KATIE ROIPHE
A WRITER’S DYING CAN SEEM THE CODA TO HIS WORK, since one definition of the poet and novelist is, or should be, someone who’s been preparing to die all along: someone whose imaginative life is usurped by the inevitability of our flesh, and the consequences that inevitability has for the spirit. Death, says William Empson, is “the trigger of the literary man’s biggest gun.” The writing of literature and the reading of literature don’t have many junctions, but preparation for death is one of them. Whatever else it may become, writing remains a stay against our fate in that writers attempt to parse that fate, and then let the rest of us know what they’ve found.
The critic who parses the artist parsing death must be every inch as intrepid as the artist himself. In The Violet Hour—on the deaths of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak—Katie Roiphe delivers a composite of daring beauty, a necessary report from “the deepening shades,” as Yeats has it, rife with her hospitable authority and critical rectitude. (The phrase is Eliot’s, from The Waste Land: “the violet hour, the evening hour that strives / Homeward.”) For the duration of this lovely book, the dark night of Roiphe’s subject becomes lit by her limpid grasp of the psyche de profundis, by the grit and thew of her scrutiny. The author of four previous books of nonfiction and one novel, Roiphe writes of the violet hour with an unassailable dignity and consummate lack of bathos. 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.
Each chapter, skillfully eliding overlap, constitutes a “biography backward, a whole life unfurling from a death.” In the slow fade of her five writers—cancer came for Sontag, Freud, and Updike; a stroke felled Sendak; Thomas decimated himself exuberantly with drink—Roiphe finds “glimpses of bravery, of beauty . . . of truly terrible behavior, of creative bursts, of superb devotion, of glitteringly accurate self-knowledge, and of magnificent delusion.” Death approaches unbidden and demands you “put away,” says Dickinson, your “labor” and your “leisure.” Her use of “labor” has always put me in mind of Christina Rossetti’s line “Of labor you shall find the sum”: all of our earthly strivings have the same outcome. Death is the great leveler.
Roiphe: “I think if I can capture death on the page, I’ll repair or heal something. I’ll feel better. It comes down to that.” Yes, it does; it comes down to virtually nothing else. “I don’t believe you can learn how to die, or gain wisdom, or prepare”—and she’s mistaken about that—“but I do think you can look at a death and be less afraid,” and that’s right on. “I want to see death,” she writes, and “to see the world I’ve always opened a book.” That’s a fine encapsulation of why literature matters: it permits you to see past yourself, to see the world, and death is an always integral element of that world. Next to being born, dying is the most important thing that ever happens to you.
A distinction must be made between those who sought their deaths and those who fought them. Freud was uncommonly devoted to tobacco; even after he became certain it would kill him, he smoked with an erotic intensity. (Roiphe’s meditation on his smoking is one of the book’s many gems.) Dr. Johnson might have said that a sick man can’t help but be a scoundrel but Dr. Freud proved otherwise. He seems to have been not just genuinely resigned to dying but genuinely unafraid of it, too. Rousseau has that passage in his novel Julie, about how there’s no such thing as fearlessness in the face of death, that we must be very afraid or else the species would self-destruct. In that Freud proved as obstinate as in all else. Roiphe sees him as having a “rational acceptance of the stony path that leads us out of existence . . . because the alternative is unthinkable: to fear death, to deny it, to rage against it, to be, in other words, out of control.” In his eighty-third year, Freud died as he wished, at home in London, his last reading pleasure a Balzac novel, his disciple-daughter Anna at his bedside. The lifelong master of control—of his work, of his legacy, of the art form he founded—was not about to give it up at the close.
That dervish Dylan Thomas, on the other hand: he was an epic relinquisher of control, a drinker of otherworldly virtuosity. “Thou comest,” says Everyman to Death, “when I had thee least in mind,” but Thomas was almost never free of his deathward lean. Like Rilke before him, he fancied himself death’s plaything in one mood, death’s playboy in another. Roiphe quotes aptly from Thomas’s letters and poems, though she misses this bit from a letter he penned as a self-wallowing seventeen-year-old: “Death stinks through a thousand books.” And this one from the year before: “The majority of literature is the outcome of ill men.” To that line he appended this: “I am always ill.” So you see the romance Thomas was having with himself, a romance that started young and never stopped.
Thomas enjoyed “the theater of sickness,” Roiphe writes, because he “found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function.” The illness factor in alcoholism appealed to him, and at a time when people called it a weakness instead of a disease. Biographers differ on how many straight whiskeys Thomas downed before he dropped into a coma in New York City at the age of thirty-nine, but eighteen is the number that keeps coming up. Byronic self-mythologizer, Thomas knew that talent, sex, booze, and early death are the golden quartet of literary immortality. Although that’s an outsized ambition with a high rate of failure, it happened to have worked for him. Good advice, that famous line about raging “against the dying of the light,” but few poets ever raged so feelingly into darkness.
Where Freud and Thomas might have been imprudent, Sontag and Updike were exceedingly sane, nondestructive, engined by an incorruptible will to live. Roiphe quotes Sontag’s line, “One can’t look steadily at death any more than one can stare at the sun,” without noting that it’s an annexation of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim, “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.” But Sontag was forced to look. To the attempted blitzing of her cancer she brought the selfsame ferocity of will she’d brought to her life and work. She sought whatever medical scorchings and strafings might stand some chance of helping her, of adding days to her truncated calendar. As an intellect and personality she was afraid of nothing, of nobody, and so she appeared to believe that cancer was one more foe she could vanquish by sheer superiority of assertion—she had, after all, beaten it twice before. “Brave” is the cliché tirelessly attached to one’s struggle against cancer, but for Sontag, the cliché wouldn’t do. She was, instead, caustically heroic when she wasn’t pointlessly petulant.
