leaned in and said to me, “Henry David Thoreau had Ralph Waldo Emerson. This poor guy has no one. But there are so many wonderful writers of some wonderful books that no one knows or reads today and their books were not best sellers by a long shot,” he said. He noticed a man sitting at another park bench with a very thick moustache. He had eyes like dark beams of light and wavy hair combed back. “That’s George Gissing, a writer from the 1890s,” Joe told me. “His book The Odd Women is well loved.”
I had never heard of it.
Joe then gestured to a woman walking through the park. “There’s Olivia Manning. Her book School for Love got her up here.”
I thought I had heard of the book but wasn’t sure.
“We’ll see if she becomes an Eternal,” he said.
We walked around and Joe pointed out other writers to me. “There’s F. M. Mayor. She died when she was sixty, having never married after the man she was engaged to died of typhoid fever in India. Her Rector’s Daughter is considered a neglected classic,” Joe told me. “I enjoyed it, but it is such a devastating story of love lost.”
F. M. Mayor sat at the base of the Taj Mahal with a young, handsome British soldier who I thought must be her husband. She was reading her novel to him, and they looked happy despite the storyline.
Suddenly we were in Bermuda and I saw an interesting-looking woman sitting by a swimming pool, typing and wearing her sunglasses. “Who is she?”
“Oh, that is Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. She wrote The Blank Wall and Raymond Chandler called her the best detective and suspense writer of them all.” Joe grinned. “Look out for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“They just made a movie of her book a couple of years ago. She may actually make it out of the Valley of Those on the Verge.”
That’s when we saw an interesting statue. It was of an old man and it was in the middle of a square. The old man was asleep and looked a little like someone who had eaten a sour grape. “Who’s that?”
“Henry Roth,” Joe answered. “He wrote Call It Sleep. An American classic.”
“A great book no one reads,” I said. I looked at the marble statue. “Why is this here?”
“Well, Henry Roth wrote that wonderful novel, then he had the longest writer’s block in history. He had no interest in being famous, so when he died and first came here he built this statue as a reminder to all writers that fame is not the point. Then he went to the place where ordinary people go when they die and has never been seen since,” Joe told me.
I had had enough of writers who almost, might, and/or never will make it to the hill where the Eternals dwelled. “Take me to the Eternals, please,” I asked.
Leo Tolstoy was impressive. We found him standing on this huge archway in the center of a snow-covered field. Thousands of his admirers were sitting facing him on all sides of the archway reading War and Peace in unison, in Russian. It was so dramatic, so filled with great words, gloom and doom. Tolstoy looked like a prophet up there in the swirling snow, mouthing the words as his readers held their heads down in his enormous book.
“Very cool,” I said.
Joe smirked. “The Eternals have some peculiar needs. Would you believe Tolstoy hasn’t moved since he got here? That enormous crowd reads everything of his over and over again, and he just listens without a single reaction. But you can tell he loves every moment of it.”
Watching John Keats was a lovely experience. He sat on a small hill under a row of trees with golden leaves. It was autumn, and he was reading a small book of his own poetry; sitting beside him was a young woman as petite as he. I was beginning to realize that so many of the writers I had come across were small-boned men and women.
Keats looked like a child to me, yet managed to be elegant in his fame. Everything around him was so perfectly put together: the bushes, the green grass, and the golden trees. His companion had auburn hair and as they sat together on a blanket, she frequently smiled. I realized as we got closer that Keats was reading aloud his poetry to her, and she was listening intently. They held hands as he read.
We soon came upon Mary Shelley who was running wildly in the same woods, followed by Victor Frankenstein and the monster. But they were all laughing; there wasn’t any fear or anxiety in any of them.
I did notice that Mary was naked and her very pale English skin gleamed in the bright sunlight. Percy Shelley was not far away; he was lecturing a crowd of college-age coeds and he looked like a rock star as his lovely wife ran naked through the throng of his admirers. They seemed in love, though, as if they were spending eternity in a very odd sexual tease, happy despite their being competitive and so very famous.
Lord Byron was sitting on a rock below a Grecian ruin. He had curly hair and looked as if he had just finished playing a gig up in Woodstock. He was reading “She Walks in Beauty” to a small crowd of very sophisticated men and women all dressed as if it were the early nineteenth century. They gave the impression that listening to this poet read was all they wanted. As I drew closer, I saw that Byron had put heavy makeup on his face, which made him look more brooding and near death despite the big smile he had on his face and all his fans sitting at his feet.
Charles Dickens was also a petite man who hurried through the London streets followed by two happy boys: Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Joe and I followed Dickens into a large theater and watched him step onto the stage. In a few minutes he began to recite his own prose to the large crowd. He’d always been one of my favorite novelists and there he was, on stage reading his own work sounding like a pretentiously bad actor, but who cared? The audience was just happy to see him in person as he read aloud and acted out the characters of Uriah Heap, Pip, Amy Dorrit, Cratchit, Estella, Morley, and my all-time favorite, Ebenezer Scrooge.
And there in the front row were David and Oliver, living for every word Dickens pronounced. I sighed with gratification to see such a great talent being idolized in the Afterlife.
Just a few moments later, I came up on Lorraine Hansberry. She wrote one of my favorite plays, A Raisin in the Sun, and was the first black woman to have her play produced on Broadway. She was only in her mid-thirties when she died. There she was in the back of a Broadway theater watching a young man who I was sure was the character Walter Lee Younger.
“I always wanted to meet you,” I whispered to her.
She turned to me and shook my hand but didn’t say a word. I could see that she lived for every moment she had written. I was close enough to hear that she was not only mouthing the words as Tolstoy had done, but whispering them aloud.
At the intermission she stood in the middle of a crowd who barely acknowledged her and said to me, “I’m so happy to spend every night of eternity as if it were opening night. They will love the play and they will give it awards and though I will die soon, I am so happy. So very, very happy.”
I nodded.
“And I just love that young man.”
The lights blinked and she quickly went to her place in the back of the theater to watch her play and keep her eternal love of her wonderful character Walter Lee Younger
