not? The alternative – the screams of a dying man, the squelch of bowels involuntarily emptied on the forum floor and the frightened clucks of murderous politicians – lacks nuance by comparison.

In terms of plausibility, though, Shakespeare’s version of Caesar’s final words holds about the same amount of water as Kenneth Williams’s in the 1964 comedy Carry On Cleo. As his assassin converges on him with daggers drawn, Williams’s Caesar exclaims, ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’

Death is, often, a messy business, and coherence in the face of it is a luxury rarely afforded. Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times according to Suetonius, so it is doubtful he had the time to project his collegial disappointment. The remains of another of Shakespeare’s historical subjects, King Richard III, were found beneath a car park in Leicester in 2012. A very post post-mortem examination of his skeleton showing nine separate injuries to Richard’s skull indicates that his last moments were quick and brutal: he was hacked to death on Bosworth Field, with barely time to cry for his mother let alone offer his kingdom in exchange for a horse.

In reality, last words can commonly be as insensible as those of Dutch Schulz, a New York gangster who was gunned down by Mafia rivals in the 1930s. The police attempted to question him as he lay in his hospital bed, but all Schulz could produce in his dying delirium was an admittedly compelling free-flowing babble, of which here is a taste:

Please give me a shot. It is from the factory. Sure, that is a bad. Well, oh good ahead that happens for trying. I don’t want harmony. I want harmony. Oh, mamma, mamma! Who give it to him? Who give it to him? Let me in the district fire-factory that he was nowhere near. It smouldered. No, no. There are only ten of us and there ten million fighting somewhere of you, so get your onions up and we will throw up the truce flag. Oh, please let me up. Please shift me. Police are here. Communistic … strike … baloney … honestly this is a habit I get; sometimes I give it and sometimes I don’t. Oh, I am all in. That settles it. Are you sure? Please let me get in and eat. Let him harass himself to you and then bother you. Please don’t ask me to go there. I don’t want to. I still don’t want him in the path. It is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Please put me in that room. Please keep him in control. My gilt-edged stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in. Please, mother, don’t tear, don’t rip; that is something that shouldn’t be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends. Please, look out. The shooting is a bit wild, and that kind of shooting saved a man’s life. No payrolls. No wells. No coupons. That would be entirely out. Pardon me, I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Look out. Look out for him. Please. He owed me money; he owes everyone money. Why can’t he just pull out and give me control? Please, mother, you pick me up now. Please, you know me. No. Don’t you scare me. My friends and I think I do a better job. Police are looking for you all over. Be instrumental in letting us know. They are Englishmen and they are a type I don’t know who is best, they or us. Oh, sir, get the doll a roofing. You can play jacks and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it. I take all events into consideration. No. No. And it is no. It is confused and it says no. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand Kim. Did you hear me?

The above was captured by a police stenographer, for entirely practical reasons. Fascinatingly, however, the transcript later became an influence on writers of the Beat generation such as Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson and William S. Burroughs, who even used it as the bedrock of a surreal screenplay.

Sometimes, death gets in the way of a good story. The last words of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa were: ‘Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.’ Villa, an early fan of the movies, lived his life as if in a film (he even signed a contract with a Hollywood studio who wanted to film his battles) and, like Shakespeare, was aware that good drama demands a killer pay-off line. So, as he lies bullet-ridden, victim of a roadside ambush, the media-savvy Villa purportedly urges an associate to think up the last words that he, in his death agonies, is not able to; grand words that will confer dignity on his life and cause. All fine so far. Except Villa’s car was hit by a volley of forty bullets fired by seven gunmen. Villa himself was hit by nine bullets, four of which were dug out of his head, meaning he must have died instantly. His last words, words that have passed down through generations as accepted historical fact, were put in Villa’s mouth at a later date, most likely taken from an obscure film version of the bandit’s life made a decade after it ended. Truly attributed or not (that they are once-removed serves only to make the situation achingly post-modern), the words have become iconic in that they perfectly illustrate a tension in our love for famous last words. They interest us because they seem to complete a story, retrospectively validating a life that has been lived.

In that regard, they can also be redemptive. It was famously said of King Charles I of England, a truly execrable monarch who nevertheless put on a remarkable display of dignity and self-possession in his declamation at the axeman’s block, that nothing so became him in life as the leaving of it. Though Charles’s boldness pales in comparison to that of Major-General Thomas Harrison, a signatory to the king’s death warrant, who, condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered upon the Restoration, still managed to swing a punch at his executioner.

