The oddness of this chapter, however, concerns what happened between Updike’s family during his last illness. Like Freud, he cleaved to stoicism in considering death, but unlike him had sought comfort in religious faith and sexual adventure, the latter his way – or at least his characters’ way – of cheating mortality: “If you have a secret, submerged, second life, you have somehow transcended or outwitted the confines of a single life.” In an almost too-perfect illustration of his twin drives we learn that Updike plotted Couples, his great novel of adultery, while in church – “little shivers and urgencies I would jot down on the program”. John Updike, characteristically, worked unto the last, writing some of his most poignant poems (in Endpoint) from his hospital bed. Here Roiphe does get at something useful, which is the consolation of work: “For the time it takes to draw what is in front of you, you are not helpless or a bystander or bereft: You are doing your job.” (I would take “or bereft” out of that sentence.) When his lover died, Sendak drew his corpse, obeying the creative instinct “to turn something terrible into art”. He owned Keats’s original death mask and would take it out “to stroke the smooth white forehead”. He suffered a heart attack at 39, but lived on till his 80s. Maurice Sendak, a writer and illustrator she has revered from childhood, described death “as if it is a friend who is waiting for him”.
Either that, or she doesn’t quite know how to structure her argument. Instead of a continuous narrative, she writes in discrete floating paragraphs, as if conducting a philosophical investigation. Can writers teach us how to die? The uncertain, provisional nature of her project is evident. Shadowing Roiphe’s book is a tentative desire to find something consolatory – a truth, a meaning – in death. His disciples believed that Freud had no terror of the end, but Roiphe wonders if he protested his indifference too much: he may have been trying to persuade himself that he didn’t care. Was his stoicism a better, braver way to face the end? As Larkin wrote in “Aubade”, “Death is no different whined at than withstood”. “I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think clearly,” he said. Stricken by an inoperable cancer of the jaw, he refused any painkillers other than aspirin. Even as a young man he disliked the idea of “prolonging life at all costs”. Sigmund Freud, on the other hand, adopted the opposite approach. Her example is unlikely to make Roiphe, or anyone, “feel better” about death. Sontag is an extreme case – and the only woman – in this book. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features At this point I couldn’t help thinking of Woody Allen’s line: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. The treatment caused her shocking physical agony.
She took up cudgels once again, enduring chemo and the dangerous procedure of a bone marrow transplant. Believing herself to be “exceptional”, she rejected the evidence, adopting a get-well-or-die-trying attitude that caused intense anguish among the people who cared for her – her son David, friends, nurses, hired hands. She had already survived cancer, twice, when she was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2004. Sontag’s determination to outface death became part of her legend. Fittingly, her first subject is Susan Sontag, a writer whose personal and intellectual fierceness could be Roiphe’s model. Her most recent books – a study of literary unions, Uncommon Arrangements, and In Praise of Messy Lives, a scattershot broadside against the way we live now – reveal her tough, unbiddable, non-ingratiating character. Roiphe (right), an essayist, teacher and contrarian, is a woman up for a challenge. They bookend a sequence of five case studies of writers whose thoughts on mortality are often arresting, sometimes moving, yet never add up to a coherent vision of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing”. It comes down to that.” This mini-memoir, and a coda, are the most compelling parts of The Violet Hour. “I think if I can capture death on the page, I’ll repair or heal something. Who could make sense of such a thing? Her answer: great writers, specifically great writers as they approached death’s door. Ever since that narrow escape, death became her obsession, but one that continued to defy understanding or articulation. She had in fact developed acute pneumonia, and after an operation that removed half of a lung she came out of hospital weighing 60lb, “too weak to open a door”. At the age of 12 she began coughing up blood, but decided not to tell anyone – not her parents, or sisters, or doctor. K atie Roiphe begins her study of writers in their last hours with the story of a near-death experience: her own.