Where Are They Buried? (53 page)

In 1980 Alex wrote a television series called
Palmerstown, USA
, in 1988 published
A Different Kind of Christmas
, and
Queen: The Story of an American Family
was released posthumously. Unfortunately, none of these works had the impact of
Roots
. On its own merits,
Roots
is an astounding piece of culturally significant fiction, and if Alex had released it as such, with appropriate bibliographic footnotes, his reputation would be untarnished and permanent. As it is, his place in literary history stands under a shadow.

At 70, Alex died of a heart attack and was buried at his boyhood home in Henning, Tennessee.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Henning is located 40 miles northeast of Memphis. From the center of Henning (Routes 87 and 209) follow Haley Avenue one-third of a mile to its intersection with Church Street. The Haley home is on the corner, and Alex’s marker is in the front yard.

Upon Alex’s death, his literary and royalty rights went to his widow, Myran Haley, who filed for bankruptcy in 2001. In August 2002, John Palumbo of Jacksonville, Florida, an investor who buys “unusual” assets, purchased them from an Arizona bankruptcy court trustee for what would seem to be an impossibly low price of $10,400.

MAY 4, 1923 – DECEMBER 12, 1999

After training as a B-25 bombardier in the Army Air Corps, Joseph Heller was shipped to Italy in 1944 and would later describe his 60 requisite combat missions as “largely milk runs.” But they inspired him too, and he made notes of his adventures in the skies for a masterpiece that would take another fifteen years to complete.

Returning to America in 1950, Joseph taught composition at Penn State and then wrote ad copy where his unusual creative process emerged: Find the first and last sentences of a story, then fill in the middle. His most significant book hit like lightning but would take years to fully develop. “I wrote the first chapter in longhand one morning in 1953, hunched over my desk at the advertising agency.” Accepting a $750 advance for his book, it took another five years to complete. But it was well worth the wait.

His darkly comic novel,
Catch-22
, became a universal metaphor not only for the insanity of war but also for the madness of life itself. The breathtaking satire centered on a pilot Yossarian, who tries to get himself declared crazy so he won’t have to fly any more missions. But, he is foiled by regulations, as Doc Daneeka explains: “Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.” This absurdity, along with every other illogical aspect of war, was masterfully captured by Joseph who then gave all of it the name Catch-22. “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. If he flew the missions he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to.”

The book was not an immediate success but, a few years after its 1961 release, as the reality of Vietnam set in,
Catch-22
was embraced and became required reading for the flower-power generation. Part of the genius of the book was that readers could grasp Yossarian’s terror and cynicism even while believing that World War II was wholly necessary. But, when young Americans began
to be drafted and to die by the tens of thousands during Vietnam,
Catch-22
became an allegory for a war that many felt was unnecessary. Succeeding first as a work of literary art, it had a forceful second life as a powerful political document.

Joseph later produced a half-dozen more novels but could never duplicate the satirical wit that defined
Catch-22
, and they were never met with much more than a lukewarm response. Nonetheless, his drollness was evident to interviewers. Asked about never having written another book as successful as his first, he answered: “Who has?” Quizzed about his pastimes, he replied, “I hate sports. I also hate gardening and walking. I don’t go to movies or the theater or watch television, but what I do like is lying down.”

In the mid-1980s he was afflicted with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disease that strikes without notice, and Joseph was left in near-total paralysis within days. After gradually recovering, he divorced his wife of nearly 40 years and married his nurse. At 76, he died of a heart attack and was buried at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Easthampton, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Heading east on Route 27 into Easthampton, make a left on Toilsome Lane which will turn into Gingerbread Lane. Make a left onto Race Lane, which will become Cooper Lane, and then turn into the last cemetery entrance on your left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and take the second right to Section P. Just after the second tree on the right, Joseph’s military-style stone reminds you “There was only one catch…”

JULY 21, 1899 – JULY 2, 1961

FEBRUARY 16, 1954 – JULY 1, 1996

While World War I raged, young Ernest Hemingway tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected due to a vision problem in one eye. Eager for action, he instead took a job driving an ambulance for the Red Cross, and in that capacity found himself under fire on the Italian front. After being severely wounded by a mortar blast, then two machine gun rounds as he was being carried away on a stretcher, Ernest the war hero recovered at an Italian hospital
and fostered a relationship there with a nurse. These experiences would provide the groundwork for one of his greatest novels,
A Farewell to Arms
, written ten years later.

Ernest married during a short stay in the U.S., and in 1921 the couple moved to Paris, flitting into an intellectual circle of expatriate authors and artists that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, who, at some level, Ernest accepted as a mentor. This “lost generation,” a term that Stein coined but Ernest made popular in the epigraph of 1929’s
The Sun Also Rises
, characterized a postwar generation that decried the false ideals that led naïve soldiers marching to their dooms for the gratification of carnal elders. This book was the first to bring widespread recognition to Ernest.

After Paris, Ernest traveled extensively for both work and pleasure, hunting in Africa and witnessing bullfights in Spain, where he returned in the late 1930s as a correspondent covering its Civil War. Again drawing from personal experience, Ernest wrote
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
,
Death in the Afternoon
, and his most ambitious novel,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. In this period, he gained international acclaim for simple, straightforward prose sprinkled with unemotional but realistic dialogue.

