If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?This is the question that author Katie Roiphe examines in The Violet Hour, and after picking the “great writers” to whom she was drawn “by instinct”, Roiphe devotes a chapter to each of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak; sharing the stories of their final illnesses from eyewitness accounts, and where possible, including each author's final perspective. Each of these outsized personalities did have an interesting story surrounding their death (so I was never bored, exactly, by this book), but if the premise was to discover what a group of singularly articulate people put into words about their own impending ends, well, there was actually very little of that (so I felt a bit cheated out of what I thought I was in for).
The research that went into this book is impressive – evident from the frequent references to each author's many books, biographies about them, and the personal interviews that Roiphe was able to conduct with insiders – but while this information was of startling breadth, it was disappointingly shallow; there was a definite lack of humanity in these pages. Here's what I learned: after beating cancer twice through the decades already, Susan Sontag expected to beat it once again, insisting on harrowing experimental treatments that destroyed what small quality of life she might have expected at the end; Sigmund Freud refused to quit smoking even though he knew it was killing him, and even as his beloved dog shunned him (because of the necrotic smells from his rotting mouth), Freud insisted on meeting death with dignity, refusing anything more than aspirin for his pain; John Updike had always written about death (and often, about the idea that the stolen hours of a clandestine affair is like living a parallel life that can be considered an extension of the finite life given us), and when he was suddenly diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, Updike attempted to capture the experience in a final book of poetry; Dylan Thomas had always been sickly, and as he had a premonition that his final speaking engagement in the US would be his last, he may have been overdrinking and otherwise hastening the death that he was anticipating; and Maurice Sendak, also a sickly child, had always been working through a fear of death and a yearning for maternal love in his children's books. As I said, the research in this book is admirable, but with a scattershot, time-skipping, flitting-from-the-works-to-the-eyewitnesses style that Roiphe employs, I didn't learn much more than this brief synopsis.
The Violet Hour isn't about famous last words, but since Updike used the dwindling strength of his last months to compose poetry, he was able to leave us with this:
Updike had written a peaceful death before he died. He wrote a peaceful death before he was dying, and he wrote it when he was dying: “To live is good / but not to live – to be pulled down / with scarce a ripping sound, / still flourishing, still / stretching towards the sun – / is good also.”And as Thomas' final illness involved a coma from which he never awakened, the premonition of his own death as confided in his correspondence is brilliantly captured here:
Thomas wrote one of his very last letters, a sort of delirious fantasy about himself as Houdini at the bottom of the sea to Princess Caetani: “Oh, one time the last time will come and I'll never struggle, I'll stay down here forever handcuffed and blindfolded, sliding my windaround music, my sack trailed in the slime, withal the rest of the self-destroyed escapologists in their cages, drowned in the sorrows they drown and in my piercing own, alone and one with the coarse and cosy damned seahorsey dead, weeping my tons.”In a final bit of dramatic irony: after completing all the research and the writing that went into this book, Roiphe interviewed author James Salter (who was eighty-nine at the time), talking about these other writers in particular and mortality in general. When discussing Roiphe's own father's death from a sudden heart attack, Salter explained the extreme pain and panic that such a death would cause (something that Roiphe had never considered; she had always imagined it quick and peaceful), and months later, before she was even able to send him the copy of this book as promised, Salter himself dropped dead of a sudden heart attack. That would be so unbelievable if it were not true.
So, in the end, The Violet Hour wasn't the book that I was expecting (which is entirely my own failing), but as a mostly superficial assemblage of facts, it was also not a book that I particularly needed to read. I liked the Prologue (in which Roiphe explains her own childhood illness that led to her lifelong fascination with death) and Epilogue (the bits with Salter, and later, her experiences with all of the intimates she interviewed) the best, and I suppose that simply means that I would have preferred for Roiphe to have inserted herself more into the chapters about her chosen authors; to have filtered the facts through her own humanity; how could a book with so many intimately witnessed deaths have had zero emotional effect on me? There were certainly some interesting stories in here, and many references make me want to go back and read some of these authors (I've always meant to pick up Updike's Rabbit books), so this was certainly not a waste of time; again, just not what I would have expected from the book's jacket.
