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Summary
Summary
From one of our most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched account of the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter--an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality.
In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of six great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called "the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea."
Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas's fatal collapse at the Chelsea Hotel. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak's beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look.
The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, "If it's nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?" By bringing these great writers' final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid.
Praise for The Violet Hour
"A beautiful book . . . The intensity of these passages--the depth of research, the acute sensitivity for declarative moments--is deeply beguiling." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Profound, poetic and--yes--comforting." -- People
"Unconventional, engaging . . . [ The Violet Hour ] is at once scholarly, literary, juicy--and unabashedly personal." -- Los Angeles Times
"Enveloping . . . I read it in bed, at the kitchen table, while walking down the street. . . . 'What normal person wants to blunder into this hushed and sacred space?' she asks. But the answer is all of us, and Ms. Roiphe does it with grace." --Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
"A beautiful and provocative meditation on mortality." --Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A tender yet penetrating look at the final days . . . Roiphe has always seemed to me a writer to envy. No matter what the occasion, she can be counted on to marry ferocity and erudition in ways that nearly always make her interesting." -- The Wall Street Journal
"Here is a critic in supreme control of her gifts, whose gift to us is the observant vigor that refuses to flinch before the Reaper. . . . She knows that true criticism does not bother with the mollification of delicate sensibilities, only with the intellect as it roils and rollicks through language." --William Giraldi, The New Republic
Author Notes
Katie Roiphe received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in English literature. Her articles have appeared in "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "Esquire", "Harper's", and "The New Yorker", among many other publications. She lives in New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When acclaimed writer Roiphe (In Praise of Messy Lives) was 12, she contracted pneumonia. This book, she declares, had its origin in the hazy, fever-filled days she spent hovering between life and death. Roiphe explores, through mesmerizing storytelling, how six writers-Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter-confronted mortality. Drawing on her subjects' writing and on interviews with their friends and loved ones, she relates how they "embraced or evaded, made peace with or raged against death." When Sontag receives her breast cancer diagnosis, she steels herself to continue her work. Returning home after deciding on chemotherapy, Updike rests his head on his typewriter, as if resigned to never writing again, until his wife, Martha, says to him, "Just one more book." Freud faces his final days calmly, refusing painkillers, as if collecting notes for an essay about his own death. Thomas seems almost to long for death, while Sendak expresses pure terror in his stories and drawings. When Roiphe visits Salter, who died suddenly of a heart attack months after her visit, he tells her he doesn't think much about death. Roiphe's riveting profiles reveal a simple truth: each person faces death in a unique way. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Consider the group Roiphe (In Praise of Messy Lives, 2012) selected: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter all articulate, creative people who were especially sensitive to death. Roiphe combed through their letters and journals, their interviews and manuscripts. She also talked to family and friends as well as caretakers and housekeepers. Her motivation, she writes, was to see if I can capture a death on the page in order to repair or heal something. She wanted to look at death and be less afraid. Sontag fought to the end, convinced that she alone she was always the exception in everything she did, after all could conquer this most universal of human fates. Freud refused painkillers so he could think clearly at the end. Updike was unprepared for his bleak fate. Thomas avoided doctors at all cost. Sendak was obsessed with death, even at a young age. The 89-year-old Salter didn't really think much about death. These are vivid portraits of human beings who, whether consciously or not, teach the rest of us how to face the final journey. Roiphe's book is touching and luminous, profound and somehow reassuring. Recommend it to anyone who is grieving or has experienced a death, which ultimately means all of us.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AT THE AGE of 12, Katie Roiphe developed pneumonia. She didn't want to admit how sick she was, and so she insisted on struggling to school, doing her homework feverish, waking drenched in sweat. When she began to cough up blood, she concealed it from her parents. Eventually she was hospitalized and had half a lung removed. During this alarming, exhausting period, she became death-fixated, soothing herself by looking directly at the threat that faced her. She developed a particular obsession with books about genocide, gorging herself on images of dead children. The desire to confront death stayed with her through the decades, quickening more recently when her beloved father died of a heart attack on the marble floor of his building, at the age of 81. What does it mean to die? How should one face it? Is there a good way of dying, as the medieval "Ars Moriendi" suggested, or should it be resisted at all costs? "The Violet Hour" is Roiphe's impassioned attempt to answer these