The Bankhead Gleaner, 2

Not the Worst Death in the World for a Writer

Hello, friends. Thanks for reading. I’m keeping a commonplace book, a collection of annotated quotes, gathered from whatever I happen to be reading. This is a sidebar venture to the jottings I’ve been making — infrequently in the last year — about Mavis Gallant. What’s on hand today begins and ends with another, very different, MG.

AI-generated image of monkey mixologist

I’m talking about a concoction called "The Monkey Gland.” One of its foundational components is absinthe which, as we know, makes the heart grow fonder. A hundred years ago, this gain-of-function cocktail escaped from Harry's Bar, in Paris, and launched a failed bid for widespread infection. Conascent at Harry’s with the Monkey Gland, but more enduring, was the Sidecar, which sparkled for a season, lay dormant for a stretch, then enjoyed a resurgence in the 90’s — probably something else to blame on Sex and the City — and still turns up on cocktail lists. (I suspect most of the trendier bartenders — bartrenders? — in most of the tonier gin joints can wizard one up without cribbing from a mixology manual or ChatGPT, or whatever now serves as an aide memoire.)

Super creepy AI-generated interpretation of monkeys and sidecars. I mean, really, wtf?

A minor adjustment of consonants turns “Sidecar” into “sidebar,” and a sidebar, as noted, is what this is. I’m sidebar tolerant, both as a writer and a reader. I’m talking about those adjacent chunks of text that get framed and hung in the margins of the main body of the writing. They represent the fruits of research that don’t complement the main course but are too good to jettison, and that merit a more prominent placement on the page than might be afforded by, say, a footnote.

When last we spoke, I mentioned that I’ve been reading Brendan Gill’s 1972 pictorial biography Tallulah, which is chockablock with such asides, mostly mini-biographies of Bankhead’s family, friends, and sundry show biz associates. One such thumbnail remembrance is of Wolcott Gibbs, a longtime editor and writer at The New Yorker, a theatre critic and a tortured soul of whom Tallulah was fond. Gill writes:

“Gibbs spent his summers on Fire Island, where he liked to lie on the beach with a shaker of ice-cold martinis buried up to its neck in the sand. He died there, cigarette in hand, reading a newly arrived advance copy of one of his books - not the worst death in the world for a writer.” (1)

As exits go, Gibbs’ was, to me, appealing. Well. Not in its every detail. I loathe the beach, and cigarettes have lost their allure; but there are many activities — anything pertaining to theme parks, breakfast buffets, and bathyspheres — in which I would far less rather be engaged at the moment of my snuffing than reading.

I thought about the graceful (as it seems) exit of Wolcott Gibbs, and wondered how many others had gone out in such quiet style, i.e. have died while reading. I remembered that James Barber — still a familiar name for many years here on the Canadian west coast, a columnist and celebrity TV chef — gave up the ghost while sitting at the kitchen table, reading a cookbook, a pot of chicken soup on the stove; that was in 2007. I was sure there must be others — many, probably — so I decided to look into it. What follows is a selective catalogue of their names — the known, the unknown — and their circumstances. To find out how this all connects to The Monkey Gland, you just have to make it through to the end. Or do as I would, and skip there now.

AI - generated image of Tennyson dying in the moonlight while holding a book, rendered in the style of Rembrandt

Anyone intent on assembling such an inventory as this will find, as I did, that a number of well-known names surface again and again. One is Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who’s alleged, in popular lore, to have crossed the bar while reading Shakespeare. This turns out to be halfway true. As the most celebrated poet of his day, and in an age when bards were held in greater esteem than is now the case, his passing was avidly anatomized. On October 6, 1892, The Boston Globe reported,

“He asked for his favorite copy of Shakespeare, turned the leaves until he found Cymbeline, and gazed at one page for several minutes, moving his lips as if reading to himself. The watchers waited in silence for him to speak, but he finally laid down the volume without having uttered a word, and with his finger still between the leaves he fell asleep. The book was not removed. Late in the evening the moon rose with unusual splendor and flooded the death chamber with light. Tennyson watched it through the curtainless window with his hand still resting between the leaves of Cymbeline, and thus he died.”

