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The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End
From one of our most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched account of the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak—an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality.
In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of five great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called “the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.”
Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas’s fatal collapse on the floor of a Greenwich Village tavern. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak’s beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look.
The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, “If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?” By bringing these great writers’ final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid.
In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of five great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called “the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.”
Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas’s fatal collapse on the floor of a Greenwich Village tavern. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak’s beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look.
The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, “If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?” By bringing these great writers’ final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid.
320 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 8, 2016
153 people are currently reading
2640 people want to read
About the author
Katie Roiphe
22 books128 followersKatie Roiphe is the author of the non-fiction works The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994) and Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997). Her novel Still She Haunts Me is an empathetic imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson (known as Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She holds a Ph.D in English Literature from Princeton University, and is presently teaching at New York University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 196 reviews
March 9, 2016
3.5 When I was young, not that I think I am old now, I would pluck books off the shelves like candy. I had a few favorite authors but never really thought about their lives outside their words on the page. This book is about death, but it is also about their lives, their personalities, and all that went into how they approached the ends of their lives. I realized a while back how reading about an authors lives gives one a unique perspective on their writing. Like our children, their books are a part of them.
I particularly liked the sections on Susan Sontag, whose fiction or so it states,has many times focused on death. She was a fighter till the end. She is a author I have never read but will definitely do so now. Also loved the section on James Salter, again never read but do have a copy of Light Years which I have dug out.
Not just their death but their lives, their quirks and they had many, Freud was a study in contradictions, are all thoroughly discussed in this book. Extremely readable, informative and gave me an appreciation of a few writers I now need to read.
ARC from Netgalley.
I particularly liked the sections on Susan Sontag, whose fiction or so it states,has many times focused on death. She was a fighter till the end. She is a author I have never read but will definitely do so now. Also loved the section on James Salter, again never read but do have a copy of Light Years which I have dug out.
Not just their death but their lives, their quirks and they had many, Freud was a study in contradictions, are all thoroughly discussed in this book. Extremely readable, informative and gave me an appreciation of a few writers I now need to read.
ARC from Netgalley.
December 9, 2015
I devoured this. I don't find it macabre to be interested in death, let's face it- it's coming for all of us. Here some accept it, fight it, fear it, embrace it, question it and create with it. What better way to face your fears than to use it as a creative outlet?The panic that Updike felt isn't really that shocking to me. I think more people, at some point in their lives, have struggled with the fact that 'one day I am going to die. Then what?' I have to admit I came away not thinking to highly of him though. More than any of the people in The Violet Hour, I fell in love with Maurice Sendak. What an interesting fellow and I never knew the hidden meanings behind his books. There really is something endearing about him, and such a sad childhood, no wonder he drew monsters, wild things. "Maurice was one of those confusing people who needed both unusual amounts of solitude and unusual amounts of attention." I can relate to that and his love of cakes.
I know many find the subject of death dark, death is supposed to be a subtraction, a void, a disturbing untouched fact of life- but I didn't feel that way. I found beauty in their vulnerability. There are moments I was disgusted by selfishness and then had to say, well- these are real people and everyone is messy in their own way. There isn't a reader alive that can't relate to this book. I could go on talking about everyone and what they felt, but I don't want to take away from Roiphe's work. This was fantastic non-fiction. Something about it just touched me and kept me up reading all night. Books find you at the right time, I have been talking about the subject of death with my own son lately. He, at 19 is more fearful of what happens next and there has been much discussion. Books know where they are needed, one of the universe's strange mysteries readers ponder. How do books end up in our hands at the right time?
I know many find the subject of death dark, death is supposed to be a subtraction, a void, a disturbing untouched fact of life- but I didn't feel that way. I found beauty in their vulnerability. There are moments I was disgusted by selfishness and then had to say, well- these are real people and everyone is messy in their own way. There isn't a reader alive that can't relate to this book. I could go on talking about everyone and what they felt, but I don't want to take away from Roiphe's work. This was fantastic non-fiction. Something about it just touched me and kept me up reading all night. Books find you at the right time, I have been talking about the subject of death with my own son lately. He, at 19 is more fearful of what happens next and there has been much discussion. Books know where they are needed, one of the universe's strange mysteries readers ponder. How do books end up in our hands at the right time?
May 5, 2016
The subtitle – “Great Writers at the End” – gives you a hint of what to expect from this erudite, elegiac work of literary biography. In a larger sense, it is about coming to terms with the fear of death, one of the last enduring Western phobias.
Roiphe was a sickly, morbid child. After a serious, extended case of something like pneumonia, she had half a lung removed, and her chosen reading was books about Armenian genocide. Although she was convinced she was going to die at 12, it was only a blip; her next significant encounter with death was her father’s cardiac arrest at age 82. Once again, she was utterly unprepared. In investigating six great authors’ deaths, Roiphe is not so much looking for sage tour guides to the underworld as asking how one faces and narrates death.
To start with I was skeptical about Roiphe’s set of chosen writers. Between Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter there’s no class or racial diversity, and the gender balance is poor. Yet as I read on I set these quibbles aside. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of subjects Roiphe could have chosen, so in a sense the particular authors discussed here are arbitrary. She’s eschewed more obvious candidates like Christopher Hitchens, probably because he wrote enough about his own impending mortality himself. The criteria were probably as plain as this: an author who meant something to Roiphe, left a lot of documentary evidence, preferably had some living descendants and colleagues to interview, and whose death was drawn out enough that s/he had time to wrestle with the thought of it in writing.
Starting each chapter with the vigil at an author’s deathbed in a hospital room or at home, Roiphe skips back and forth in time to pinpoint where illness and death cropped up in that author’s life and work. For Susan Sontag, dying at New York’s Sloan Kettering in 2004, it was her third bout with cancer. A final extreme intervention, a bone marrow transplant at Seattle, had recently failed. Still Sontag shirked the notion of death, refusing even to talk about it. Work was how she had always transcended the specter of death – by writing books like Illness as Metaphor and inserting scenes of false death into her fiction – and now it was all that kept her going. Perhaps, Roiphe theorizes, there was a kind of solipsism at the heart of Sontag’s denial of death: she just could not believe that anything would continue existing without her. Well before her first experience of cancer in the 1970s, she wrote in a notebook: “Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me.”
One might expect Freud to have been more disciplined about the business of dying, what with his theory of Thanatos (the death drive) and his frequently professed acceptance. However, as Roiphe emphasizes, it is one thing to say you accept death, and quite another thing to actually accept it. In Freud’s case, his refusal to give up cigars despite painful throat cancer and 33 oral surgeries flew in the face of his otherwise rational methods. Cigars were his only vice, he shrugged. Is a cigar just a cigar, or are there overt sexual connotations? For Updike, sex was like Freud’s cigars: sensual evidence that life goes on. Adultery, a frequent theme in his fiction, was perhaps an unconscious strategy for ‘cheating’ death. It was only after his diagnosis with lung cancer that death replaced sex as the central obsession of his work. His last book, like his first, would be poetry: Endpoint, one last valiant effort before death.
I found the Updike chapter the most absorbing, even though I’ve never read any of his work. (Like Joyce Carol Oates, he was so darn prolific I have no idea where to start.) Prior familiarity with the author in question is neither here nor there, though: you learn everything you need to know from Roiphe’s biographical treatment, and thematic threads are strong enough to lead from one to another. Self-destructive behavior, compartmentalizing life, turning to work or sex to ward off depression, ignoring signs of mortality like serious illness and others’ deaths – we all employ hypocritical strategies, and these authors are no different. Even Thomas’s “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” resistant as it might sound, was actually delivered in a lulling tone of resignation when he read it aloud, Roiphe reveals.