During the Second World War, Ernest volunteered as a Caribbean submarine spotter using his own fishing boat, and it was then that he discovered the allure of Cuba, to which he’s now inextricably linked. By 1950 the literary clique was whispering that “Papa” was finished, as for the last decade Ernest had been living in a small Cuban village, making no waves. But in 1952 Ernest unexpectedly set readers on their heads again with what many consider his most significant short work,
The Old Man and the Sea
, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

After Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement triumphed in 1959, Ernest again relocated, this time to Idaho. By then, his physical health had begun to decline, partly as a result of internal injuries he’d suffered in an airplane crash during an African safari, and he was repeatedly hospitalized for uncontrolled high blood pressure and hepatitis. Increasingly confined to his home and complaining that he was unable to write, Ernest suffered anxiety attacks and depression, and his mental stability spiraled downward.

His wife, Mary, found him one morning holding a shotgun and staring out a window, and Ernest spent the next two months under heavy sedation at the Mayo Clinic. Upon his return home, Mary locked all the guns in the basement, but Ernest remembered where to find the keys. Two days later, while Mary slept, he chose a favorite shotgun he’d used many times to hunt birds and, with
the magnificent view of the Sawtooth Mountains at his foyer’s bay window, Ernest put the gun to his forehead and pulled the triggers of both barrels.

At 61, Ernest was buried at Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the center of town, follow Route 75 a half-mile north and the cemetery is on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, bear right, and proceed about 100 yards. On the right is a stand of three evergreen trees, under which is the marble tablet marking Ernest’s grave.

The Hemingway family seemed to have an uncanny predilection for suicide. Ernest’s father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, shot himself to death with a revolver in 1928. In 1966, Ernest’s sister Ursula did herself in with a deliberate drug overdose, and in 1982, his brother Leicester killed himself with a pistol. More than one wag has suggested that perhaps the Hemingway family’s NRA membership should be revoked.

And of course, who could forget about Margaux? She was the fresh-faced granddaughter of Ernest who burst onto the modeling scene in the early 1970s. Some maintained, probably correctly, that Margaux’s ascent was solely due to the Hemingway mystique but, in any event, she leveraged her popularity and moved to acting. Her star soon dimmed though, and her roles became increasingly marginalized as she appeared in one lackluster film after another. If any were notable, perhaps it was her first, the decidedly dreary 1976 drama,
Lipstick
.

By 1980 Margaux’s life was a slow-motion train wreck. Middle-child syndrome left her feeling unloved, dyslexia hindered the memorization of scripts, bulimia left her weak, depression encumbered ambition.

In 1987 Margaux admitted herself to the Betty Ford Clinic for alcoholism treatment, in 1990 came a last-ditch effort to jump-start her career by posing for
Playboy
, and in 1991 she filed for bankruptcy. In 1994 it seemed her troubles might finally be worked out with the Dalai Lama’s spiritual guidance. But after returning from a visit with him, Margaux experienced difficulty separating fantasy from reality. She was hearing voices, and soon checked into an Idaho mental hospital for several weeks. In 1995 she hit rock bottom, filming infomercials for the Psychic Friends Hotline.

After Margaux hadn’t been seen for a few days in June of 1996, concerned friends asked the handyman of her Santa Monica
apartment building to check her quarters. Upon entering, he was overwhelmed by a horrible odor; Margaux had been dead a few days. She was found covered up in her bed, wearing only a white T-shirt. On a coffee table was an altar of sorts, complete with salt at each corner, an arrangement of candles, a variety of pendants lined up alongside burned incense, a white horseman chess piece, and pieces of paper arranged in a heart-shape. On the papers, in Margaux’s handwriting, was written, “Love, healing, protection for Margot forever.”

An autopsy found Phenobarbital in Margaux’s system at many times the recommended dosage, and it was concluded that she died of a suicidal overdose, in the Hemingway family style, at 42.

After cremation, Margaux’s ashes were buried at Ketchum Cemetery alongside her grandfather. Her epitaph reads, “Free Spirit Freed.”

Ever since entering show business, her name had been alternately spelled “Margaux” or “Margeaux,” which differed from her given spelling, “Margot.” But on her altar note, as described above, and on her gravestone, she reverted to her given spelling.

APRIL 3, 1783 – NOVEMBER 28, 1859

Washington Irving studied law haphazardly and amused himself by writing essays on New York society and theater under a variety of pseudonyms, including Diedrich Knickerbocker. (The surname was a colloquialism for Dutch settlers but, after being used by Irving, it became slang for “New Yorker.”) In 1809 he published
A History of New York
, which purported to be a scholarly account of the occupation of the New World but was really a satire. Today it is regarded as the first great American book of comic literature.

Washington traveled to Europe on three different occasions that, considering the period in which he lived, ranked him very highly within that elite category of the well traveled. His first two trips were in service of his family’s durables business and, after the enterprise soured, Washington refocused his concerns. He arranged a collection of his stories and essays into
The Sketch Book
, publishing it in 1819 under the name Geoffrey Crayon. Within this compilation were two widely loved tales that would immortalize the Washington Irving name—“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—and their enthusiastic reception immediately promoted him to the status of best-known living figure in American literature.

By 1826, Washington had parlayed his credentials into an appointment as a diplomatic attaché at the American embassy in Madrid, and there he produced a number of other narratives and sketches, though none as popular as his previous work. Upon his final return from Spain, where he served as Ambassador, Irving labored on a comprehensive, five-volume biography of George Washington, which he completed just before his death at 76.

For 137 years, Washington was buried in the village of North Tarrytown, New York, but, in November 1996, without ever having been moved, he was at once buried in the village of Sleepy Hollow. By referendum, the residents of the village honored their deceased son and legally changed the village’s name to Sleepy Hollow. He’s buried there at the Old Dutch Burying Ground.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-287, take Exit 9 and turn north onto Route 9. Drive through town and the cemetery is 1½ miles ahead on the right.