The Violet Hour (9 page)

Peter, who is not coming often now, because he feels increasingly alienated and burned out by the situation, brings her
Persepolis
, a graphic novel written by an Iranian woman, Marjane Satrapi, which he knows will interest her. She consumes it
in ten minutes; he wonders if she has taken it in. David reads to her from Byron's
Don Juan
, because he thinks the pacing will keep her attention, because the cadences keep you going.

The room is a double room, meant for two people, so there are two beds, two rolling tables, two side tables, and they are quickly colonized by the laptop, the printer, the Ethernet cable; the room is, even now, part office.

In the notebooks, Susan writes extensively about the “theme of false death in my work.” And indeed her fiction is filled with false deaths, with resurrections, with people who turn out to not really have died. In
Death Kit
, in
The Benefactor
, in
Duet for Cannibals
, people who have died pop up again literally as in a cartoon: “Surprise, here I am!”

Sontag traces this interest in fake deaths back to her father. He died when she was five. He was a fur trader in China. She barely knew him, but the idea of his death, so far away, in a storybook world, was not convincing. It somehow didn't
take
. “It seemed so unreal,” she wrote. “I had no proof he was dead.” For years she dreamed that he would knock on her door.

A series of private nurses have been hired to take care of her in Sloan Kettering. Susan is very comfortable with one in particular, an older black woman named Edaline Cross. Edie would say later, “That woman did not want to die. She did not want to go into God's arms. I can tell you that. I've seen a lot of very, very sick people. And that woman wanted to live.”

When Susan was a child, she had been told that her father died of pneumonia, but when she was nine or ten she peeked at her own medical records and read that he had died of tuberculosis. This revelation had an unsettling effect on her: It made her feel like the facts were slippery—this one death, still mysterious, still more fable than anything else.

In her journals Sontag writes of conceiving of her novel
Death Kit
in a flash, whole, when her friend Richard Howard reveals a nickname of his: “Diddy.” Sontag writes,
“Diddy. Daddy. That's the source of the meditation of death I've carried in my heart my whole life. Diddy is 33 years old. So was Daddy when he died. Did-he? Did he die? The theme of false death, la mort équivoque, la résurrection inattendue [
‘unexpected'
] in all my work—” How powerful can that theme be? What form does it take when one lies in a hospital bed in the throes of Vicodin or Percocet or morphine?
La mort équivoque:
the idea, deep down, that one comes back. Was it possible that Sontag, who had made a career of being the exception, of rising above, in some corner of her soul believed that she was never going to die? There are so many ways she has done and undone death in her novels, in her notebooks, in her essays: Heavy, romantic, perfumed,
la mort équivoque
is one of her favorite story lines.

Late one night with Sharon, Susan sits up in bed, telling stories about Hannah Arendt and Jeanne Moreau, sometimes conflating the two. She can't, however, sort out what happened in her hospital room earlier that day. Sharon reports to David: “I left around 1am, with some difficulty, since she wouldn't
stop talking. It's her way of keeping her head above water, which is very touching, and certainly better than the querulous kvetching, and in an odd way more alarming.”

Peter feels that because of his hospice work, because she knows about how many deaths he has seen, she might open up to him about death. He tries to create openings where she can talk about it. But she never talks to Peter about dying. She sometimes uses a euphemism: “I don't know if I am going to make it.” But she never once talks directly about the possibility that she will die.

Peter found the scene at Sloan Kettering demoralizing; he thought, If this were my mother, this is not how I would want her to die. In his view Susan was a tough character, she knew what she wanted, and there was no way anyone on earth could stand up to her. But he wondered if they should have tried. He wondered if they should have taken her to a transplant ward before she had the transplant, so she could see what it looked like. He knew David believed he was following her wishes, but could her wishes have changed? He didn't say anything to David. He thought about saying something, but he didn't.

David, though, was busy arguing with himself. He relentlessly questioned his choice to promote a hope he didn't privately believe in. David himself put it this way in a piece he wrote about it: “I find myself wondering whether the false hope those close to her strived so hard to provide her with in the end consoled her or just increased that isolation.”

David also put it this way: “To go on living: perhaps that was her way of dying.”

