'I Don't Think Much of It'

Many of us share a fascination with last words, the final utterances especially of people we admire or detest. Do such words distill the wisdom of a lifetime, spew braggadocio, beg forgiveness or signify cerebrum-atrophied gibberish? 

Deathbed gems inspire skepticism. We’re told the last words of William Hazlitt, a brilliant essayist and notably difficult human being, were, “Well, I’ve had a happy life.” Is that mythology? Would so cranky a man, in effect, repudiate the thrust of his own life? Could a man tell a lie at the moment of death? Could the immanence of death so chasten him? Was he feeling guilty? Or do we have Hazlitt all wrong? Or take Walter de la Mare, who is quoted as saying “Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.” Sounds just too pat and polished, a little like Rodney Dangerfield on a mediocre night. I’m especially fond of Wyndham Lewis’s swan song. When dying he was asked about the condition of his bowels and replied, “Mind your business!” Good man.

 

Robert Phillips has written a poem, “Famous Last Words” (Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems, 2006), composed entirely of the exit lines of well-known figures and dedicated to Dana Gioia. Most cryptic is Henry James: “So it has come . . . The Distinguished Thing.” Most predictable are Lytton Strachey’s final hiss: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.” How’s that for life-affirming gratitude?

    

Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957) is mostly a collection of Max Beerbohm’s radio broadcasts. The volume concludes with a lecture Beerbohm delivered in 1943 devoted to Strachey, whom he knew and about whom he has reservations. He writes:

 

“It takes all kinds to make a world, or even to make a national literature. Even for spirits less fastidious than Strachey's, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There's nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”

 

Beerbohm’s final words are reported to have been, “Thanks for everything.”