questions, by way of forensic investigation into the final months of six writers: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter. "I've picked people," she writes, "who are madly articulate, who have abundant and extraordinary imaginations or intellectual fierceness, who can put the confrontation with mortality into words - and in one case images - in a way that most of us can't or won't." Sontag is the pugilist of the group. She twice survived terminal diagnoses of cancer, successfully pursuing the then unusual strategy of aggressive treatment. "I am gleaming with survivorship," she wrote, and this ability to stare down death became part of her formidable myth, her intellectual glamour. The third diagnosis came in March 2004: myelodysplastic syndrome, a lethal blood cancer. This time, the odds were off; this time, it was harder to dismiss the pain, or convince herself that she was inching upward, toward health. She suffered through radiation, followed by a bone-marrow transplant. The treatment was agonizing. Worse, it wasn't working. One by one, members of Sontag's support team realized she wasn't going to survive. But Sontag refused to accept that she was headed toward the end, an absolute denial that caused intense feelings of conflict for those who cared for her, a disparate group that included family members, friends, lovers and paid assistants. Sontag's wholehearted resistance is unusual. Most of the writers here had more complicated, ambivalent relationships to their own dying. Take Freud, in exile in London during the Second World War. He was suffering from mouth cancer, but couldn't bring himself to give up smoking. As Roiphe observes, this is an exemplary illustration of his own concept of the death drive, the way a person can long in some quarter of herself for annihilation or extinction. Roiphe, the daughter of psychoanalysts, is subtle and incisive with this kind of material, at ease with ambiguity, capable of grasping how a man who has begun to reek of rot might still wish to inhale the pleasure-giving poison of his beloved cigars. And then there's Dylan Thomas, madly vital, hurtling greedily toward death. Roiphe tracks his rackety last days, reeling around New York in the fall of 1953. Is he suicidal, slamming down whiskeys in the White Horse Tavern, or is he clinging to the last joyous vestiges of life, gleefully sleeping with the hostess of a party while his mistress waits downstairs? Like many alcoholics, he wanted two things at once. The spectacle of him lying bloated and unshaven in a bed at St. Vincent's Hospital, while half of literary New York watched him from behind a glass partition, is one of many indelible scenes here. Roiphe's book "Uncommon Arrangements" dealt with complicated marriages and ménages à trois, and she is beady and generous on the aftermath of adultery, the blended families and shifting, complicated loyalties. Endearingly, a friend of Maurice Sendak's hired life models on Craigslist so the artist could have the pleasure of drawing naked men in his last years. But not everyone behaves with such thoughtfulness. Death doesn't always draw out generosity. One of the more distressing deathbed tales concerns John Updike's first wife, Mary, who visited as he lay dying in the house he shared with his second wife, Martha. Mary stood at the end of the bed, holding his feet through the covers, but didn't kiss him goodbye or have the final conversation she longed for because she assumed she'd be coming back. She asked to return, only to be told by Martha that this was her last visit. The intensity of these passages - the depth of research, the acute sensitivity for declarative moments - is deeply beguiling. "The rich excitement of dusk," Roiphe writes in an afterword on her research method, which involved long, rambling conversations with the surviving witnesses to her cast's final months. She's especially good at viewing a death through the lens of a life's work, a mode that culminates in an illuminating reading of Sendak's masterpiece "In the Night Kitchen." In her introduction, Roiphe writes almost hungrily of her desire to look at death unsentimentally, without romance. But in this I'm not so sure she's been successful. "These deaths kind of reassured me," Roiphe tells Salter, in the conversation before his unexpected passing, adding later: "The beauty was what ambushed me." This is undeniably cheering, but it comes at the expense of a grave omission. Almost every writer here was intensely aware of mass death, meaningless death, death in which the individual is absolutely erased. They lived through wars, and they grappled with the specter of cruelty and annihilation in their own work with near-reckless courage. Roiphe is not especially interested in all that. There are brief mentions of Nazis and bombing raids, but as the book draws on it becomes increasingly clear that her project is to redeem death, to make it palatable, even a little glamorous. A single example. While she does mention that Sendak's relatives were killed in the Holocaust, her focus is far more personal in scope, mapping the damage inflicted by his angry, unloving mother and by the accidental death of a childhood friend. /Among the biographical details that go untold is a story he recounted in a late interview, about how his father attended Maurice's bar mitzvah the same day that he heard his entire family had been killed in the camps. Even as a very old man, Sendak remained haunted by the memory of his father's "vivid, livid face" as the crowd sang "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Roiphe certainly read this interview, since she quotes from it approvingly that Sendak wanted to have "a yummy death." We all do, of course, but death is not yummy, or sweet, or tame or even dignified. The livid, traumatized face of Maurice Sendak's father testifies to that: to all the vicious, violent, unspeakable things that death can be. This is a beautiful book, absolutely, but perhaps not quite as fearless as its author might have hoped. OLIVIA LAING'S latest book is "The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone." What does it mean to die? How should one face it? Is there a good way of dying?
