A Good Death

by Grace Andreacchi

Enough about the writer’s life, let’s think about the writer’s death for a change. It’s sure to come, after all, for of all things nothing is more certain than death. A big subject, and arguably the starting point for much if not all of the world’s literature. Without death we would have no Wuthering Heights, no Death Be Not Proud, we would have neither metaphysical sonnets, nor lamentations, nor elegies, nor grief and certainly no Sylvia Plath with her poor little head in the oven. Without death it’s questionable whether we’d have any literature at all, as it is perhaps the knowledge of oblivion that tempts us to leave a record, to say – this was my life, this was my time, this my vision, my world. Remember me when I am gone/Gone far away into the silent land…

Is there such a thing as a good, a particularly appropriate and satisfying death for a writer? Without trespassing upon delicate ground of individual conscience and belief, I would suggest there is. Who does not admire the dash of Lord Byron, casting his young life away heedlessly in a Grecian swamp? Who is not moved by the terrifying double suicide of Heinrich von Kleist and the mortally ill Henriette Vogel? Before he died Kleist sat down and wrote eloquent letters to just about everybody he knew, and they make exciting reading. So this to his cousin and close friend Marie von Kleist:
‘Your letter broke my heart, my dearest Marie, and I promise you, if it were in my power, I’d give up this idea I’ve got of dying. But I swear to you, it’s completely impossible for me to live any longer; my soul is so wounded that, I might even say, if I go and press my nose against the windowpane, the very daylight that glimmers there is enough to cause me pain.’ He shot Henriette and then himself on the shores of the Wannsee near Berlin. He was only thirty-four.

Well, count on a German for a good, romantic Liebestod, but the letters are a touch. Surely only a writer feels the desire, nay, the compunction, to sit down and knock off a few choice paragraphs before the big exit. What really was getting Kleist down was the absolute failure of his written work to make the slightest impression on the world. God forbid any of us should take the inevitable rejection letters that much to heart! Better, perhaps, to follow the example of Jean Rhys, hiding out in a cottage in soggy Devonshire, drunk and disorderly, and brandishing against the dying of the light only her best book ever.

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years – sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.