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July 24, 2006
TT: It's my party
I made my will last week. Not to worry--I'm as healthy as a middle-aged horse--but in light of my recent illness, it seemed prudent to ensure that my worldly goods, such as they are, will be properly distributed should my cardiologist turn out to have been wrong about my future prospects.Making a will is an uncomplicated affair for those who, like me, are neither rich nor overly endowed with possessions. I do, however, own forty works of art (not counting my cel set-up from The Cat Concerto), and at one point I considered leaving them en bloc to some small regional museum whose permanent collection is weak on the American moderns. In the end, though, I decided it would be more appropriate for me to share some of the vast pleasure I've derived from living with art. I'm leaving two of my most treasured objects, Milton Avery's March at a Table and John Marin's Downtown. The El, to the Phillips Collection as a gesture of gratitude to my favorite museum. The rest will go to friends and family members.
It took me two days to figure out who was to get what. By the time I was done, I felt so ceremonial that I started drawing up a list of music to be played at my funeral. At that point my sense of humor finally kicked in, and I found myself recalling this passage from Boswell's Life of Johnson:
I have known him at times exceedingly diverted at what seemed to others a very small sport. He now laughed immoderately, without any reason that we could perceive, at our friend's making his will; called him the TESTATOR, and added, "I dare say, he thinks he has done a mighty thing. He won't stay till he gets home to his seat in the country, to produce this wonderful deed: he'll call up the landlord of the first inn on the road; and, after a suitable preface upon mortality and the uncertainty of life, will tell him that he should not delay making his will; and here, Sir, will he say, is my will, which I have just made, with the assistance of one of the ablest lawyers in the kingdom; and he will read it to him (laughing all the time). He believes he has made this will; but he did not make it: you, Chambers, made it for him. I trust you have had more conscience than to make him say, ‘being of sound understanding;' ha, ha, ha! I hope he has left me a legacy. I'd have his will turned into verse, like a ballad."
Mr. Chambers did not by any means relish this jocularity upon a matter of which pars magna fuit, and seemed impatient till he got rid of us. Johnson could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till we got without the Temple-gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter, that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch.
Is there a more revealing anecdote in all of Boswell? Better than anyone else, Dr. Johnson understood the vanity of human wishes, so it was wholly typical of him to find the blackest of humor in so grave an undertaking as the making of a will. I know just what he had in mind when he laughed uncontrollably at the puffed-up presumptuousness of poor Mr. Chambers, the TESTATOR--yet even so, I felt the need to do as Mr. Chambers did. Anyone who thinks knowledge leads to wisdom hasn't lived long enough.
I don't claim to be wiser than the next man, but my sense of humor is at least as healthy as my heart, so I've scrapped my plans for the Terry Teachout Memorial Concert. Should a pianist happen to be present when the time comes, I'd like her to play Aaron Copland's Down a Country Lane. (Remember that, Heather.) The rest I'll leave to whoever is in charge of disposing of my earthly remains, with the caveat that she keep it simple. I've never cared for funerals, nor do I wish to burden my friends with the chore of attending an elaborate one.
Neither did H.L. Mencken, whose bald, uncomforting obsequies I described in The Skeptic:
The next day, a small band of family, friends, and colleagues joined August, Gertrude, and Charlie [Mencken] in the chapel of a Hollins Street funeral parlor to say goodbye. Hamilton Owens led a delegation from the Sunpapers; Alfred Knopf and James Cain represented the world of literature; a sprinkling of Saturday Night Club members was on hand, including Ed Moffett, the oldest surviving member, and Louis Cheslock, who had seen more of Mencken in the past eight years than anyone other than August and his servants. In 1927 he had issued a "clarion call to poets" for an agnostic funeral service that was "free from the pious but unsupported asseverations that revolt so many of our best minds, and yet remains happily graceful and consoling," but none having obliged, his final instructions to August were passed on to Hamilton Owens. "August asked me to stand up for a few minutes," Owens told the mourners, "and repeat what most of you already know. His brother Henry, orally and in writing, said he wanted no funeral service of any kind. All he wanted was that a few of his old friends gather together and see him off on his last journey. That we are doing."
It did little to ease their sorrow. "Somehow, we were made to subserve a gag," Cain recalled, "and the effect wasn't so much bleak as blank." Cain, Owens, Knopf, and Frank Kent went straight from the funeral parlor to Marconi's, there to drown their sorrows in loud reminiscence, while August and Charlie accompanied the coffin to Loudon Park Cemetery, where it was cremated and the ashes placed in the family plot next to those of Sara. Mencken had gone there in 1945, ten years after her death, and gazed at the lone white marble stone that bore the family coat-of-arms and the names and dates of the dead. "There is room left for all the rest of us," he wrote in his diary that day. "My own name will be there soon enough."
That's carrying simplicity a bit too far. What I'd like is for the thirty-odd friends to whom I'm leaving the Teachout Museum to gather at my apartment, drink a toast, strip the walls, then go home and hang up their booty. That's my kind of funeral--complete with party favors.
Posted July 24, 2006 12:00 PM
