The Violet Hour (22 page)

Updike once said that finishing
Rabbit at Rest
was like a kind of death. In the Rabbit books, Rabbit's son is with him when he dies. Nelson is undone at his father's death, demanding that he not die. Rabbit feels some sense of obligation to tell him something. He says, “All I can tell you is, it isn't so bad.” He thinks he should say more, but then he doesn't say more. The book ends, “But enough. Maybe. Enough.”

In 1990, Philip Roth wrote to him, “Poor Rabbit. Must he die because you're tired?”

Though, of course, it doesn't end. Updike can't resist
Rabbit Remembered
, a continuation of the story without Rabbit. More Rabbit, without Rabbit.

In fact, it seems Rabbit has a robust afterlife because Updike needed to keep him around. He wrote to his friend Warner Berthoff, a professor at Harvard, that he shouldn't joke about Updike doing another Rabbit book in 2009. He says the Rabbit books brought something out in him that nothing else has.

From very far away, the gray-shingled hospice resembled a house, if your vision was very bad. It had only eight rooms; the institution had an overlay of homey-ness, patchwork quilts laid across hospital-like beds.

The Updikes brought a copy of
The Book of Common Prayer
. Martha packed a big duffel for each of them, as if they were going to be there for months.

The children felt that Martha was still restricting their “alone time” with Updike. They did not feel free to stay as long as they liked or come as much as they wanted.

When David and Elizabeth arrived, Updike thanked them for coming so soon. Elizabeth sat on his bed and rubbed his feet through his white socks. They didn't know what he meant by “soon.”

When the Episcopal minister from Updike's church arrived, Elizabeth and David recited the Lord's Prayer with him, as they had in their rooms as children.

Updike once wrote:

At the hospice they had a couch in the room that folded out into a bed, and Martha stayed the night.

In the morning, Martha ducked out to take care of something. Michael and Miranda came in. The priest told them it was very near the end.

Updike wrote a peaceful death for Rabbit: “He is nicely tired. He closes his eyes.”

Updike had written a peaceful death before he died. He wrote a peaceful death before he was dying, and he wrote it when he was dying: “To live is good / but not to live—to be pulled down / with scarce a ripping sound, / still flourishing, still / stretching toward the sun— / is good also.”

When Martha came back, it seemed to her that there was too much going on in the room.

It seemed to her that the children were doing a lot of crying. The priest was doing a lot of praying. She did not want any more praying or crying, so she said, “Clear the room please. I want everyone out.”

Michael and Miranda did not want to wait outside, but they waited outside.

Martha read from
The Book of Common Prayer
and talked to him. She had never seen anyone die. He was taking huge loud breaths. She held him and talked to him. His breathing quieted.

Afterward, she went out and got Michael and Miranda and took their hands and brought them in to see their father, an ending so completely in the penumbra of his oeuvre that one can only think: How would Updike write it?

In planning his funeral, Updike had said that he wanted a passage from the end of “Pigeon Feathers” to be read aloud. It had not been included in the planned service, so the priest wove it into his own eulogy. The boy is gazing at the dead pigeons' feathers: “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

Credit 4.1

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent's Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed.

It was a bright, cold day. Half of literary New York was gathered outside his room, as if they were still at one of the roving drinks parties that sprang up spontaneously around him.

There was intense competitive jostling about who was closest to him and who was representing his interests. As his wife, Caitlin, put it, “It was like a super melodramatic spy story…with all the characters suspecting each other of the vilest motives.”

His visitors stood in the hallway, gazing at him through a glass partition. Caitlin, who had always resented the way Thomas
was the center of attention, may have been the only one who noticed that even in this situation he had an audience.

Before he was taken to the hospital, Thomas had been staying at the Chelsea Hotel. He was in the middle of a lecture tour. His unnaturally devoted biographer, John Malcolm Brinnin (unnaturally devoted in that he would come into Thomas's hotel room and find him curled up in the fetal position, nude, and would cover him with blankets and turn off the light), had set up a busy schedule of readings.

Thomas was a spectacular reader. At one lecture at the Kaufman Auditorium, with an audience of over a thousand people, the small, plump, rumpled poet stood at the lectern and took out a sheaf of handwritten pages on which he had copied poems. A single shaft of light fell against the blue curtains. His words poured into the velvety darkness: “And death shall have no do-min-i-on.” His voice was so rich, so expansive, so majestic, so perfectly enunciated, that one could forgive anyone anything for that voice. Afterward, the audience was wild with applause, young women standing and screaming.

Dylan Thomas had burst into public at nineteen with his first lush poems, many of which, like “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” were preoccupied with death. He wooed readers with the heat of romanticism, the ripe lyricism of an earlier tradition. The literary world, accustomed to the brainy coolness of modernism, to Eliot and Auden, was immediately in thrall to his talent. His friend the poet Elizabeth Bishop said,
“Dylan made most of our contemporaries seem small and disgustingly self-seeking and cautious and hypocritical and cold.” His reputation for self-destruction, for alcoholism, for erratic behavior, for publicly conducted adultery, and for overall messiness only enhanced his legend and raised his poetry, which was sometimes obscure, to a more beguiling, almost sensual plane. In America, the adulation was magnified, unmanageable. Caitlin wrote later in a letter to a friend, “Nobody needed encouragement less, and he was drowned in it.”

For him, the tidal admiration was thrilling, terrifying, alienating; he loved and hated it, felt on some level it was dangerous to him. Elizabeth Hardwick, who was married to Thomas's friend Robert Lowell, put it this way: “Dylan Thomas was loved and respected abroad, but he was literally
adored
in America. Adored, too, with a queer note of fantasy, with a baffled extravagance that went beyond his superb accomplishments as a poet, his wit, amazing and delightful at all times, his immense abilities on the public platform….He was also, and perhaps this was more important to some of his admirers, doomed, damned, whatever you will, undeniably suffering and living in the extremest reaches of experience….Here, at last, was a poet in the grand, romantic style, a wild and inspired spirit not built for comfortable ways.”