It’s easy enough to understand why posterity, and those who stoke its fires, would favour “Tennyson died reading Cymbeline,” over the more accurate “Tennyson died fingering Cymbeline.” Death bed scenes benefit from, and might even require, a certain elasticity vis a vis the truth. Even a source as seemingly unimpeachable as the Vatican can prove fallible. When, on Thursday, Sept. 28, 1971, Pope John Paul 1 died, he was reported to have been reading The Imitation of Christ. A few days later, Vatican officials apologized and clarified, stating for the record that the Pontiff had been found clutching not Aquinas but “a batch of papers containing his personal writings such as homilies, speeches, reflections, and various remarks.”

AI-generated image (highly offensive, one need scarcely say) of Franz Schubert in a ceremonial North American indigenous headdress

My mother never raised me to be a popper of balloons but here are a few other “died while reading” scenarios that come to the surface on the first shake of the pan, but prove, under scrutiny, to be less than golden.

• Franz Schubert, an early adopter of the Austro-Prussian craze for North American indigeneity, was a great admirer of James Fenimore Cooper, and while it may well be, as is here and there claimed, that The Last of the Mohicans was among the last books he read as he came to the end of his tenancy on Earth, it did not fall from his failing fingers as the spirit left the building, November 19, 1828.

“Book!” repeated Hawkeye, with singular and ill–concealed disdain; “do you take me for a whimpering boy at the apronstring of one of your old gals; and this good rifle on my knee for the feather of a goose’s wing, my ox’s horn for a bottle of ink, and my leathern pouch for a cross–barred handkercher to carry my dinner? Book! what have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without a cross, to do with books? I never read but in one, and the words that are written there are too simple and too plain to need much schooling; though I may boast that of forty long and hard–working years.” The Last of the Mohicans, Chapter 12

• William Tecumseh Sherman, that stalwart of the Union Army, was a Dickens fan, for sure. No doubt, as his time drew nigh, sensing his days were numbered, he would have revisited some of his favourite passages. But he did not fade to black, February 14, 1891, clutching a copy of Great Expectations.

Look at your linen; fine and beautiful! Look at your clothes; better ain’t to be got! And your books too,” turning his eyes round the room, “mounting up, on their shelves, by hundreds! And you read ’em; don’t you? I see you’d been a reading of ’em when I come in. Ha, ha, ha! You shall read ’em to me, dear boy! And if they’re in foreign languages wot I don’t understand, I shall be just as proud as if I did.” Great Expectations, Chapter 39

Bela Lugosi, as has been bandied about over the years, was not reading the Ed Wood screenplay The Final Curtain when he died on August 16, 1956. (It is absolutely true, however, that he was buried in his Dracula cape. )

Bela Lugosi, the final photo shoot. Note that in addition to the cape, he’s also wearing his Dracula ring.

Some stories, you’ll be glad to know, do withstand scrutiny. The discredited Bela died just as “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” were climbing the charts. Twenty-one years later, August 16, 1977, Elvis slipped from the clay whilst ensconced in the bathroom, reading — the reports are true — The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus by Frank O. Adams.

AI-generated mage of “Elivs in a lab coat considering the face of Jesus.”

Tennyson, Schubert, Sherman, Presley, Lugosi: all known entities. But some of the tenderest stories that come to light when one begins tilling this field of inquiry — who died while reading? — attach to the unknown, even the unnamed. On March 9, 1865, this Civil War story appeared in the Buffalo paper, The Advocate.