Guardian Review
Sensitive and faithful, this book charts the last hours of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter The grave's a fine and private place, as Marvell wrote; the deathbed, as he did not, less so. Here we have six intrusions on the last moments of six writers: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter. (The last name perhaps not so well known in the UK: I recommend checking him out.) Dr Roiphe (she has a PhD in literature) has always been a bit obsessed with death, we learn from an introduction that tells of a traumatic childhood bout of pneumonia. Recovering, she read "exclusively books about genocide" by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and others, describing her "great, endless appetite for these books, not just for people dying but people dying in great numbers". Being so consumed by her subject, and at the same time highly sensitive to the areas where art and life meet, is what lifts her book from the category of Higher Gossip (nosiness excused by the trappings of Great Art). It is presumptuous to intrude on anyone's inner life at the best of times; to do so at one of the most intimate and fearful stages of their existence without being offensive is a tricky act to pull off. Roiphe manages it through scrupulous adherence to her sources: notebooks, letters, testimony. Bad or meretricious biographies tell us, with little or no justification, what is going on in their subjects' minds; when Roiphe tells us that Sontag didn't want to be alone, it's because she's talked to all the people who stayed with her hour upon hour. Her endnote, "Notes on Sources", allays all suspicions in this regard. Her subjects do not seem to have been picked at random. Sendak was "obsessed by death" and owned Keats 's death mask; he would take it from its box and stroke its forehead. Thomas's death came, famously, after drinking 18 whiskies at the White Horse Tavern in New York (not exactly going gentle into that good night). Perhaps all decent writers have something important to say about death, or brood on it more than most. Sontag, who hated the idea of dying even more, you feel, than many of us, once wrote: "Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me." You know exactly what she means, but in this book Roiphe takes us as close to the concrete fact of death as anyone can, and when she says something happened, you can bet she has good sources for her claims. For example, that Freud's dog was so repelled by the smell of death exuding from his master's jaw that he never came near him again was to me a surprise -- but other sources corroborate this, particularly Max Schur's account, Freud: Living and Dying. The book is not all gloomy: there is a brittle humour here. Updike, on first learning that he had Stage 4 lung cancer, stopped caring about the cover of his next book ("They can use whatever blue they want"); the next day he changed his mind, and was back to nagging the publisher, as per long-standing, unbreakable habit. There is something very valuable about this book, for all that my initial reservations were severe. If philosophy is knowing how to die, as Montaigne proposed, then this is a philosophical work in itself, even if some deaths are unedifying. Thomas's legend is tightly entwined with the way his life ended; and while it is awful to read of Sontag, swollen and intubed, looking unrecognisable, she allowed herself to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz, her sometime lover. I feel as though my life has been enriched by learning that Sendak liked to eat "enormous amounts of cake". And by this exchange, from his late interview with Stephen Colbert: "Is rumpus sex?" "Yes... your mother screaming. Your father saying 'shut up'." I will not look at Where the Wild Things Are in the same way again. - Nicholas Lezard.