Each chapter is its own microcosm. The author herself only appears in the prologue and epilogue; in between, although she obviously interviewed survivors (and Salter, who died before he could read the finished book), she edits herself out so we can be right there with the subject. There’s no distance at all. That sense of intimacy is clearest in the chapter-heading photographs of the authors’ (posthumously?) empty studies. These are haunting images. Look at Sendak’s desk covered in paints and drawings, slippers carefully waiting underneath; a cardigan on the back of the chair – there’s such a sense of life. The life continues in the work.
None of these authors got death perfectly right. Several of them fought it right to the end; several of them veered towards faith despite a lifelong antipathy to religion; several of them were ultimately taken aback by the simple realization that they, too, were mortal. Roiphe discovers no magic formula for how a writer should do death. Despite their contradictory approaches, though, all her subjects had the same destination:
This would be an ideal book for fans of Olivia Laing (The Lonely City) or Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened of. What Roiphe observes of Sendak’s habit of drawing the dead and dying could equally be applied to The Violet Hour: it’s about seeing the beauty in what terrifies you. One of my top few nonfiction reads of 2016 so far.
With thanks to Grace Vincent of Virago for sending a review copy.
Originally published with images at my blog, Bookish Beck.
Roiphe was a sickly, morbid child. After a serious, extended case of something like pneumonia, she had half a lung removed, and her chosen reading was books about Armenian genocide. Although she was convinced she was going to die at 12, it was only a blip; her next significant encounter with death was her father’s cardiac arrest at age 82. Once again, she was utterly unprepared. In investigating six great authors’ deaths, Roiphe is not so much looking for sage tour guides to the underworld as asking how one faces and narrates death.
To start with I was skeptical about Roiphe’s set of chosen writers. Between Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter there’s no class or racial diversity, and the gender balance is poor. Yet as I read on I set these quibbles aside. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of subjects Roiphe could have chosen, so in a sense the particular authors discussed here are arbitrary. She’s eschewed more obvious candidates like Christopher Hitchens, probably because he wrote enough about his own impending mortality himself. The criteria were probably as plain as this: an author who meant something to Roiphe, left a lot of documentary evidence, preferably had some living descendants and colleagues to interview, and whose death was drawn out enough that s/he had time to wrestle with the thought of it in writing.
Starting each chapter with the vigil at an author’s deathbed in a hospital room or at home, Roiphe skips back and forth in time to pinpoint where illness and death cropped up in that author’s life and work. For Susan Sontag, dying at New York’s Sloan Kettering in 2004, it was her third bout with cancer. A final extreme intervention, a bone marrow transplant at Seattle, had recently failed. Still Sontag shirked the notion of death, refusing even to talk about it. Work was how she had always transcended the specter of death – by writing books like Illness as Metaphor and inserting scenes of false death into her fiction – and now it was all that kept her going. Perhaps, Roiphe theorizes, there was a kind of solipsism at the heart of Sontag’s denial of death: she just could not believe that anything would continue existing without her. Well before her first experience of cancer in the 1970s, she wrote in a notebook: “Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me.”
One might expect Freud to have been more disciplined about the business of dying, what with his theory of Thanatos (the death drive) and his frequently professed acceptance. However, as Roiphe emphasizes, it is one thing to say you accept death, and quite another thing to actually accept it. In Freud’s case, his refusal to give up cigars despite painful throat cancer and 33 oral surgeries flew in the face of his otherwise rational methods. Cigars were his only vice, he shrugged. Is a cigar just a cigar, or are there overt sexual connotations? For Updike, sex was like Freud’s cigars: sensual evidence that life goes on. Adultery, a frequent theme in his fiction, was perhaps an unconscious strategy for ‘cheating’ death. It was only after his diagnosis with lung cancer that death replaced sex as the central obsession of his work. His last book, like his first, would be poetry: Endpoint, one last valiant effort before death.
I found the Updike chapter the most absorbing, even though I’ve never read any of his work. (Like Joyce Carol Oates, he was so darn prolific I have no idea where to start.) Prior familiarity with the author in question is neither here nor there, though: you learn everything you need to know from Roiphe’s biographical treatment, and thematic threads are strong enough to lead from one to another. Self-destructive behavior, compartmentalizing life, turning to work or sex to ward off depression, ignoring signs of mortality like serious illness and others’ deaths – we all employ hypocritical strategies, and these authors are no different. Even Thomas’s “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” resistant as it might sound, was actually delivered in a lulling tone of resignation when he read it aloud, Roiphe reveals.
Each chapter is its own microcosm. The author herself only appears in the prologue and epilogue; in between, although she obviously interviewed survivors (and Salter, who died before he could read the finished book), she edits herself out so we can be right there with the subject. There’s no distance at all. That sense of intimacy is clearest in the chapter-heading photographs of the authors’ (posthumously?) empty studies. These are haunting images. Look at Sendak’s desk covered in paints and drawings, slippers carefully waiting underneath; a cardigan on the back of the chair – there’s such a sense of life. The life continues in the work.
None of these authors got death perfectly right. Several of them fought it right to the end; several of them veered towards faith despite a lifelong antipathy to religion; several of them were ultimately taken aback by the simple realization that they, too, were mortal. Roiphe discovers no magic formula for how a writer should do death. Despite their contradictory approaches, though, all her subjects had the same destination:
here’s what I learned from the deaths in this book: You work. You don’t work. You resist. You don’t resist. You exert the consummate control. You surrender. You deny. You accept. You pray. You don’t pray. You read. You work. You take as many painkillers as you can. You refuse painkillers. You rage against death. You run headlong toward it.
In the end the deaths are the same. They all die. The world releases them.
This would be an ideal book for fans of Olivia Laing (The Lonely City) or Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened of. What Roiphe observes of Sendak’s habit of drawing the dead and dying could equally be applied to The Violet Hour: it’s about seeing the beauty in what terrifies you. One of my top few nonfiction reads of 2016 so far.
With thanks to Grace Vincent of Virago for sending a review copy.
Originally published with images at my blog, Bookish Beck.
September 8, 2024
Although containing the thoughts of 6 great authors about death, this book is not maudlin. It is, in fact, enlightening and has helped me understand a little bit better how to face my own death.
A few quotes from the Prologue:
"I don’t believe that you can learn how to die, or gain wisdom, or prepare, and the work I have done on this book has, if anything, confirmed that suspicion, but I do think you can look at a death and be less afraid."
George Bernard Shaw: “Don’t try to live forever, you will not succeed.”
Susan Sontag - had miraculously evaded death twice before the final cancer took her. She fought very hard to live each time death knocked at her door.
"Here again is the recurring fantasy of cheating death, the last-minute reprieve, the swooping bird that carries you back to safety."
Sigmund Freud
"The ideal Freud set out in this description of Anton von Freund’s “heroic clarity” is to see clearly. To be rational. To allow oneself to apprehend, fully and with all the senses. Which is, of course, even harder and rarer at the very end than at other points in life."
In the weeks after her father died, Anna would speak of this elegant resignation of his as his ability “to reduce every occurrence to its right proportions.”
John Updike Loved his wife but was a womanizer.
"Updike writes constantly about cheating as an antidote to death; in his fiction it is through sexual adventure that one accesses immortality."
Dylan Thomas a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" and "And Death Shall Have No Dominion". Thomas died at the age of 39 of pneumonia.
