Ordained Servant: The Orthodox Presbyterian Church

When requesting a review copy of this book from the publisher, I noticed that I had mistakenly titled the book The Violent Hour. I responded: “Sorry for botching the title. When I think of death, I think more of violence than violets as in Dylan Thomas’s, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ ” Indeed, Dylan Thomas is one of the six great writers whose final days are examined by Katie Roiphe in this book. Though she writes from a secular perspective, Roiphe’s account of death is poignant and reflects her own profound encounter with her own potential death at age twelve.

The Puritan imperative, based on an accurate interpretation of Scripture, was that the Christian life should be lived in preparation for death. What we discover in this book is that, Christian or non-Christian, death is always in view; it hovers over human consciousness like black flies in New England May.

In reviewing The Violet Hour, I will follow Roiphe’s order in discussing each of the six writers, but with an emphasis on John Updike and Dylan Thomas, the two with whom I am most familiar.

Roiphe is a master of identifying the Achilles heel of each dying writer. She reports their talents, hopes and fears, virtues, vices, and foibles accurately. For example, Susan Sontag, filmmaker, teacher, political activist, and author of On Photography (1977) and Against Interpretation (1966) among many others, “was a person who took creative liberties with truth” (50).

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.” (67)

A very talented but self-centered woman, Sontag always asserted her presence (68), and had no time for religion. But she was interested in viewing religion as a tourist at a distance. After visiting a Tibetan prayer meeting, she remarked, “He was very charming, but, my God, what nonsense!” (73). As she was dying in the hospital, her last words to a friend as she grasped her sleeve were, “Get me out of here” (75). She could never accept her death, but death accepted her. She died at age seventy-one, three days after Christmas in 2004.

Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis, whose work and writings have had a major influence on Western thought and popular culture, was an advocate of a stoic approach to death, facing “the hard facts of mortality” (83). “After all, we know that death belongs to life, that it is unavoidable and comes when it wants.” It is something to be mastered by reason (84). Here Roiphe mocks this attitude, “As if one is supposed to be only a little bit attached to life” (85). For Freud control was everything. Even in the face of being obsessed with the idea that he was dying, he refused to give up smoking twenty cigars a day, against his doctor’s advice (92). He was diagnosed with mouth cancer in 1923 at age sixty-seven. Here is the irony of irrationality of the supreme rationalist. Roiphe notes that he even called his smoking his sin, “an interesting word choice for a man of science” (95).

Freud’s focus on rational assessment and complete control was so all-consuming that it encompassed his mode of dying (101). He refused painkillers. His neurotic fear of death succumbed to resignation in the face of his “inescapable anger” over his own demise (105). His youngest child, Anna, who was present at his death, poignantly observed, “I believe there is nothing worse than to see the people nearest to one lose the very qualities for which one loves them, I was spared that with my father, who was himself to the last minute” (110). My mother was also herself right to the end, but that would have been small consolation had she not trusted her crucified and resurrected Lord.

Another person who was cogent to the end and even wrote poems about that end was the important writer John Updike.

On his deathbed at Massachusetts General Hospital, Updike felt compelled by custom to be a “good host,” but resented it, as he reflected in this poem.

Must I do this, uphold the social lie
that binds us all together in blind faith
that nothing ends, not youth nor age nor strength,
as in a motion picture, once seen,
can be rebought on DVD? My tongue
says yes; within, I lamely drown. (116)[1]

Sex was a kind of redemptive activity for Updike; and while we may understand the impulse, we cannot embrace the conclusion since we know both impulse and conclusion to be sin. Roiphe sympathizes with Updike’s linkage of adultery with immortality: “I have a soft spot for those who try to defeat death with sex” (297). Malcolm Muggeridge observed, “Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the twentieth century…. Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”[2]

Ordinarily the best poems are not the last written by a poet. But Updike is an exception, as Roiphe accurately reports:

[Y]et in his new poems, the wily inventiveness, the powers of observation, the sheer gift with words that both his warmest admirers and sharpest critics found astonishing, are all on display. He had been writing about death since he was young, but now he had a fresh subject: his dying. (119)

On his death bed, however, morbid apprehensions, or what he called “gray sensation” (121) could not be overcome with sex. Unlike life’s negatives of loss, fear, and guilt, which Updike had turned into “the honey of words, … the approach of death, and the dwindling of self, involved a whole other, physically and emotionally trickier level of pain” (124). Thus his deathbed reading included The Book of Common Prayer. Roiphe observes, “There was also a book he was not reading, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, which Martha [Updike’s second wife] had given him for Christmas” (126).

