Ideas - Death and the Artist: Four Stories

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

A final experiment from a dying musician. A painter whose work finds its cultural moment, posthumously. An aged writer intent on ‘getting to know death.’ From David Bowie to little-known creatives, this documentary looks at the ways that an artist’s mortality gives their work new meaning.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Works of art can survive centuries, long past the time of their creation. But artists themselves? Well, they're as mortal as any of us.

Alan B. Doggett, artist, widely mourned. Boston artist dies at summer home. Artist B.K. Canfield dies of dog's bite. Helen Mears, sculptor, dies in her studio. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. There's a classic art history book, Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists. Life stories of painters, sculptors, and architects. A hit in the Renaissance and still read today, though the definition of artist has now expanded. Musicians, writers,

and performers also qualify. We're still fascinated by the lives and work of creative people, and very often by their deaths too. But our interest in artists and their deaths isn't always for morbid or scandalous reasons. We are now very ready for the things that she was talking about. News of the artist's death can cause us to discover or reconsider a unique creative voice. I think she was definitely years ahead of her time. Death can sometimes give the artist a rich final theme

to share with their audience. It wasn't unusual for David Bowie to sing about death. It was one of his favorite subjects. And artist or not, the reminder that there is an end date to life can give shape and meaning to what is left of it. I think of Christopher Hitchens, who, before he died, said that we should live dyingly. And I love that. And I think I do live dyingly. On this episode, a search for the life force to be found in the deaths of artists.

Four different stories presented by Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey, who begins this episode on a hot August day filled with the buzz of cicadas. She's with author Jim Moskey. Jim, where are we today? Park Lawn Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A really large cemetery and oddly it is teeming with life in the sense that there are hawks overhead and squirrels and skunks and cicadas exactly. And, oh there it is. Describe this headstone.

One word, death. No other information, no dates, no given name, nothing else. So I don't know, is it the family name or just a statement of fact? My name is Jim Moskey, and I've written a book called Deaths of Artists, and it tells the story of a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

where I was until recently the managing archivist. And this curator lived about 100 years ago and became obsessed with the theme of how artists of his own time died. So you're working as an archivist at the Met, and you came upon what you call in your book, weird scrapbooks. What were they? They were 200-year-old scrapbooks that were packed with thousands and thousands of newspaper obituaries, newspaper clippings that were glued into the pages over a span of about 13 years from 1906 to 1919 that seemingly documented, you know, every artist you can imagine who died in that time period.

And who was behind this meticulous collection? A curator at the museum at the time named Arthur de Hervély. He was a paintings curator at the Met who had actually been assigned to research biographical information about artists of the day to help the museum publish a catalog about the collection. At the beginning, he was focused on using obituaries as a handy way to gather information about people's lives as well as their deaths. But it became clear to me when I realized that the catalog was published around 1911, and I noticed that he continued to obsessively collect hundreds and thousands more obituaries for another eight years beyond that date. And it was also clear that the vast majority of the obituaries that he pasted into these scrapbooks were not for artists who were represented in the collection or who were even included in the catalog he was producing.

So I think that he began to develop kind of an obsession with collecting a representation as broad as he could to document all of the artistic lives of the time through which he was living, and not only for those who were recognized enough or famous enough to have an artwork hanging on the walls of the Met. Were you able to determine what it was in him that created this kind of need to document relentlessly? Not entirely. He's a bit of a shadowy figure. But I do know that before he came to the Met, he was himself an artist and in some ways maybe a frustrated artist who hadn't managed to create a successful career for himself as a creative, as a painter, and sort of turned to a curatorial museum world career as a way to stay connected with the arts. And at the

same time, there's some evidence that as a curator, he was a bit of an outsider figure at the Met and wasn't always given the most choice assignments by the directors of the museum and the leadership of the institution. So kind of an outsider figure. And one of my theories is that he began to develop an idea through the formation of this obituary archive that he was almost smuggling into the museum as complete a representation of all the artists who are living around him in his lifetime as he could. In many cases, painters, sculptors, and others like himself, who may never have sold a painting or had success in placing something in a gallery or museum show,

but that he recognized still were living significant creative lives that he wanted to document within the walls of the museum in some other way. He had quite a shadowy past, right? Like an outsider as an artist and even had some trouble with the law, right? Yes. As a younger person in his early 30s, he worked as a clerk for an industrial firm in Philadelphia, and I discovered in the Philadelphia City Archives that he was an embezzler. He embezzled for the firm he was working for and spent a year in a prison in Philadelphia. So the obituaries come from newspapers, and there's some headlines. Could you read these ones?