In the case of executions, last words are often used as an opportunity to set the story straight or to confer scorn on an enemy. Convicted killer Thomas J. Grasso used the occasion of his death by lethal injection to admonish the Oklahoma state prison system for not providing his requested last meal, claiming, ‘I did not get my SpaghettiOs, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.’

So some of us die with great dignity, some of us die with a curse on our lips, and most of us die in complete anonymity; our last words unrecorded, our lives unregarded.

In this book are the last words of nearly 200 people, including lovers, killers, artists, traitors, spies, rulers, poets, dreamers and mystics, from times ancient and modern. Some are probably accurate, some most likely are not, and I confess I have by no means attempted to err on the side of caution in all cases, particularly where to do so would get in the way of telling a good story.

And therein lies the rub: amusing, exhorting, inspiring or chilling, behind all famous last words there is a story, and telling stories is what separates us from the dead – because stories are what we use to fend off the gathering night.

1

The Hedonists

Drinkers, gourmands, libertines and the hopelessly entertaining

‘CODEINE … BOURBON.’

Tallulah Bankhead, d.1968

Tallulah Bankhead was, in her day, one of America’s leading actresses on both stage and screen. Descended from United States senators, Bankhead’s enormous talent is somewhat overshadowed to modern eyes by an appealing reputation as a libertine, and her famously liberal attitudes towards sex and drugs.

Probably bisexual (she referred to herself as ‘ambisextrous’), Bankhead’s outspoken libidinousness often got her into hot water, even garnering her a place on the Hays Committee’s infamous blacklist, a government report presented to all Hollywood studios listing actors who were not be promoted to the public on grounds of moral turpitude.

Bankhead suffered terribly from addictions to both alcohol and drugs. Unable to sleep without the aid of handfuls of prescription drugs, she reputedly had to be tied to her bed at night to prevent her unconscious body from shovelling nearby pills into her mouth. As she lay dying in St Luke’s Hospital, Manhattan, on 12 December 1968, she was asked if she needed anything. Her last coherent words, above, were in response.

‘I’VE HAD EIGHTEEN STRAIGHT WHISKEYS. I THINK THAT’S THE RECORD.’

Dylan Thomas, d.1953

Born in Swansea at the start of the First World War, Thomas was the most significant Welsh poet of the twentieth century. Writing in English, he is celebrated for poems such as ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘Love in the Asylum’, as well as for the radio play Under Milk Wood. Famously patronising London’s bohemian drinking district of Fitzrovia in the ’40s and ’50s, Thomas developed a parallel reputation as a hellraiser and alcoholic, which was exacerbated by a complex, often destructive relationship with his wife Caitlin Macnamara, to whom he was serially unfaithful.

Unable to live by writing alone, Thomas supplemented his lifestyle with broadcasting, and with poetry tours of the United States. It was on one such trip, in November 1953, that Thomas finally came to grief. Already unwell, Thomas spent most of the 3rd drinking in his room at New York’s Chelsea Hotel.

Later he went out to the White Horse pub in Greenwich Village, boasting upon his return that he had drunk eighteen whiskeys in a row. At some point over the next two days, Thomas slipped into a coma from which he would not emerge. He died at St Vincent’s Hospital on 9 November 1953.

‘I SHOULD NEVER HAVE SWITCHED FROM SCOTCH TO MARTINIS.’

Humphrey Bogart, d.1957

Charismatic, tough and versatile, Humphrey DeForest Bogart was the quintessential Hollywood male lead of the 1940s, becoming a screen legend for his roles in films including Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, as well as for his portrayal of hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep.

‘Bogie’ was a founder member of the Rat Pack, essentially a drinking club for Hollywood stars, which included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. A lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking took its toll on Bogart when, in 1956, he discovered he had cancer of the oesophagus. True to his on-screen tough-guy persona, Bogart kept the illness to himself until it was too developed to be successfully treated. He passed away on 14 January 1957, allegedly blaming a change in drinks for his misfortune.

This seems to be an incorrect attribution, however, and his true last words were more likely, and appropriately, to have been, ‘Good-bye, Kid. Hurry back,’ spoken to his young wife, Lauren Bacall, as she briefly left his bedside. She returned to find him comatose and he died soon after.