The Violet Hour
by Katie Roiphe, Virago, £16.99
Subtitled Great Writers at the End, this book is written on the premise that writers are “especially sensitive or attuned to death” and that they “have worked through the problem of death in their art, in their letters, in their love affairs, in their dreams”. Katie Roiphe, who admits that she wrote the volume because of her own fear of death, draws on the writings, letters and diaries of her chosen group, as well as interviewing family members and friends.
She herself has no religious beliefs and nor (with the exception of John Updike) do her subjects: Susan Sontag, Updike, Dylan Thomas, Freud, the illustrator Maurice Sendak and James Salter. Thus, readers will discover no hint of deathbed conversions. This makes her survey somewhat depressing, alongside a rather voyeuristic element for the reader – after all, contemplating these accounts, we can reassure ourselves that we are still healthy,
aren’t we?
What we learn is that people – and “great writers” are no exception – generally die as they have lived. Thus Dylan Thomas famously drank himself into a terminal coma, as if he had a death wish. Those who accompanied him on his last lecture tour in America in 1953 were powerless to stop him. The strong-willed Sontag, having overcome two earlier bouts of cancer, felt invincible. She rejected the medical verdict that nothing could be done. Her rage against the dying of the light is painful to read.
Freud, who fled Austria for Hampstead in 1938, was already a sick man, having fought cancer of the mouth and jaw for 16 years, refusing all painkillers stronger than aspirin. By September 1939, he told his personal physician, “It is only torture now. It has no longer any sense,” and requested a fatal dose of morphine. Updike kept writing – “Turning pain into honey.”
Roiphe provides fascinating biographical details, evidence of her immersion in her subjects’ lives, as well as personal reflections, which are described in a series of linked but discrete passages. “I do think you can look at a death and be less afraid,” she suggests. I am not sure her book bears this out.