Famous artist dies penniless and all alone. Artist recluse dies amid works. Noted artist dies on the street. Two artists end life with bullet. Artist, dying of starvation, paints picture of herself. These are sensational headlines. Can you tell me about what was going on in that era? Yeah, so the obituaries and some of these really dramatic and macabre headlines

are very representative of a lot of the tabloid newspapers of the day. The tone of the stories was highly sensationalistic and often played up any aspect of stories that were violent or involved a criminal aspect or an odd twist of fate. And what I came to realize looking at thousands and thousands of these obituaries is that they played into stereotypes about artists and the kind of characters that they were and the lives that they led, which were often unorthodox. Artists as poor, struggling to make a living, obsessed with the theme of their work. The artist then was seen as a social outsider. Yes, certainly in that era, to some extent still today. And I also, in my book, did some research

into how artists were characterized in even earlier times and found that some of these stereotypes of artists as outsiders and living unorthodox lives went back hundreds, even thousands of years. One of the examples I look at in my book are how the Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote both about artists' lives, but also about how they died. And in many cases, I found, or in some cases, I found stories of artists' deaths in Vasari that paralleled aspects of stories I was seeing in these obituary headlines from the 19-teens. Was there anyone among the obits that really, the unknown artists who really stuck with you or haunted you? There were many.

And one is a painter and sculptor named Ella Finley. One of the headlines in an obituary for Ella Finley read, artist dying of starvation paints picture of herself. She was a Philadelphia painter and sculptor characterized in the obituary as being so obsessed with her artistic practice that she neglected to feed herself and essentially starved to death little by little in her studio in Philadelphia. And so the story goes, was painting her own self-portrait. That's the

picture that was on her easel when she was found nearly starved to death and taken to a hospital where she passed away a few days later. One of the obituaries includes a photograph of this self-portrait, which is also very haunting. I think I saw it and she looked healthy. One of the obituaries describes her as actually painting a self-portrait reflecting her memory of what she looked like at a younger stage of life. She was about 50 years old when she passed away, and the portrait looks to be a somewhat younger woman. But the painting doesn't survive, and from all the research I've done,

there's no work of her that survives otherwise. So she's one of these characters who, if not for the obituary, and if not for de Hervély's effort to preserve this in a scrapbook, it would be hard to find any trace of her. There's no work of hers in a museum or elsewhere. Yeah, it just struck me that de Hervély had this sort of feeling or empathy for artists who were not well-known,

who just worked away at their art. And there is this feeling that many of the people mentioned did not leave a legacy behind or were even recognized in their time. Did you feel any kind of emotional feeling looking at all of these people who worked away at stuff and were not recognized. Yes, and that was really one of the most powerful aspects of these scrapbooks as documents for me. The much broader emphasis of the collection as a whole was on artists who would slip pretty quickly into obliv, became much more kind of interesting and perhaps valuable aspect of the archive in itself, that he was, it was almost like a kind of archival activism to

create a world of documentation that told a bigger story about the art historical moment that he was living through than a traditional museum exhibition or catalog would tell. And that to me became very interesting, I think, in our own day. And we have a greater sensitivity to that. But at the time, art history and history was still very much about kind of great artists and creatives that no one had a question about. And he suddenly was opening a window, a much more kind of broad democratic view into a whole generation of artists whose names might otherwise be entirely forgotten if he didn't kind of bring them together out of all of these newspaper sources. How many people do you think are buried here? Oh, tens of thousands.

I don't know, 20,000? Unlike many of the artists in Arthur T. Hervely's archive and Jim Mosky's book, Denise Tomasos was not obscure. Her work had been in shows and exhibitions and earned admiration from others, including her students at Rutgers University. What inspired you to become an artist? I started drawing at a young age. I was 16. I went to a life drawing class, something called gesture drawing, which is line drawing with movement.

