Marlowe popped up from behind a tree. I already knew a lot about him; he’d been a friend of Shakespeare’s and had died in his twenties. He was murdered in a bar and he might have been a spy of some kind for the queen of England. His Faust, though not as long as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s, was pretty well known. He was one of those who’d died just as he was becoming famous.
“You see, up here, there are Eternals; there are those who were famous while on Earth and now forgotten; and there are those who are, like you on the verge,” Joe said.
“The verge,” I repeated.
“Those who died before fame happened. Christopher Marlowe is more famous than you think and that too came after his death.”
We watched the handsome, young, and carefree Marlowe running through the trees, seemingly drunk, followed by several other handsome young men as carefree and seemingly as drunk. Their voices quickly disappeared.
“He seems happy.”
“Well, in his instance graduate students keep him famous. He did write some famous lines. And I guess that’s fame enough for him. Think about it, his competition is Shakespeare and Marlowe did die at twenty-nine.”
“‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’” I quickly added.
“The majority of writers here fall into the last category: on the verge, those who tried and failed, and wait in the Valley of Those on the Verge in hopes of one day becoming an Eternal. There are thousands of you like that.”
“So it can happen?” I asked.
“Yes. It does happen.”
“Emily Dickinson only published seven poems in her lifetime. Think about that! She is now considered the most famous woman poet of all time,” Joe said.
“How did that happen for her?” I asked.
“After Emily died, her sister, Lavinia, collected all of her poetry in a book and sent it to a publisher.”
“Wow.” I sighed.
“And Franz Kafka! He was virtually unknown when he died and told his friends to burn all of his work. In fact, his Metamorphosis was the only thing he ever completed and it was very short for a novel,” Joe continued. “It was his friend Max Brod who made sure Kafka’s work was published after he died. Now there’s the Franz Kafka Society Center in Prague.”
I took it all in, not knowing any of this when I was alive.
“So yes, it can happen for those who are lucky to have someone care about their work after they die—and for those who go back to influence at least one person who is still alive and can make the difference.”
I was stunned. “We can influence those still alive?”
Joe nodded. “Yes, you have one chance, one opportunity to go back to life and do all you can to change the fate of your fame.”
We walked on. I was perplexed, and Joe could see it. “It’s all very complicated,” he said, “and you will learn all the details in time.”
CHAPTER 5
“Who is that?” I asked as Joe and I walked along the sidewalk of a big city somewhere in the twentieth century. I’d just noticed a middle-aged man sitting alone in a park.
Naturally the city was deserted and only an illusion, as was all that existed in the Writers Afterlife. Joe nodded. “Sad story, his,” he replied. “He had five best sellers in America in the early twentieth century. He was the first person to ever make a million dollars for writing fiction. He was very wealthy and very, very popular. Only Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott have had more best sellers in the English language before him.”
“Who is he?”
“You wouldn’t even recognized his name if I told you.”
“Really?”
“Fifteen movies were based on his stories. Gary Cooper and John Wayne starred in two of them. He wrote plays and published nineteen novels. Hardly anyone reads his work anymore.”
“Please tell me who he is.”
“Harold Bell Wright,” Joe told me.
“Who?”
“Exactly.”
I was wobbly with all the information.
As we walked by I noticed the man look up at us. He spoke up, and his voice still echoes in my head. “Do you read me?” he asked.
Joe hurried me along. “Don’t respond. Whatever you say will be the wrong answer.”
Suddenly we were in another city, and another man was at a table alone sipping champagne with music from the Roaring Twenties floating through the air. A yellow Rolls-Royce was parked beside his table and he was eating caviar. The scene struck me as odd, as the man was alone yet trying to act as if he were surrounded by friends and adoring fans.
“Do you see that man there?”
I could very clearly see the slender man with thick hair, thick eyebrows, and a bushy mustache dressed impeccably in a grandiose suit and tie, doing all he could to make it obvious to anyone looking that he was enjoying himself.
“Who is he?” I asked, looking closely.
“He had a best seller the year The Great Gatsby was published. Every high school student knows that novel; hardly anyone alive remembers his,” Joe told me.
“What was it titled?”
“The Green Hat. It was about the same world of the Roaring Twenties as Gatsby but it lacked the style, execution, language, and perhaps the great storytelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But that author, he was on the cover of Time magazine!”
“The cover of Time magazine?” I repeated. “But I don’t know him,” I said. I said it too loudly, and the man looked at me with a deep sadness in his big, dark eyes, then looked away from us both.
“Michael Arlen,” Joe whispered his name. “The last ten years of his life he suffered from writers block and didn’t write a word. A few years after he died, he was nearly forgotten.”
I shrugged my shoulders. I remembered a saying I knew back when I was alive: “A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.” I turned to Joe. “So are we saying that the mediocre talents who are famous when alive fade into obscurity once time catches up with them?”
Joe shrugged. “Not entirely true but there’s a better chance of that happening than someone living in obscurity and being discovered later on.”
As we left the city I looked over my shoulder and there he sat on the park bench, the only man in the entire metropolis. He sat there for all eternity with the tall buildings as a backdrop. In a city of thousands, no one knew him. Though he felt no hunger, no lust, no need for sleep, and no
