Somewhere I have an old yellowed copy of The Razor’s Edge, the 1944 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. When I first read it nearly four decades ago I remember it absorbed me and I need to read it again.
Maugham, who apparently was never well received by the British critics famously said, “Death ends all things, and so, is the comprehensive conclusion of a story…
Certain writers really get this right. Somerset Maugham certainly wasn’t the only one to use death as the ultimate conclusion. I’ll try not to spoil things for anyone who hasn’t read the stories I’m about to mention. But in matters of death, Hemingway can’t be beat. Two of his stories come quickly to my mind. The Snows of Kilimanjaro leaves no doubt you are in the presence of a Nobel Laureate. And when I first read The Capital of the World the last few pages set in a Madrid restaurant’s kitchen had me sweating droplets out of my armpits like I had gulped three cups of coffee in rapid succession. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is another. With Marquez death can enter the realm of the macabre. His story Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness happens “on the island of Pantelleria, at the far southern end of Sicily”…and its last scene has graven a place for itself on the tablet of my memory. I hope I can make it to Panelleria. I don’t know but one story by Lawrence Sargent Hall, a professor of English at Bowdoin College for four decades. His story, The Ledge, is about a father taking two boys sea-duck hunting off the coast of Maine. I just happened on it in an archive of The Sun magazine dated February, 2016. “Based on actual events and initially rejected by Esquire and The New Yorker, [this story] was selected by John Updike as one of the best of the century,” according to The Sun. We all have stories rejected and knowing this one once shared that ignominious fate points to the capriciousness of the game. And to the fact that publishing exists in a world of scarcity, not a world of plenty.
I daresay every writer, every playwright, every artist, from antiquity to modernity, has known innately the power of Maugham’s “comprehensive conclusion.” So many of them have used it that the examples are too numerous to list.
For my part there is nothing in my experience of writing that even comes close to the satisfaction I get out of euthanasia. Having poured everything into a story, often over a period of weeks, then, killing it off.