And from there, I was introduced to painting, and I loved it. She painted with striking skill and ambition, making huge, dynamic canvases fueled by global themes. In the summer of 2012, the same year that interview video was recorded, she went to an appointment for a medical test in Manhattan. She experienced an unforeseen allergic reaction, and she died. Denise Tomasos was 47 years old. She left behind her young family in New York and relatives in Toronto. She also left behind a rare body of work, the expression of a powerful and visionary

contemporary painter. In the 12 years since the death of Denise Tomasos, her paintings have not been forgotten. In a way, they've found the moment and the audiences they anticipated. For Michelle Jakes, one of the people who has ensured that the paintings live on, that mission is professional and political and personal. Denise was somebody who made friends easily and bestowed friendship so generously that I think everybody who knew her felt close to her. I certainly felt close to her even though we had only known each other for seven years when she passed away in 2012. And when she passed away, I realized what a short friendship that was and how many things we didn't get to talk about. I probably didn't even tell her how much I loved her work.

My name is Michelle Jakes and I'm the Director of Exhib collections and chief curator at Ramey Modern in Saskatoon. And I'm one of the co-curators of the exhibition, Denise Tomasas, Just Beyond. For the catalogue to this travelling retrospective, Michelle wrote four essays in the form of unsent letters to Denise. Those letters were what I needed to do. They allowed me to say things that I had never been able to say to Denise when she was alive. There were moments that were very emotionally overwhelming

while we were preparing the exhibition, but having the opportunity to share the work with so many people in so many places, it has actually felt like I've been able to continue my friendship with Denise. And true to the letters, I've been able to tell her many of the things that I didn't get to tell her when she was still alive. Denise is often referred to as an abstract painter, and in my letters I was really thanking her for opening up a point of entry into abstraction for me as a Black art history student and then a Black emerging curator.

What I loved so much, what I love so much about Denise's work is that she figured out how to use abstraction in an incredibly political way. Do you have a certain method when it comes to creating an art piece? My work comes from a very political place. I look at a lot of politics. In particular, I look at prisons and structures that have confined people of color, slave boats. A painting that I would describe is a later work called Ark, about 11 feet tall and 20 feet wide. It really is an incredibly complex composition.

Amorphous overlapping blocks of colour, pinks and browns, light yellows, muted blues, and then acid green and yellow striped with black. But there's a really sort of complicated structure emerging from that background. You can almost pick out something that looks like a fighter jet. And then there are also elements that look like architecture. My work is architectural and very abstract. So one of the things in terms of the process is I try to recreate that psychology.

So I start often with very small brushes on a very large scale of canvas and I'll start in the middle and I do this sort of hatching structure that is repetitive and it's really to recreate a kind of confined psychology, which is very much the kind of structures that I eventually create. Structures, but everything is sort of packed together so that what you read is this multifarious but unified object, a huge object coming out of the background, almost obscuring the background.

Then at the front bottom foreground, there's a pile of skulls. In her mature work, there was thinking about slavery and all of the violence and death associated with that. But I think as she worked through what it was she wanted to do and say in her work, she was realizing that while she had to grapple with those histories, while she felt she had to grapple with those histories, while she felt she had to grapple with those histories, really she was doing so in order to move onto a place of greater hope. So I do think that the works absolutely team with life.

What is the best thing about being an artist? You know, I tell my students that I have had the most magical life I can imagine. Every dream I've ever dreamt has come true, every single one of them. And one of the big dreams was to travel around the world. Denise was born in Trinidad, and Denise went not only to Africa, but to India, China, Europe, South America, all places that represented her diverse cultural heritage. And on those travels, she was engaging with the legacies and histories of colonialism, to be sure, but she was also engaging with the contemporary life of those places and I think that is what

has what came to dominate her painting. And then I would come back and I have the opportunity to translate all that I've seen to show this work in a gallery and to get feedback from audiences. She became incredibly adept at saying the things she needed to say in paint. It seems, I don't know, I'll just be blunt, it seems to me that she was a genius, and I think that's why I wanted to talk about her loss in a way, but where might she have been headed? Well, a sense that I have clearly gotten watching this show move from venue to venue and having the opportunity to speak to people about Denise's work is that we are now very ready for the things that she was talking about. I think she was definitely years ahead of her time. She, in her lifetime, had challenges getting people to be willing to engage with the difficulty of

some of the issues that her paintings brought up. And I feel like we're much more ready for that conversation now. So I think that Denise would be at the top of her game if she were still with us. So it's very bittersweet. I'm so glad that this exhibition, Just Beyond, has been so well received and has introduced so many more people to Denise's work. But I really wish she was here to enjoy it. What advice do you have for upcoming artists? I think how I've seen it for myself is that to generate the most interesting life and have the art be an interpretation of that.

