The Violet Hour (42 page)

I know this tranquillity is highly constructed—the lighting, the careful labor of the funeral home, the dress from a designer that
Sontag loved, the necklace draped around her neck, the stirring, wishful vision of the photographer—but it's still tranquillity. The struggle, once it's over, doesn't exist. The fight is calmed.

I have this idea that I can work through the problem of death, the way Sendak did in drawing after drawing, and be less afraid, but maybe you are never less afraid; you are just better able to get along with the fear.

Maybe the whole idea that I need to find a way to be less afraid is wrong. Maybe even the fear is tolerable. Maybe Salter's friend's idea of “marking the moment” involves diving into that fear. Maybe that fear is not impossible. Maybe you get through the terror because you have to get through the terror. For some reason I have unconsciously been thinking of death as something you let happen, as a partnership, an agreement you enter or wrangle your way into, which is wrong.

In the actual moment, you do not have a choice. Grace finds you. Acceptance hunts you down.

“The deaths kind of reassured me,” I say. “It's hard to explain why.”

“Try,” Salter says.

It is hard to put this into words. I think of the letter Sendak wrote about visiting the old family friend who is dying. He is
terrified of this visit. He can hardly bear the idea of it. But when he finally goes to see her, he writes about how strangely great it was. He writes that it was like gazing into something you've always been terrified of and finding it magnificent.

The beauty I found in these deaths was what surprised me, the life rushing in, the vastness of the work, the great, sometimes deranged seeming courage, the mad love in the last moments. I think of Updike's first wife, Mary, holding on to his feet in her last visit to him; of Caitlin hugging Thomas in his hospital bed, until the nurse pulled her off him; of Annie Leibovitz climbing into Sontag's hospital bed. Part of the creative work these people did, their art, was their lives themselves. There is something glorious in the conflagration of everything at the end. The beauty was what ambushed me.

I tell Salter about the snow-painting dream Sendak has in the hospital. How he sees Lynn lying on a divan in front of a giant backdrop of a Dickensian Christmas scene of a snowy town, with horse-drawn carriages. How he hated Christmas, and he hated snow, how he, in fact, had always called snow “white death,” but somehow the dream was radiant. How even after he couldn't hold a brush or pen, he dreamed in paintings, his mind still producing art. How, through the sheer crazy force of his imagination, he transformed the terror and rage (snow, Christmas, white death) into something beautiful and consoling.

Salter likes this story as much as I do. He says, “We make our own comfort.”

It's almost evening now. There is a chill in the air. The light tossed through the leaves is very much Salter's light, an extravagant dark gold. I think of what he said: “The language is evasive yet strangely summoning.”

I do not have a car and do not know how to drive. I have been planning to walk from Salter's house into town. He doesn't like this plan. He says he'll drive me. When we stand up I notice he is wearing sandals with socks. He reminds me suddenly of my father, who never wore sandals and socks. He drives me to the main street. We chat about his going off in a week to the University of Virginia, where he will teach a fiction seminar and give a series of talks.

“Send me the book!” he calls out the half-open window.

And I meant to send it to him. After I finished, I thought I would wait until I had made a few more changes, until it was in the form I wanted him to see. Months drifted by, and when I thought of sending it to him, I decided I still might make a few more little changes, and it wasn't quite good enough for him to see. Then, in June, I got a phone call saying that he had died. I was sitting on a deck in East Hampton, a tangle of trumpet flowers in a cerulean pot, late afternoon sun silver in the bay, and felt dizzy.

It had not occurred to me that he might die. I had thought of him teaching at the University of Virginia, pictured how the
students would love his gruffness, would struggle for even the most minor or understated praise. I thought while on the phone, This can't be right.

He had a heart attack in the gym, a few days after his ninetieth birthday party. He celebrated it at Peter Matthiessen's widow's house in Sag Harbor, with a couple dozen of his friends. He had worn a white linen suit.