Sontag wore her snobbery like a red velvet robe, and that’s one way to do it, I suppose. She seemed often to forget the basic moral arithmetic which says that while fierceness on the page is necessary, fierceness in person is not. It’s hard to take her insolence to friends and nurses who say the wrong thing in their kind attempt to say the right thing. Death makes us bumble, renders language more inadequate than it normally is, and those who fail to recognize that are missing a fundamental fact of being human. At the age of sixteen, an impossibly precocious Sontag wrote in her notebook: “How is it possible for me to stop living . . . How could anything be without me?” Her self-regard was so unconquerable that she considered her dying a cosmic discourtesy.
Roiphe flashes her richness of mind most intently on Updike: “Memory is more vivid in Updike, more intrusive, more gorgeously rendered, than in most people’s actual days.” All through his canon—and if any American writer can be said to have composed “a canon,” it is Updike—“one is struck not by the glittering seductions of the sharp, ambitious, sexually enthralling mistresses but by the deep, agonized love the husbands feel for the first wives.” Roiphe commands a supercharged insight into Updike’s religio-sexual realm that many critics are too ideological or panderly to muster—she has none of what Eliot named “these impure desires to satisfy.” She knows that true criticism does not bother with the mollification of delicate sensibilities, does not cater to the economic or epidermal, to the gendered or genital, to whatever ism flutters in the breeze of trend, only to the intellect as it roils and rollicks through language.
Whole swaths of Updike’s work are “about not submitting gratefully to that eternal sleep, cheating, tricking, denouncing it, protesting it, fixating on it; so much involves the hope for more than our animal walk, an afterlife or, better yet, more life.” His exuberant buoyancy of language, a style that pursued every contour and lineation of living: no other major American novelist has been so delighted by the tensile strength of English, no one else so wedded to the notion of writing as deliverance. The eighteenth century poet Edward Young, in his magnificent nine-part poem “Night-Thoughts,” has this to say: “Who can take / Death’s portrait true? The tyrant never sat. / Our sketch all random strokes, conjecture all.” And Empson says of death: “I feel very blank upon this topic, / And think that though important, and proper for anyone to bring up, / It is one that most people should be prepared to be blank upon.” But for Updike blankness was never a possibility. Here’s Roiphe:
In those arduous last poems, he scrawls through rage, bitterness, bile, jealousy of the living; he works through nostalgia, fond slippage into the past, bewilderment. He writes through magical salvation, resurrection. He imagines himself reading his own death: “Endpoint, I thought, would end a chapter in / a book beyond imagining, that got reset / in crisp exotic type a future I /—a miracle!—could read.” He is writing his way out of death; he is dreaming his way past or through it.
This book about writers dying is also about those who congregate around them as they do: Tony Kushner’s loyalty to Sendak, Annie Leibovitz’s to Sontag, Anna Freud’s to her father. The dying of a loved one can also underline all of our most grating qualities. Caitlin, Thomas’s wife, says of his hospitalization: “It was like a super melodramatic spy story . . . with all the characters suspecting each other of the vilest motives.” That makes a near-accurate description of Sontag’s dying, too, her friends and family sometimes jostling for dominance of the indomitable. We see here the appalling callousness of Updike’s second wife, Martha, toward Updike’s first wife, Mary, and toward Updike’s own children—consider the moral smallness of someone who would feel that threatened, for that long, by her husband’s children and ex-wife—a callousness for which she seems to have had Updike’s unspoken approval, and not only during his final days. That doesn’t sit well: we want our literary heroes to be decent people off the page, despite our knowing that personal decency has nothing to do with their effectiveness on the page.
For all of Roiphe’s subjects, their minds mattered most to them; bodily pain, as Sontag believed, was irrelevant. Freud refused any painkiller more potent than aspirin: “I prefer to think in torment,” he said, “than not to be able to think clearly.” Roiphe knows that “the writer controls words in ways one can’t control feelings.” As for her own prose, you forgive the scant missteps—“gaping holes,” “bone white,” “above and beyond”—because more often than not she’s turning lovely phrases—“rhapsodic philandering”—and hitting you with wisdom you want to remember: “Your thoughts are not your own in a hospital; your thoughts belong a little bit to the nurse who is coming to check something,” or her reference to “the willful, playful, temporary, in the end completely illusory control that language gives over life.”
In his poem “The Last Invocation,” Whitman writes, “Let me glide noiselessly forth,” and that sounds ideal, but a demise can contain multitudes, the bartering between riot and calm. We’ve seen recently, in last testaments, the multiform ways to cope: the grating sentimentality of Oliver Sacks in Gratitude, the trademarked recalcitrance of Christopher Hitchens in Mortality. In Latest Readings, cancer-stricken Clive James has this to say: “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do” because “the childish urge to understand everything doesn’t necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.” If literature indeed helps us understand living, why read when there’s but scant living left, when your understanding won’t do you any good? Because the dying aren’t always dead to pleasure, and for a writer at the end, the knowledge of literature still gives the most pleasure of all. “We won’t be taking our knowledge any further,” says Clive James, “but it brought us this far.”
—The New Republic, APRIL 2016