'Violet Hour': How great writers faced death

There’s an irresistible force driving Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End (The Dial Press, 287 pp., *** ½ out of four stars). At the most fundamental level, it’s death­ — its inevitability, its mystery and how we all imagine we will face it, given the chance, when the time comes.

The subtle brilliance of this “meditation on mortality,” which borrows its title from Eliot's The Waste Land, is its overarching conceit — an examination of the last days of the writers, thinkers and artists Susan Sontag, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, James Salter, Sigmund Freud and Maurice Sendak.

Through research, interviews and a healthy dose of her own interpretative reading, Roiphe paints a series of revealing and intimate portraits of her subjects while pursuing her own very personal search for answers.

She talks about her own brush with death at age 12, adding, “This is when I start writing this book.”

She begins with Sontag, exclaiming, “If there is anyone who could decide not to die it would be Susan Sontag; her will is that ferocious.” For Sontag, a supreme intellectual, death didn’t figure. A world without her? Incomprehensible. She seemed intent on thwarting the inevitable all the way to the end — so much so that Roiphe found those close to Sontag starting to believe the impossible because “she has been for so long the person who doesn’t die.”

When the author moves on to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, she has a field day picking through his motivations, wondering — and recounting in sometimes grim detail — why Freud stubbornly continued to smoke his beloved cigars when he knew they were hastening his death and exacting such a gruesome toll along the way.

We are reminded that Dylan Thomas, the revered Welsh poet who so famously wrote, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” and “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” was, in fact, rushing headlong to an early death, sped by his own wretched and exhausting excess — not so much raging “against the dying of the light” as much as ensuring it. And yet, he trembled at the thought of it. “I’ve got death in me,” he told a drinking buddy when he was still in his 20s.

With Updike, Roiphe shuttles back and forth between the author’s real-life passions and the ones he imagined, particularly for his most famous character, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Updike had fashioned “the peaceful death” for Rabbit. But it was different for Updike, writes Roiphe, because “so much of his work, his life, is about not submitting gratefully to that eternal sleep.”

Most touching of all is Sendak. Death was ever-present in the world of the children’s book illustrator and author — playful but monstrous all the same. After the huge success of Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak runs into an old friend from high school. She asks him, “How does it feel to be famous?” And, Sendak replies, “I still have to die.”