Famous Drownings in Literary History

The hero is a man who leaves the sea of despair and goes ashore.

—Peter Sloterdijk

Children drown quietly. No thrashing, no screaming. Clawing at the top of the water is for grownups; they know how far they’ve come and what they are giving up. This is why the mother on the five o’clock news says, but she was just here, while her sister-in-law protects and hugs and puts a hand to the camera, and the newscaster finishes her standup, wondering how a thing like this could happen in a community like ours.

A hotel in Cincinnati. I help my daughter, who cannot yet swim, as she kicks her legs from the steps of the hotel pool. Look, I’m kicking. Over at the Jacuzzi another traveling family, three generations of men: grandfather, father, two-year-old boy. Talk and laughter. Busy pool. The chubby toddler, wearing a swim diaper like ballast, ambles away from them and toward the big pool, a large, inviting ocean. He approaches the steps, takes them. He does not tumble, but walks carefully down a step. Then another. Then another. Then he is under.

There is no noise as he drifts down. His eyes are contemplative. He is moving down and away from breathing. It won’t be long now. I reach down with one firm hand and pull him to the surface. He doesn’t even know to cry. The late-arriving grandfather finally arrives. He thanks me, grateful, embarrassed, and I accept, embarrassed. The boy gets a talking-to because the grandfather needs to do something, something. I check back for my daughter, who has found the courage to go chest-deep and is still kicking, kicking, troubling the top of the water with her tiny feet.

Drowning in literature is gendered.

—Prof. Helen V. Emmitt of Wake Forest University

Myself at three years old, my daughter’s age, on a family camping trip to upstate New York with my mother, uncle, aunt, older cousins.

My uncle had been a submariner years earlier and between wars. He was 18 years old in a skinny white uniform, sleeping on a tiny rack hundreds of feet below the surface next to dozens of other men, which I guess qualified him to take his daughter and me on a wobbly canoe down the Delaware River.

My cousin was ten years older than me, pretty and black-haired and attentive, still more interested in her little cousin than in older boys or socializing. I adored her. I would have followed her anywhere. I followed her as she hopped about in the canoe, despite my uncle’s warnings. I followed her as she tipped the boat with her gangly legs. When it turned over, I followed her into the water.

How deep was it, really? Probably no deeper than the shallow end of a pool. I was wearing work boots, my first real shoes. I was proud of them. The boots filled up with water. Of course they became very heavy. Of course they pulled me down.

I came up, or was pulled. I had been under just long enough to feel drowning, the horizontal push movement of the river that didn’t allow me to surface or sink, just drifting along without breath. Water in the mouth, in the lungs. The overturned canoe floated in the edge of my vision, growing smaller, heading downstream. Someone went to chase it. My uncle held me by the arm and pulled me to shore.

“We lost the canoe,” I told my mother. “No we didn’t,” my cousin corrected. I cried over my ruined boots, which felt soggy, awful. “We lost the canoe,” I said again, because something had to be lost.

I think my cousins and my uncle downplayed the canoe accident. They did not want to worry my mother, who was recently divorced and raising me by herself in Brooklyn. Most of our relatives had drifted away—to Long Island, to Florida. Only the two of us remained in the swirl of the city, the rush of people.

Maybe I...