Kirkus Review
How five artists dealt with that carriage that kindly stopped for them. In this absorbing and affecting book, Roiphe (In Praise of Messy Lives, 2012, etc.) chronicles how Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak dealt with what Freud called the "painful riddle of death." She chose them because she always "felt some heat coming off their writing." The last thing Sontag wanted to do was die. She was ferocious in her fights against three cancer attacks. She finally succumbed to cancer of the blood but not before enduring as a last resort great suffering and pain from a blood transfusion procedure using near-lethal doses of chemotherapy. She didn't die; she just wore out from trying so hard to live. Roiphe notes that her hospital rooms always looked like her office at home. Freud approached his impending death from necrosis in his mouth, brought on by years of smoking his beloved cigars (he never quit), with a scientific stoicism. He finally gave up, and his private doctor performed euthanasia. Updike had been writing about death (and sex) since he was young; he often had death panics. When he accepted the fact that his lung cancer would kill him, he turned to poetry, urgent to finish Endpoint. "If style could defeat death," writes Roiphe, "Updike would have." Ferociously alcoholic, Thomas turned his preoccupation with death into ragingly beautiful poetry. His death at 39, Roiphe writes, was "both a great shock and utterly anticipated." Sendak, who kept Keats' "original death mask" in a guest room, was also obsessed with death and, Roiphe notes, wrote about it constantly in his books. He died at 83 from a stroke. As he told one interviewer: "I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready." An epilogue about James Salter, who died just before Roiphe finished her book, completes this beautiful and haunting work. Never overly sentimental, this is a poignant and elegant inquiry into mortality. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Susan Sontag December 2004 If there is anyone on earth who could decide not to die it would be Susan Sontag; her will is that ferocious, that unbending, that unwilling to accept the average fates or outcomes the rest of us are bound by. She is not someone to be pushed around or unduly influenced by the idea that everyone has to do something or go through something, because she is and always has been someone who rises above. Nonetheless, right before Christmas, she is lying in a bed in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, doing something that very much appears to those around her to be dying. One night she and her friend Sharon DeLano stay up late listening to Beethoven's late string quartets in her hospital room. Sontag is very doped up. She is in a good enough mood to tell Sharon one of her favorite jokes. "Where does the general keep his armies?" Sharon answers, "I don't know." "In his sleevies," Sontag says, smiling. The next day she is much more sober. When Sharon arrives, Susan is reading the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder's juvenilia and they watch two movies together. Sharon has to press pause frequently, because Susan is talking through the whole movie, adding commentary and glosses. Susan has known Sharon DeLano for a long time. They met in the mid-seventies when Sharon was working as an editor at The New York Review of Books. When Susan, who was recovering from her first cancer, doesn't want to be alone, she calls Sharon, who comes up and keeps her company at her Riverside Drive apartment. Sharon has been an editor at Vanity Fair, Random House, and The New Yorker, where she edits Susan's work. On the surface, Sharon can seem tough, but to her friends she is warm and funny and ferociously loyal. Sontag's third cancer comes into focus when Sookhee Chinkhan, her housekeeper, who's been with her for over a decade, sees bruises on her back when she is drawing her bath. Sookhee works for Susan five days a week, cleaning, cooking; there is a running chatter between them that other people are bewildered by. The diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, which leads to a particularly virulent strain of blood cancer, comes in March 2004. Sontag's son, David Rieff, a journalist in his early fifties, accompanies her to the doctor for a follow-up visit after the initial tests. David is tall and elegant. He is handsome in the way of a Roman coin. He has the slight air of being crown prince to a country that has suddenly and inexplicably gone democratic. The doctor lays out the grimmest possible scenario: There is absolutely no chance of remission or cure. He suggests that Sontag do nothing and take the remaining six months or so left to live her life. In the weeks after Susan is diagnosed, Sookhee notices that sometimes she says, "Wow wow," and closes her eyes. Susan tells her it's the pain. Inevitably, this latest illness brings back Sontag's first, dire cancer diagnosis in 1975. She was in her early forties when she discovered that she had stage 4 breast cancer. None of the doctors she initially consulted thought she had any hope at all, but she sought out aggressive treatments and she survived. From that point onward, the transcendence of ordinary illness and ordinary endings became incorporated and entangled with who she was--the person who seeks treatment, who solves her disease like a math problem, like a logical puzzle of the highest order. "I am gleaming with survivorship," she wrote in the eighties. The brush with death was incorporated into her dark glamour, her writer's pose. In an essay