Where Are They Buried? (59 page)

Steamboat traffic dried up with the commencement of the Civil War’s river blockade in 1861, and Mark, whose sympathies in those days were with the South, hurried to Hannibal and enlisted with a company of rangers. But, after a few cheerless weeks, and with no one yet to fight, Mark deserted and, along with thousands of others avoiding the War, moved west. Landing in San Francisco, Mark returned to journalism for the duration of the war.

By 1866, he was in New York City working as a correspondent aboard the
Quaker City
steamer, which was departing for a voyage to Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Before he left, he compiled his writings from his western days and arranged for the publication of his first book,
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches
. Mark returned from the eight-month trip to find that
Calaveras
had been a success, and the next year he published a book of his travel letters from the
Quaker City
voyage,
Innocents Abroad
.

Between 1873 and 1889, Mark settled in Hartford for a period of concentrated writing. These were his most productive years and he completed seven novels, including the childhood classics
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
,
Life On the Mississippi
, and his masterpiece,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. In these novels, in which he wove colloquial language through socially intimate storylines, Mark Twain captured the era’s rhythms and by 1890, stood among the greatest character writers in the literary world.

For most of his final decade, having outlived his wife and three children, Mark resided in New York City in the company of dignitaries, usually appearing in his trademark white linen suit. Though he continued to write for the remainder of his life, none of his subsequent works ever approached the popularity of his Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn tales.

Mark had been born with Halley’s Comet clearly visible in the heavens, and he predicted he’d “go out with the comet.” While it streaked through the skies almost 75 years later, Mark slipped into a coma and died of angina pectoris. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-17, take Exit 56 and follow Church Street 1¾ miles to Walnut Street. Turn right and, after about a mile, Walnut Street ends at the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and turn at the second right. Then turn at the second left and stop. The Twain plot is on the right.

MARCH 30, 1853 – JULY 29, 1890

Though painter Vincent van Gogh’s work became an important bridge for modern painting between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was almost wholly unknown during his brief lifetime and, of his more than 1,500 paintings and drawings, he sold just one of them.

The son of a Protestant minister, Vincent alternately worked at his uncle’s art dealership, clerked at a bookshop, studied theology at the University of Amsterdam, and served as a lay missionary until he was 27. Then, in 1880, Vincent attended a Brussels school and chose art as a vocation, which he considered to be his spiritual calling.

Interested in the poor and dispossessed, Vincent concentrated on depicting miners and peasants in his so-called Dutch period, between 1880 and 1886. But, except for one picture,
The Potato Eaters
, his works from that period display few hints of the talent that was growing within.

By 1886 Vincent was drawn to the bohemian life and artistic activity of Paris and went to live there with his brother, Theo, who directed a small gallery in the city. Through contacts provided by Theo, he met the leaders of impressionism—Monet, Pissarro, and
Gauguin. Under their influence, Vincent was persuaded to adopt more brilliant hues and change his subject matter to more typical impressionist themes such as the cafés and cityscapes reflected in works like
Restaurant de la Sirene at Asnieres
.

Vincent painted in Paris for almost two years and, though his palette was liberated, he wearied of the city’s frenetic energy and its long months of winter, and he left for southern France. In Arles, Vincent worked feverishly to capture the rustic life of the Provence region; he applied colors in simplified, highly saturated masses, and his images became more virile and incisive than ever before. Among the masterpieces of his Arles period are
Still Life with Sunflowers
and
Night Café
.

In the fall of 1888 Gauguin moved to Arles in an effort to work more closely with Vincent. But by this time Vincent had begun to experience maddening blackouts and seizures, which historians today speculate may have been caused by epilepsy or syphilis. Whatever van Gogh’s affliction, he and Gauguin often fell into violent quarrels. Finally, in an irrational fit of anger, Vincent mutilated the lower portion of his left ear with a razor and brought the severed lobe to a brothel, where he presented it to a woman there. Gauguin left immediately for Paris and the two never met again.

By May 1889, some of the citizens of Arles had become alarmed by Vincent’s increasingly bizarre behavior and after a group petitioned their concerns to the city’s board, Vincent volunteered to have himself confined. At the St. Remy asylum, Vincent soon resumed painting at his feverish pace and in this period was drawn to natural objects under stress, such as whirling suns and twisted cypress trees. His colors lost their intensity, his lines became restless, and he applied the paint more thickly and violently, as in one of his best-known works,
Starry Night
, an obsessively beautiful exercise in circularity.

A year after being admitted to St. Remy, Vincent left to live near Theo again, this time in Auvers. Here he produced his last painting,
Wheat Field with Crows
, a disturbing struggle of savage brush strokes supercharged with crows, a universal symbol of death. A few days after its completion, Vincent set out his easel and painting materials in a wheat field and shot himself in the chest. The bullet did not kill him, however, and he staggered back to his room and collapsed in bed. Two days later, Vincent died in Theo’s arms.

Vincent and Theo were very close, even for brothers, and corresponded constantly through letters. These letters form a uniquely human biographical record, and the 700 of them
authored by Vincent provide a vivid historical account of his hopes and disappointments as his physical and mental states fluctuated. Six months after Vincent’s death at 37, Theo, the grief-stricken brother, died at 33.