The following is from an eye witness:

On visiting the battle-field at Pittsburgh Landing, the day after the bloody fight, he found a young man lying upon his back, with his head resting upon the roots of a tree, his elbows resting upon his body and his arms erect yet stiffened in death; and in his hands was a copy of the Testament and the Psalms, open at the nineteenth Psalm, which he had died reading. His last thoughts were of heaven, of the words of the Holy Writ. The book was the gift of the Bible Society.

Many, many are the stories told — at least, before the hegemony of secularism — of women and men who were found to have died while reading the Bible or other devotional texts. Lizzie Miles, the famously bawdy blues singer known as “the Creole Songbird,” spent her latter years working for Catholic charities in New Orleans, and died while studying a prayer book, March 17, 1963. Also in the South, the Atlanta Constitution reported on December 7, 1956 that Miss Ida Barzell, 65, was found dead in the hotel room in which she had lived for 35 years. She was well-known in Atlanta, having worked the city’s neighbourhoods methodically for many years as a door-to-door seller of furniture polish. She was discovered lying across the bed, the Bible she had been reading open on her chest. (2)

From Illinois, on September 27, 1951, in the Springfield Leader and Press, we read of Mrs. Elma R. Bell, blind for 57 years, dead at 79.  “Mrs. Bell,” we are told, “owned an 11-volume Bible for the blind, done in New York print, which differs from the Braille. It was given her 49 years ago and at the time of her death she was reading it for the 43rd time.”  Every bit as impressive was Mrs. N. H. Hoover, whose death was reported in the “Willits News of Past Week” column in The Ukiah Dispatch Democrat (August 27, 1970). She died “aged 76 years, 5 months and 17 days. … At the time of her death she was reading her New Testament for the 137th time. One of her dying requests was that her bible be buried with her.”

Of course, those engaged in secular reading also looked up from the page and into the eyes of the reaper. Sadly, much of the reporting on this absorbing question — who died reading? — falls short on the questions of “what?” It’s as though there was a universal rule stating that if it wasn’t the Bible, it wasn’t worth mentioning. The facts of the matter, when supplied, are often compelling. Consider this, from The Idaho Statesman, December 9, 1925

While reading a magazine mystery story by his niece, Margaret Culkin Banning, Michael H. Culkin, 50, died at his home yesterday the authorities say, by suicide. His body was found in a gas-filled room and Coroner R. B. Rawlings returned a verdict of suicide. His niece’s story ends: “The dawn still found him reading.” Arrangements are being made to send his body [from El Paso, Texas] to Oswego, N. Y., the home of his brother, Judge James Culkin.

More lurid still is this, from the wonderfully named Daily Nonpareil (Council Bluffs, Iowa), February 15, 1898. The headline is “Dies Reading a Novel: Charles Jackson of Michigan Commits Suicide in New Orleans.”

Charles A. Jackson of Jackson, Mich., committed suicide during the night in a bathroom at the Cosmopolitan hotel. He turned on the gas, stretched himself out on a small pallet in a bathtub and died while reading the pages of the novel A Miserable Woman. … Jackson was found stretched out in the bathtub. His left hand held the novel he had been reading and his right rested upon his chest. Jackson’s head rested on the bolster, which he had taken from the bed. His end must have come just as he read the lines on page 179, in which a love scene is described, for it was upon this page that his finger pointed. He left the following bit of reprint in a conspicuous place:

“I’ll believe, as I’ve done for three years past, that this life is all there is; that there is no hereafter; that the grave is our destination and that Jesus’ mercy is a myth or he would help me keep my faith and have pity on me. I ask not happiness or luxury or anything for myself but mercy to him whom I am to wrong so terribly this day. Do not let his future be all misery. O, God, I beseech thee.”