on photography, she wrote about "the sex appeal of death," and this was a sex appeal that she took on, the danger and thrill of coming near to it, of breathing it in, and turning back. The extremity of her breast cancer, once she recovered, fed into her long-standing idea of herself as exceptional. Another way to look at this is that her long-standing idea of herself as exceptional fed into the way she handled her cancer. Sharon DeLano says, "Because she was so fierce, because she was confrontational in terms of authority, her instinct was to confront it. She immediately decided that the doctors were wrong. This was a period when the idea of a second opinion was not a very common one . . . and she was so fierce that she went out and got one, and she survived. I think it was a vindication of who she was and how she thought. Because she didn't do the conventional thing, and she thought for herself and she lived. And it sort of reinforced all the things she was and the kind of thinker that she was. What that meant was that the next time she got sick and the next time, she thought she could do the same thing." Indeed, when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 1998, she avidly pursued arduous and aggressive treatments, chemotherapy, surgery, and she survived. In her notebooks you can see the work of self-mythologizing all along, the labor of it, the relentless taking of raw life materials and shaping them into an idea of herself as exceptional. Everyone does this, of course, but Sontag does it with a million times more commitment, more intensity, and more success than other people. Her myth is all-encompassing, seductive. One of her friends comments that she has "star quality," and he is referring not to her beauty but to her drive for attention, her self-conscious deployment of myth. She berates herself in her journals: "Don't smile so much." "Weakness is a contagion. Strong people rightly shun the weak." It is her will to become that is most spectacular, her constant working on herself, tinkering with it as if it were an essay. She writes at twenty-four, "In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself." Her drive for transformation was always powerful. She went to Berkeley at sixteen, transferring after a semester to the more academically rigorous University of Chicago. There she met a much older professor, Philip Rieff, and after ten days decided to marry him. She got a master's degree in philosophy at Harvard, and then she left Rieff and their four-year-old son, David, for a couple of years to go and study at Oxford and the Sorbonne, when that was what she felt she needed to do. From girlhood, Sontag's private mythology was predicated on a contempt for the ordinary and a distance from it. She once mocked her good friend Stephen Koch for having a savings account and health insurance, because that was what ordinary, middle-class people had. Intellectuals and artists didn't have savings accounts or health insurance. In early interviews after her recovery from breast cancer, she seemed intoxicated by her proximity to death. She said the following in an almost giddy interview in The New York Times in 1978: "It has added a fierce intensity to my life, and that's been pleasurable. . . . It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow them very real to you. That has somewhat receded now; more than two years have gone by, and I don't feel the same sort of urgency. In a way I'm sorry; I would like to keep some of that feeling of crisis. . . . I think it's good to be in contact with life and death. Many people spend their lives defending themselves against the notion that life is melodrama. I think it's good not to damp down these conflicts. . . . You get terrific energy from facing them in an active and conscious way. For me, writing is a way of paying as much attention as possible." While she was being treated for her breast cancer, she did not stop working or thinking, or struggling to work and think. In the midst of chemotherapy, she was taking notes for her elegant and influential polemic Illness as Metaphor. In it she argues against the various fantasies that surround disease. Instead of poetry and emotionally charged beliefs, she argues, patients need clarity, rational thought, and medical information, to prepare themselves for the hard work of the cure. In her hospital room, she wrote in her journal, "I have become afraid of my own imagination," and it was this fear she so brilliantly investigated and rejected in Illness as Metaphor. She writes that the imagination, the romantic overlay we give disease, is itself violent, destructive. After the diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, Sookhee sometimes sleeps over in the living room, because Susan does not want to be alone. One night she wakes up to Susan screaming. She is panicked. Sookhee has never seen her like this before. Sookhee sits on the bed and holds her and begins to pray, because that is all that she can think to do. "Please Lord, give Susan peace." In "The Way We Live Now," her excellent short story about illness, about what it is like to be sick, Sontag writes: "Dying is an amazing high he said to Quentin. Sometimes I feel so fucking well, so powerful, it's as if I could jump out of my skin. Am I going crazy, or what? Is it all this attention and coddling I'm getting from everybody, like a child's dream of being loved? Is it the drugs? Or what? I know it sounds crazy but sometimes I think it is a fantastic experience." She writes this in 1986 as someone who knows what dying feels like. She writes this as