Anne Jump also comes to see her a few afternoons a week. Anne is dark and pretty and somehow manages to project extremes of both competence and fragility. Does she bring fresh winter air, like Ivan Ilyich's young servant? She brings news of the world, correspondence. She is the last tether to the regular, working world. She brings the introduction of the Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness's book, which Sontag is working on. There is still the work. Is she really writing? Anne says that she is. Others say she is not “the full Susan.” But everyone recognizes the importance of Anne coming in. Anne does not always want to come in. She is twenty-five, and she is feeling the strain of the job.

Sontag sits fiddling with the Laxness introduction the way she fiddled with everything: “Imagining the exceptional, often understood as the miraculous, the magical, or the supernatural, is a perennial job of storytelling.” She was always rejiggering. She was the person T. S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote: “time for a thousand visions and revisions.” She would work steadily through the galleys—never finishing, always inside the work, tinkering. David points out she never said “my work,” always “the work.” And that was it:
the
work, the article “the” itself lifting the words on the page above their petty human origins. (One can't help imagining the tangled quandary
for the son, who might have work of his own, work that wasn't “the” work.)

Sontag had always worked in extremis. When she was receiving a round of chemotherapy for her breast cancer, in December of 1976, she was determined to finish
On Photography
by the beginning of January, and she did. During the entire ordeal of her first cancer, she was working her way toward the way to write about it; she was grappling with questions of craft. In the thick of the treatment, she wrote, “I know how to do ‘I' now, impersonal, not autobiographical.”

And so from her hospital bed she wrote the Laxness introduction: “Time and space are mutable in the dream novel, the dream play. Time can always be revoked. Space is multiple.” By the end she was changing words back and forth. This was how she always worked, though. And, of course, for a certain kind of person there is something life-affirming about introducing an experimental Icelandic novel, ushering it into the world.

When Susan was very young, she wrote to a lover, “You must live in terms of dying, Irene, in terms of the pounding imminence of the cessation of your life.”

Throughout her casual jottings, you see the thread of not believing in a death, not accepting it, as if one has a choice. In a letter, she wrote about her French editor: “I didn't call Paul Flamand when I was in Paris but of course I am eager to know what's happened to the French translation of
Death Kit
….It's
still hard for me to believe that Monique is dead, and I guess one of the reasons I didn't call Flamand myself is that such a call would have made Monique's death more real to me.” This is trademark Sontag (not the Sontag of
Illness as Metaphor
, who dealt in hard truths, but the wilier, wishful Sontag of the novels and notebooks), this magical thinking: that one can unmake a death, that one can render it “not real,” that one has the option to accept or not accept it.

Many years before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Sontag wrote in the notebooks: “Thinking about my own death the other day, as I often do, I made a discovery. I realized that my way of thinking has up to now been both too abstract and too concrete. Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me.”

Once she begins the new protocol, with the drug Zarnestra, the symptoms are bad. She is nauseous, and then the anti-nausea pills knock her out. There is very little life in between. On Tuesday, December 14, she tells Sharon she is afraid. She does not tell her what she is afraid of. She tells her that she “wants to be out of this place.” Sharon wonders what she means by this place: the hospital room or something bigger.

One of the private nurses, who is from Guyana, holds Susan's hand for much of the night. She also reads Susan's book
Regarding the Pain of Others
. The nurse tells Susan she wants to read more of her books. Susan says she can't breathe. Dr.
Nimer watches her breathe in her sleep, and her breathing is fine. The doctors conclude that the feeling of not being able to breathe is a panic attack.

At some point in these last weeks, Sontag stops asserting her presence in the clear and powerful way that she was used to asserting her presence. Her presence is instead filtered through the observers, the people who love her, who mean well and have different and conflicting interpretations of what would be best for her. They sometimes refer to her in the third person, in her room, while she is there. She wrote about this condition brilliantly in “The Way We Live Now,” where the AIDS patient is refracted through the voices of his friends. “Quentin said, according to Max, what he likes best is chocolate. Is there anything else, asked Kate, I mean like chocolate but not chocolate. Licorice, said Quentin.” The voice of the patient himself is lost, subsumed in the chatter and report of others. “The bad news seemed to come almost as a relief, according to Ira, as a truly unexpected blow, according to Quentin.” This is the radical loss of self, the truth seeping out into others' perceptions, that Sontag foresaw and understood in her first illness and that she evoked so masterfully in the very syntax and structure of the story. One thinks of Auden's line about Yeats's death: “He became his admirers.”