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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
08
The Poetry of Drowning:
Writers Who Literally Drowned Th
eir Sorrows
Hart Crane never got along with his Life Savers–inventing fa-
ther, Clarence. While Clarence was an industrialist, Hart was
a sensitive and eff eminate boy obsessed with language. Father
and
son did reconcile, though, shortly before Clarence’s death
in 1931. By then, Hart was a well-known and relatively suc-
cessful poet whose infl uences included Walt Whitman and
Edgar Allan Poe. But he was tired of being known as the third-
best poet of his time (behind e.e. cummings and T. S. Eliot—
maybe Hart would have fared better if he’d gone by H. H.
Crane). A year after his father’s death, he
announced, “Good-
bye, everybody,” and then leapt from the deck of a cruise
ship—at which point he could have used a lifesaver of the
noncandy variety. Hart’s body was never found.
✖ ✖ ✖
On July 8, 1822, having recently suff ered the
death of two
children and his wife, Mary’s, nervous breakdown, the Ro-
mantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
went sailing in his schoo-
ner. (Th
is was back in the days when poets could aff ord
schooners.) Th
e ship, which was never terribly seaworthy,
sank amid a sudden storm. Although it seems likely to have
been an accident, rumors have swirled ever since that Shel-
ley’s death was a suicide.
✖ ✖ ✖
Th
e author of such classic have-to-read-in-college
novels as
To
the Lighthouse
and
Mrs. Dalloway,
Virginia Woolf struggled for
decades with mental illness.
After writing her husband, Leon-
ard, a heartbreaking note that began, “I feel certain I am going
209
mad again,” Woolf fi lled her pockets with stones and drowned
herself in the River Ouse in 1941.
✖ ✖ ✖
In 1972, confessional poet John Berryman
intended
to
die of
drowning when he jumped off the Washington Avenue Bridge
in Minneapolis—but he misjudged the wind and died instead
on the rocky shore.
Literary Demises
It should come as no surprise that many writers, being such
clever and creative people, have found unusual ways of dying.
406 BCE:
Greek playwright Euripides
is mauled to death by
a pack of dogs.
1593:
Christopher Marlowe is killed in a bar fi ght.
1825–1855:
All six children of Maria Branwell and Patrick
Brontë—including writers Anne, Charlotte, and Emily—die
of tuberculosis.
1849:
Edgar Allan Poe dies of either alcoholism or rabies.
1914(ish):
Ambrose Bierce disappears in Mexico while fol-
lowing Pancho Villa. He was probably shot by bandits,
although—who knows—he could just be chilling in Can-
cun, soaking up the sun and enjoying his 164th birthday.
1941:
Sherwood Anderson dies
after accidentally swallow-
ing a toothpick.
1980:
French literary critic Roland Barthes steps out into the
street and gets run over by a truck.
1983:
Having apparently failed to learn from Anderson the
abundant risks of placing non-food items in your mouth, Ten-
nessee Williams chokes to death on a bottle cap. But enough
about writers’ endings. Let’s talk about their beginnings . . .
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