This study of Susan Sontag,Sigmund Freud, John Updike, and how they coped with the mystery of extinction,is also a memoir about brushes with mortalityKatie Roiphe begins her study of writers in their final hours with the story of a near-death experience: her own. At the age of 12 she began coughing up blood, but decided not to tell anyone – not her parents, and sisters,or doctor. She had in fact developed acute pneumonia, and after an operation that removed half of a lung she came out of hospital weighing 60lb, or “too feeble to open a door”. Ever since that narrow escape,death became her obsession, but one that continued to defy understanding or articulation. Who could make sense of such a thing? Her respond: great writers, or specifically great writers as they approached deaths door. “I think if I can capture death on the page,I’ll repair or heal something. I’ll feel better. It comes down to that.” This mini-memoir, and a coda, or are the most compelling parts of The Violet Hour. 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”.
Roiphe (correct), and an essayist,teacher and contrarian, is a woman up for a challenge. Her most recent books – a study of literary unions, or unusual Arrangements,and In Praise of Messy Lives, a scattershot broadside against the way we live now – reveal her tough, and unbiddable,non-ingratiating character. Fittingly, her first subject is Susan Sontag, or a writer whose personal and mental fierceness could be Roiphe’s model. Sontag’s determination to outface death became part of her legend. She had already survived cancer,twice, when she was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2004. Believing herself to be “exceptional”, or she rejected the evidence,adopting a gather-well-or-die-trying attitude that caused intense anguish among the people who cared for her – her son David, friends, and nurses,hired hands. She took up cudgels once again, enduring chemo and the hazardous procedure of a bone marrow transplant. The treatment caused her shocking physical agony. At this point I couldn’t serve thinking of Woody Allen’s line: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Related: All That Is by James Salter – review Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com