The Violet Hour (5 page)

The sun was going down and she suddenly decided she wanted to write the introduction to Peter Hujar's book of photographs,
Portraits in Life and Death
, which she had agreed to do a long time before but had procrastinated. The portraits of prominent downtown figures included one staggeringly beautiful one of her, lying on a bed, staring upward, in a gray cable sweater; there were also the remarkable photographs of human remains from the catacombs in Palermo from the early sixties.

Hujar had brought the photographs of the catacombs over to Sontag's house on Washington Place after he took them. There was some discussion of coming after Sontag's eleven-year-old son, David, was asleep, so that the photographs wouldn't alarm him and give him nightmares. There were skeletons of children draped in ruffles, skulls with bits of ribbon, skulls with wreaths of flowers; it is not the bones but the remnants of the lives, these little bits of cloth and ribbon, that are terrifying, evocative, that reach out and draw the viewer into the idea that everyone they love will die too.

That evening in the hospital in 1975, her friend found something wide and flat for her to write on, and she scribbled away. The mood of the essay is dreamier than usual. In her hospital bed, she took a romantic, intimate view of death with its “sweet poetry and its panic.” Her scrawled sentences have a mesmerized quality too. She was staring at something in the middle distance that we cannot normally see. “We no longer study the
art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures,” she wrote, “but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge.”

There was peace in the room as she was writing. To be finishing, to be working: This was important to her. The friend who sat with her leafed through a magazine as the orange dusk flooded the room. The essay, one of her more graceful, unbelabored pieces of writing, took her less than an hour.

Her friend remembers her quoting Samuel Johnson with amusement: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Peals of laughter after saying it.

If Sontag was fierce in her determination to fight in that first experience with cancer, her companion of the time, Nicole Stéphane, was equally fierce. Nicole tracked down Dr. Lucien Israel, who pioneered Sontag's experimental treatment, in Paris. He wrote to Sontag, “I do not think your case is hopeless,” and that very faint expression of optimism was enough to spur her on. After the operation for her breast cancer, a radical mastectomy called a Halsted, someone sent flowers to Susan's apartment on Riverside Drive. Nicole threw them off the terrace in rage. Flowers were for death.

Later, in Sontag's private mythology, this fierceness is processed as a by-product of her intellect and determination: her refusal to accept her diagnosis or her mortality, her ability to shake off the metaphors of her illness and
act
. But now, in 2004, with this latest, dire diagnosis, she is laboring to maintain her
belief in this specialness; she is now having to work to prop it up. She says to several people, including David, “I don't feel special this time,” or “I don't feel lucky this time.” She is working to fight off the dread, to find her way back to the luck, the specialness, again.

In the meantime, she doesn't want to be alone. She doesn't like the lights off. She has people coming through all the time, people in attendance. These people offer reassurance that she is who she was. One gets the sense that it is only in the dark, and alone, that she is dying.

Her long relationship with Annie Leibovitz, whom Sharon had introduced her to, is by now distant and troubled, but Annie is still in her life. Even at the high point of their relationship, they don't like the label “couple” and prefer “friends” or “lovers.” Annie has taken photographs of Susan in hotels, in beds, in baths, that are playful, soft, open, evoking a happier time—unlike the usual daunting photographs of Sontag. They keep separate apartments that overlook each other, in the Chelsea building London Terrace.

That spring she continues to try to go to theaters and restaurants and other public places for a few weeks, but soon has to enter the hospital. As she is packing up for Sloan Kettering, Susan says to Sookhee, “Do you think I am ever going to see this apartment again?” Sookhee says she will. Then Susan says, “When I come back, you have to have a drink with me to
celebrate. You have to have a glass of wine.” She knows that Sookhee's religion doesn't allow her to drink alcohol; but Sookhee says, “I am sure going to have a glass of wine with you, Susan. I am sure going to have a glass of wine with you.”

David is torn about what to say to her. “If I am being honest,” he would later write in
The Guardian
, “I cannot say that I ever really thought my mother had much chance of making it….I did keep wondering whether, given the fact that her chances were so poor and she was going to suffer so much, perhaps I should be candid with her. But she so plainly did not want to hear this that I never really came close to doing so.”

