The Violet Hour (39 page)

I say, “Most people don't think of their marriage that way. As things glimpsed from the train.”

He says, “No, they are too involved. They're too warmly in it to think that way. I have a certain amount of detachment. I am observing.”

It's the detachment in his work (the sliver of ice in his heart?) that made me think we could have this conversation; it's why I think he can help me. He is able to take the long view.

We are talking about work. The peculiar energy it bestows on the last years. I mention Sontag's determination to take any treatment without regard for suffering, to fight the disease to the end, to milk as much life as she could.

“That sounds like Peter Matthiessen,” Salter says. “He wanted to have more time to write, no matter what.” Matthiessen was one of his very old friends, a novelist, former editor of
The Paris Review
, former CIA agent in Paris, explorer, environmentalist, Buddhist. At eighty-six, Matthiessen fought his leukemia with grueling experimental drugs. He wanted to finish his last book,
In Paradise
. Salter didn't see him in the last weeks, but he heard that the treatment was harrowing.

I tell Salter the story of Tony Kushner thinking in the middle of a despairing phone call that Sendak might kill himself because he couldn't work and then driving all the way up to his house in Connecticut, only to find him stooped over his desk, covering the one eye that had been affected by cataract surgery, and working happily on his
Nose Book
. He'd figured out a way to work, and the crisis passed. As long as he could work, he could continue.

“That reminds me of Jules Feiffer,” Salter says. “We just had dinner with him.” The famous cartoonist, at eighty-six, is joyfully working in a new medium, the graphic novel. According to Salter, he is full of enthusiasm because he is still inventing, still drawing. He began a new form and is alive in it.

I say, “Updike wrote his last poems as he was dying.” “Updike.” Salter pauses. “He wrote through anything.” There may be some old rivalry, some wryness in this comment: He says “Updike” with the tone of someone looking up at a darkening sky and saying, “Rain.”

He's not uninterested, though. I tell him about Updike writing with his last bit of energy. How he put his head down on his typewriter when he got home from the hospital and said, “I can't do it,” but then forced himself to type. How he took his magnificent work ethic to his hospital bed, how it saved him, or maybe “saved” is too romantic an idea here. How it organized that last stretch, elevated those painful days, how it bestowed on that bitter time some purpose, until it didn't anymore. How he wrote to his editor: “The Endpoint theme came crashing home, and so have pushed myself to take this as far as I can.”

“I will always be writing something,” Salter says. “But probably won't be something as glorified as a poem or a novel.” He pauses. “I will be writing a letter.” I look at him. “That's not a promise.” He looks out the screen window at the trees.

When Salter was fifty-five, his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Allan, died in an electrical accident. She was in the shower in a cabin next door to his in Aspen. He walked in and found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. He carried her dead body in his arms. He took her outside and tried to resuscitate
her, somehow thinking she was drowning. We do not talk about this.

He says only, “There was the wreckage of that.”

He has never written more than a few lines about it. In his memoir, he writes instead about another daughter, Nina, who had an infection in France when she was eleven and how he dreamed that she died. He writes, “The death of kings can be recited but not of one's child.” He musters this formality for a reason. He is marking out territory. There are things you don't have to write. There are things you don't have to talk about. There are things that you don't need to resolve into words.

I read a piece about Salter somewhere in which his wife, Kay Eldredge, said, “He thinks it's important not to reveal everything, in part so the mystery of things won't dissolve. I'm closer to him than anybody, and there are still great pockets of isolation and privateness.” In his introduction to
Dusk
, Philip Gourevitch says it another way: “For everything that is described, even more is evoked.”

Salter tells me he is reading Heidegger. He tells me what interests him most in Heidegger is the gap between the said and unsaid.

Heidegger also wrote about the importance of being aware of
das Nichts
(the nothing, death). He was asked once how we could better lead our lives and he said we should spend more time in graveyards.

One freezing winter day, my eleven-year-old saw the Harry Potter–ish gates of the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn from the car window. She said, “You know, it clears your head to run down a hill in a cemetery,” so her father drove us through the eerie streets of the dead and stopped so she could get out. She took her five-year-old brother and they both trudged up to the top of the hill and ran, hair flying, barreling past graves, while we waited at the bottom in the car with the door open. They flew back in, red-cheeked, cold. “Did that clear your head?” I asked, and they both said, “Yes!”

I think of Updike waking up the day after his lung cancer diagnosis and asking Martha for a piece of scrap paper, and her taking the blue cover of
My Father's Tears
from her purse so he could write on the back, because that was the only paper she had; I think of Sendak telling Lynn that he didn't want to see his dog, Herman, in the hospital, that he was done with life; I think of David Rieff's deep and tortured commitment to his mother's ideas in extremis, and of her bravery and resolve in the face of pain; I think of Freud refusing painkillers so he could think clearly about what was happening to him, until he chose the precise moment of morphine-aided oblivion; I think of Dylan Thomas drinking eighteen—or however many—whiskeys as a detective stood watching him from a dark corner of the bar, so he didn't have to think clearly about what was happening to him.

In even the worst deaths, observed closely, there is a great burst of life. I don't want to be sentimental. I think of Sontag's epic fight against her cancer and am tempted to see something
heroic in it, something to admire in the fierceness and commitment, something inspiring. But I also think of David Rieff writing, “To me, torture is not too strong or hyperbolic a word.”

The stories entangle: Both Sontag and Updike were reading
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
in their last months; the younger Updike had affairs to stave off his fear of mortality, and Dylan Thomas in his last desperate days ran upstairs at a party to sleep with the hostess while his mistress waited downstairs.

S
ALTER:
Most people want to die in their sleep.

M
E:
Yeah.

S
ALTER:
A friend of mine said, “I wouldn't want that moment to pass unnoticed.” I think he has something there.

M
E:
I don't know. Maybe.

S
ALTER:
Maybe it's better
not
to die in your sleep.

M
E:
Freud had this idea of “heroic clarity.” He wanted to be clearheaded and aware.

S
ALTER:
It's very human to want to, you know, mark the moment.

M
E:
You're right. To be there and attentive.

S
ALTER:
Something big is happening.

[He looks away.]

S
ALTER:
I don't know what I'll do.

[I don't say anything.]

S
ALTER:
Let's not talk too much about this.

Salter goes into the kitchen for more iced tea.

When he comes back, I say, “I am sorry to dredge up this depressing subject.”

“This doesn't depress me!” he says. “It's not depressing.”