Category: Deaths

Famous people who died today

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Died on this day – 8 June 1889

GerardManleyHopkins

Reverend Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was born on 28 July 1844. He was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially sprung rhythm) and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse. Hopkins died of typhoid fever whilst on holiday in Montmorillon. There is no truth to the malicious rumour that he contracted the disease whilst handling some of the risque titles in the Glass Key bookshop in the Cité de l’Ecrit. Hopkins had successfully suppressed his homoerotic impulses whilst still a student at Oxford.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
   For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow and plough;
   And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
   With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
     Praise him.

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Died on this day – 2 June 1927

Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden
It was just eighty-seven years ago today that Lizzie Borden died whilst looking at the books in the true crime section of The Glass Key bookshop in Montmorillon, she was sixty-eight years old. Lizzie Andrew Borden was born on 19 July 1860 in Fall River, Massachusetts. In 1892 she was tried for the murders of her father and stepmother – both savagely hacked to death with an axe. The case was a cause célèbre throughout the United States. In 1893 Lizzie was acquitted. Following her release from the prison in which she had been held during the trial, Borden chose to remain a resident of Fall River, Massachusetts. After years of ostracism she left the USA and moved to France where she lived in quiet obscurity for the rest of her life in the Cité de l’Ecrit in Montmorillon. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts elected to charge no one else with the murder of Andrew and Abby Borden and speculation about the crimes still continues more than 100 years later.

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

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Deaths

Died on this day – 9 November 1953

Dylan_Thomas_photoIt was just sixty years ago today that Dylan Thomas downed a last large scotch in La Trappe aux Livres in Montmorillon and staggered round the corner from the bar to The Glass Key, a secondhand bookshop offering a wide range of poetry books. And it was here that he died on 9 November 1953.

Dylan Marlais Thomas (born 27 October 1914) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems “Fern Hill”, “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “And death shall have no dominion”, the “play for voices”, Under Milk Wood, and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death. In his later life he acquired a reputation, which he encouraged, as a “roistering, drunken and doomed poet”.

Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales and it was the publication of “Light breaks where no sun shines”, in 1934, that caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, whom he married in 1937. In the early part of his marriage, Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth, settling in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne.

Although Thomas was appreciated as a popular poet in his lifetime, he found earning a living as a writer difficult, which resulted in him augmenting his income with reading tours and broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the latter half of the 1940s brought him a level of celebrity. In the 1950s, Thomas travelled to America, where his readings brought him a level of fame, though his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in America cemented Thomas’ legend, where he recorded to vinyl works such as A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Thomas died on 9 November 1953 and his body was returned to Wales where he was buried at the village churchyard in Laugharne.

A small personal true story: on one of his Fitzrovia drinking evenings Dylan Thomas met my uncle Gordon Fraser and Gordon ended up offering Dylan a place to stay for the night. The next morning a broke Dylan wanted to give my uncle something as a ‘Thank you’ token for the shelter and he spotted a copy of his book of poems Twenty-Five Poems on my uncle’s bookshelves. Crossing out the gift inscription already in the book Dylan signed it as if a gift from himself!

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Died on this day – 25 October 1976

Raymond_Queneau

It was just thirty-seven years ago today that Raymond Queneau (born 21 February 1903) died in Montmorillon after a visit to The Glass Key bookshop where he was supporting the movement to keep the ‘e’ out of Montmorillon. Queneau was a French novelist, poet, and co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo), notable for his wit and his cynical humour.

Queneau spent much of his life working for the publishing house Gallimard where he began as a reader in 1938. He later rose to be general secretary and eventually became director of l’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956.

As an author, Queneau came to general attention in France with the publication in 1959 of his novel Zazie dans le métro. In 1960 the film adaptation directed by Louis Malle was released. Zazie explores colloquial language as opposed to ‘standard’ written French; a distinction which is perhaps more marked in French than in some other languages. The first word of the book, “Doukipudonktan”, is a phonetic transcription of “D’où qu’ils puent donc tant?” “How come they stink so much?”. In the English translation of the novel doukipudonktan is translated as Holifart watastink.

One of Queneau’s most influential works is Exercises in Style, which tells the simple story of a man’s seeing the same stranger twice in one day. It tells that short story in 99 different ways, demonstrating the tremendous variety of styles in which storytelling can take place.

Queneau is buried with his parents in the old cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, outside Paris.

