Stephen McGinty: Coming to terms with the Big Sleep

ONCE, many years ago, when I was younger man, scribbling for a different newspaper, I experienced the most unsettling interview of my career. The photographer and I had driven down to northern England to research an article on "woodland burials" and had arranged to speak to the manager of a graveyard that had set aside a field where the deceased would be laid to rest in a cardboard coffin, coloured paint optional, with, as the only marker, an oak sapling standing sentinel. The manager was a quiet man, smartly dressed with a tightly knotted tie and a clipped moustache, and was an evangelist of this new hope for the dead.

We began by talking in his office about the humanists and atheists and Christians who had embraced his pioneering new system and the undertakers' unhappiness that he was offering coffins for 30. We had not yet seen the cardboard coffins, or toured the grounds, when our conversation was interrupted by the sharp ring of the telephone. He picked it up, listened, spoke a few brief words, then hung up. I cannot recall his face changing, but he immediately told us that it had been a friend calling to inform him that his sister, who had been missing, had been killed in a car crash.

Both the photographer and I sat in stunned silence for a few seconds, before offering our sincere condolences and saying that we would immediately go. No, he insisted quite firmly. His sister was a strong supporter of his work and of the woodland burial, and he would prefer to continue our conversation. Conscious that he may now be in shock, we tried to explain that perhaps he would like to be alone, and that our visit could be rearranged for another day, but he was adamant that the tour go on, and I can still see him posing beside two cardboard coffins, brightly decorated in the colours of the local football team. In the field, he spoke eloquently of how decomposition would nourish the roots of each sapling. Although he lapsed into distracted silence at times, he gave the appearance of a man at ease with the end, and pleased to be offering an alternative to cremation or the chill of a marble headstone.

Whenever I think of death, I think of him, sitting at his neat desk, his hair carefully parted, receiving the news with a stoicism worthy of Seneca. It's strange, but death has only recently crept into my thoughts. I know friends for whom the reality of the end has always been pecking, like a blackbird at a window, regardless of their emotional weather. But I've been lucky, or perhaps ignorant, for I've breezed through the past few decades without giving him a single nod of recognition. I don't know what has happened now, but it's as if I've spent my entire life only looking at one side of the street and have now glanced at the darkness across the road.

I think, perhaps, this is why I'm drawn to a line at the end of the original True Grit, which I recently watched again. (Don't let the Coen brothers kid you; it was remarkably faithful to Charles Portis's novel, with reams of dialogue lifted straight from the page.) However, the line of dialogue was an invention of the screenwriter, Marguerite Roberts, and comes towards the end when Matty Ross is talking to Rooster Cogburn about the family plot where she will one day lay between ma and pa and her younger brothers. When John Wayne's cantankerous Cogburn brushes her off, unwilling to contemplate his own demise, Matty says that it is "a comfort to know where one will meet eternity".

This was a view shared by the Victorians, who created municipal cemeteries where stone angels wept, Greek columns rose above Egyptian pyramids and Roman urns. Today, Glasgow's Necropolis is a worthy tourist attraction, if one is content to have Death as a guide, with his scythe scraping along marble headstones. While Raymond Chandler was educated in the last year of Victorian England, he made his name in the City of Angels, 7,000 miles to the west, where his famous gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, a tarnished knight in a fedora, righted a few of the Los Angeles' wrongs. In his novels, he reflected on death, most famously in the final pages of The Big Sleep (1939), when he wrote: "What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump, or in a marble tower on top of a high hill. You were dead, you were sleeping the Big Sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell." But for all his world weary cynicism, Raymond Chandler believed it did matter where you lay, and with whom you shared The Big Sleep. To Chandler, his companion through the afterlife should be Pearl "Cissy" Pascal, with whom he embarked on an affair after his return from the trenches of France to Los Angeles. An older women, some 18 years his senior, Cissy left her husband and they eventually wed in 1924. She stuck by him as he rose up as an oil executive and then fell down the neck of a bottle, then rose once again as the author of a series of seminal crime novels, none of which, sadly, he felt was good enough to be dedicated to her. He nursed her through a long illness and, when she died in 1954, he was heartbroken: "She was the beat of my heart for 30 years, she was the music heard faintly at the end of sound." Cissy was cremated and Chandler's wish was that her ashes should be buried with him upon his own passing, but when he died five years later, in 1959, his will and papers were in such a mess that his last wish was overlooked and, so, while he rested in Mount Hope Cemetery outside San Diego, she resided a mile away in a mausoleum.

And so they would have remained, were it not for Loren Latker and his wife, Annie Thiel, from Malibu. The couple read of the Chandlers' separation these past 52 years in a biography of the writer and set about rectifying the matter with the assistance of John Wayne's daughter, Aissa Wayne, a successful attorney who unpicked the red tape and liberated Cissy's ashes. On Valentine's Day, a Dixieland Jazz band led a procession of antique cars, flanked by men in fedoras and women in forties frocks, to Chandler's graveside, where the ashes were re-interned. At the graveside, Judith Freeman, the author of The Long Embrace, about Chandler's relationship with women, read an extract from a poem he had written after his wife's death:

When the bright clothes hang in the scented closet

And the three long hairs in a brush and a folded kerchief

And the fresh made bed and the fresh, plump pillows

On which no head will lie

Are all that is left of the long wild dream.

I don't know why I found this story so affecting. Perhaps because it involved those two great unknowable subjects: love and death. Or maybe it's just the notion of two lovers united at last, under a quilt of grass, slumbering through the Big Sleep.