I thought of his evocation of the heart attack, his entering into it. I saw how steadily he could look, how much fortitude he could have in looking away. I thought of the colonel flying toward the earth in the soup, the place you navigate without instruments. I thought of how he said, “We make our own comfort.” Those were the words I was looking for but couldn't get to: We make our own comfort.

To Anne Roiphe

My biggest debt is to the people who spoke to me for this book. Many of them were revisiting a very arduous time, and I am hugely grateful to them for their generosity and trust in sharing their observations. I learned a lot from all of them.

Thanks to David Rieff for several conversations in which he helped and dazzled me enormously with his erudition and insight while adroitly answering exactly none of my questions; to Sharon DeLano for many lunches, her invaluable guidance and interpretations, her editorial advice, and her faith in me; to Stephen Koch for his memories and analysis; to Sookhee Chinkhan for her perspective; to Anne Jump for her recollections and corrections; to Peter Perrone for marathon conversations in his East Village walk-up and for his openness and point of view; to the night nurses for sharing their perspective on Sontag's last nights; to Martha Updike, who so graciously and intelligently and openly narrated Updike's last two months—without her that chapter would be a pale shadow of itself; to Mary Weatherall, Updike's first wife, for her graceful, honest reminiscences, for her admirable clarity; to Miranda Updike and Elizabeth Cobblah for their stories about that last few weeks; to David Updike for a conversation I'll always remember and for all of his help; to Michael Updike for his singular, funny sensibility and for sharing his understanding; to Dick Purinton for describing his last afternoon with Updike, for his wonderful photograph, and for the golf descriptions; to Lynn Caponera for her hospitality and great generosity with her memories and theories—without her I would not have nearly as rich a sense of my subject; and to Jonathan Weinberg for all of our in-depth conversations, for
his ideas about art, his patient tutorials, his guidance through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his insights into Sendak and reflections on biography and subjectivity; to Tony Kushner for his gorgeous writing on Sendak and for his candid conversation and analysis; to Hilma Wolitzer for digging up high school memories.

I am also indebted to the libraries and special collections that house the archives I used: Houghton Library at Harvard, and Leslie Morris for helping me navigate the collection; the New York Psychoanalytic Institute; the Rosenbach Museum and Library; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin; the Sigmund Freud Archives, Inc.; the Freud Museum, London, and the Library of Congress; and the Charles E. Young Research Library's Department of Special Collections at UCLA. I am also grateful to the various estates for their kind permission to quote from crucial texts and for their sometimes arduous consideration of my sometimes pushy requests.

Huge thanks to my beloved and patient editors, Susan Kamil and Noah Eaker, and to my amazing agent and old friend, Suzanne Gluck. Thanks also to Amelia Zalcman, who maybe heard a little too much from me. I've been incredibly lucky in my research assistants, Laura Smith and Maddie Gressel, who, along with their extraordinary work, also make everything more fun. Thanks also to Andrew Keese for his research assistance from afar. I am indebted to Adam Begley for talking me through arcane Updike issues and for his generosity with his scholarship. Thanks also to Dean Richard Kalb at New York University for the opportunity to try out one of these chapters as a lecture to excellent undergraduates in the scholars' lecture series.

I am grateful to my mother, Anne Roiphe, for support of this project, which went far beyond her contractual obligations as my mother. Thanks, also, for everything from talking through issues and ambivalences, to reading drafts, to general encouragement of this crazy project: Harry Chernoff, Theodore Jacobs, Radha Ramkissoon, Janet Malcolm, Amanda Brainerd, Casey Greenfield, Deborah Copaken, Hanna Rosin, Meghan O'Rourke, Judith Thurman, Jean Roiphe, Emily Roiphe, Daniel Swift, Caroline Moorehead, Larissa MacFarquhar, Leo Roiphe, and Violet Chernoff, and to Tim Nye, my late-arriving inspiration, salvation, etc.