Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   8

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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 

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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 . . .