someone who was dying and then turned back. That spring of 2004, after her diagnosis with leukemia, she turns her apartment into a center for medical research. Everyone is doing Internet searches, and friends are calling with suggestions and doctors' names and obscure studies. Susan's young assistant, Anne Jump, helps her find as much information about the illness as she can. They have gone into crisis mode, and everything is about finding a cure. Susan becomes a student of her disease; she studies, underlining in the leukemia pamphlet. Once, years earlier, she jotted down in her notebooks an Auden quote: "I must have knowledge and a great deal of it before I feel anything." The night before her first exploratory surgery for breast cancer in 1975, she sat in her hospital room at Sloan Kettering with a close friend. Susan was very much herself, which is to say that she had snapped at the intake nurse who called her "Sue" and brought another well-meaning friend who had tried to talk in the platitudes of adversity almost to tears. And yet all of this snappishness was energy, high spirits of a kind, the imposition of herself on the world. The sun was going down and she suddenly decided she wanted to write the introduction to Peter Hujar's book of photographs, Portraits in Life and Death, which she had agreed to do a long time before but had procrastinated. The portraits of prominent downtown figures included one staggeringly beautiful one of her, lying on a bed, staring upward, in a gray cable sweater; there were also the remarkable photographs of human remains from the catacombs in Palermo from the early sixties. Hujar had brought the photographs of the catacombs over to Sontag's house on Washington Place after he took them. There was some discussion of coming after Sontag's eleven-year-old son, David, was asleep, so that the photographs wouldn't alarm him and give him nightmares. There were skeletons of children draped in ruffles, skulls with bits of ribbon, skulls with wreaths of flowers; it is not the bones but the remnants of the lives, these little bits of cloth and ribbon, that are terrifying, evocative, that reach out and draw the viewer into the idea that everyone they love will die too. That evening in the hospital in 1975, her friend found something wide and flat for her to write on, and she scribbled away. The mood of the essay is dreamier than usual. In her hospital bed, she took a romantic, intimate view of death with its "sweet poetry and its panic." Her scrawled sentences have a mesmerized quality too. She was staring at something in the middle distance that we cannot normally see. "We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures," she wrote, "but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge." There was peace in the room as she was writing. To be finishing, to be working: This was important to her. The friend who sat with her leafed through a magazine as the orange dusk flooded the room. The essay, one of her more graceful, unbelabored pieces of writing, took her less than an hour. Her friend remembers her quoting Samuel Johnson with amusement: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Peals of laughter after saying it. If Sontag was fierce in her determination to fight in that first experience with cancer, her companion of the time, Nicole Stéphane, was equally fierce. Nicole tracked down Dr. Lucien Israel, who pioneered Sontag's experimental treatment, in Paris. He wrote to Sontag, "I do not think your case is hopeless," and that very faint expression of optimism was enough to spur her on. After the operation for her breast cancer, a radical mastectomy called a Halsted, someone sent flowers to Susan's apartment on Riverside Drive. Nicole threw them off the terrace in rage. Flowers were for death. Later, in Sontag's private mythology, this fierceness is processed as a by-product of her intellect and determination: her refusal to accept her diagnosis or her mortality, her ability to shake off the metaphors of her illness and act. But now, in 2004, with this latest, dire diagnosis, she is laboring to maintain her belief in this specialness; she is now having to work to prop it up. She says to several people, including David, "I don't feel special this time," or "I don't feel lucky this time." She is working to fight off the dread, to find her way back to the luck, the specialness, again. In the meantime, she doesn't want to be alone. She doesn't like the lights off. She has people coming through all the time, people in attendance. These people offer reassurance that she is who she was. One gets the sense that it is only in the dark, and alone, that she is dying. Her long relationship with Annie Leibovitz, whom Sharon had introduced her to, is by now distant and troubled, but Annie is still in her life. Even at the high point of their relationship, they don't like the label "couple" and prefer "friends" or "lovers." Annie has taken photographs of Susan in hotels, in beds, in baths, that are playful, soft, open, evoking a happier time--unlike the usual daunting photographs of Sontag. They keep separate apartments that overlook each other, in the Chelsea building London Terrace. Excerpted from The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End by Katie Roiphe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue | p. 3 |
Susan Sontag | p. 25 |
Sigmund Freud | p. 77 |
John Updike | p. 111 |
Dylan Thomas | p. 159 |
Maurice Sendak | p. 201 |
Epilogue: James Salter | p. 261 |
Acknowledgments | p. 291 |
Notes on Sources | p. 293 |
Photo Credits | p. 303 |
Permissions | p. 305 |