The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe review – great writers on their deathbeds

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.

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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.