And so the creativity is not so much just in the work, but it is also in how incredible and creative and spontaneous and surprising your life is. For me, a failed artistic life, if all I did all day was to paint in the studio, if I was not really experiencing life. So for young artists, I would tell them to really focus more on creating

a wonderful life for themselves and also having a way of interpreting that through their medium. Is it hard to think of such a vital and timely artist becoming a kind of figure of history. That is a hard thing to think about, and I feel like we're still right in the activity of presenting the exhibition and seeing how appreciation for and attention to Denise's work grows as a result of it. So I'm enjoying Denise in the current moment and not thinking about her becoming part of art history just yet. You're listening to Ideas. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio,

across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus, and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what

vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted from CBC's Personally, available now. cited from CBC's Personally, available now. Late style. That's a term given to the final era of an artist's work. Sometimes that style is unintentional, when the end of life comes without warning. But sometimes, when an artist is ill or aging, they can see that death is coming, and some incorporate that heightened sense of mortality right into their work. That's the case with the next artist in producer Lisa Godfrey's documentary, one of the world's most famous singers and songwriters.

Someone utterly in control of his presentation, starting with his breakthrough album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust in 1972. Sick of playing guitar David Bowie, a rock star, but also a theatre and screen actor, trained in the visual arts and design, a popular but experimental multimedia performance artist, synonymous with extreme transformations,

with avant-garde concepts and costumes and sounds. I felt really comfortable going on stage as somebody else. And it seemed a rational decision to keep on doing that. And so I got quite besotted with the idea of just creating character after character. Always changing over the span of his 50-year career in the 20th and early 21st centuries. the 20th and early 21st centuries. Some critics argue that Bowie brought all of that knowledge and experience to fruition in his final work, including a set of enigmatic songs, their meaning unlocked by his death. January 8th, 2016 was David Bowie's 69th birthday.

And the day arrived with a surprise for fans. A new album recorded in secret. A moody and noisy collaboration with some improvisational jazz musicians. An album called Black Star. Just two days later. We begin with breaking news. Musician, actor and artist David Bowie has died. An official announcement of his death is made on David Bowie's Facebook page. It said that David Bowie died peacefully today, surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer. His passing has been just changed music, you know, and allowed people to be who they wanted to be. I didn't go to work today. I couldn't go to work. It was a big surprise. No one

knew it was coming aside from, you know, Bowie's inner circle. And his death really dramatically changed the context and how everybody read and understood Black Star and its singles forever. forever. And it was a really bold and surprising and shocking and morbid thing to witness, but also amazing because of the way that he executed it out of the blue like that. Musicologist Leah Cardos wanted to write about this last Bowie album and thought she knew how to make sense of it. I wanted to say that Black Star was death art, and it sounds really morbid, but I wanted to sort of analyze it as an artist who had made their death part of their catalog, part of their work. And what's really interesting is that through writing the book I kind of realized that that wasn't it at all in the end. My name's Leah Kados and I'm a musician and a writer and an

academic and a few years ago I wrote a book called Black Star Theory, The Last Works of David Bowie. I mean, he knew he was dying, but he did not know that he was imminently dying. So it wasn't all orchestrated to be around his death, right? Well, these are the big questions that everyone was asking, and myself included, in the aftermath. You know, because for us to learn after he had died, oh, he had terminal cancer. And then you see the Lazarus video and he's on a deathbed having a death dream. And you look at Black Star and all of the imagery in that, you know, then you think, oh, this is his, you know, his farewell. This is his message. This is what he wanted to say. And

in a way, yeah yeah it is a very terminal very mortal album and there is a lot of that going on but you know when you dig into the storyline he he wanted to live i know that he had been artistically quiet for a time in the early part of the new millennium and had had heart issues before the cancer. So in a way, he might have been someone who was, and he had a child, so he might have been someone who was, in fact, conscious of his mortality at that time. Is that fair to say? Yeah, that's a really fair thing to say. I mean, his whole career is quite death obsessed, if you look at it. It wasn't

unusual for David Bowie to sing about death. It was one of his favorite subjects. Hans Vilte's lesson, I think probably some of my input was the thing that you either become comfortable or live in terror of as you get older, which is that life is finite, that there's a physical end to it, that you die. I think the filthy lesson of the heart is when you really understand that, that you die. So this was one of the things, you know, when Blackstar came out and it was quite dark and morbid, you know, some of us fans weren't very phased.

