The Violet Hour (14 page)

Freud is reading Balzac's
La Peau de Chagrin
in these last days. “There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most people's downfalls are not dangerous; they are like children who have not far to fall, and cannot injure themselves; but when a great nature is dashed down, he is bound to fall from a height. He must have been raised almost to the skies.”

Anna sends her very close friend Dorothy Burlingham, who is in New York, a cable saying that her father is worse and no treatment at present is possible. Dorothy writes back, “It's so sad and hard. I wish the ocean were not so wide and I so far away.”

The pain is now debilitating, but Freud continues to refuse painkillers. He accepts aspirin and a hot-water bottle at night. He is having trouble sleeping, which is unusual for him. Here is the “heroic clarity” he wrote about in Anton von Freund's death. The clarity is a willed, arduous clarity, a clarity to be honest, which most of us would refuse if we had the choice. He is choosing not only how long to suffer but also how to experience that suffering. He does not want a dimming or a blurring or a diminishing of awareness. He does not want to sink into the state Balzac describes in the novel he is reading: “Thanks to the material power that opium exerts over the immaterial part of us, this man with the powerful and active imagination reduced himself to the level of those sluggish forms of animal life that lurk in the depths of forests, and take the form of vegetable refuse, never stirring from their place to catch their easy prey.”

He has a different idea. Freud had written about his own father, who died at eighty-two, “He bore himself bravely up to the end, like the remarkable man he was,” and that is the model he has in his head. It bothered him enormously when his first doctors lied to him about the fact that he had cancer
and then later about his prospects for recovery. He had written to Marie Bonaparte the previous March: “One has tried to draw me into an atmosphere of optimism: the cancer is in shrinkage, the reaction manifestations are temporary. I do not believe it, and do not like being deceived.” Likewise, he has no desire to avoid or gloss over the truth in this last stretch. He talks to Anna about the importance of “courageously looking life, and whatever it brings, in the eye.” In his poem about Freud, W. H. Auden puts this same tendency a slightly different way: “all he did was to remember like the old and be honest like children.”

Anna sends Dorothy Burlingham a cable, saying her father is wretched and in great pain. Dorothy writes back, “There is nothing to say. One just feels, for him and for you. I feel like Job these days as I look in the newspaper and there is nothing but bad news each day worse than the last.”

In London, though, the skies are quiet. The air raids have stopped for a few days.

Anna cables Dorothy to say that her father has gotten much worse.

Dorothy writes back: “It's such a terribly cruel world. I've somehow lived with the feeling that your father would always be there—anything else seems so impossible. Such courage and such a wish to live.”

Freud finishes the last page of the Balzac novel and closes the book. He is not working anymore. He is not reading. He says, “My dear Schur, you remember our first talk. You promised me then you would help me when I could no longer carry on. It is only torture now and it has no longer any sense.” Then he asks Schur to talk to Anna about it—Anna, who has become almost an extension of his own body. Schur asks Anna for her assent.

This is a question that is impossible to answer. He does not seem different to Anna, just reduced. She writes to a friend, “His bodily pain grew more and more but his spirit never changed in spite of everything.”

At first Anna says no, and then Anna says yes.

Schur gives Freud a third of a gram of morphia. He drifts to sleep. Later, Schur administers more morphia when he becomes restless.

A quiet falls over the house. Freud is quiet under the mosquito netting.