"He certainly liked the theater of sickness, the staginess, the attention it brought him, and later the excuses it provided."
"At some point, the poet’s morbid and overblown fear of death transformed itself into barreling headlong toward it."
Maurice Sendak Illustrator and writer of children's books. Very sickly as a child. Obsessed with death through all of his 83 years.
"Now she said to him, “How does it feel to be famous?” He said, “I still have to die.”
James Salter Had not heard of this author. Now that I have I plan to read at least one book authored by him. The author calls this last 'chapter' an epilogue. In it , Salter remembers Sontag, Freud, Updike, Thomas and Sendak. What a wonderful way to recap the thoughts of the other authors.
Roiphe is a WONDERFUL author. Describes her thoughts beautifully. I will read other of her works.
5 stars
A few quotes from the Prologue:
"I don’t believe that you can learn how to die, or gain wisdom, or prepare, and the work I have done on this book has, if anything, confirmed that suspicion, but I do think you can look at a death and be less afraid."
George Bernard Shaw: “Don’t try to live forever, you will not succeed.”
Susan Sontag - had miraculously evaded death twice before the final cancer took her. She fought very hard to live each time death knocked at her door.
"Here again is the recurring fantasy of cheating death, the last-minute reprieve, the swooping bird that carries you back to safety."
Sigmund Freud
"The ideal Freud set out in this description of Anton von Freund’s “heroic clarity” is to see clearly. To be rational. To allow oneself to apprehend, fully and with all the senses. Which is, of course, even harder and rarer at the very end than at other points in life."
In the weeks after her father died, Anna would speak of this elegant resignation of his as his ability “to reduce every occurrence to its right proportions.”
John Updike Loved his wife but was a womanizer.
"Updike writes constantly about cheating as an antidote to death; in his fiction it is through sexual adventure that one accesses immortality."
Dylan Thomas a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" and "And Death Shall Have No Dominion". Thomas died at the age of 39 of pneumonia.
"He certainly liked the theater of sickness, the staginess, the attention it brought him, and later the excuses it provided."
"At some point, the poet’s morbid and overblown fear of death transformed itself into barreling headlong toward it."
Maurice Sendak Illustrator and writer of children's books. Very sickly as a child. Obsessed with death through all of his 83 years.
"Now she said to him, “How does it feel to be famous?” He said, “I still have to die.”
James Salter Had not heard of this author. Now that I have I plan to read at least one book authored by him. The author calls this last 'chapter' an epilogue. In it , Salter remembers Sontag, Freud, Updike, Thomas and Sendak. What a wonderful way to recap the thoughts of the other authors.
Roiphe is a WONDERFUL author. Describes her thoughts beautifully. I will read other of her works.
5 stars
July 22, 2016
The phrase is Eliot's, from The Waste Land, meaning the evening, end of day. The violet color evokes sadness and in the heavy atmosphere of The Waste Land suggests death. The 48-year old Roiphe has written a book about death and the relationships of 6 writers with it. It's also an impressive work of criticism. It stands to reason that her inquiry into these writers at the end of their lives would consider what their work revealed about their perceptions of death, particularly their own. The weakest of the studies, I thought, was that on John Updike. He was, she implies, surprised by its quick, unseen approach through lung cancer. It seemed important to him to continue working, so that he turned out one final slim volume of poetry written in part as he succumbed to the disease, but I thought the chapter on him misfocused and that it propitiously, perhaps, spent too much time discussing the sexual attitudes conveyed by his fiction and by the author's life. The best critical analysis was that of Dylan Thomas's poetry and her nimble demonstration of how he expressed a wish for death in his writings and rushed hastily toward it in the life he lived. There's also Susan Sontag's abject fear of death and fierce denial when it was near. Sigmund Freud calmly studied death's arrival. He denied himself pain killers until the very end so he could be conscious of the fascinating transformation. Maurice Sendak thought of death as an adventure and revered it.
Roiphe's writing about these people offers no real surprises. She writes factually, presenting only what's known about their deaths and their thoughts on the end of life. It's in her "Epilogue" that she begins to write conclusions about what she's learned from her research. In this final section she talks to James Salter. At the time he was still alive and 89-years old. He told Roiphe he didn't think about his own death. He'd seen some death--flying planes in the military, the accidental death of a daughter. Talking to Salter allowed Roiphe to more clearly process what she'd learned about these writers dying. He allowed her to see that maybe we don't need to think about it. "You take your knowledge and move on." Talking to Salter she realized you work while dying, or you don't, you struggle against it or you give in, you maintain control of your emotions or not, you deny its coming or you accept, you pray or not, you continue reading or you sit and reflect on meaning, you kill the pain or you don't. You run from it or you run willingly toward it. "In the end the deaths are the same." In the end they're released. "The struggle, once it's over, doesn't exist."
I enjoyed this little book very much. To be honest, it's a little uneven. We know a lot about Updike's philosophical views on the nature of existence and the end of it, for instance, from such novels as Roger's Version and from another book on death, the philosophical work Why Does the World Exist? in which he plays a key part as the only writer who's interviewed on the subject. Yet Roiphe chose to keep her writing focused on the bedroom Updike we know best. I thought her chapter on Sendak uninspired. I was bored, at any rate. But others soared: Sontag's story was harrowing, Dylan Thomas's brought me new perceptions of his work I'd not been aware of. I enjoyed most her telling of the afternoon she spent with James Salter and the deep insights he led her to. "He writes more radiant sentences than any writer alive," she said of him. But he, too, who never thought about death, died, and before the book was published.
Roiphe's writing about these people offers no real surprises. She writes factually, presenting only what's known about their deaths and their thoughts on the end of life. It's in her "Epilogue" that she begins to write conclusions about what she's learned from her research. In this final section she talks to James Salter. At the time he was still alive and 89-years old. He told Roiphe he didn't think about his own death. He'd seen some death--flying planes in the military, the accidental death of a daughter. Talking to Salter allowed Roiphe to more clearly process what she'd learned about these writers dying. He allowed her to see that maybe we don't need to think about it. "You take your knowledge and move on." Talking to Salter she realized you work while dying, or you don't, you struggle against it or you give in, you maintain control of your emotions or not, you deny its coming or you accept, you pray or not, you continue reading or you sit and reflect on meaning, you kill the pain or you don't. You run from it or you run willingly toward it. "In the end the deaths are the same." In the end they're released. "The struggle, once it's over, doesn't exist."
I enjoyed this little book very much. To be honest, it's a little uneven. We know a lot about Updike's philosophical views on the nature of existence and the end of it, for instance, from such novels as Roger's Version and from another book on death, the philosophical work Why Does the World Exist? in which he plays a key part as the only writer who's interviewed on the subject. Yet Roiphe chose to keep her writing focused on the bedroom Updike we know best. I thought her chapter on Sendak uninspired. I was bored, at any rate. But others soared: Sontag's story was harrowing, Dylan Thomas's brought me new perceptions of his work I'd not been aware of. I enjoyed most her telling of the afternoon she spent with James Salter and the deep insights he led her to. "He writes more radiant sentences than any writer alive," she said of him. But he, too, who never thought about death, died, and before the book was published.
March 16, 2016
This book is about more than writers. It is about how we all deal with death. As Susan Sontag's biographer, I found the chapter on her moving and enlightening. Roiphe does not just recycle the work of others. She did her own research, and some of it I have used in my own updated and revised Sontag biography. Roiphe selects a wide range of writers. Updike could not be more different from Sontag, but Roiphe is superb on his final days. What an elegant and profound study.