We were like, oh, OK, Bowie's being Bowie. You know, it wasn't a big red flag at all. In the last three years, it seemed he worked whenever he was well enough. And perhaps in retrospect, you know, kind of remarkably worked right up to the end, as long as he could. How fertile would you say this late period of his creativity was? I would say it was remarkably fertile. The work ethic in 2015 alone, staggering. There was this musical, off-Broadway musical called Lazarus, that he was developing at a very fast pace. At the same time as he was writing and recording Black Star.

It was definitely a purple patch. He was energized to get this work done, and I think that you can really sense this in the music. Copyright limits how much music we can play from Black Star, but the official videos are on YouTube and also at the Ideas webpage for this episode, Death and the Artist. The album has his usual liveliness and wit about it, this improvisational collaboration with the band, and yet in some of it, there is a kind of thrum of seriousness or something underneath.

This was certainly a feeling that I got when I heard the album, because there's always this dividing line between before and after. And what struck me before I knew that he had died was just this kind of, it was so full of feeling and so full of intention but yet it wasn't clear what this feeling was there was this chaotic turbulence to it that seemed to be an energy that wanted to speak but you it that he was dealing with these big ideas, these big truths, all of this really heavy stuff, that drama begins to sort of make a little bit more sense. But it also just has a lot of liveness. And it is this liveliness, this energy, this material quality of chemistry, of musicians in the room, of making a big racket, of this chaotic swelling of energy, I think is remarkable. Really quite avant-garde and chaotic and risk-taking. And as you say, this seriousness to it, this dark thread, it's definitely there. a person seemingly, as in the biblical Lazarus, wearing their burial shroud in a hospital bed,

it's because the music and the words are of a piece and yet not in any kind of sense seemingly purely directly autobiographical or anything, but just really affecting. Yeah, I agree. Bowie was extremely talented at working impressionistically with shades and imagery and these subtle modes. Another thing I should say is that the Lazarus song kind of exists as well in a different world, and that's in the Lazarus musical. And in the musical, it's sung from the perspective of a fictional character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton from Walter Tevis's book, The Man Who Fell to Earth. And so we're talking about these weird, strange tissues of connection

across space and time and reality and fiction, where you have Bowie inhabiting a character and singing from the perspective of a character who is written in a book that happened to be made, adapted into a film that he happened to star in. What do you do for a living, I mean? Oh, just visiting. And then we also have him writing the ending

of that fictional character's life at the same time as his life is ending. And you also have this music video that is released days before he dies. Look up here, I'm in heaven. I've got scars that can't be seen. I've got scars that can't be seen. I've got trauma that can't be stolen. Everybody knows me now.

And so all of these lovely tissues of connection are just wonderful to trace because you know that none of those were an accident. And so he was thinking about all of this and how the stories of his career, all these threads in the tapestry of his life as David Bowie, he was sort of tying them all up really neatly. Can you talk about the title, Black Star, and if you want, the song and how it sort of plays with that idea of star on a very associative level? and stardom as this portmanteau of, you know, it's cosmic and it's potential and it's science, but it's also chaos and it's also unpredictable and it's also hubris and it's fame and it's stardom and stars and who is a star? And this goes right back not only to Ziggy Stardust and that whole thing, but even further back to Major Tom and Space Oddity.

Even in the late works, Bowie had a song called The Stars Are Out Tonight, which is about celebrity culture and how horrible and vacuous it is and how parasitic it is that stars aren't the stars you see in the sky. They're the vampiric stars that leech off you, your attention and your longing. But you need them to exist because you need your heroes

and they need you to exist. And so it's this parasitic thing. And so in the context of all of this, all of the stars that Bowie sung about, star men, all of this, Black Star then becomes quite a statement at the end and a really lovely image because, I mean, I looked into this, you know, Black Hole is a singularity.