This was his fourth American tour. The others had carried him across the country, to Boston, Chicago, Colorado, Utah, California. Thomas wrote of one of these tours: “I buried my head in the sands of America: flew over America like a damp, ranting bird; boomed and fiddled while home was burning;
carried with me, all the time, my unfinished letters, my dying explanations and self-accusations….” As this damp, ranting bird made his way across the country, he was feted, and invited to parties, and invited to stay, and the trips were overwhelming, flattering, draining, exhilarating, lonely, addictive. He described himself as being “loudly lost for months.” He described himself as “peddling and bawling to adolescents the romantic agonies of the dead.” But now he was done with the peddling and bawling. The only sound in the room was the beep of the machines and the faint hiss of the oxygen.

Outside his room, the crowd made dinner plans. People left and arrived in small clumps of twos and threes. The hospital switchboard was barraged with calls. And this was just the beginning. Friends, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, acquaintances, patrons, poets, critics, and biographers would try to read this coma like one of his denser and more incomprehensible poems. Did Thomas know he was going to die on this trip? Did he drink himself to death? Did someone botch his medical care or fail to take care of him? Did an irresponsible American cohort lead him into a spiral of even more excessive behavior for their own morally suspect reasons? Was it suicide or was it an accident?

When Thomas boarded the plane to New York, Caitlin half-thought the unthinkable: that the two of them were splitting up. Their marriage had deteriorated to such an extent that there was certainly in the air when he left the
question
of their
splitting up. They fought bitterly and frequently, and sometimes, after hours in the pub, these fights degenerated into hitting, and it wasn't only, or even largely, Thomas doing the hitting. There was also hair-pulling, kicking, and plate-throwing. Caitlin was spirited, prickly, angry, narcissistic; she did not take well to the inflated ego of her husband, to his fame, to his perpetual poverty, or even to his irresistible, buoyant charisma at a pub. In photographs, the early smiling ones, in cable sweaters at the beach, they emanate a tumbling domestic peace, and in the later ones, fatter, sadder, they look like brother and sister.

Over the last, unhappy years of their marriage, Thomas had many opportunities to leave. He had seduced other women and entertained fantasies, at least, about what would undoubtedly be an easier life with one of them, but he hadn't left.

Perhaps the most serious of these flings was the one he had, three years earlier, with Pearl Kazin, an editor at
Harper's Bazaar
and sister of the critic Alfred Kazin. She had dark hair with bangs, an appealing face, a girlish, disheveled, elfin mien. She was a more substantive person than most of the other women who surrounded him. He wrote to her once, “There isn't any future for us; hold me now, in the long undying present, and let me hold you. Oh but London is a beast. Sticky or grey or both. After eleven at night, dodo dead. I drift disconsolate through the dead streets, putting off and off my clean, high, remote and broken room. Would to God that you were allowed to stay here with me; then the room would be an enormous field, shadowed, full of flowers and running brooks and
bottoms and bottles, where, till the first fissionary gleam, we'd lie close, happy, and half die.”

Their time together was fraught with long silences and fevered letters. At one point, she was supposed to meet him in London, but he couldn't see her. In the background he was trying desperately to preserve his marriage and mollify Caitlin, who had heard of the affair. But he continued to write gorgeously to Pearl about the hypothetical plane, the impossible space in which the two of them could continue to meet and conduct their affair. “Oh what a sniveling note to you, my darling, when I could write two War & Peaces. Believe in me. I'm nasty, but I adore you, I wouldn't hurt you. Nothing is impossible for us: it can't be. And out of everything we'll make, somehow, some happiness together again & again & again till the end of whatever.”

He continued to write—even from Persia, where he was working on a film script—to Pearl about how much he loved her, and he continued to invoke one day, one night, one moment, they might have together, but he stopped writing about the relationship in practical terms. The fantasy of a life together had passed, though they would continue to meet on his American tours.

The truth is, he didn't seem capable of leaving Caitlin. In which case, what can one do? How does one leave without leaving? Anyone who has lived through the unraveling of a marriage knows that there comes a certain point when death does not seem like an unsensible solution. His state of mind in
the days leading up to his coma was hugely affected by his vast, unmanageable anxiety about his marriage. His escape to America was at best temporary. Even he, connoisseur and visionary of the temporary escape, would have known that.

From the beginning, the Thomases' love affair had a desperate quality; it was one of those romantic connections largely fueled by frenzies and fears, largely distinguished by a mad and urgent clinging. Thomas's letters to Caitlin, even at the happiest, most balanced point in their marriage, can only be described as hysterical. He writes, “My dear my dear my dear Caitlin my love I love you; even writing, from a universe and a star and ten thousand miles away, the name, your name, CAITLIN, just makes me love you, not more, because that is impossible, darling, I have always loved you more every day since I first saw you looking silly and golden and much much too good forever for me…no, not more, but deeper, oh my sweetheart I love you and love me dear Cat because we are the same, we are the same, we are the one thing, the constant thing, oh dear dear Cat.” There is here and elsewhere a fearful, babyish, needy attachment that reveals itself in sharp contrast to his highly articulate and ebulliently controlled letters to nearly everyone else.

Right before Thomas left London, a manager at Lloyds Bank had sent him the following note: “Dear Sir, I write to advise you that as the balance of your account at the close of business today is overdrawn £1.3.2d (one pound, three shillings, and two pence) I regret I have had to return your cheque of £15 payable to self with the answer ‘Return to Drawer.' Yours Faithfully, R. Larmour.”