Another question typically unplumbed by the over-worked journalists who composed these accounts of those who die while reading is “Why?” Did the theatrical great and Stratford Festival founder Tyrone Guthrie, who died while reading his mail on May 15, 1971, receive some particularly unsettling news that pushed him over the edge? We are not told. And when we read in The Akron Beacon Journal, January 2, 1923, that  “Henry Prosper, 49, of Licking County, died while reading of President McKinley’s mother’s funeral,” no mention is made about whether cause and effect was in play. Was Mr. Prosper simply and coincidentally stricken at the moment of that reading, or was he fatally triggered by being so attached to the idea of the Presidential family — also from Ohio, after all — that he couldn’t bear an account of Mother McKinley consignment to earth, even though it had taken place some 26 years prior, in 1897? It would be good to know, if only to ensure an uninterrupted sleep.

Far, far, far and away the most usual printed portal for the conveyance of the soul from the quick to the dead is the newspaper. You would think that reporters wouldn’t necessarily scamper to disclose to the public how their organs of gossip dispersal are so often agents of fatal harm, but there are hundreds (truly, hundreds) of stories of readers who sat down of a morning or an afternoon for a quick perusal of the headlines and never rose again. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, was among them, March 19, 1950. He was having breakfast in bed and reading the funnies when his heart packed it in, and Burroughs stepped into mystery.

AI-generated image of Tarzan, reading

Of all the many, many accounts that describe, however succinctly, deaths visited upon newspaper readers, this one, from The Anaconda [Montana] Standard, November 22, 1920, most hits home. Under the headline “Woman Is Found Dead In Her Cabin,” we read of Mrs. Elizabeth Cranor, a known user of morphine. When detectives Mitchel and Calpin answered a call to come to her residence, located at the rear of 226-1/2 South Wyoming Street:

“… they found the door of the cabin standing open and the woman slumped down against the wall with a newspaper in her lap. She apparently had died while reading. A small dog and cat were the only signs of life found about the place. … Although she is known the have been regularly employed to look after the renting of a number of cabins in that district her cupboard was almost bare. Her exact age is not known…”

Oh, Elizabeth. Your sad but determined days, your quiet and not quite anonymous end, the few remaining, poignant crusts of a life gathered up, examined, set down with little regard for their worth and no thought for their keeping. A dog. A cat. Your mother Hubbard cupboard. Your addiction. Your age not known. A death, in other words, like millions of others, every year, in every city, town, and village, in every country. A minor curiosity. A cleanup job. We remember you here, Elizabeth, if only for a moment, if only for the time it takes to read these few words. For what it’s worth — and that’s not much — your story made me stop. Your story made me wonder. It made me feel, Elizabeth, and not much does that to this old, labouring heart. Not any more. For your sake, and if there is a hereafter, I hope you found peace there. I hope you found something to read.

Enough of this, I think; more than enough for a mere sidebar. By way of envoi, and to bring us back to our starting point, which was the 1923 invention of “The Monkey Gland” cocktail, I leave you with this facsimile of this December 13, 1932 obituary of Irving R. Bacon. What is not noted here, in this brief account of a very strange man, who gave his body as an experiment so that others might know if the laying under the skin of monkey glands will enhance male potency, is that Bacon died, 10 years after his operation, while reading a latin version of The Temptations of St. Anthony. Perhaps you knew that already. If not, now you do. You’re welcome, although there is no need to thank me. It has been entirely my pleasure to spend this time so engaged. Now I’m done. Now, I’m off to find a bar where they know how to make a Sidecar.

(1) The book in question was More in Sorrow.

(2) Miss Barzell, of Atlanta, dying in her hotel, her Bible on her chest, connects to this story reported in the The Vancouver Daily Province, February 6, 1923. After the headline —  Died While Reading His Favorite Author: Peter Thornton is Found Holding Novel of Sir Walter Scott — the nameless journalist pulls out every sentimental stop:

His lifeless fingers closely clasped about a copy of The Antiquary, the dead body of Peter Thornton, 60, was found in his room at the City Hotel on Monday by the police and hotel clerk. Without money and lacking food, the old man spent his time in the little room which the hotel manager allowed him to occupy. pouring (sic) over the works of the great Scottish novelist. Death found him engaged in feasting his mind, although he had nothing for his physical sustenance.