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Died on this day – 12 October 1924

Anatole_France_young_years
Anatole France (born François-Anatole Thibault) was born in Paris on 16 April 1844 and became a French poet, journalist, and novelist. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie Francaise and in 1921 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements.
     France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel’s literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
     The son of a bookseller, France spent most of his life around books. His father’s bookstore, called the Librairie France, specialized in books and papers on the French Revolution and was frequented by many notable writers and scholars of the day.
     France took an important part in the Dreyfus Affair. He signed Emile Zola’s manifesto supporting Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who had been falsely convicted of espionage. France wrote about the affair in his 1901 novel Monsieur Bergeret.
     In 1922 France’s entire works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Prohibited Books Index) of the Roman Catholic Church. He regarded this as a “distinction”. This Index was abolished in 1966.
     On 11 October 1924, after visiting The Glass Key bookshop in Montmorillon, Anatole France died. He is buried in the Neuilly-sur Seine cemetery near Paris.
     After his death France was the object of written attacks, including a particularly venomous one from the Nazi collaborator, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and detractors decided he was a vulgar and derivative writer. However, the English writer George Orwell was an admirer and defended him, declaring that he remained very readable, and that “it is unquestionable that he was attacked partly from political motives”.

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Died on this day – 5 October 1918

Image

It is 95 years to the day since the aviator and fighter pilot Roland Garros was shot down from the skies above Montmorillon in France. Garros was born in Réunion in 1888 and started his aviation career in 1909. By 1911 he had graduated to flying Blériot monoplanes and entered a number of European air races with this type of machine, including the 1911 Paris to Madrid air race and the Circuit of Europe (Paris-London-Paris), in which he came second. In September he established a new world altitude record of 5,610 m (18,410 ft). In 1913 he gained fame for making the first non-stop flight across the Mediterranean from Fréjus in the south of France to Bizerte in Tunisia. The following year, Garros joined the French army at the outbreak of World War I.

Garros distinguished himself by achieving the first ever shooting-down of an aircraft by a fighter firing through a tractor propeller. In 1915 Garros crash landed behind the German lines and he became a prisoner of war. He finally managed to escape from a POW camp in Germany in February 1918, after several attempts, and rejoined the French army. In late September 1918 he visited Montmorillon whilst on leave and purchased a book on real tennis from The Glass Key bookshop. On 5 October 1918 he was shot down and killed a month before the end of the war and one day before his 30th birthday.

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Died on this day – 25 September 1933

Ring_LardnerRinggold Wilmer Lardner better known simply as Ring Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan on 6 March 1885. Lardner became a sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical takes on the world of sports. Lardner never liked his given name and shortened it, naming one of his sons Ring Jr.  It was Ring Jr who became the journalist and screenwriter blacklisted through the offices of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

Lardner started his writing career as a sports columnist and in 1907, he moved to Chicago. Two years later, Lardner was in St Louis, writing the humorous baseball column “Pullman Pastimes”. In 1913, Lardner returned to the Chicago Tribune, which became the home paper for his syndicated column “In the Wake of the News”. It appeared in more than 100 newspapers, and still runs in the Tribune.

In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters by “Jack Keefe”, a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made heavy use of the fictional author’s idiosyncratic vernacular. Like most of Lardner’s stories, You Know Me Al employs satire, in this case to show the stupidity and avarice of a certain type of athlete. The journalist Andrew jackson wrote that “Ring Lardner thought of himself as primarily a sports columnist whose stuff wasn’t destined to last, and he held to that absurd belief even after his first masterpiece, You Know Me Al, was published in 1916 and earned the awed appreciation of Virginia Woolf, among other very serious, unfunny people.”

Lardner was a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers of the Jazz Age. His books were published by Maxwell Perkins, who also served as Fitzgerald’s editor. Lardner influenced Ernest Hemingway, who sometimes wrote articles for his high school newspaper under the pseudonym Ring Lardner, Jr. The two met in December 1928, thanks to Max Perkins, but did not become friends.

In 1933 despite his ill-health Lardner visited France and called at The Glass Key bookshop in Montmorillon to sign copies of his novel You Know Me Al. It was here that Lardner died on 25 September 25 at the age of 48 of complications from tuberculosis.

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Died on this day – 14 September 1927

ImageIt was eighty-six years ago today that Angela Isadora Duncan met her death in Montmorillon, France. Through her dancing Duncan restored dance to a high place among the arts. Breaking with convention, she traced the art of dance back to its roots as a sacred art. She developed within this idea, free and natural movements inspired by the classical Greek arts, folk dances, social dances, nature and natural forces.