November 6, 2017
I was drawn to Katie Roiphe’s book, The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, because I am fascinated by the lives of the writers whose experiences with death and dying she attempted to capture—Susan Sontag, John Updike, Sigmund Freud, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak. I was not disappointed. Roiphe amassed a narrative with facts and poignant personal details about each of her subjects that were, more often than not, riveting reading. Some spoke to me more than others. I was left especially haunted by the life and end-of-life experiences of Maurice Sendak, enough to go back to his children’s book, The Night Kitchen, to experience it once again, this time through the prism of his compulsions, sadness, and symbolism. Of course, every person’s experience of life and death is their own, and a writer/researcher like Roiphe can only collect data about her subject’s behaviors and intuit what must have been in these writers hearts and minds at the end of their lives, and I came away convinced that I had learned as much about Roiphe as I did about Freud, or Sontag or Dylan Thomas.
January 2, 2018
Dat dit boek over de dood van zes grote schrijvers gaat, betekend niet dat het een zwaar, duister verhaal is. In tegendeel zelfs. Het boek is goed geschreven, inspirerend, intrigerend en het raakt je. Ondanks dat er bijna geen emotie in voorkomt. Het houd je als het ware een spiegel voor: Hoe denk je zelf over de dood, maar vooral over het leven?
Alle zes schrijvers hebben, net als Katie Roiphe zelf, iets met de dood, eigenlijk al van jongs af aan. Wanneer blijkt dat zij ongeneeslijk ziek zijn, reageren ze daar allen op hun eigen manier op. Hun reacties doen denken aan een kazatzka: de Dodendans. Een wals waarin ze denken dat zij leiden, maar De Dood heeft allang de leiding overgenomen en sleept hen mee naar het onvermijdelijke einde.
Ik was vooral geraakt door het verhaal van Dylan Thomas, de poët van de prachtige gedichten en de nog mooiere stem. Onbegrijpelijk dat niemand heeft ingegrepen in zijn bijna Munchhausen-achtige zelfdestructie. Toch sprak het verhaal van Katie Roiphe zelf me het meeste aan. Net als zij ben ik, doordat ik als kind erg ziek was, als sinds jongs af aan geïnteresseerd in De Dood. Ik hoop van harte dat zowel zij als ik het antwoord op dat raadsel nog lang niet zullen vinden.
Alle zes schrijvers hebben, net als Katie Roiphe zelf, iets met de dood, eigenlijk al van jongs af aan. Wanneer blijkt dat zij ongeneeslijk ziek zijn, reageren ze daar allen op hun eigen manier op. Hun reacties doen denken aan een kazatzka: de Dodendans. Een wals waarin ze denken dat zij leiden, maar De Dood heeft allang de leiding overgenomen en sleept hen mee naar het onvermijdelijke einde.
Ik was vooral geraakt door het verhaal van Dylan Thomas, de poët van de prachtige gedichten en de nog mooiere stem. Onbegrijpelijk dat niemand heeft ingegrepen in zijn bijna Munchhausen-achtige zelfdestructie. Toch sprak het verhaal van Katie Roiphe zelf me het meeste aan. Net als zij ben ik, doordat ik als kind erg ziek was, als sinds jongs af aan geïnteresseerd in De Dood. Ik hoop van harte dat zowel zij als ik het antwoord op dat raadsel nog lang niet zullen vinden.
February 1, 2016
Death is one of our culture’s last taboos. We just don’t talk about it if we don’t have to. Yet the way we approach our deaths says a lot about who we have been in our lives. In some cases, there is bravery and beauty; in others, cold stoicism; in still others, self-destruction and wantonness.
Katie Roiphe chooses her subjects well to give a good cross-section of how some of our greatest creative minds approached their deaths. Susan Sontag, for example, is the poster child for another subject’s (Dylan Thomas’) much-quoted poem: Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And rage she does. She is determined to be the one person who defeats death, undergoing arduous medical procedures including near-lethal experimental chemotherapy cocktails. Driven, in all likelihood, by her raging narcissism, she appears stunned that she will die like any other mere mortal.
Sigmund Freud is the polar opposite. He is determined to project a cool, rational acceptance of the necrosis of the mouth that defigures and ultimately kills him. He refuses to part with the cigars and nicotine that almost certainly caused the cancer to begin with (Sontag also refused to give up her cigarettes) and another therapist would likely have a field day with analyzing what cigars really meant to him. He maintains control of his death to the end, when his hand-picked physician helps him in an assisted suicide.
Dylan Thomas is, of course, a story of excess. Ms. Roiphen writes, “The true mystery of Thomas’ last days, however, is not the precise medical cause of his coma; it is how the unnatural fear and apprehension of death melts into a craving for it…It seems if you are afraid or preoccupied with something for long enough, you begin to develop a feeling toward it not dissimilar to love.” John Updike, the creator of the Rabbit series, attempts to turn “pain into honey” in his last days, with poems that carry the urgency of his early work, the sharpness and swiftness he was afraid he had lost. And Maurice Sendak, who kept Keats’ original death mask in one of his rooms, obsesses about death but lives a long life. The very end includes an interview that Ms. Roiphe conducts with James Salter, who is afraid not of death itself but the fear of death—the panic at its approach.
Thoughtful and nuanced, the book has much to say about our acceptance of our own mortality.
Katie Roiphe chooses her subjects well to give a good cross-section of how some of our greatest creative minds approached their deaths. Susan Sontag, for example, is the poster child for another subject’s (Dylan Thomas’) much-quoted poem: Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And rage she does. She is determined to be the one person who defeats death, undergoing arduous medical procedures including near-lethal experimental chemotherapy cocktails. Driven, in all likelihood, by her raging narcissism, she appears stunned that she will die like any other mere mortal.
Sigmund Freud is the polar opposite. He is determined to project a cool, rational acceptance of the necrosis of the mouth that defigures and ultimately kills him. He refuses to part with the cigars and nicotine that almost certainly caused the cancer to begin with (Sontag also refused to give up her cigarettes) and another therapist would likely have a field day with analyzing what cigars really meant to him. He maintains control of his death to the end, when his hand-picked physician helps him in an assisted suicide.
Dylan Thomas is, of course, a story of excess. Ms. Roiphen writes, “The true mystery of Thomas’ last days, however, is not the precise medical cause of his coma; it is how the unnatural fear and apprehension of death melts into a craving for it…It seems if you are afraid or preoccupied with something for long enough, you begin to develop a feeling toward it not dissimilar to love.” John Updike, the creator of the Rabbit series, attempts to turn “pain into honey” in his last days, with poems that carry the urgency of his early work, the sharpness and swiftness he was afraid he had lost. And Maurice Sendak, who kept Keats’ original death mask in one of his rooms, obsesses about death but lives a long life. The very end includes an interview that Ms. Roiphe conducts with James Salter, who is afraid not of death itself but the fear of death—the panic at its approach.
Thoughtful and nuanced, the book has much to say about our acceptance of our own mortality.
October 22, 2019
This book is such a tender read.
Ms. Roiphe does not make any of these writer's death ~ a lyrical magical way to exit.
She is honest & she documents the last weeks, months, days & hours.
In the case of Dylan Thomas, we are left wondering, did he really mean it when he wrote
" As I sail out to die..." did he mean to continue drinking into the dawn?
Was staying home really simply nothingness & so he kept on & kept at it?
All the women that he kept loving, were they unable to just say NO to him & somehow save him from himself?
Could they not see that at 39 years of age ..perhaps..... whiskey number 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 perhaps 18 would be too much?
Just a bit too much for one eve?
Why could they not pull him back into bed & tell him to sleep, to rest, to wait for daybreak?
She begs the questions, what would we have done?
These writers seem to be a light that dazzles & at times even in their most weakest moments, the strength they exhibit in illness, causes those around them to stumble.
"Where many~maybe most~ people look away, he wanted to render.
He was very wrapped in the goodbye, the flight, the loss; it was almost Victorian, to be so deeply entranced with the moment of death, the instinct to preserve or document it. "
Maurice Sendak & how he dealt with the many losses that happened along his path of life.
He kept drawing.
He could not stop.
Reading the last chapter & her conversations with Peter Salter, frank discussions about death
& how we accept it or we do not.
Their conversation on all of this death is simply amazingly enlightening.
He is quite calm & matter of fact about it all.
And she is surprised.
He quite in a matter of fact fashion expresses that yes, even in that quick moment of a faulty heart, one would feel pain~no matter how quick the heart attack & the surprise that Ms. Roiphe expresses honestly, when she realizes she never considered pain.
When she is ready to share again with him, she learns he has also died.
Her honesty about her feelings on all of this ~ makes this an excellent read.
(Did I say that already? )
She mulls & shares her final thoughts on the writer's she has chosen to write about &
she discusses that beauty she has found within them.
In Life & In Death.
"Part of the creative work these people did, their art, was their lives themselves.......
The beauty is what ambushed me............"
From Susan Sontag refusing death, Annie Leibovitz photographing that denial, to Maurice Sendak, this chapter made my heart weep, (oh just weep) continuing to create, even when he accepted what was to be, even as I always listen again & again to his interview with Terry Gross, which is mentioned within these pages ......
( have a listen to it ........just listen to it ~ he is simply just so......... wonderful....).
All of these writers & even though they have left, Ms. Roiphe makes them alive & has us reconsider everything about them.
In life & in death.
I simply loved this little book.
I just loved it.
So you should read it............
Ms. Roiphe does not make any of these writer's death ~ a lyrical magical way to exit.
She is honest & she documents the last weeks, months, days & hours.
In the case of Dylan Thomas, we are left wondering, did he really mean it when he wrote
" As I sail out to die..." did he mean to continue drinking into the dawn?
Was staying home really simply nothingness & so he kept on & kept at it?
All the women that he kept loving, were they unable to just say NO to him & somehow save him from himself?
Could they not see that at 39 years of age ..perhaps..... whiskey number 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 perhaps 18 would be too much?
Just a bit too much for one eve?
Why could they not pull him back into bed & tell him to sleep, to rest, to wait for daybreak?
She begs the questions, what would we have done?
These writers seem to be a light that dazzles & at times even in their most weakest moments, the strength they exhibit in illness, causes those around them to stumble.
"Where many~maybe most~ people look away, he wanted to render.
He was very wrapped in the goodbye, the flight, the loss; it was almost Victorian, to be so deeply entranced with the moment of death, the instinct to preserve or document it. "
Maurice Sendak & how he dealt with the many losses that happened along his path of life.
He kept drawing.
He could not stop.
Reading the last chapter & her conversations with Peter Salter, frank discussions about death
& how we accept it or we do not.
Their conversation on all of this death is simply amazingly enlightening.
He is quite calm & matter of fact about it all.
And she is surprised.
He quite in a matter of fact fashion expresses that yes, even in that quick moment of a faulty heart, one would feel pain~no matter how quick the heart attack & the surprise that Ms. Roiphe expresses honestly, when she realizes she never considered pain.
When she is ready to share again with him, she learns he has also died.
Her honesty about her feelings on all of this ~ makes this an excellent read.
(Did I say that already? )
She mulls & shares her final thoughts on the writer's she has chosen to write about &
she discusses that beauty she has found within them.
In Life & In Death.
"Part of the creative work these people did, their art, was their lives themselves.......
The beauty is what ambushed me............"
From Susan Sontag refusing death, Annie Leibovitz photographing that denial, to Maurice Sendak, this chapter made my heart weep, (oh just weep) continuing to create, even when he accepted what was to be, even as I always listen again & again to his interview with Terry Gross, which is mentioned within these pages ......
( have a listen to it ........just listen to it ~ he is simply just so......... wonderful....).
All of these writers & even though they have left, Ms. Roiphe makes them alive & has us reconsider everything about them.
In life & in death.
I simply loved this little book.
I just loved it.
So you should read it............
Read
December 20, 2015I was excited to read this book but it fell short for me. Subtitled "Great Writers at the End," it's an exploration of death via the examination of mortality in the life and works of famous figures including Susan Sontag, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, Sigmund Freud, and James Salter.
Oddly, I felt at times Roiphe was disdainful toward her subjects. I was wishing someone who had more sympathy for them wrote this book. Yes, the subject is death but I was hoping for some intriguing insights instead of a dull, sad, distant tone. This is why I was surprised when, at the end, she claims she found some "beauty in these deaths...the life rushing in, the vastness of the work..." I only caught glimpses of that in her portrayals, except with Salter (the only person she profiled who was still alive at the time).
She says, "I don't want to be sentimental"--but to me, she went too far in the other direction. I craved more emotion and reflection. We get more toward the end, a little too late.
In fact, I found her notes at the end more lively than the rest of the book. In these notes, she talks about how she studied each writer--and here the voice is more human and less staid than in most of the rest of the book. It's as though she relaxed in writing the errata.
I was going to give this book two stars, but because of the ending and a few nuggets throughout--and because I especially liked learning about Maurice Sendak's life--I give it 2 1/2 (bumped up to 3 because of the Goodreads system).
(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for this review.)
Oddly, I felt at times Roiphe was disdainful toward her subjects. I was wishing someone who had more sympathy for them wrote this book. Yes, the subject is death but I was hoping for some intriguing insights instead of a dull, sad, distant tone. This is why I was surprised when, at the end, she claims she found some "beauty in these deaths...the life rushing in, the vastness of the work..." I only caught glimpses of that in her portrayals, except with Salter (the only person she profiled who was still alive at the time).
She says, "I don't want to be sentimental"--but to me, she went too far in the other direction. I craved more emotion and reflection. We get more toward the end, a little too late.
In fact, I found her notes at the end more lively than the rest of the book. In these notes, she talks about how she studied each writer--and here the voice is more human and less staid than in most of the rest of the book. It's as though she relaxed in writing the errata.
I was going to give this book two stars, but because of the ending and a few nuggets throughout--and because I especially liked learning about Maurice Sendak's life--I give it 2 1/2 (bumped up to 3 because of the Goodreads system).
(I received a free copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for this review.)
June 1, 2023
I've just finished this book and oh my, it was exceptional writing. Katie Roiphe has done an amazing job of looking with a critical eye at the final months, weeks, days and hours of memorable writers.
I love that Katie's interest is sparked from a childhood fear of death after being gravely ill. Facing your fears is a great therapy and Roiphe's book is certainly therapy and then some.
The writing is engaging, informative and objective without being overly sentimental, in fact Roiphe states that she doesn't want to veer into the nostalgic or soppy perspective of death.
I really enjoyed this read as it was intelligent writing which sparked me to think and ruminate and reflect- all the best things a book can provoke from a human.
Highly recommended.
I love that Katie's interest is sparked from a childhood fear of death after being gravely ill. Facing your fears is a great therapy and Roiphe's book is certainly therapy and then some.
The writing is engaging, informative and objective without being overly sentimental, in fact Roiphe states that she doesn't want to veer into the nostalgic or soppy perspective of death.
I really enjoyed this read as it was intelligent writing which sparked me to think and ruminate and reflect- all the best things a book can provoke from a human.
Highly recommended.
May 5, 2016
If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?
This is the question that author Katie Roiphe examines in The Violet Hour, and after picking the “great writers” to whom she was drawn “by instinct”, Roiphe devotes a chapter to each of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak; sharing the stories of their final illnesses from eyewitness accounts, and where possible, including each author's final perspective. Each of these outsized personalities did have an interesting story surrounding their death (so I was never bored, exactly, by this book), but if the premise was to discover what a group of singularly articulate people put into words about their own impending ends, well, there was actually very little of that (so I felt a bit cheated by what I thought I was in for).
The research that went into this book is impressive – evident from the frequent references to each author's many books, biographies about them, and the personal interviews that Roiphe was able to conduct with insiders – but while this information was of startling breadth, it was disappointingly shallow; there was a definite lack of humanity in these pages. Here's what I learned: after beating cancer twice through the decades already, Susan Sontag expected to beat it once again, insisting on harrowing experimental treatments that destroyed what small quality of life she might have expected at the end; Sigmund Freud refused to quit smoking even though he knew it was killing him, and even as his beloved dog shunned him (because of the necrotic smells from his rotting mouth), Freud insisted on meeting death with dignity, refusing anything more than aspirin for his pain; John Updike had always written about death (and often, about the idea that the stolen hours of a clandestine affair is like living a parallel life that can be considered an extending of the finite life given us), and when he was suddenly diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, Updike attempted to capture the experience in a final book of poetry; Dylan Thomas had always been sickly, and as he had a premonition that his final speaking engagement in the US would be his last, he may have been overdrinking and otherwise hastening the death that he was anticipating; and Maurice Sendak, also a sickly child, had always been working through a fear of death and a yearning for maternal love in his children's books. As I said, the research in this book is admirable, but with a scattershot, time-skipping, flitting-from-the-works-to-the-eyewitnesses style that Roiphe employs, I didn't learn much more than this brief synopsis.
The Violet Hour isn't about famous last words, but since Updike used the dwindling strength of his last months to compose poetry, he was able to leave us with this:
Updike had written a peaceful death before he died. He wrote a peaceful death before he was dying, and he wrote it when he was dying: “To live is good / but not to live – to be pulled down / with scarce a ripping sound, / still flourishing, still / stretching towards the sun – / is good also.”
And as Thomas' final illness involved a coma from which he never awakened, the premonition of his own death as confided in his correspondence is brilliantly captured here:
Thomas wrote one of his very last letters, a sort of delirious fantasy about himself as Houdini at the bottom of the sea to Princess Caetani: “Oh, one time the last time will come and I'll never struggle, I'll stay down here forever handcuffed and blindfolded, sliding my windaround music, my sack trailed in the slime, withal the rest of the self-destroyed escapologists in their cages, drowned in the sorrows they drown and in my piercing own, alone and one with the coarse and cosy damned seahorsey dead, weeping my tons.”
In a final bit of dramatic irony: after completing all the research and the writing that went into this book, Roiphe interviewed author James Salter (who was eighty-nine at the time), talking about these other writers in particular and mortality in general. When discussing Roiphe's own father's death from a sudden heart attack, Salter explained the extreme pain and panic that such a death would cause (something that Roiphe had never considered; she had always imagined it quick and peaceful), and months later, before she was even able to send him the copy of this book as promised, Salter himself dropped dead of a sudden heart attack. That would be so unbelievable if it were not true.
So, in the end, The Violet Hour wasn't the book that I was expecting (which is entirely my own failing), but as a mostly superficial assemblage of facts, it was also not a book that I needed to read. I liked the Prologue (in which Roiphe explains her own childhood illness that led to her lifelong fascination with death) and Epilogue (the bits with Salter, and later, her experiences with all of the intimates she interviewed) the best, and I suppose that simply means that I would have preferred for Roiphe to have inserted herself more into the chapters about her chosen authors; to have filtered the facts through her own humanity; how could a book with so many intimately witnessed deaths have had zero emotional effect on me? There were certainly some interesting stories in here, and many references make me want to go back and read some of these authors (I've always meant to pick up Updike's Rabbit books), so this was certainly not a waste of time; again, just not what I would have expected from the book's jacket.
May 20, 2016
The book is about tracking writers in their final days. Interviewing those who survive the dead is a sensitive matter. One person Roiphe interviews asks, "I wonder what your motive for writing this is." It's a good question and it stunned Roiphe that someone would actually ask.
At this point in her career we can divide Roiphe's books into those conformists she would rather have nothing to do with ("In Praise of Messy Lives" - women who live their lives through their children; feminized male authors; social media users, etc.) and the greats she wishes to be associated with ("Uncommon Arrangements" - socially experimental early 20th century British writers). This hodgepodge of anecdotal journalism belongs to the second.
There are the usual quirks of Roiphe's style:
"In (Sontag's) notebooks you can see the work of self-mythologizing all along... shaping them into an idea of herself as exceptional. Everyone does this, of course, but Sontag does it with a million times more commitment, more intensity, and more success than other people."
Roiphe hates it when the common herd charges her with snobbery, but the "of course" and "more success than other people" gives the game away, as does the girl fandom of Sontag doing it a "million" times better. For someone who insists we pay closer attention to language it's charming that the language of her teenage self continues to slip by the censor.
Elsewhere I have no idea what to make of this metaphor:
"David (Rieff - Sontag's son) is tall and elegant. He is handsome in the way of a Roman coin. He has the slight air of being crown prince to a country that has suddenly and inexplicably gone democratic."
What's so inexplicable about people wishing for more freedom? Not to mention when has this ever happened "suddenly"? I think she means to praise Rieff, though comparing him to a Roman emperor amidst the mindless barbarians is a weird way to go about it in a democratic country.
And don't expect Roiphe to weigh in on whether Annie Leibovitz was unethical in photographing Sontag in her cancer-stricken state without Sontag's permission. Roiphe will report that family and intimates hated it, but resists doing so herself, for fear, probably, of having something to say about the well-regarded she sees herself among.
At this point in her career we can divide Roiphe's books into those conformists she would rather have nothing to do with ("In Praise of Messy Lives" - women who live their lives through their children; feminized male authors; social media users, etc.) and the greats she wishes to be associated with ("Uncommon Arrangements" - socially experimental early 20th century British writers). This hodgepodge of anecdotal journalism belongs to the second.
There are the usual quirks of Roiphe's style:
"In (Sontag's) notebooks you can see the work of self-mythologizing all along... shaping them into an idea of herself as exceptional. Everyone does this, of course, but Sontag does it with a million times more commitment, more intensity, and more success than other people."
Roiphe hates it when the common herd charges her with snobbery, but the "of course" and "more success than other people" gives the game away, as does the girl fandom of Sontag doing it a "million" times better. For someone who insists we pay closer attention to language it's charming that the language of her teenage self continues to slip by the censor.
Elsewhere I have no idea what to make of this metaphor:
"David (Rieff - Sontag's son) is tall and elegant. He is handsome in the way of a Roman coin. He has the slight air of being crown prince to a country that has suddenly and inexplicably gone democratic."
What's so inexplicable about people wishing for more freedom? Not to mention when has this ever happened "suddenly"? I think she means to praise Rieff, though comparing him to a Roman emperor amidst the mindless barbarians is a weird way to go about it in a democratic country.
And don't expect Roiphe to weigh in on whether Annie Leibovitz was unethical in photographing Sontag in her cancer-stricken state without Sontag's permission. Roiphe will report that family and intimates hated it, but resists doing so herself, for fear, probably, of having something to say about the well-regarded she sees herself among.
February 28, 2023
I don't worry about death. I don't think about death. I don't care about death.
Nevertheless, this book is a brilliant book. Whether you care about death or not, whether you care about writers or not, this book will set your little mind a-spinning about life and, yes, death, and meaning and purpose, and love and hate, and all the important things. It's thoroughly researched, full of all the little details and stories that delight and reveal, and it's beautifully written, in solid little chunks, almost like poems.
Nevertheless, this book is a brilliant book. Whether you care about death or not, whether you care about writers or not, this book will set your little mind a-spinning about life and, yes, death, and meaning and purpose, and love and hate, and all the important things. It's thoroughly researched, full of all the little details and stories that delight and reveal, and it's beautifully written, in solid little chunks, almost like poems.
January 21, 2018
als ik boeken als deze lees, voel ik me altijd dommig: zoiets zou ik never nooit kunnen bedenken en ik zou het al helemaal niet zo op kunnen schrijven. daar komt bij dat ik wel van Susan Sontag en de andere schrijvers uit dit boek gehoord heb, maar verder niet echt een idee of gevoel bij ze had en daarom kreeg ik ook geen echte binding met dit boek, of met hun verhaal.
dat gezegd hebbende, wat machtig interessant om over de laatste dagen van deze mensen te lezen. de dood is net zo "gewoon" als het leven, en het fascineert me al m'n hele leven. dit boek gaat over doodgaan, en maakt het bijna grijpbaar. ik snap dat mensen die goed weten wie de beschreven mensen waren, hier een magnifiek boek aan hebben.
dat gezegd hebbende, wat machtig interessant om over de laatste dagen van deze mensen te lezen. de dood is net zo "gewoon" als het leven, en het fascineert me al m'n hele leven. dit boek gaat over doodgaan, en maakt het bijna grijpbaar. ik snap dat mensen die goed weten wie de beschreven mensen waren, hier een magnifiek boek aan hebben.
February 27, 2024
Heirloom Books recently received over fifty boxes of books consisting, mostly, of literary criticism and biographies of writers, this among them. Not knowing how I could possibly fit all these texts in our available shelves, I became pretty selective, sending hundreds of books off to neighborhood book boxes and the Salvation Army. This one I kept but did not shelf.
'The Violet Hour' is a meditation on our mortality represented by the cases of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter. Freud and Thomas were of greatest interest to me, particularly as regards Freud's persistent smoking habit even in the face of a death which quite probably was 'caused' by just that.
'The Violet Hour' is a meditation on our mortality represented by the cases of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter. Freud and Thomas were of greatest interest to me, particularly as regards Freud's persistent smoking habit even in the face of a death which quite probably was 'caused' by just that.
November 29, 2017
Like many (or perhaps only some) people, I am fascinated by death. And I am a writer. So it was natural for me to be drawn to The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. Author Katie Roiphe turns her considerable skills to the subject, while trying to work out what she herself believes about her own final hours.
Employing painstaking research, Roiphe explores the approaches to death made by five brilliant people: John Updike, Sigmund Freud, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and Susan Sontag. Each faces their death in a unique way: Sontag with defiance, Freud with precise thinking and analysis, Thomas with alcohol and outrageous behavior, Sendak with acceptance of a certain beauty in death, and Updike with the writing of poems, nearly till the bitter end, hoping that words would generously lead the way. All had written extensively about illness and death in their lifetimes, but as their own ends approached, their thoughts took a new slant.
How will we each move toward our final hours? This is the primary question posed in this book, using fiercely intelligent thinkers as examples. Roiphe writes in her prologue: "There are in these deaths glimpses of bravery, of beauty, of crushingly pointless suffering, of rampant self-destruction, of truly terrible behavior, of creative bursts, of superb devotion, of glitteringly accurate self-knowledge, and of magnificent delusion." What a privilege to glimpse the final days of these brilliant human beings.
The Violet Hour not only offered me much food for thought; it also spurred me to want to read more of some of our most splendid writers.
Employing painstaking research, Roiphe explores the approaches to death made by five brilliant people: John Updike, Sigmund Freud, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and Susan Sontag. Each faces their death in a unique way: Sontag with defiance, Freud with precise thinking and analysis, Thomas with alcohol and outrageous behavior, Sendak with acceptance of a certain beauty in death, and Updike with the writing of poems, nearly till the bitter end, hoping that words would generously lead the way. All had written extensively about illness and death in their lifetimes, but as their own ends approached, their thoughts took a new slant.
How will we each move toward our final hours? This is the primary question posed in this book, using fiercely intelligent thinkers as examples. Roiphe writes in her prologue: "There are in these deaths glimpses of bravery, of beauty, of crushingly pointless suffering, of rampant self-destruction, of truly terrible behavior, of creative bursts, of superb devotion, of glitteringly accurate self-knowledge, and of magnificent delusion." What a privilege to glimpse the final days of these brilliant human beings.
The Violet Hour not only offered me much food for thought; it also spurred me to want to read more of some of our most splendid writers.
February 18, 2016
I was initially interested in this because I presumed it was writers doing what they do best - writing. Only this time, they were writing about their own unbeatable illnesses, or the spectre of death that follows us all around. What I actually read was a book about these great writers and the end of their days. Nothing inherently wrong with that...except that, often, I found the writing long and drawn out - far past the point of where anything needed to be. It felt almost as if, during the writing, the author was hoping that the longer she wrote, the more death itself would make sense. Unfortunately, death often *doesn't* make sense to those around us, other than being the end that everyone will greet - some sooner than others.
Sadly, I was only able to get about halfway through before I simply could not read anymore. It's rare that I abandon a book (more from simple stubborn refusal), but - this one I did. I'm sure there will be some who might truly get something out of this, or value what they perceive as possible insights given - but as with beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. And these eyes simply could not continue the long slog.
Sadly, I was only able to get about halfway through before I simply could not read anymore. It's rare that I abandon a book (more from simple stubborn refusal), but - this one I did. I'm sure there will be some who might truly get something out of this, or value what they perceive as possible insights given - but as with beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. And these eyes simply could not continue the long slog.
May 16, 2018
Six writers at the end of their lives. My favorite section was about Maurice Sendak.
(page 233) "Maurice said he dreamed up the idea of the wild things as an adult, at a shiva after someone had died, with his brother and sister. They were sitting around, laughing about their relatives from Europe. The relatives didn't speak English. Their teeth were yellow. They grabbed the children's cheeks. It was like they would gobble up Maurice and his siblings, along with everything else in the house. The wild things were Jewish relatives."
(page 233) "Maurice said he dreamed up the idea of the wild things as an adult, at a shiva after someone had died, with his brother and sister. They were sitting around, laughing about their relatives from Europe. The relatives didn't speak English. Their teeth were yellow. They grabbed the children's cheeks. It was like they would gobble up Maurice and his siblings, along with everything else in the house. The wild things were Jewish relatives."
June 14, 2023
3.5
Comforting and unflinching at the same time, and tone-wise somewhere between Olivia Laing and Siri Hustvedt.
Comforting and unflinching at the same time, and tone-wise somewhere between Olivia Laing and Siri Hustvedt.
December 29, 2019
I wanted to read this because it covered Updike's death, but I found it to be fascinating in describing the deaths of several others, including Susan Sontag and Sigmund Freud. It is more about the final days leading up to death than the deaths themselves, or the moments of dying, if you like.