Black Star is not quite. It's something more mysterious which has different potentials in it. We really don't know if it's there or not. There could be strange matters and, you know know quarks and strange space-time disturbances happening inside of it and in the song you know he sings about being a black star in a very mysterious way he kind of lists all the things that he's not But I can tell you how We were born upside down This idea that matter has a life beyond our consciousness, that we are stardust,

all these ideas that he's been playing with all along, these metaphors for life force, creativity, hubris and all of this other stuff, the good and the bad, the shadow, id, all of this stuff, comes to bear in these last works through this chaotic, cathartic expression of life at the end. And that brings me back to say that I don't think Black Star is death art. I think it's, if anything, it's life art because it's so full of life.

Not just for the drama of it being the final track, but that song, I Can't Give Everything Away, seems extra meaningful given what we know. Give everything away. What did you make of that one? I remember listening to it and going, okay, right, don't give everything away. What an enigmatic way to end the album. It's fine. And, of course, again, you know, with with the knowledge you go back to it and suddenly it's so profound and and it's i feel my reading of it anyway is that it's on a few levels so the first level is it's a statement of privacy and then the next level down is also this kind of locking eyes, you know, this kind of moment of shared knowing of him saying, by now you probably know what's happened, but I couldn't tell you. But also, I can't tell you everything you want to know. You've got questions.

know and actually not knowing is why you love me and we keep it mysterious because if you knew everything then that's when the magic trick gets ruined and so it's this little continuation of magic in that song and this lingering quality of let's go around again let's not leave yet let's give donny a solo section now let's give ben mondor a guitar solo now let's come back and put some organ in and let's just go around one more time again. And it's just, it doesn't feel so much like Bowie being Bowie and performing with the mask on in the pyro suit. It feels more like Bowie the artist slipping the mask off for a second and locking eyes with you and, you know, saying goodbye.

and, you know, saying goodbye. Whether he knew he was saying goodbye with it or not, you can really feel that. And it's one of the most amazing songs to cap off a catalogue that I know of. I can't think of any other artist who has died that has left something like that behind. Sometimes, an artist's life is cut short. Their final work is a statement of major intensity. For other artists, though, death is more foreseeable,

the natural consequence of a long life. But until that end comes, their creative work, the work that has sustained them and connected them to others, carries on. Work that you're still doing on your way to death, what drives you to do that? doing on your way to death. What drives you to do that? Oh, because if I didn't do it, I really would not, I would not want to live. And that's why I wrote this book, actually. My name is Gail Godwin. I'm 87 years old. I'm a Southerner. I was born in Alabama, raised in Asheville, North Carolina. You sure you want all this? Sure. Okay. And then there was all the rest, and I went to live in Europe, and I

married twice, both times the wrong person. And then I met Robert at Yaddo, which is a writer's, I mean, an artist's colony. And we decided to ruin everybody else's life and get together. So we got together and we built this house. And now I'm writing. Now I've written 17 novels, three or four nonfiction, one about the heart, which I can recommend, one about publishing, which I can recommend. And this one, of course, Getting to Know Death. And that brings me up to today, which is the 24th of June, 2024. we're three days past the summer solstice, which makes me sad every year. Why does it make you sad? I don't know, because the light starts going away.

Gail Godwin, writer, and Robert Sterrer, composer, lived together in their house on a hill in Woodstock, New York, until his death in 2001. A couple of years ago, Gail herself nearly died there, after a fall. It was mid-afternoon. I had written on my novel that morning, and it was too early for Nicole Wallace and Deadline White House. So I thought, well, I'll go out and water the little dogwood tree because it was very hot. So I took my cane just for security and went out and walked across the gravel and to the spigot where the hose was and turned it on and came back to the gravel. And then I just lost my nerve. I lost my nerve and I knew I was going to fall. And I went just right down flat, flat on my face with my head turned to the left.

