Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
LET’S TALK OF GRAVES, OF WORMS AND EPITAPHS
This is one of
those rather self-indulgent things I do every so often. I speak to you of some
personal peccadillo and hope you won’t notice that it is not really a universal
trait or worth your time of day.
Today’s
peccadillo is the way I sometimes like to hang around cemeteries, or graveyards
as I prefer to call them.
I do not think I
am a particularly morbid person. I am not always spotting the skull beneath the
skin, stressing over how the years move swift as the weaver’s shuttle or how
soon you and I will meet the Grim Reaper, or “the Distinguished Thing” as Henry James more touchingly called it.
Okay, so we will all die some day; but that does not make me don daily
sackcloth or fail to register the joys of life.
So I am not
morbid and I am not visiting graveyards as some sort of self-flagellatory memento mori.
Nor am I a Romantic
who associates graveyards with moonlight and spectres and the sound of the Danse Macabre. Of course it’s fun to
look at an old black-and-white horror film and see Frankenstein and his
assistant going to a very convincing Hollywood studio graveyard and digging up
a fresh corpse for resuscitation. Of course graveyard poetry and epitaphs and
funeral scenes in novels and movies are enjoyable in the way good ghost stories
are enjoyable. Long live Sheridan Le Fanu and Gothick fiction for all the
harmless diversion it brings. But my preferred time for a graveyard visit is not
by the light of the moon. It is in daylight or (preferably) near sunset when I
can work up a Thomas Gray or William Collins sort of mood.
So why do I like
graveyards?
Partly because
they are so quiet – places for reflection and also places to consider the dead
and give thanks for them and (without donning the sackcloth) getting a
perspective on my own life. My life is, after all, no more important than that
of these people who are now only bones, dust and worms’ excrement that might
stop a hole to keep the wind away.
It is no less
important either.
Partly, too, it
is the attraction of real folk art, for what are all those gravestones and
monuments and inscriptions if not the art of ordinary people who thought such
things important? Folk art.
I had early
training in the appreciation of graveyards, and here I will cannibalise myself.
Four years ago, I wrote a commissioned history of the Catholic diocese of
Auckland called Founders and Keepers.
I chose to begin it on a personal note by explaining that I grew up in a house
in the east Auckland suburb of Panmure. The house was equidistant between two
churches. However, I wrote:
“More important to my growing sense of
history… were graveyards. The Anglican church of St Matthias had a neat little
cemetery overlooking the part of the Tamaki Estuary that was bridged. As a
moody teenager, I found it the perfect place to sit and think or look at the
stars on evening mooches. The Catholic cemetery was between St Patrick’s church
and the part of the convent school attended by older boys and girls (the infant
classes were on ‘our’ side of the church). It sprawled down towards the Panmure
shopping centre. From the late nineteenth century, it had become the custom to
bury diocesan clergy and religious in this cemetery. So, after its earliest
years, it stored the mortal remains of very few laypeople, although my good
friend the craft-printer Ronald Holloway, and some members of his family, did
manage to get buried there. Rows of crosses commemorated priests, brothers,
sisters and nuns.
We would walk cheerfully through the
graveyard, on our way between home and school. Inevitably, as young
schoolchildren, we developed our own folklore about some of the inmates. One
grave had a cross with a photograph of the deceased priest on it, under a thick
plastic covering. There was a small dark spot of mildew on the plastic,
precisely over the priest’s left temple. I can still remember being young
enough to believe my brother’s tall story that the priest had been martyred and
that this spot showed the exact place where he had been shot.
In the south-west corner of the
cemetery, nearest the main church door, was the impressive grave of Bishop
Cleary, laid to rest in 1929. We would often irreverently scramble over the top
of it on our daily journeys to and from school – at least if we knew we were
not being watched by one of the Mission Sisters who taught us. The top of
Cleary’s monument was cruciform; that is, shaped like a cross lying down.
Again, I can just remember believing somebody who told me that this cross was
really the shape of an aeroplane, because Bishop Cleary often travelled by air.
