[Great essay on writers’ last words. 1977. -egg]

It occurred to me that writers traditionally do seem to come to dramatic ends themselves, as if they deserved the same ironic or bizarre conclusions they so often gave the characters in their books.

The Russian writers: Tolstoy, packing his knapsack and setting off from home on that last strange journey of his that ended up at the railroad station at Astapovo, where he died in the stationmaster’s room; or Gogol, with leeches on his great nose, the bishops filing slowly by, as he lay thinking how he could destroy all extant copies of Dead Souls; or Chekhov, packed in a box labeled OYSTERS, being transported back home on a bed of ice from the Black Forest where he died.

It was not only the manner in which certain writers died that was interesting: often they managed to push out a memorable last word or two which seemed too studied even to put into fiction: Goethe’s “More light!” or Henry James’s “Ah, it is here, that distinguished thing”—now discounted by Leon Edel. Some of the words which one would like to have overheard were lost, of course. Aeschylus must have had a final comment on being conked by the turtle which an eagle, trying to break it on the rocks below for a meal, dropped on the dramatist’s bald pate. In my notes I imagined Aeschylus regaining consciousness briefly:

“What happened?”

“Well, sire, you were hit on top of the head.”

“By what? It felt awful.”

“A turtle.”

Then the memorable phrase must have come, just a faint, unheard murmur, before the dramatist’s eyes clouded over.

via The Last Laugh by George Plimpton | The New York Review of Books.