I remember in high school reading Louis Fischer’s The Life of Lenin (1964), though all I retain of the book is the account of Lenin’s autopsy, following his death at age fifty-two from atherosclerosis. When tapped with tweezers, his cerebral arteries pinged like stone. They were calcified but in his short life Lenin had been granted sufficient time to write some 10-million words and murder more than 8-million of his countrymen -- a piker compared to Stalin, of course.
Dying and
death are democratic, the true levelers sought by revolutionaries everywhere. No
respecter of demographics, death makes no distinctions. You want egalitarianism?
Die. In contrast to Lenin, think of Yvor Winters – poet, critic, teacher,
husband, father. In 1964 at age sixty-four he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat.
In a letter to Allen Tate the following year he writes:
“. . . I
haven’t much time left. I am trying to finish a book [Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical
Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English, 1967], which will be my
last criticism. Last May I had an operation for cancer of the tongue. Too
much pipe smoking. . . . No more tobacco, no more liquor. I drink Knox’s Gelatin.
I have one more year to teach, and I shall be glad to be done with it.”
Winters
retired from Stanford in 1966 after teaching there for thirty-two years. That
November he underwent a second surgery. He writes to Gus Blaisdell a month
later:
“It was
cancer but the pathologist found it to be strictly in one spot. There will be
no radiation treatment, at least for now. My surgeon says that in a couple of
years it will probably be possible to control this sort of things with pills.
“The surgery
was what is popularly known as massive surgery. Most of the muscle up the right
side of my jaw and my right collarbone was removed, with most of everything
else within the triangle. . . . No pain worth mentioning, because all the
nerves were removed.”
Two months
before his death on January 28, 1968, Winters writes to Blaisdell: “With the
glasses, I can sit up and read for short periods; sitting up increases pain without
giving me the exercise I need; the pain blinds me, glasses or not.”
Among
Winters’ students at Stanford was the poet Charles Gullans (1929-93), who was also
killed by cancer. In his final collection, Letter
from Los Angeles (John Daniel & Co., 1990), he includes “The House of
Exile”:
“Death is no
riddle, not a mere unknown;
It is
unknowable--like Nothing, None.
It is pure
absence, no place, nowhere, not,
Negative
absolute, the unlived through.
It is pure
evil, the unspecified,
Unspecifiable
in any way
By figure,
trope or crude analogy.
Using the
oldest magic that we know,
We give
death vesture, habit, and a name.
We give it
entrance with a golden bough
Or stony
lintel and a keep of thorns.
We give it
locus and mythography
With skies
as blue as and banal as our own,
And people
its dim land with dimmer shades
Forever
silent on their distant shore;
Or call it
some abstraction of the mind,
Repose, or
contemplation, or the good.
In truth, it is imploded space, a name
Which has no
definition and no face.”
[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters
(ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]
1 comment:
My father died in a nursing home just over twenty years ago. The whole family was gathered by the bedside and I remember, in the last few minutes, how I could feel death enter the room, a palpable presence, and I understood why we personify it. (It was the first time I had ever been present when someone died.) And awful as it is to say, I also got an inkling of why some people (I thought of those "Angel of Mercy" hospital mass murderers) become addicted to death. Whatever it is, there is nothing remotely like it (not even birth).
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