The Violet Hour (13 page)

Whether or not this is true of the “organism,” it was certainly true of Freud. He was increasingly focused on the issue of control,
a control so expansive and consuming it encompassed even the mode or method of one's dying. Freud wanted to choose when and how to die. When Anna suggested that they should poison themselves if they couldn't get out of Vienna because of the Nazis, he was irritated and snapped, “Why, because they want us to?” Freud was in no way opposed to suicide in extremis, but he did not want to be forced to die by Fascists or nature; he wanted to choose when he would die. He wrote, while waiting for his visa out of Austria, that he wanted to “die in freedom,” which meant, ostensibly, that he wanted to die in England, away from the minor and major persecutions of the Nazis. But he also meant: “the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”

For a long time Anna thought he might recover. She was used to his heroic recoveries. She wrote later, “It is really not so that we had known for a long time that he would die. He was very ill, but then he had been very ill many times before.”

Freud, however, was thinking about death in increasingly pragmatic terms. In December of 1936, he wrote to Marie Bonaparte: “If you, at the youthful age of fifty-four, can't help thinking so often of death, are you surprised that at 80 ½ I keep brooding on whether I shall reach the age of my father and brother, or even that of my mother, tortured as I am by conflict between the desire for rest, the dread of renewed suffering…and by the anticipation of sorrow at being separated from everything to which I am still attached?”

Marie Bonaparte wrote a note to herself at the bottom of the letter. “M.: How beautiful everything is that you say, but how sad!

“Fr.: Why sad? That's what life is. It is precisely the eternal transitoriness which makes life so beautiful.” She was making this dialogue up, of course, but he had often expressed this view—in a short essay on Goethe, in his letters; it was a recurring theme in their conversation.

In spite of his increasing preoccupation with his physical decline, Freud does not want to stop working. Over the years and through all kinds of harrowing treatments, he had seen patients, often taking only a day or two off after his surgeries. In March 1939, in his office in London, when he was weak from brutal radiation treatments, he continued to see his patients without interruption. He was a willing patient, able to tolerate a great deal of pain, up for any chance of prolonging his life, as long as that life was productive.

“The only real dread I have,” he once wrote, “is of a long invalidism with no possibility of working.” The work was worth suffering for; likewise, the discipline and habit of it was sustaining. In some not entirely abstract sense, the patients were healing the doctor.

He does not close his analytic practice until August 1, by which time he is undeniably too weak to continue. At that point, he
has four analytic patients, who come to the house at Maresfield Gardens, and one training analysis. He records their visits and their fees in midnight-blue notebooks. As he writes to a friend, “With all the resignation before destiny that suits an honest man, I have one wholly secret entreaty: only no…paralysis of one's powers through bodily misery. Let us die in harness, as King Macbeth says.”

And so, even when he closes the practice, the idea lingers
:
“Let us die in harness.” Though he has stopped seeing patients, he has not stopped working. Freud has always used himself in his work. In
The Interpretation of Dreams
, he analyzed his own dreams and childhood. He has very often been the guinea pig, the science experiment, and his own experience and observations feed right into his theories. So the work he is doing now is the work of dying: He is doctor and patient, subject and writer, analysand and analyst.

Freud seems, at times, to be studying his own relation to life: the subtle and nuanced fraying of the connection. As he had written earlier to Lou Andreas-Salomé: “The change taking place is perhaps not very conspicuous; everything is as interesting as it was before; neither are the qualities very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking.”

When Schur comes back from a trip to America to work on securing his own visa, Freud is pale and has lost weight. He is coming to resemble one of the finely carved Egyptian statues he keeps on his desk, all whiteness and angle.

In the winter, Leonard and Virginia Woolf came to visit him. Leonard wrote later: “There was something about him as of a half-extinct volcano, something somber, suppressed, reserved. He gave me the feeling which only very few people whom I have met gave me, a feeling of great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength.”

For a very long time, Anna has taken on the role of nurse; in his illness the two have developed a physical intimacy that transcends the more ordinary intimacy he has with his wife. His illness has burned down and transfigured his love and somehow allowed or permitted him to be closer to his daughter, without the guilt or self-criticism he expressed in the past. It's as if he is, in extremis, beyond the conventional structures of family life, outside them. He says to Schur in the last weeks, “Destiny was kind to me, that it also granted me a relationship with such a woman—I mean, naturally, Anna.”

Even as a younger man, Freud did not like the idea of prolonging life at all costs. He did not subscribe to any lofty or sentimental ideas about longevity. He did not romanticize suffering in any of its forms. When in 1904 Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote a floridly sentimental poem about how she would like to live a thousand years, even if those years contained nothing but pain, Freud commented wryly, “One cold in the head would prevent me from having that wish.”

And yet throughout August he remains committed to his extreme alertness, to the idea of not dulling his consciousness. In writing about the rampant casualties of the First World War,
he says, “Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it….The accumulation of deaths puts an end to the impression of chance. Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content.” In some way it is this “full content” that Freud is chasing in these last days: this bright, vivid, painful awareness.

On September 1, Freud reads the newspaper reports of the Germans marching into Poland, and Schur moves in to Maresfield Gardens to attend to his patient. Because of air raids, Freud's bed is moved to a safer part of the house. At one point, they are listening to the radio and the announcer refers to the war as “the last war.” Schur asks his patient if he thinks it is, in fact, the last war, and Freud says, “
My
last war.” Here is Leonard Woolf's half-extinct volcano—which is, of course, half active. The volcano remains a volcano.

Schur would later write a letter to Jones about Freud's mood: “Freud's attitude toward death changed from a neurotic fear of death to an awareness of the inescapable anger which one has to face with wisdom, resignation and indomitable courage…he certainly hated the idea of death up to the very end and was eventually constantly aware of its imminent reality, but the ‘neurotic anxiety' was gone.”

The previous winter, five days after Freud had surgery and three days after he discovered the malignant lesions had returned, Marie Bonaparte wrote to him about a paper she was
working on called “Problems of Time in Life, Dream and Death.” She ended the letter saying, “But I want to hear about you soon, and learn that we will still be able to have conversations on this earth, before we go to the hereafter in the Elysian Fields.”

Instead of his usual protestations of rationality and worldliness, Freud wrote a playfully posthumous letter: “I've been imagining how I would greet you on the Elysian Fields, after learning of your arrival. It's fine that you've finally gotten here. You let me wait so long, and I didn't get to read your last big opus about time. I'm already quite curious to learn what you've found out about it. Because, as you can readily imagine, conditions for acquiring experience about this strange aspect of our mental functioning are particularly unfavorable in this place. Altogether you'll have to tell me a great deal about analysis.” In this vision of the afterlife—one he would have spun out only for Marie Bonaparte, whose frothy sentimentality he somehow didn't mind, the way he minded other people's—he is still working on his theories. He is dead but still working.