It must have been a garbled version of something a grown-up had said about
Cleary being the pioneering ‘flying bishop’.
Directly across the road from the
Catholic cemetery lived a pious Anglican lady. Her father, long deceased, had
not had much time for the Catholic Church, but she did tell us how greatly the
same man admired Bishop Cleary for his charitable work during the lethal
‘influenza’ epidemic of 1918. For some years after Cleary’s death, she said, a
cat with a white tail had haunted the cemetery. Whenever she looked across the
road and saw the white tail bobbing between the crosses, her father would tell
her that it was the ghost of Bishop Cleary.”
Oh well, I
suppose a little bit of romanticism about graveyards did creep into those
childhood impressions.
Now when I am in
a foreign city, once I have exhausted the museums and art galleries, I do like
to visit the more illustrious graveyards. Here, there is the added attraction
of spotting the graves of the famous. A couple of times in Rome a decade ago, I
of course visited the Protestant Cemetery (“Protestant” here meaning anybody
not buried according to Catholic rites – including Eastern Orthodox Christians
and Jews and freethinkers) so that I could enjoy the cypresses and look at the
white pyramid outside the cemetery walls and hover around John Keats’ (unnamed)
grave with its epitaph to “one whose name
was writ in water”.
And this year,
more by accident than design, I visited the Montmartre cemetery in Paris. My
wife and I were heading, in a long trek on foot, across Paris from St Germain
des Pres to the peak of Montmartre in order to visit the Sacre Coeur basilica.
And en route we stumbled across the Montmartre cemetery. I know that when you
are in Paris, the cemetery you are supposed to visit is the vast Pere Lachaise,
but we had far from exhausted the city’s other attractions. Graveyards were not
yet on our agenda. Yet here one was right in front of us, and we couldn’t
forebear to go in and indulge ourselves.
It is much smaller
than the Pere Lachaise yet still huge by the standards of New Zealand graveyards.
Family vaults and tall monuments are organised into what amount to the city
blocks of a necropolis. A motor overpass (built about twenty years ago) goes
over one end of the graveyard, but it has disturbed none of the graves and
there are acres and acres to walk with just the sky above. And of course there
are stray cats slinking about, sunning themselves or waiting to kill sparrows
and cadge food.
When we entered
the graveyard, I could think of only one person who was buried there –
Alphonsine Plessis, who styled herself “Marie du Plessis”, the kept woman, or
prostitute to the carriage trade, who died at the age of 23 after having
inspired Alexandre Dumas fils to
write La Dame aux Camelias. I knew she
was buried at Montmartre because I had just been researching, for Opera New
Zealand, a programme note on Plessis for their production of Verdi’s La Traviata, which was based on Dumas’
novel. So of course we found out where Plessis’ monument was and made our way
there and photographed it. We bumped into a middle-aged Frenchman who insisted
on telling us who he thought the most illustrious corpses were. He talked up
the nouvelle vague film actor
Jean-Claude Brialy, who is buried near Plessis. To humour him I took a
photograph of Brialy’s inscription and hoped the gentleman would go away. But
instead he launched into a long account of the Egyptian-French pop singer who
styled herself “Dalida”, also buried at Montmrtre. He seemed shocked that we
had never heard of her. He gave us complicated directions on how to find her
grave. We thanked him and mercifully at this point he went away.
We ignored his
directions as we were in search of better game.
A directory at
the cemetery’s entrance has told us how we could find the graves of the film
directors Francois Truffaut and Henri-Georges Clouzot. We searched diligently
and failed to find them. Only when we were leaving, some hours later, did we
realize we had misread the directions and were looking in the wrong city block
of the necropolis. But, serendipity,
Dearie me. This
hasn’t been a very edifying tour, has it? I began by saying I would tell you
why I find graveyards attractive, and I end up giving you a list of names like
any head-hunter. I do also note one thing this Parisian graveyard has in common
with the Protestant cemetery in Rome. The largest and most eye-arresting
monuments – especially the family vaults – tend to belong to people who are
forgotten by history, mainly the families of wealthy businesspeople, capitalists
and property owners.
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