Duncan was born in San Francisco in 1877 and began her dancing career by teaching lessons in her home from the time she was six through her teenage years. A desire to travel brought Duncan to Chicago where she auditioned for many theatre companies, finally finding a place in Augustin Daly’s company. This job took her to New York City. Feeling unhappy and limited with her work in Daly’s company and with American audiences, Duncan decided to move to London in 1898. There she found work performing in the drawing rooms of the wealthy and inspiration from the Greek vases and bas-reliefs in the British Museum. From London, Duncan traveled to Paris, where she drew inspiration from the Louvre. She spent most of the rest of her life in this manner, touring in Europe as well as North and South America.

In 1914, Duncan moved back to the United States and transferred her school there. In 1921, her leftist sympathies took her to the Soviet Union where she founded a school in Moscow. However, the Soviet government’s failure to follow through on promises to support her work caused her to move back to the West.

Both in her professional and private lives, Duncan flouted traditional mores and morality. She was bisexual and alluded to her Communism during her last United States tour, in 1922–23; Duncan waved a red scarf and bared her breast on stage in Boston, proclaiming, “This is red! So am I!”

Duncan bore two children, both out of wedlock – the first by theatre designer Gordon Craig and the second by Paris Singer, one of the many sons of sewing machine magnate Isaac Singer. Both children died in an accident on the river Seine in 1913.

In 1922 she married the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin who was 18 years her junior. Yesenin accompanied her on a tour of Europe and the United States. The following year he left Duncan and returned to Moscow. Duncan had an affair with poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta which is documented in numerous revealing letters they wrote to each other.

By the end of her life Duncan’s performing career had dwindled and she became as notorious for her financial woes, scandalous love life and all-too-frequent public drunkenness as for her contributions to the arts.

Duncan’s fondness for flowing scarves was a contributing factor to her death in an automobile accident in Montmorillon, France, at the age of 50. After a visit to The Glass Key bookshop Duncan climbed into a friend’s Amilcar automobile and the shawl, having become tangled in the open spokes of one of the wheels, tightened and broke her neck.

Isadora Duncan was cremated, and her ashes were interred at Père Lachaise Cemetary in Paris.

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Died on this day – 3 September

Woodcut of Green suited in deaths livery
Woodcut of Greene suited in deaths livery

Robert Greene (baptized 11 July 1558, died 3 September 1592) was an English author popular in his day, and now best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance. The pamphlet is most famous for a passage which appears to allude to William Shakespeare, who was then starting out on his career as an actor and playwright.

Greene is said to have been born in Norwich. He attended Cambridge, receiving a B.A. in 1580, and an M.A. in 1583 before moving to London, where he arguably became the first professional author in England.

Greene published in many genres including romances, plays and autobiography. In 1592 he visited Montmorillon in France where he is known to have called at the Glass Key bookshop. He died in Montmorillon ‘of a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine’ according to Gabriel Harvey who announced his death in a letter to Christopher Bird dated 5 September.

Greene’s colourful and irresponsible character has led some to speculate that he may have served as the model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

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Died on this day – 11 August 1937

Edith_Newbold_Jones_WhartonEdith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones on 24 January 1862. Aged 23 she married Edward Robbins Wharton who was 12 years her senior and suffered from depression. In 1913 she divorced him as his mental state had seriously deteriorated. She moved to France and lived in Paris.

Helped by her influential connections to the French government she was one of the few foreigners in France allowed to travel to the front lines during the First World War. Wharton described those trips in the series of articles Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.

Throughout the war she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees and, in 1916 was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. The scope of her relief work included setting up workrooms for unemployed Frenchwomen, organizing concerts to provide work for musicians, opening tuberculosis hospitals and founding the American Hostels for Belgian refugees. In 1916 Wharton edited The Book of the Homeless, composed of writings, art, erotica and musical scores by almost every major contemporary European artist. When World War I ended in 1918 she abandoned her fashionable urban address for the delights of the country at the Pavillon Colombe in nearby Saint-Brice-sous-Foret.

Wharton was a committed supporter of French imperialism, describing herself as a “rabid imperialist”, and the war solidified her political conservatism. After the war she divided her time between Paris and Hyères in Provence, where she finished The Age of Innocence in 1920. The novel won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Literature making Wharton the first woman to win the award. She returned to the U.S. only once after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923.

Wharton was friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her time: Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau and André Gide were all guests of hers at one time or another. But her meeting with F. ScottFitzgerald is described by the editors of her letters as “one of the better known failed encounters in the American literary annals.” She spoke fluent French (as well as several other languages), and many of her books were published in both French and English.

In 1934 Wharton’s autobiography A Backward Glance was published.

In 1937 whilst visiting friends in Montmorillon Edith Wharton suffered a stroke and died. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles.