In 1947, MGM thought it might film Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and invited the crusty author to Los Angeles. No film was forthcoming, but Waugh's sojourn in the sun inspired his satire on the SoCal funeral industry, The Loved One. In an accompanying article in Life magazine (a title whose irony he richly relished), the novelist declared that California was a society in denial about death.
Spending the holiday season (none of that morbid Christian stuff) in a sun-soaked LA, 2006/7, one still felt further from the grim reaper than in, say, Wigan. In the upmarket parts of town there are still those armies of sun-seeking retirees who, as Waugh put it, "warm their old bodies and believe themselves alive, opening their scaly eyes two or three times a day to browse on salads and fruits".
None the less, the "distinguished thing" (as Henry James called it) is not to be entirely extinguished, even in southern California. Prominent on the current "staff choice table" of the large, airy Vroman's Bookshop in Pasadena is Michael Largo's Final Exits: the illustrated encyclopedia of how we die. "It's selling like hot cakes," an assistant told me.
Not for Largo the banal heart attack, cancer or stroke. A statistician by trade, he has assembled a ghoulish Wunderkammer of morbidity. For example, every year 750 Americans die from sneezing and 73 from religious snake-handling ceremonies. Since 1975, 5,366 deaths have been attributed to accidents while sleepwalking. Since airbags came on the market in 1990, 6,982 deaths have been caused by the (so-called) life-saving technology. Airbags have also caused numerous cases of "degloving" ("the outer layer of skin being peeled to the bone"). Every year, 1,795 people die as a result of ambulance crashes. Since 1850, 6,613 Americans have died from injudicious ingestion of the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly. Since 1986, 3,113 Americans have been guillotined to death by automatic garage doors. Since 1975, 4,399 Americans have died while using exercise equipment (the grim reaper, it would seem, has gym membership).
"Auto-castration"? Don't ask. And "919 women die each year of an embolism obtained while engaging in oral sex". Since 1940, 9,007 Americans have been killed by lightning - most of them on Sundays in July, between 2pm and 6pm. You have been warned.
To read Largo is to appreciate the truth of John Webster's observation that birth has one entrance but "death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits". Except that Largo would probably refine the figure to something more like 9,998 or 10,006. He's a statistician, for God's sake, not a Jacobean dramatist.
In his (grimly humourless) introduction, Largo writes: "I predict that those who buy this book will gain - at the minimum - an average of two extra years of life." That's the kind of sales pitch that goes down a bomb in southern California.
Michael Largo's "Final Exits" will be published in the UK on 30 January by Harper Paperbacks (£9.99)