And then I had to figure out what to do next. And I knew I was not going to dare get up again and fall again. So I decided I would try to walk to the house sitting down on my butt. So I butt walked. I started walking to the house. It took me about 45 minutes. Wow. And on the way, I often speak aloud and I said, am I going to make it? And my other voice said, do you want to? And I said, I don't know. said, do you want to? And I said, I don't know. And the other voice said, like they do on TV,

yes or no. So I said, I'm not sure. I have curiosity, but I have no resolve. And you know what? I think that exchange between me and me got me through the whole thing because I hung on to that curiosity. As long as you're curious about something, at least you can get to the door, which is 45 minutes away. So that's how I got to the door. Then I got into the house and called 911, which I've done often. And you know what? One of the ambulance people, the ET people came, and he was the same little guy who was here when they came to get Robert. That was 2001. And he looked exactly the same. He could have been a

ghost of himself. How did you feel about that? Did you feel haunted? I didn't feel haunted. No, I said, oh, you're here. I remember you. But he never spoke, which made me feel, you know, he was more ghostly. The EMT guy was not there to ferry Gail Godwin to the underworld, as it turned out, but almost. She had broken her neck and spent months recovering, first in a rehab hospital and then at home. I had seven months when I was hoping to heal and sitting outside, and I didn't want to read, and I didn't want to watch TV. So I just started writing about the act of falling on the gravel on my face, and then more things came to me. Meditations on death in literature and death in her own life, sketches of of Fellow Patients and Her Home Care

Workers, a nonfiction book emerged. The title, Getting to Know Death, came from something she'd misheard. I was talking to my therapist, this is before I broke my neck, and I said to her, you know, the only place I feel safe now is when I'm inside my novel. And then she said to me, what would happen if you stepped outside your novel and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I didn't want her to think I was hard of hearing. So I just let it pass. think I was hard of hearing, so I just let it pass. So the next week when she came, I said, who is Steph? And she said, Steph who? I said, you said that if I stepped outside of my novel and if I got to know Steph, and she said, no, I said death, getting to know death. to know death. You know, even if I asked you that now, step outside whatever is occupying you or obsessing you and get to know death. What would happen in your mind, really? Yeah. What?

Yeah, it would be completely abstract to me. Well, the one I thought of was my partner of 30 years used to quote Ingmar Bergman, who said every artist should have one work between himself and death. And Robert, who's dead now, finished a piece of work that day, and then he went to the hospital and didn't come home. And the organist played his sketches of what he had written that day at his funeral. So that was kind of dramatic. And then I think of Christopher Hitchens, who, before he died, said that we should live dyingly. And I love that. And I think I do live dyingly. So did Robert.

What did that mean to you guys? That you're just always aware of it. When I was reading at this bookstore the other night at the table with me, they put on a grief counselor. They like to have someone come and talk to the author. And she was really wise. And she actually has a master's degree in, get this, sanatology. Sanatology. Isn't that something? Sanitology. Sanitology. Isn't that something? And we really had a great room. We had a room full of people, and they were all interested in every word that came out of our mouths. Yeah. Even though people seem to want to avoid the topic in another way, there's... That's a very insightful thing. Though they want to avoid it, it's really great if someone else brings it up.

I think some people are Thanatos people, and other people are Eros people. And Robert told me I was a Thanatos, and he certainly was. We just think more about the end. That doesn't mean that Gail is fixated on the end. She's still observing the life going on around her in 2024 America. I'm writing something else now, another meditation. It's called The Art of Becoming a Citizen. It is about right now, through this whole whole year and how uncertain things are.

Yeah, I was going to ask you, do you feel a responsibility to keep on describing life or is it a need to do that? It's a need. And I don't feel any responsibility to do it beyond where I want to. But it is a need. And I still have so much to say. In fact, I have more and more to say. When she's writing fiction, Gail Godwin can shape the fate of her imaginary people. But in real life, no one knows when and how their own ending will come. She's not afraid of that. I know just when my characters are going to die in the book, but the rest is surprise, and that's where curiosity comes in, because waiting and not knowing will keep me going a little while longer. Interesting. So the curiosity even extends to death.

Yes, yes. Not a day goes by that I don't learn something really, really new. You've been listening to an Ideas episode called Death and the Artist. You can find some of the artwork mentioned, along with more information on the guests, on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. This episode was produced and presented by Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Technical producer, Danielle Duval, with special thanks to Reynold Gonsalves and Eric Delage. Senior producer is Nikola Lukšić.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.