The Violet Hour (43 page)

The title
The Violet Hour
comes from T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
. To me, the phrase evokes the mood of the elusive period I am describing: melancholy, expectant, laden. It captures the beauty and intensity I was finding in these scenes, the rich excitement of dusk. It is a poem obsessed with the nearness of death in many registers, irreverent, manic, and elegiac. Its famous line brings to mind the work all these writers did: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

S
USAN
S
ONTAG

This book first came into focus when I was working on a review of David Rieff's fascinating and tortured account of his mother's death,
Swimming in a Sea of Death
. Sontag's extraordinary response to her final illness made me think of exploring other writers' approaches to mortality and delving more deeply into hers.

I began researching this chapter using her notebooks and manuscripts, most of which I read for the first time in the Sontag archive at UCLA. I also spent some time immersed in the letters in the Farrar, Straus & Giroux collection in the New York Public Library.

My work in the archives quickly led to the inescapable and, to me, semi-alarming idea that I would have to talk to live people. I had lunch with David Rieff, who managed to be completely reticent yet hugely helpful. I met with Sharon DeLano in her Chelsea apartment. At first, her demeanor was daunting and a little gruff, and I thought she would decide she did not want to talk to me. But over a long period of time, she filled in an enormous amount of
background on Sontag's last weeks for me. Sharon also gave me her email correspondence from that period, which was a hugely valuable resource, as was a calendar from Annie Leibovitz's office that helped me sort out the logistics of that time. In conversation, Sharon is sharp, funny, and insightful. I could see that she would be a superb editor. Mysteriously, she seemed almost to have played an editor's role in some of her friends' lives, advising them, tinkering with their problems, and straightening things out.

I met with Peter Perrone in his incense-scented East Village walk-up, and we talked for hours about his time with Susan as her caretaker, when he sometimes spent as much as sixteen hours a day with her. I also talked to Sookhee Chinkhan and two of the night nurses who were hired to be with Susan at the end. In addition, I talked to Anne Jump, Susan's last assistant, and Stephen Koch, her old friend.

I talked to Annie Leibovitz only once, and briefly. I was accidentally seated next to her at a book fair at my old school, Brearley, on the Upper East Side. I introduced myself and mentioned that I was working on this book, and she told me that Susan's bravery at the end was “too much.” This seemed to be something that everyone I talked to subsequently agreed upon, even if they agreed on little else. Her bravery was too much. I tried to arrange a more formal conversation later, but Annie had by then decided not to talk to me. I pored over her photographs, combed through her introductions and interviews, to piece together some of her thinking on the subject, but it is mostly other people's accounts of her actions that inform the book.

All of Sontag's work fed into this chapter, but most central to my thinking were
Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others
(I often thought of that title in the years I spent basically regarding the pain of others),
On Photography
, the stories in
I, Etcetera, Death Kit
, and “The Way We Live Now,” along with her play about Alice James,
Alice in Bed
.

S
IGMUND
F
REUD

Freud was a major part of my Ph.D. dissertation, “The Writer and the Dream,” and coming from a family of psychoanalysts, I feel that I have been absorbing his atmosphere my whole life. I originally became interested in his death because of the enviable control he seemed to wield at the end, and because of his complex and resonant writing on mortality.

In thinking about my father's smoking, I became interested in Freud's smoking: Why did he, otherwise a good patient, a rational scientist, continue to smoke against the advice of his physicians? I began work on this chapter by combing through his letters and other people's observations for clues. Freud's own letters helped me unpack his relation to smoking, as well as his
personal physician Dr. Max Schur's account of the conversations they both did and didn't have on the subject.

Absolutely vital to this chapter was Peter Gay's superb biography,
Freud: A Life for Our Time
, along with the three volumes of Ernest Jones's biography,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
. I also found extremely fascinating Mark Edmundson's
The Death of Sigmund Freud
, which has an intriguing analysis of Freud's thinking and how it dovetailed with the rise of fascism. For insight into Anna Freud, I turned to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's
Anna Freud: A Biography
, and for background on Marie Bonaparte,
Marie Bonaparte: A Life
, by Célia Bertin. Much of the medical information, in addition to many details of Freud's relationship to sickness and of his final months, comes from Max Schur's vivid account,
Freud: Living and Dying
.

Freud's letters were the richest source for this chapter:
Letters of Sigmund Freud
, edited by Ernst L. Freud;
The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–1925
, edited by Ernst Falzeder;
Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Letters
, edited by Ernst Pfeiffer;
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904
, edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, along with several other collections.

The works of Freud's I drew most directly on for this book are “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,”
The Interpretation of Dreams
, and
Topsy: The Story of a Golden-Haired Chow
, by Marie Bonaparte, which Freud translated from French into German.

For a sense of Freud's house in Vienna, I relied on
Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud's Home and Offices, Vienna 1938
. The Freud Museum, in London, has also been a very valuable resource for both information and a sense of place.

In addition, several very intriguing letters and telegraphs from the Anna Freud archive at the Library of Congress made their way into the book. Anna Freud's exchanges with Dorothy Burlingham in particular give a more intimate glimpse of her father's final days.

J
OHN
U
PDIKE

Many of the details I have of the last weeks of Updike's life come from his second wife, Martha Updike, who was generous enough to describe them to me over the course of several very long phone calls. I felt in these conversations both her enormous charm and the daunting strength of character other people described. I felt a strong urge to please her that I didn't quite understand.