Now, you may well be wondering where did the brothers then Gogh? Theo was buried in Utrecht in the Netherlands, but, almost 25 years later, his wife had him reinterred alongside Vincent. They now both rest at the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise, France, a sleepy little town on the banks of the Oise, one of the tributaries of the Seine, just north of Paris.

AUGUST 6, 1928 – FEBRUARY 22, 1987

Andy Warhol is considered the creator of Pop Art. His paintings and prints of presidents, movie stars, and other American icons—coupled with a keen talent for attracting publicity—earned him a following that still regards him as one of the most important artists of the modern era. Indeed, that his art could even maintain the interest of a notoriously fickle public for all these years is testimony to his dominion.

Throughout the fifties, Warhol worked as a commercial artist in New York City, but by the early sixties he hung up his brush and turned exclusively to hard-edged images made in the medium of silkscreen print (which he pioneered). The results were the depersonalized images that would become his trademark. Producing a portrait of cans of Campbell’s Soup wasn’t his only radical act; he also adapted a means of producing the images en masse; a new consumer art had effectively mimicked both the process and look of consumer culture.

Although himself shy and quiet, Andy attracted dozens of disciples who were anything but introverted, and their energy combined with his genius to produce a number of notorious events throughout his career. His Manhattan studio, the Factory, became a chic hangout for like-minded artists, musicians, fashion mavens, and movie stars, as well as the usual hangers-on and groupies who flocked to the new jet-set scene. Andy also produced underground films, some of which attempted to redefine our ideas of boredom and repetition; one showed 33 minutes of someone having his hair cut and another featured a follower, Edie Sedgwick, talking about herself through out-of-focus frames. Later, a rejected disciple shot Andy, who was momentarily declared dead, but Andy the survivor recuperated and thrived for two more decades.

At 58, Andy died of complications after a relatively routine gallbladder operation and was buried at Saint John the Baptist Catholic Cemetery in Castle Shannon, Pennsylvania.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
In this village seven miles south of Pittsburgh, this cemetery is easy to find at the corner of Route 88 and Connor Road. If you proceed south along Route 88, you won’t miss it on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Directly behind the office, up the grassy hill and six rows from the chain-link fence, is the Warhol plot. (Incidentally, Andy’s given family name was Warhola, but in 1949 a magazine crediting his work misspelled his name. He decided to make the change permanent.)

JULY 11, 1899 – OCTOBER 1, 1985

Known more commonly by his initials than by his given first name, literary stylist Elwyn Brooks White graduated from Cornell University in 1921 and soon joined the staff of the newly established
New Yorker
magazine. In a crisp and graceful style, E.B. churned out hundreds of essays advocating respect for nature and a simple life, detailing the complexities and failures of technological society, questioning the merits of organized religion, and celebrating internationalism. He married the magazine’s literary editor, Kathryn Sergeant Angell, and continued to contribute to the publication for the remainder of his life.

E.B. first gained wide fame in 1929 when he copublished
Is Sex Necessary?
with colleague James Thurber. But it was the children’s books that he wrote that brought him the most accolades. In 1945 he depicted an independent mouse child in
Stuart Little
. A few years later came
Charlotte’s Web
and its barnyard friendships. And in 1970 a mute swan found his voice in
The Trumpet of the Swan
.

In 1939 E.B. moved to a farm in Maine and continued writing without the responsibilities of a regular job. He never stopped loving New York, calling it “a riddle in steel and stone,” but he also foresaw the vulnerability of the city when he wrote in 1949’s
Here is New York
, “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate millions. Of all targets New York
has a certain clear priority in the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning.”

In 1978 E.B. was awarded a special Pulitzer citation for his body of work and he died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease a few years later. At 86, he was buried at the Brooklin Cemetery in Brooklin, Maine.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 1, take Route 15 and then Route 175 into Brooklin. Just before the center of town you’ll see the cemetery on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Side by side under twin gray tombstones you can find the graves of E.B. and Kathryn. They’re all the way in the back, under the oak tree near the maintenance sheds.

MAY 31, 1819 – MARCH 26, 1892

Born to an undistinguished Long Island family, Walt Whitman had almost no formal education but, by self-teaching through immersion in Shakespeare and Dante, he became a schoolteacher at seventeen. By his early 20s Walt moved into journalism and, though he published some of his writings, by his 30s he had still not displayed the slightest hint of any unique talent or vision.

It’s difficult, then, to account for Walt’s sudden transformation from hack writer into revolutionary poet. But, somehow, at 36, Walt distinguished himself when he self-published a slim volume of poetry,
Leaves of Grass
, in 1855. The twelve poems in his first edition were plain and simple celebrations of the explosive joy of living, and they seemed to have come from nowhere. Their style was connected to nothing else being written at that time or any other; Walt had turned his back on literary models of the past and virtually ignored meter and rhyme. Stressing the rhythms of native American speech, Walt delighted in colloquial and slang expressions. His ideas were as sexually frank as diary entries.

Walt received little attention and even less money for his groundbreaking
Leaves of Grass
. But by the time he added twenty more poems for its second issue, and an additional 146 that appeared in his “new Bible” third printing, he had created controversy for readers, whose attentions had by then turned to the Civil War’s battlefields. Walt was enormously impacted by the Civil War, and
he published his reminiscences in a publication he called
Drum-Taps
. With aesthetic simplicity, these poems captured the horror and anguish of the war, and they too were later folded into
Leaves of Grass
, which by the end of Walt’s life had been issued in nine different editions.