I found the stories to be moving, the details entrancing. Seeing how someone ends his or her life tells you volumes about their character. The common thread in the deaths of this book is a devotion to work. The writers want more time to work, or draw. They want to claw out as much time as they can before its over, because I suppose they think their work will outlive them and it is vitally important to get down on paper that latest insight.
I wish there were more books like this.
I found the stories to be moving, the details entrancing. Seeing how someone ends his or her life tells you volumes about their character. The common thread in the deaths of this book is a devotion to work. The writers want more time to work, or draw. They want to claw out as much time as they can before its over, because I suppose they think their work will outlive them and it is vitally important to get down on paper that latest insight.
I wish there were more books like this.
February 7, 2017
Turning 65 last year, I discovered I was old and to reinforce this notion, I lost several friends and colleagues unexpectedly. I have always been interested in good books on how people deal with the end so this title intrigued me. I read a previous book by this author that I enjoyed very much so I was pleased to read about this one. It's a collection of articles about how the following dealt with their respective end of days: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter. Their stories were each individually interesting though I could see no particular parallels to be drawn by the group. I was surprised to learn that Maurice Sendak was gay but didn't come out of the closet till he was 80. Sigmund Freud would not give up smoking even though he had undergone horrible surgeries which left him with an artificial palate and a gaping hole in his cheek, but he died in his 80s despite the cancer and the smoking. John Updike's wife was so protective of his privacy that she wouldn't let his children from his first marriage visit their father except by strict appointment. Dylan Thomas was paid fortunes to tour America and give poetry readings but he died penniless and never sent any money home to take care of his kids. This book just reinforces what I already knew: I have to separate the art from the artist. It's okay to love one and despise the other.
All in all, I enjoyed the book and was interested in the stories.
All in all, I enjoyed the book and was interested in the stories.
March 15, 2016
In this riveting and absorbing account of how 6 writers and thinkers approached their deaths, author Katie Roiphe gives the reader an insightful and compassionate profile of each of them. It’s an original approach to biography and I found it totally absorbing. Intimate and personal but never intrusive or prurient, well-researched and thoughtful, the book works on many levels. The 6 people she chose (and they are a very personal choice) - Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter – each approached their impending deaths in very different ways and I found it fascinating and illuminating to learn how they coped. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
January 21, 2018
A book about the last days/weeks of 6 famous writers. I have been drawn to memoirs about death but this book is much more clinical and professional with interviews with friends, relatives, nurses, and medical staff. It's a history of the treatments they tried, and whether they worked and how everyone reacted. It lacks heart and soul and I wasn't interested in the subjects she chose which would have made it more interesting.
August 17, 2017
Mooi, maar zwaar thema. Op momenten iets te uitputtend in de beschrijvingen. Het slothoofdstuk, de epiloog met James Salter, is prachtig!
February 2, 2020
I quite liked this book about writers thinking about, then facing, death. Roiphe has picked accessible writers that most of us know well - Sontag, Freud, Dylan Thomas, Updike, Sendak - and then an epilogue interview with James Salter.
Sontag is the first writer, and the least palatable - to me. She rages against death, she seems surprised, and petty and imperious. She is the only woman, so perhaps a mistake to leave it there. Will have to think about that. The Freud chapter was clinical, the Updike chapter moving, and Sendak - well, his last years of interviews seem to be common enough knowledge.
The two standouts were Dylan Thomas and the Epilogue. Dylan Thomas just because his writing was so gorgeous, and his such a flamboyant strange "overwritten nature" - though placarded everywhere, the bit from his 35th Birthday poem is incredibly beautiful and wonderful to read the whole poem:
That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
Finally the Epilogue. I've come late to Salter (thanks Book Club Ladies) , but Roiphe's spare observations, and on point comments about his writing ("generous and harsh") and Salter's spare comments - and his friendship with Peter Matthiessen - just slew me.
Sontag is the first writer, and the least palatable - to me. She rages against death, she seems surprised, and petty and imperious. She is the only woman, so perhaps a mistake to leave it there. Will have to think about that. The Freud chapter was clinical, the Updike chapter moving, and Sendak - well, his last years of interviews seem to be common enough knowledge.
The two standouts were Dylan Thomas and the Epilogue. Dylan Thomas just because his writing was so gorgeous, and his such a flamboyant strange "overwritten nature" - though placarded everywhere, the bit from his 35th Birthday poem is incredibly beautiful and wonderful to read the whole poem:
That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
Finally the Epilogue. I've come late to Salter (thanks Book Club Ladies) , but Roiphe's spare observations, and on point comments about his writing ("generous and harsh") and Salter's spare comments - and his friendship with Peter Matthiessen - just slew me.
February 23, 2025
I spent most of this book veering between enjoyment and annoyance. It was kind of like when I read The Three-Pound Enigma by Shannon Moffett and realized that you can write about the human brain all you want but you can't really get outside thinking. Roiphe interviews the families and friends of great personalities about their last days, but that's quite different from actually confronting death, isn't it?
Near the end of the book she talks about interviewing James Salter, a writer in his late eighties, and says "In some larger sense, of course, the thing I want from him is delusional. I want him to tell me what it means to come up close to death." And then I relaxed and let myself enjoy the reading experience. All of the research and interviewing and contemplating does paint an interesting portrait of the different approaches these five people took to the work of dying. I also appreciated the backstories, which initially seemed less relevant, but did go into forming the personality that was left at the end. It was kind of a perfect ending that she meant to send her book to James Salter and was a bit surprised that he died before she could, even though he was ninety. Because that's how it is, isn't it? No matter how much death is to be expected, it's almost always still a surprise in some way. The fact that someone has lived an unusually long time should make it more likely to us that they die, but somehow it seems less likely because, well, it hasn't happened yet.
Near the end of the book she talks about interviewing James Salter, a writer in his late eighties, and says "In some larger sense, of course, the thing I want from him is delusional. I want him to tell me what it means to come up close to death." And then I relaxed and let myself enjoy the reading experience. All of the research and interviewing and contemplating does paint an interesting portrait of the different approaches these five people took to the work of dying. I also appreciated the backstories, which initially seemed less relevant, but did go into forming the personality that was left at the end. It was kind of a perfect ending that she meant to send her book to James Salter and was a bit surprised that he died before she could, even though he was ninety. Because that's how it is, isn't it? No matter how much death is to be expected, it's almost always still a surprise in some way. The fact that someone has lived an unusually long time should make it more likely to us that they die, but somehow it seems less likely because, well, it hasn't happened yet.
September 19, 2020
Katie Roiphe presents a well-researched book. She explores the last weeks and days of some famous writers - Maurice Sendak, Dylan Thomas, Susan Sonntag, and Sigmund Freud. She intersperses it with some facts from their life - mostly ones that relate to that particular person's thoughts and feelings on death.
The book was a little too clinical for me to give it a higher review. I did learn a lot and found some of the information fascinating, but I was also able to drift off and start balancing the budget in my head while I was reading.
It's such a small snippet of their lives. It was strange to read about the end of their lives without much of the beginning or middle.
But it was interesting to have such an in-depth look at the final moments. So - a perfectly adequate book.
The book was a little too clinical for me to give it a higher review. I did learn a lot and found some of the information fascinating, but I was also able to drift off and start balancing the budget in my head while I was reading.
It's such a small snippet of their lives. It was strange to read about the end of their lives without much of the beginning or middle.
But it was interesting to have such an in-depth look at the final moments. So - a perfectly adequate book.
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