The Last Rest of the Literati
 by Wade Stevens Ricks

DUSK WAS COMING RAPIDLY as I stood on a hilltop in Concord, Massachusetts, shivering on one of the first really cold days of the New England autumn. The season had already taken much of the foliage. Looking down on a frozen bog, I tried to imagine what this place looked like more than a century ago, when Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne took some of their walks here.

"In this quiet valley, as in the palm of nature's hand, we shall sleep well when we have finished our day," Emerson once said of this place. Now he and Hawthorne are indeed sleeping here, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, along an area called "Author's Ridge." Nearby are the Alcotts, including Louisa May. And there is Henry David Thoreau, whose name is wedged inconspicuously near the bottom of his family's plot marker.

Concord, 18 miles northwest of Boston, has fought to retain the beauty and serenity it possessed in the 1850s, when the aforementioned parties were elevating domestic literature and thought in the so-called "American Renaissance." With its well preserved colonial façades, Concord is a tourist magnet for those interested in the American Revolution as well as the literary phenomenon dubbed "The Flowering of New England."

I can't imagine going to Concord and not visiting Sleepy Hollow. Seeing Ralph Waldo's massive marble tombstone, sitting amid the cemetery he himself consecrated in 1855, was as essential an experience as hiking around nearby Walden Pond, finding what is left of Thoreau's rural retreat.

While some may find it morbid or ghoulish, to me visiting places like Sleepy Hollow is necessary to appreciate any travel destination. When I look back at the trips that I have taken, both abroad and at home, I relish the opportunity to see Westminster Abbey in London, Père Lachaise and Montparnasse cemeteries in Paris, and even the City Cemetery in Key West. Each has a certain mystique, a cache of legend that has accumulated over the years, not to mention that they hold the last manifestations of certain famous or infamous figures.

Every time I go to London I am drawn to Westminster Abbey. The last time I was there, roughly two weeks before Princess Diana's funeral, I noticed that Lord Laurence Olivier had been interred since my previous visit. He is in the south transept of the building, in the area known as the Poet's Corner. Dickens, Kipling and Hardy are all there. Chaucer is nearby, too, but his presence is due to his service as a clerk for Westminster, rather than his writing. The juxtaposition of poets and the monarchy, under the same vaulted ceilings, seems rather improbable to an American such as myself.

If you want to see Shakespeare, you have to head for Stratford-Upon-Avon, where he is entombed in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. Lord Byron, Milton and Wordsworth are elsewhere, too.

For some strange reason, during my first visit to Westminster, I noticed the absence of playwright Noel Coward. When I asked, I was directed to a desk where a listing was consulted. Coward, I was told, was buried in Firefly, Jamaica. Oh, well, I thought, I'll probably never make it there.

Several weeks later, when I returned to the states, a friend called to invite me to share a house in the Montego Bay, Jamaica area later that summer. Two months after inquiring about Coward at Westminster Abbey, I was primed to visit his island retreat and final resting place.

Once in Jamaica, I encountered a couple from Washington (acquaintances of the friend who invited me) who were also interested in visiting Coward's home. Through our groundskeeper, we arranged to hire a local driver to take us to Firefly. En route, as we were passing through a small coastal village, we were stopped for no apparent reason by a uniformed constable, who waved our noisy, aging vehicle to the curb.

"Do you want to buy tickets to the policemen's ball?" he said. I looked at my travel companions, realizing that this was more than an innocent request. Before I could say anything further, the husband, a correspondent for a well-known large U.S. newspaper, asked "When is it being held?" Almost in unison, the man's wife, the police officer and I responded: "It doesn't matter." At which point I looked up at the officer and said: "How many would you like us to buy?" I don't remember the exact amount that changed hands, but I do recall thinking at the time that it was a small price to pay for escaping unscathed. After all, when I was a small child growing up in Georgia, there was a notorious speed trap town where they not only took your money, but kept you in the catacombs-like city jail for a night, too.

Once we reached Firefly, I realized the trip was worthwhile. Just outside Ocho Rios, Coward's Firefly retreat was high on a hill looking out on the Caribbean. Even in the 1990s, in a country overrun with beggars and con men looking to take advantage of unwary tourists, Firefly was a true refuge. One could easily imagine Coward sipping a drink on his patio, conjuring up some witty dialogue for one of his plays. Now he was planted in the yard of this sweaty paradise.

Young Jamaican girls escorted tourists through the tidy bungalow, reciting by rote their handful of facts, wondering all the while what the fuss was about.

Looking back, I realize that visiting Coward's final resting place was one of the few special moments of that trip to Jamaica -- second only to a clothing-optional pool party that needn't be discussed in this forum.

Another classic cemetery that shouldn't be overlooked is Père Lachaise in Paris. While this beautiful and mysterious garden is the site of lasting repose for innumerable artists, I have to admit that it was curiosity about singer Jim Morrison that first drew me there. I don't think I was ever more embarrassed to be an American as the day I arrived to find the caretakers feverishly pressure-washing the latest graffiti from the various stately tombs and mausoleums that surround Morrison's grave.

Someone had taken the time to etch an incredible likeness of the singer on the back of an adjacent stone. Most of the other graffiti was less subtle: names in red spray paint and passé slogans such as "Flower Power" and "All You Need is Love" (wrong singer). Apparently efforts are being made to move Morrison's remains to another location in the future.

