Books |
The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End
Katie Roiphe
By
Published: May 15, 2016
Category:
Biography
I read somewhere that it is good to greet each day with an acknowledgment that death awaits you — and then banish the thought and live your day. Some mornings I remember. Some mornings I forget. When I forget, the thought often strikes me later, when it’s unwelcome.
“What normal person wants to blunder into this hushed and sacred space?” Katie Roiphe asks in “The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End.”
Well, me. And if you are even dimly aware that you’re not immortal, you too may be interested in this book, and for the simplest of reasons — you can be assured that “great writers” have thought about death. If only about their own, in which case at least one of their thoughts is: “50 years after my death, will my writing live on?” The writers she profiles are Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas and Maurice Sendak. In an epilogue, she writes about a conversation with James Salter. A memorable conversation — he died shortly afterward.
This subject was a natural for Roiphe. When she was 12, she couldn’t breathe. The operation took 7 hours. When she came home, she weighed 60 pounds. She couldn’t walk around the block. So she has a clue what it feels like to be leaving her life. [To read the prologue to the book, click here.]
At first she thought she was “trying to understand death.” Then she realized she wanted to “see” death. For her, that didn’t mean interviewing. It meant reading. Seeing the rooms of the dying. Talking to the survivors of the dead. The point, she finally understood, wasn’t to help readers “learn how to die, or gain wisdom, or prepare.” It was to help readers, by looking at death, “to be less afraid.” [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Susan Sontag: I knew her slightly. I overheard her say something shitty about a woman who had been her hostess and slight benefactor, and I got that she was an intellectual snob — the worst kind — and didn’t think about her much after that. But I read every word of this chapter. It was shocking: Sontag, dying, had no plan to die. And in her denial, she brutalized everyone around her. I’d read somewhere that intellectuals fear death more than others. If so, here’s exhibit A.
Sigmund Freud: Dying, he refused painkillers, so he could fully experience his suffering. “We cannot observe our own death,” he wrote. But he almost did.
John Updike: A cold is revealed to be stage 4 lung cancer. A shock. And then he went on. I was interested in Updike for decades because of his view that sex is a way to cheat death, that women hold the key to vitality. But that’s fiction, apparently. On his bedside table: The Death of Ivan Ilyich. One thing jumped out at every reviewer: His first wife came to see him. Their visit was touching. When Updike was near death, she wanted to see him again. His second wife wouldn’t allow it.
Dylan Thomas: Did he drink himself to death? Sure reads like it. I loved this line: “The poet lay like a chunky pietà on the starched white sheets.”
Maurice Sendak: My favorite chapter. Being famous but not feeling seen. Fronting during his final illness so his friends wouldn’t worry. He described death “as if it were a friend waiting for him.” A self-created character who “would intrigue, provoke admiration, elicit deep love and loyalty, bind people to him in a way they are rarely bound.” He stared into death and found it beautiful. Peace on his face at the end. Did you hear his last interview with Terry Gross? It’s…beyond. Especially the end.
And James Salter. She sees in this conversation that it’s not death she fears but “the panic of its approach.” In the end, she writes, “The deaths are the same. They all die. The world releases them.” Or as Salter tells her, “We make our own comfort.”
This book helps me make mine.