Many of the scenes I describe were gleaned from interviews with the Updike children. David biked to meet me in Harvard Square, and we talked for three hours. Michael, who carves gravestones, among other things, and I
had a couple of sprawling phone conversations, and I emailed with Elizabeth and Miranda. Someone said to me, “Martha's children were always more likely to be stockbrokers; Updike's children were more likely to be artistic types.” His children were unfailingly open about the difficulties of Updike's last months—and life with him generally—as well as the exhilarations of both. Mary, his first wife, was also kind and open in giving her perspective. I was very struck by how fair and affectionate she seemed, how little she expressed of the bitterness divorced people usually harbor, how simply and clearly she was able to narrate both the spectacular and the arduous sides of life with a man like Updike.

I also found my conversation with Dick Purinton, Updike's old friend and golf buddy, extremely helpful. In our conversation, I understood as much about what they didn't talk about over the years as what they did. I grasped, for the first time, the liberation Updike must have felt when he ambled through lush Irish golf courses with his friends.

Much of my sense of his illness, and his dedication to work, came from a trip to the Updike archives at Harvard's Houghton Library. The handwritten manuscripts of the final poems were particularly startling, as the handwriting itself told a story about the sheer effort it took to get the words on the page. One can know this abstractly, or have it described, but it is very different to see it in the spidery letters themselves, the slanted lines, the scratched-out words.

Updike's correspondence is so charming and lively and wonderful that it evokes the man more powerfully than his published bits of autobiography; I also got a more tangible sense of how many of his relationships existed mostly in writing. He had close friends, like Warner Berthoff, who lived and taught at Harvard but whom he rarely saw, though they exchanged intimate letters for decades. One also saw how connected he was to many famous literary figures, though he deliberately lived outside the literary hub of New York City. The isolation was physical, but his letters were sociable, chatty, engaged. It may not be surprising that much of the work of friendship, for Updike, existed on the page.

Adam Begley's wonderful biography,
Updike
, was a tremendous resource for this chapter. He also talked me through some of the issues that were bewildering me, such as Updike's religious commitment. I was flummoxed by Updike's irony, specifically by how he could be so ironic about religion but serious about it as well, and Begley talked me through that particular apparent contradiction. He was generous with his impressions and observations, and my talking things through with him helped sharpen the narrative.

All of Updike's novels and stories, along with his autobiography,
Self-Consciousness
,
were rich sources for this chapter, as were his interview with
The Paris Review
and many of his articles. Updike took all of his pieces so seriously and unhackishly that it's awe inspiring. I once read a piece he wrote for
Allure
on sunscreen that was such a beautiful and tiny lyrical masterpiece that it put the rest of us journalists and writers to shame. It was, of course, the poems collected in
Endpoint
that first startled and obsessed me when they appeared in
The New Yorker
and made me think of Updike for this book—along with my love of his work and my special interest in his linking of adultery and immortality. I have a soft spot for those who try to defeat death with sex.

D
YLAN
T
HOMAS

Dylan Thomas's letters are charming, maddening, gorgeous, and perhaps the inspiration for much of my story of his final weeks. He was, of course, brilliant at diagnosing himself, putting his spectacular malaise into words. Who but he could come up with the sublime phrase “self-destroyed escapologist”? The books of letters that were most helpful were:
The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas
, by Dylan Thomas;
Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas
, by Constantine Fitzgibbon;
Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins
, by Dylan Thomas;
A Pearl of Great Price: The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas to Pearl Kazin
, edited by Jeff Towns.

For the cloud of controversy surrounding his last days, along with some of the detail, I found the letters and documents at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Texas to be a huge resource. What struck me most about the firsthand accounts of Thomas's conversations was the analytical brio evidenced there, the atmosphere of paranoia, rife with richly detailed accusations and passions ruffled and roused. Many of his friends seemed to write about his death as if they were being deposed by lawyers, or building a case. No one was claiming he was murdered, of course, but there was a
feeling
akin to that for them. Then there were other intriguing minutiae: the autopsy report, letters from his bank in England, doctor's opinions. For the texture of those last days before he went into a coma, those documents were invaluable. I was particularly enthralled by the notebook kept by the detective following him around for his last days, as he is a kind of shadow stand-in for any biographer.

For biographical background, I am indebted to
Dylan Thomas: The Biography
, by Paul Ferris and
The World of Dylan Thomas
, by Peter Stevenson. I also found very useful Dr. William Murphy's “Creation and Destruction: Notes on Dylan Thomas.” Another great resource for background into Thomas's life was a series of curated interviews collected in
Dylan Remembered
,
both volumes edited by David N. Thomas. In order to understand more clearly some of the conspiracy thinking that sprung up around his death, I read
The Death of Dylan Thomas
, by Dr. James Nashold and George Tremlett.

Thomas's poems were, of course, the most important of his works analyzed here, but, additionally,
Under Milk Wood, A Child's Christmas in Wales, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
, and
Dylan Thomas: The Collected Stories
all fed into this chapter.

Listening to Thomas reading his poems was one of the more fruitful things I did for this chapter. The cadences of his voice summoned him in ways I couldn't have anticipated, and suggested interpretations of the poems that I couldn't have come to by reading the words on the page. In seventh grade, I won a poetry recitation contest at school with “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” and his spoken version greatly challenged my ancient understanding of that poem.

I found the memoirs of those who knew him enormously useful in providing a kaleidoscopic impression of the complicated man, especially his daughter Aeronwy Thomas's memoir,
My Father's Places
, and Caitlin Thomas's spirited memoir,
Leftover Life to Kill
. John Malcolm Brinnin's
Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal
is a great book to read especially to apprehend the fanatical adoration that shadowed Thomas on his late trips to America. I especially love Elizabeth Hardwick's essay on Thomas's death, collected in
A View of My Own
, for its analysis of the American reaction and the role it played. The poets who remembered him, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop, were also wonderful in capturing the man in a few choice words. He was blessed with very talented onlookers.