The Violet Hour (11 page)

In one odd and prickly letter years earlier, Freud got irritated with his very close woman friend and ex-patient Lou Andreas-Salomé for being overly invested in his longevity, for being angry or grieved that he was ill. He wrote in a burst of pique: “I have always found you—I will not say resigned, but at least
raised above everything that happened around you and to you, and now it seemed to me you were behaving like someone in a violent fury of indignation. Why? Because I had taken a further step on the stony path which leads us out of this existence?” He goes on to say that he's confused by her reaction; his death, he writes coldly, like everyone's, is wholly predictable. Somehow this chastisement for her outrage, for her raging against mortality, is revealing more of his state of mind than hers: He is angry, almost, at her expression of love. He is adamant in imposing this resignation, this cool, rational acceptance of the stony path that leads us out of existence, on his intimates, because the alternative is unthinkable: to fear death, to deny it, to rage against it, to be, in other words, out of control.

When he was in Vienna awaiting permission to move to England and flee the Nazis, Freud often declared that he was done with life, that the fresh start was wasted on him. While his friends tried to negotiate with Nazi officials for permission to take his papers and library—for which his friend Marie Bonaparte ended up paying an enormous “tax”—he said to Ernest Jones, “If I was alone I should long ago have done with life.” But his actions betrayed his irrepressible energy: He studied maps of London, devoured guidebooks, did a translation into German—along with Anna—of Marie Bonaparte's whimsical book,
Topsy: The Story of a Golden-Haired Chow
, about the illness and phoenix-like recovery of her dog, Topsy, and labored away on the first drafts of his controversial
Moses and Monotheism
. He was unable to leave his house, because of
the Nazis, and unable to see patients, but his mind was throwing off sparks and casting around for projects. So, though he was undeniably old and ill, the giving up, the retreat from life he spoke about so extensively and persuasively, was not the whole story: It was something more like an official stance.

As he was finally leaving on the Orient Express to Paris, en route to London, Freud dreamed he was landing at Pevensey, where William the Conqueror had landed before being crowned—not exactly the dream of someone who has given up on his kingdom.

In fact, the cool state of being beyond caring that he often declared was belied at times by the warmth of his attachments—that is, by his continuing enjoyment of his many attachments. Once, his former patient the poet H.D. sent him white gardenias for his birthday, and he wrote to her: “Dear H.D., All your white cattle safely arrived, lived, and adorned the room up to yesterday. I had imagined I had become insensitive to praise and blame. Reading your kind lines and getting aware of how I enjoyed them, I first thought I had been mistaken in my firmness….Life at my age is not easy, but spring is beautiful and so is love. Yours affectionately, Freud.” He is always imagining this rising above, this becoming insensitive, and then something, like a bouquet of white flowers, a note from a former patient, undoes it; he is back among those enamored, implicated, busy with life.

Freud argued so eloquently and constantly over the years for his acceptance of death that his closest disciples, given as they may have been to scrutiny and analysis and second-guessing, were entirely convinced. In his memorial, Ernest Jones would say, “Nor did he in any way dread death….If ever man can be said to have conquered death itself, to live on in spite of the King of Terrors, who held no terror for him, that man was Freud.” (Jones here may have been forgetting something else Freud once wrote to him: “The overblown declarations that a death normally evokes have always been particularly embarrassing to me.”) But is it possible that death held no terror for Freud? That he did not in any way dread death? He certainly did an excellent job of presenting that impression, even in his most intimate associations. But the sheer number of declarations about how completely and entirely resigned he was to death certainly raise at least the specter of their opposite: It begins to sound as if he was persuading himself. Why get so angry at Lou Andreas-Salomé for not accepting his death? Why is not accepting death so shameful, so provocative, so enraging, if you yourself have truly accepted it?

The answer to those questions may in fact lie in Freud's writing. In his essays, he acknowledges that we can accept death while at the same time not accepting death. There is a difference, in other words, between what we know and how we feel, and of course much of Freud's revolutionary theory was pitched in that very space between the two. He writes in the marvelous novelistic beginning of his 1915 paper “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”:

To anyone who listened to us we were of course prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes nature a death and must expect to pay the debt—in short that death was natural, undeniable and unavoidable. In reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were otherwise. We showed an unmistakable tendency to put death on one side, to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up…at bottom no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.

