WE DON’ T make a habit of visiting celebrity graves, especially literary ones, but there’s no doubt they add much cause for thought to any expedition at home or abroad.
The first “celebrity” grave that I saw was that of WB Yeats, in the churchyard at Drumcliff, in the shadow of Ben Bulben in Co Sligo. He had been buried there in 1948 after being repatriated from the south of France, where he had died nine years previously. I was struck by the “ horseman” quotation on the gravestone, which has since become something of a literary cliché. I was a teenager at the time, rather a long time ago, and then, and as now, addicted to the poetry of Yeats.
But the next literary grave that I saw was infinitely more romantic, that of Keats, in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. I was 17, it was my first time in the city, and my visit to what is officially called the “non- Catholic cemetery for foreigners at Testaccio” was extraordinarily moving.
Keats’s grave bears the inscription “Here lies one whose name was writ on water”. He had died in Rome in 1821, aged just 25, as he sought a cure for TB.
The following year, the ashes of another great poet, Shelley, were interred here. The cemetery, with its cypress trees, masses of other greenery and flowers and its colony of cats, is very serene and peaceful.
(The cats, incidentally, have their own website, www.igattidellapiramide.it). Its tranquillity had inspired Shelley to write that it might make one in love with death to be buried in so sweet a place.
Much later, I found a visit to the grave of James Joyce in Zurich even more evocative. Joyce, who knew the city well, returned there after he and his family had to flee Paris in 1940, as that part of France fell to the Nazi occupation. Joyce was only in Zurich a short time when he became seriously ill and was operated on for a perforated duodenum. He died at about 2.15am on January 13th, 1941, and was buried in a non-religious ceremony in the Friedhof Fluntern in Zurich. Later, he was joined there by his wife Nora and son Giorgio.
One cold, damp winter’s morning, we took a tram from the centre of Zurich up to the heights of the Zürichberg suburb, close to the zoo, to go grave hunting. There was the life-size statue of Joyce, created in 1966 by the American sculptor, Milton Hebald, depicting Joyce sitting cross- legged, reading a book. We were amused to see, in the palm of his hand, an Irish coin that had evidently been there for years; had this been Dublin, it would have lasted no length of time.
Next to our favourite European city, Paris, where during one trip, we travelled out to the Père Lachaise cemetery in the rather grimy 20th arrondissement. The place is vast, with a galaxy of stars buried there, Balzac, Proust, Piaf, Jim Morrison,
to name but four from a cast of thousands. Yet in this vast city of the dead, it’s impossible to miss the tomb of Oscar Wilde. Wilde had died, aged 46, on November 30th, 1900, in the seedy Hôtel d’Alsace in the sixth arrondissement.
Today, the hotel has been suitably gentrified, as L’Hôtel, and people can pay good money to stay in the suite where Wilde was once a guest, the place where he said that either he or the wallpaper had to go. The wallpaper survived.
His modernistic tomb was created by Jacob Epstein and has been defiled by graffiti over the years. The sphinx on the side of the tomb was vandalised at one stage and the penis was hacked off, only to be replaced in 2000 by a sterling silver prosthetic. What a pity Wilde wasn’t around to deliver one of his epigrams! After the hurly- burly and the social animation of Père Lachaise, where many local families go to picnic, we found the Cimetière Montparnasse in the 14th, the burial place of Beckett and his wife, Suzanne, austere and clinical, close to where they had lived, very much the resting place of the haute bourgeouisie. Beckett had decreed that his gravestone could be any colour, so long as it was grey. The shiny stone top bears the name of Beckett and his wife, the woman who had saved his life when he was stabbed by a Paris pimp in 1938; Beckett and his wife both died in 1989.
Over the years, we've seen other celebrity graves, such as that of Richard Burton, the actor, in Céligny in Switzerland, where he was buried in 1984 in a red suit, to signify his Welshness, accompanied by a copy of the collected poems of Dylan Thomas. We were staying in Lausanne at the time, got off the Lausanne to Geneva train at the small station of Céligny, beside Lake Geneva or Lac Léman; and climbed the hill to the village's tree-shrouded vieux cimetière.
On another occasion, this time in Germany, we saw the grave of Richard Wagner and his wife, Cosima, a daughter of Liszt, at the Wahnfried, the Wagners’ villa in Bayreuth, Bavaria. Inside,we listened to early recordings of Kirsten Flagstad, the great Norwegian dramatic soprano. Outside, the sun was streaming down and so too was a hail of jinny-joes. It was a memorable moment, in contrast to the bleak formality of the Wagner grave outside in the back garden.
All these graveside trips inculcate a strong tide of history, yet are strangely life affirming. Once, quite a number of years ago, when I was recording a radio interview with Douglas Gageby, a former editor of this newspaper, he rather startled me when he said at one point, in his matter-of-fact way, that at that time he and his wife Dorothy had long since planned to be buried in Clifden, Co Galway, a place that had particular resonances for them. Now that I’m that much much older, I view such utterances with much more understanding.
We’re not finished yet; we still have another grave in mind; that of Patrick O’Brian, that great master of the maritime novel, who pretended he was Irish. He died in a hotel on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin in 2000 but is buried in the extraordinary seaside town of Collioure in south-west France. We know Collioure well, but the last time we were there, O’Brian was alive and well, living and working in Collioure; already, I can feel the urge for another trip taking shape.