Laudator Temporis Acti

Dear Mike,

Venter tardus might have been the undoing of Durrell as it probably was of Evelyn Waugh. I'm ... far from my books but I seem to remember that both Durrell and Waugh died enthroned. Whether the veins of their temples were engorged with the strain, we'll never know. Both would have revelled in the scene if only they weren't themselves the hapless crappers.

[....]

Best wishes,
Eric [Thomson]

Ian S. MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 688:

The next morning Larry was up as usual, his morning coffee soon followed by glasses of wine. Françoise departed to see her youngest, Edouard, off to school and to run errands. Pierre, her middle son, was in the house with Larry. Around 11.30 Larry shuffled into the bathroom; after some moments, Pierre heard a thump and called to him. When there was no response, he pushed the door open. Larry lay on the floor, unmoving. His face was a raspberry colour. Pierre fetched Françoise from her flat across the road, and the doctor was summoned: there was nothing to be done, he said, and Larry soon stopped breathing. It appeared that a massive cerebral haemorrhage had felled him. Larry had often said that he wanted to die 'on my feet, with all systems working': this would be the ideal Buddhist death, with the dying person alert and fully conscious of the process of death. Apparently Larry was cheated: the man who had prepared for death throughout his life was surprised by it, ignominiously, in the homely act of relieving himself. Perhaps it was not so inappropriate after all. God, as Larry and Pursewarden both appreciated, is a humorist.

Martin Stannard, "A Matter of Life and Death," in Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley, edd., Writing the Lives of Writers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 1-18 (at 13-14):

Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh's first biographer, gives a very vague account of Waugh's death. When I interviewed Graham Greene, he told me not only that Waugh had died in the toilet but that he had died in the toilet, had drowned, that there had been an inquest. To Greene this appeared as a spectacularly grotesque demise for his friend, strangely appropriate for a novelist who had made Apthorp's chemical toilet a structural motif to mock his vulgarity in Men at Arms (1952). I must admit to a certain illicit thrill on being told the story. Here was a coup, something Sykes had covered up, a macabre image to conclude a book about a man obsessed with the macabre. I could have printed Greene's version and left it as his account. He was quite certain it was true. It had, he said, been reported to him by Father Caraman who was in the house at the time.

Nevertheless, I felt it necessary to check the story out. I wrote to Fr Caraman, a Farm Street priest. In my interview with him I stuck to factual matters. Who was in the house at the time? Who discovered the body? Where did Waugh's last Mass take place and who conducted it? In the course of his answers he stated that Waugh was found face down on the floor with a gash in his head, presumably made by the door handle as he fell after suffering a heart attack; and that his daughter's nanny had attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Finally I came to the 'drowning'. He denied it, denied having told Greene anything of the sort. I wrote to Greene. He insisted that Fr Caraman had told him the story. I wrote to Sykes. Was Greene's story true? Yes, he said, it was but he was appalled to think that Greene was spreading such vulgarity. Sykes knew all about it but thought that the anecdote would only serve Waugh's enemies.

I wrote up my account as best I could from this miasmic scenario and sent it to Caraman for correction. He wrote back saying that it was wrong in almost every detail. I asked him to point out, in detail, where it was wrong. When he did so, approximately 50 per cent of his corrections turned out to be inaccurate but at least this purified a certain amount of the literal truth. I was still left, however, with the problem of how, exactly, Waugh had died. The death certificate mentions only coronary thrombosis. It then struck me that if there had been an inquest, there ought to be official records. I wrote to the Coroner's Office in Taunton. Did they have records? Yes, they did, and would look into it. Eventually they replied: yes, there had been an inquest but the Home Office had sent round a circular instructing that all enquiry papers since 1875 should be destroyed after fifteen years. The only exceptions were treasure trove and cases of historical interest. Evelyn Waugh apparently fell into neither category. Finally, I traced the coroner who had performed the examination. He had no memory of water in the lungs. It was, he said, an autopsy rather than an inquest, perfectly normal procedure when there are no witnesses to a death.

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