He is, in this passage, giving us the key to how to read his letters, with their wry protestations of rationality: “at bottom no one believes in his own death.” What we say to “anyone who listened” is here very different from how we feel alone in a room at night. The gulf between our rational knowledge and our primal beliefs is so great that it is impossible to accept our mortality on the deepest level. Even Freud, by implication, with his graceful bravura passages of accepting death, does not on another level believe in it. The heroic clarity he respects, then, is not entirely possible: It is a goal, an ideal, a place to move toward.

When he was diagnosed with a “leukoplakia” in his mouth in the winter of 1923, Freud finally found tangible form for his
sense of impending doom. He underwent the first of many grueling operations to remove it. His doctors did not tell him right away that it was cancerous, but he intuited that it was, and the radiation and X-ray treatments they recommended confirmed his suspicions. The fact that his doctors treated him like an ordinary patient, lying to him, obscuring the truth, enraged him: He did not want to be shielded or coddled.

His illness strengthened his attachment to his daughter Anna, made it feel more pressing and necessary to both of them. She wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé, “You are right. I would not leave him now under any circumstances.”

Six years later, at the urging of Marie Bonaparte, Freud decided to take on a personal physician, Dr. Max Schur. Dr. Schur was a warm young internist, with an unusual interest in psychoanalysis. Of course, taking on a personal physician, or
Leibarzt
, involves taking an extraordinary position toward one's health, managing it above and beyond the ordinary person; it is the luxury of the affluent, the privilege of a king, but it is also a statement of power, of intent. In taking on a personal physician, Freud entered into a personal relation with death. He was beginning what could almost be called a negotiation. He asked Schur to promise that when the time came he would help him die, which Schur did. He also asked Schur to promise to be completely honest, which he did as well.

In many ways Freud was the perfect patient—stoic, rational. He referred to himself as Max Schur's “docile patient” and was brave and uncomplaining through even the most florid mishaps
of his treatments, through no fewer than thirty-three painful and sometimes botched operations on his mouth; yet in his cigar smoking he continued to elude, to rebel, to court his illness, his future death. He knew that his smoking was compounding his lesions, making them worse, and yet he continued to smoke. As he wrote to a friend very early on in his illness: “Smoking is accused as the etiology of this tissue rebellion.” But he smoked through the discomforts and difficulties. At one point he told his friend Sandor Ferenczi that he used a clothespin to pry open “the Monster” so that he could smoke. This innovative, desperate image, which he tossed off lightly, as if it were an entertaining anecdote, communicates more clearly than words his unnatural or overardent devotion to smoking.

One wonders why he had such a strong commitment to smoking, even after his doctors urged him to quit, and the answer is hard to sort out. In part, of course, it was simply a physical addiction, but as Freud's frequent rhapsodies over smoking reveal, it was also much more than that. Freud took up what he called “the sweet habit of smoking” when he was twenty-four, starting with cigarettes and moving to cigars. His father was a heavy smoker, and he himself was soon smoking twenty cigars a day. When his seventeen-year-old nephew Harry declined a cigarette, Freud said, “My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you.”

In February of 1923, when he first discovered the growth in his throat, Freud delayed telling the doctors, in part because
he knew that they would ask him to quit smoking again. After the cancerous lesion in his throat was removed, he continued to have swelling and lesions and difficulty with the large, awkward prosthesis that was fitted to replace parts of his palate. His smoking intensified the complications and side effects; it led, very clearly, to more interventions and pain. Freud would often say to Schur, “I know what you are going to say—don't smoke.” On May 1, 1930, he wrote, “For six days now I have not smoked a single cigar, and it cannot be denied that I owe my well-being to this renunciation.
But it is sad
.”

His health problems, seriously as he took them, never really got in the way of his smoking. As early as 1893 he announced defiantly in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess his commitment to continue smoking after his heart troubles: “I am not observing your ban on smoking. Do you think it is such a glorious fate to live many long years in misery?” This is interesting because it is during this time he developed what he referred to as his “death deliria,” a serious preoccupation with the idea that he was dying, and yet even then, or perhaps particularly then, he was not willing to give up his beloved cigars. After he began smoking again, he explained to Fliess: “From the first cigars on I was able to work and was the master of my mood; prior to that life was unbearable.” These are strong statements: Life without cigars was unbearable, a misery. From very early on he linked smoking to his imaginative work, to his creative side. It seemed to him impossible to work, to concentrate, to envision without a cigar, impossible, almost, to live. Something vital, crucial, was tangled up with cigars, something akin to identity.