Even the spectacle created by Morrison's less reverent admirers is overcome by the sheer beauty and breadth of Père Lachaise. It is there you'll find Chopin, Proust, and Gertrude Stein buried alongside her partner Alice B. Toklas. Oscar Wilde has a large tomb topped by a winged figure. Though he has been dead for a century, his flamboyant reputation has attracted its share of scribbles from unauthorized epitaph writers.

In the end, I committed most of an entire day to Père Lachaise, and gladly so. While I saw many familiar names, I made a discovery, too. As my eyes scanned across the funereal lawn, I spotted the words "Nobel Prize." While such a discovery at Père Lachaise was not surprising, the name attached was unfamiliar: Miguel Angel Asturias. A Latin American writer and diplomat, Asturias had won literature's highest prize in 1967. His name seemed to lack the resonance of Neruda, Garcia Marquez or Paz. But eight years before Garcia Marquez was born, and long before Autumn of the Patriarch, Asturias was crafting El Presidente, the blueprint for subsequent, sometimes more profitable works about injustice and corruption. Carlos Fuentes called it "the mother-rock from which the modern novel has sprung." A worthwhile discovery, indeed.

While there was much to see in Père Lachaise, I have sometimes found it necessary to search the entirety of some far-flung boneyard to locate a single noteworthy grave. That was the case nine years ago, when my wife and I spent Christmas in Zurich, Switzerland. Despite my wife's protestations, I was not going to leave without taking a trolley ride up the hill to Fluntern Cemetery to see James Joyce. I remembered the year I had my first full-time newspaper job, sweating through a summer in Alabama. I spent my spare time struggling with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, willing myself to be transported away from Dixie and into the dankness of Dublin town.

More than a decade later, when I arrived at the cemetery to glimpse Joyce's eternal earthly domain, I saw to my dismay that the whole area was covered with a blanket of snow. Then I recalled that Joyce's plot was adorned with a sculpture by Milton Hebald. After about 20 minutes, I found the ice-encrusted likeness of the author, which portrayed him sitting cross-legged, smoking a cigarette. I was exultant until somebody told me later that I had missed psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was buried in the same cemetery. But on the day I visited, I probably never would have found him.

A few years later, I found Joyce's contemporary, William Butler Yeats, ensconced near the table-top mountain after which he titled one of his last poems, "Under Ben Bulben." Within that bit of verse, Yeats essentially included all of the necessary instructions for his burial, right down to the epitaph: "Cast a Cold Eye on Life. On Death, Horseman Pass By." His fellow Irishmen went to great pains to honor Yeats's desire to be buried at the churchyard where his great-grandfather was once pastor. Yeats died in France and it took nine years to repatriate his body to County Sligo.

Across the border from Sligo, in Northern Ireland, I found a somewhat more intense graveyard scene. I had read a book titled Stone Cold, by journalist Martin Dillon, detailing the calculated sectarian slayings perpetrated by Protestant paramilitary gunman Michael Stone in Northern Ireland. Stone's suicidal career culminated when he showed up at an IRA funeral in 1988 and opened fire on the mourners. Although he was chased down by some of the survivors, he was rescued by the Royal Ulster Constabulary before Republican gunners could exact revenge.

On an overcast summer day in Belfast a decade later, my wife and I drove our small, rickety rental car toward the Falls Road District of West Belfast. I wanted to see Milltown Cemetery, where Stone had conducted his spree, and where Bobby Sands and many other IRA war casualties lay buried.

Within several blocks of Falls Road, we were detoured by a detachment of police standing next to an armored personnel carrier. A cease-fire was in effect, the peace process advancing slowly despite occasional flare-ups of violence. But high-flying police helicopters were surveying the scene and we were wondering whether we should have come.

As we reached Falls Road, a crowd was gathered on both sides. A fleet of black cabs was proceeding slowly down the street, each with a small pair of Irish tricolor flags bristling from the hood. Then, all of a sudden, a familiar sound: "Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they're the modern stone age family."

It was a Catholic street fair, Belfast style. After the Flintstones float, out popped former IRA boss turned politician Gerry Adams. He was shaking hands, working the crowd, just like Clinton and Bush would do. Then, lest we forget where we were, along came a float protesting the IRA prisoners being held outside Ireland. Atop the float were young children shouting insulting slogans about a British cabinet secretary.

We worked our way down the street to the gates of Milltown Cemetery. It was unlike any graveyard I'd ever seen. Once inside, we noticed a detachment of fatigue-clad constables with their automatic rifles. They kept watch over the parade until it ended in an adjacent park. Then they methodically retraced their steps back down the street to their heavily armored police barracks, watching the rooftops and brandishing their weapons as if a shot could ring out at any moment.

Large Celtic crosses dotted the overgrown cemetery, giving it a wild medieval appearance. When we reached the Republican plots, however, we found that area to be well maintained. There, in neat, carefully marked but unpretentious rows, were the last vestiges of innumerable hunger strikes, guerilla actions and police ambushes.

In two trips to Ireland, I've seen a lot of beautiful landscape. But the images that are most vivid in my mind come from that day in the Falls, walking into Milltown Cemetery and the surreal quality of the North. I'm glad I didn' t miss it.

Wade Stevens Ricks is a writer/producer who lives in the Boston area.

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