interesting. He was in a bar, which made sense; he was drunk, which made sense, and he was sitting with the Tyrone family. I saw Mary and James and Jamie and Edmund all drinking with him. Well, Mary didn’t drink as much but she looked a bit dazed.
It was interesting how they all seemed taken with one another, though they never truly looked into one another’s faces. Only James looked right at O’Neill and said, “Look up at me, Eugene. Look me in the eye, son,” though James wasn’t much older, if he was even older at all. I could see that O’Neill himself was quite happy being in the glow of his family, possibly his real family, possibly his own fictionalized version of himself as well for all time and forever, et cetera.
I could even see a slight smile come to his face, when James recited a line from Long Day’s Journey into Night with a booming regional actor’s voice and filled the dingy bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was a play itself, watching the great playwright enjoying his own private hell. Also, somehow in the moment, I could see with my own eyes that O’Neill’s writing the play was clearly therapeutic and eased the agony of that hell—making it, in a way, a bit of heavenly comfort.
Joe and I found Samuel Beckett in what looked like a no-man’s-land of the First World War, leaning against a crumbling tree with a ray of sunlight lighting up his face. He seemed content while alone with his thoughts.
William Faulkner sat under a large willow tree, sipping a drink, dressed in a suit and tie. He was elegant, plain, and simple with his neatly trimmed mustache and his smoothly combed gray hair. He was alone, facing an Underwood typewriter, on serene display as if he were rarified and hailed. Indeed, his likeness adorned a U.S. postage stamp and he had won a Nobel Prize, which sat on display beside him. There was no hint of sound or fury in the Writers Afterlife for him. Though a heavy drinker, Faulkner never drank while he wrote and now that he was dead, he didn’t seem to allow chaos to intrude on his place in immortality.
I also got to see Robert Penn Warren, the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both poetry and fiction. He was at an old-fashioned picnic enjoying himself as if he were Willie Stark in All the King’s Men.
Mark Twain was not far off but though he was one of the Eternals, he didn’t glow in a warm light nor did he seem content or happy like the others. There was a cloud of sadness around him, a sense of tragedy that made no sense to me.
“He is thrilled to be here because of his literary recognition, but the sorrows of his personal life never seemed to leave him even in death,” Joe explained.
This is not what I expected of the man who was so famous for his erudite and self-deprecating quips, along with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
That’s when I saw a small but handsome and suntanned young man with sharp, dark eyes pacing back and forth, looking very anxiously around. “Who’s that?”
“Oh, that’s John Fante. He got asked up not long ago. He was in the Valley for a bit of time.”
“Yes, he wrote Ask the Dust!” I proclaimed. “He wrote some screenplays too, but I only learned about him when I was in Rome and found out that the Italians really love him,” I said.
Joe nodded. “Charles Bukowski helped get him into the Eternals. In fact, Time Out recently wrote it was ‘criminal negligence’ that Ask the Dust isn’t better known.” Joe walked on. After I caught up with him, he continued, “What’s interesting is that Fante got in, but look at Nelson Algren. His novel The Man with the Golden Arm was made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra. He was one of the most famous writers of his time. Fought his way up from working-class Chicago and was so respected in his lifetime. And now who knows his name? Who?”
“I do.”
“That’s my point. You’re another writer.”
I walked over to Fante. He had picked his early twenties to be in while dwelling in the land of the Eternals. He was sitting on a beach, sipping a beer, expressionless, surrounded by pretty Mexican women. I was curious about that blank look on his face so I had to introduce myself. “How did it feel when you heard your name called?” I asked.
He eased back in his lounge chair and said, “It was the most exhilarating moment of my existence.”
“Anything you can share with me?” I asked.
His windswept hair blew across his forehead and the sun rubbed light across his strong features.
“Time spent in the Valley of Those on the Verge is time spent in hell,” he answered. “Living was a picnic compared with that place.”
I lowered my head and snuck away.
The last writer we saw also surprised me. He was sitting behind the wheel of a 1955 royal-blue Packard Clipper convertible. He was a thirty-year-old Jack Kerouac, tanned with a sharp jaw, a crew-cut, and a nerdy look that was very hip back in the fifties. I heard jazz playing from all around the car as it sat there doing fifty miles an hour without moving. Anything was possible here in the Writers Afterlife. Ironically, Kerouac never got a driver’s license when he was alive.
He was on the road, a highway actually, where the sun reigned over a cloudless sky. Everything about him was at ease, relaxed and serene now that he had made it. He was an icon of the Beat Generation, probably more famous than any of the others. He looked slim and healthy, nothing like that bloated body he inhabited when he died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty-seven, having lived only three years longer than I had.
I expected to see Neal Cassady in the seat beside him or a few pretty girls he’d picked up as he drove across America but I was shocked when I saw his mother, Gabrielle, sitting in the backseat. He looked comforted and sedate. From where I stood, I could see that his round light-blue eyes filled with happiness.
I looked at Joe and said, “I bet he’s the only Eternal who sits in a car.”
Eventually Joe led me to a very strange place in the Writers Afterlife. It was where all the writers who’d committed suicide were.
“This is an odd place, so if you feel uneasy, it’s not you, it’s the place itself,” Joe assured me.
We were in a garden with so many colorful flowers and small trees and bushes everywhere. The garden had some metal and marble fountains and an occasional metal table and chair. Some writers sat at these tables and others milled around the garden.
I quickly recognized Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Ernest Hemingway, and then Thomas Chatterton and Sir John Suckling from famous portraits of them. All of these writers sat alone at their tables, reading their own works, their heads tilted down, their fingers turning the pages. They didn’t seem to notice one another at all.
“They achieved fame but at such an awful price,” Joe said softly.
I could see they were lonely and filled with regret. Hemingway, bullish and wide, was clearly cranky. Plath was pale and meek.
“Such an irony,” I said.
“Alone for all time. They are famous, yes, but alone for all time. A joyless eternity.”
Then I saw this southern man, John Kennedy Toole, who only became famous when he killed himself.
“I know what you’re thinking, and it’s wrong. His mother brought his novel to Robert Penn Warren after