In Sloan Kettering, Susan undergoes a form of chemotherapy called 5-AZ; the rationale behind it isn't that she will be cured but that it may buy her a little more time. In the meantime, she prepares for a bone marrow transplant under the auspices of the highly regarded Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which holds out the only possibility, however remote, of a total cure. For a woman in her early seventies, this seems an implausible step, but her influential doctors help arrange it. It may be that the influential doctors want to be the doctors who save Susan Sontag, or it may be that they too are drawn in by the magnetic force field of her immense desire to live. Part of her power in the world is that she can break rules and bend expectations, create possibilities where they don't normally exist; she can arrange for an extreme treatment that most people of her age would not normally qualify for, or could not afford, which she couldn't either if Annie wasn't helping to pay for it. Later there is talk of Annie arranging a private helicopter
to pick up an experimental drug for her, and this is the way Sontag expects the world to work for her; it is the way the world does work for her. Gates open for her; the doors to beautiful hotel rooms that she doesn't pay for open for her.

In June, before she leaves for Seattle, she makes a will. She doesn't want to make a will. In fact, she is furious about making a will. There had been a flurry of discussion among her intimates about the fact that she needs to make a will before the transplant. It's possible that she doesn't want to make a will for the same reason Picasso didn't want to make a will: because to make a will means admitting that you are going to die. Sontag is planning to leave the literary estate, the apartment, everything, to David, but she still needs to make an official will. Finally, over Susan's protests, her friends send an estate lawyer to the hospital room at Sloan Kettering. And Susan is angry at everyone around her, who all seem to be colluding in the question of the will. She makes the will, but she is enraged the whole time.

Sontag never wrote directly about her experience of illness. David calls
Illness as Metaphor
“anti-autobiographical,” and that is exactly what it is, in its studied resistance to confession, its superb channeling of the heat of personal experience into pure intellectual contemplation. In the introduction to that book, she announces that she is
not
going to write about “what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there.” She says elsewhere in the book that she didn't think it would be useful “to tell yet one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept,
struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage…” When her French publisher wanted to put her photograph on the cover of their edition of
Illness as Metaphor
, she objected strongly.

At the time she is diagnosed with her last cancer, she is under contract to write a memoir about her earlier illnesses. She isn't, however, writing that book. She's writing another book instead: a novel about Japan, with different time periods spliced together, with the word “Karaoke” in the title.

“She arrived at the hospital believing that she had prepared herself for the procedure,” wrote her friend the writer and physician Jerome Groopman, in his 1998
New Yorker
piece about bone marrow transplants in Seattle. “She would soon learn what I had learned: that it is not a procedure for which anyone can be prepared.”

Sontag reads this piece, with its graphic descriptions of the suffering that awaits her, while doing her voracious research of the medical options in New York. Sharon emailed it to her from the
New Yorker
archives.

On June 9, Annie flies with Susan to Seattle in a private plane. In the weeks leading up to the transplant, while Susan prepares for the procedure, her friend Juliane Lorenz, a German film editor and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last companion, stays with her in a two-bedroom suite with a kitchen at the
Marriott next to the Fred Hutchinson Center. Susan is feeling relatively well and is almost a tourist. With Sharon, she visits the new library, which was designed by Rem Koolhaas. She takes ferry rides.

A roster of caretakers fly out to stay with her. Annie's office and Susan's assistant, Anne Jump, coordinate a schedule so that Susan will never be alone. Most of these caretakers are people who have worked for Susan at one time—Karla Eoff, Ben Yeoman, Peter Perrone, and Sookhee. The others—Sontag's close friend and Italian translator Paolo Dilonardo, Sharon and David and Annie—fly in when they can. Sharon leaves
The New Yorker
in September and begins coming out for longer chunks of time.

Susan liked having someone familiar with her at all times. She was demanding, difficult, charming. Her caretakers would stay with her twelve or sixteen hours a day. “Once you were there, she was like glue,” Peter Perrone says.