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 in her heart and line of vision for all time.
Meeting Eugene O’Neill was quite 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