During the months before he died, Updike asked Martha to drive him to Smith’s Point to see Emmanuel Church, where Martha attended on her own in the summer (131). His son Michael couldn’t “understand how anyone so intelligent could believe in God” (138). Updike actually “plotted Couples almost entirely in a church” from jottings on the program (138). Roiphe opines that his faith coexisted with

a very American search for self-fulfillment, a kind of rapturous merging of the two. His affairs are tinged with guilt, his sex scenes with heaven, his love with rapture; it’s all jumbled together. (138)

Updike loved “the concrete stuff” of the church, the rituals, the Sunday mornings, the church pews. He said the Lord’s Prayer with the children in their rooms before they fell asleep. In later years he and Martha attended services regularly at an Episcopal church, St. John’s, minutes away from their home in Beverly Farms…. When he was too sick to go to church, the Episcopal priest came to his house two or three times a week to talk to him and give him communion. (139)

After Updike married Martha, he shifted from “the flashy distractions of adultery to mortality” (141). His writing continued “not submitting gratefully to that eternal sleep” (148). So his last poetry was a way of “writing his way out of death.”

End point, I thought, would end a chapter in
a book beyond imaging, that got reset
in crisp exotic type a future I
—a miracle!—could read. (149)

and reflecting with a kind of desperate resignation
God save us from ever ending, though billions have.
The world is blanketed by foregone deaths,
small beads of ego, bright with appetite. (150)

I partly disagree with Roiphe’s assessment that “the late poems breathe calm,” as this poem, while more resigned, still hates letting go.

With what stoic delicacy does
Virginia creeper let go:
the feeblest tug brings down
a sheaf of leaves kite-high,
as if to say, To live is good
but not to live—to be pulled down
with scarce a ripping sound,
still flourishing, still
stretching toward the sun—
is good also, all photosynthesis
abandoned, quite quits. (151)

But on the night before he died, Updike asked Martha if she was ready for the leap. Instead, she countered with her own question, “Are you?” “Yes!” he responded with a loudness that surprised her. “I am too,” she said. “And so is God.”

When Updike’s Episcopal minister arrived at the hospice, Updike’s children “recited the Lord’s Prayer with him, as they had in their rooms as children” (156). The following day, just before Updike breathed his last, Martha read from The Book of Common Prayer. “[A]n ending so completely in the penumbra of his oeuvre that one can only think: How would Updike write it?” (158). He had requested that a passage from “Pigeon Feathers” be read at his funeral. While the boy in the story gazed at the dead pigeons’ feathers,

he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever. (158)

Of the six writers’ deaths reported and reflected upon by Roiphe, Updike’s is the only one with a ray of light. While finally Updike seemed to have breathed his last breath in gospel hope, the remaining three writers seemed to have plunged into everlasting darkness.

The initial fame of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas revealed an early focus on death. Roiphe reports, “Dylan Thomas had burst into public at nineteen with his first lush poems, many of which, like ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion,’ were preoccupied with death” (162). Robert Lowell noted the looming disaster in Thomas’s life. Besides his enormous talent

He was also, and perhaps this was more important to some of his admirers, doomed, damned, whatever you will, undeniably suffering and living in the extremest reached of experience…. Here, at last, was a poet in the grand, romantic style, a wild inspired spirit not built for comfortable ways. (163)

As was the case for Updike, sex played a central role in Thomas’s life. Unlike Updike there was no obvious redemptive thread running through his life and work.

Women adored him. As the gimlet-eyed Hardwick observed, “So powerful and beguiling was his image—the image of the self-destroying, dying young poet of genius—that he aroused the most sacrificial longings in women.” (170)

Also, unlike Updike, Thomas thought about his own death constantly. He described the poem he had written on his birthday, “Poem on His Birthday,” “Why should he praise God and the beauty of the world, as he moves to horrible death?” (172). His morbid obsession with death also exhibited a curious enjoyment of illness. “He certainly liked the theater of sickness, the staginess, the attention it brought him, and later the excuses it provided” (176).

Thomas’s drunkenness was a way of escaping his manic creativity, which left the rest of his life in chaos. He preferred reading other poets aloud in performance because reading his own amplified the pressure to create new poems.

But in spite of hours wiled away in the pub, in spite of his nearly insatiable need for company, when Thomas was writing, he was fanatical. He wrote draft after draft; when one looks at the scrawlings and scratchings of those drafts, the sheer labor involved in his poems, the huge amount of time and effort on a single word, a phrase, is undeniable. He also felt peace and purpose when he was writing. Those rare moments of concentration in his shed at Laugharne were a great salve to him. (181)

This is the necessary discipline of all great poets, as I have learned from poets like Donald Hall. The tragedy is that Thomas was never able to embed his discipline in an otherwise disciplined life. The idea that creative genius must be cultivated in the soil of dissolute life is a dangerous myth initiated in the Romantic era.

Late in his life Thomas felt that his poetic muse was departing. “One can chart his self-loathing through his last years” (181). It was during his last trip to New York in 1953 that a poem that had been published a year earlier, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” became a prophecy fulfilled. The alternating refrain in the six stanza poem, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” was a lament over his father’s death, but really a presage of his own demise. Roiphe’s interpretation that it is “a poem about acceptance … a love song to death” (182–83) is considerably off the mark. It probably reflects the way that she wishes to deal with death.

Just prior to going into a coma, which would result in his death a few days later on November 9, he lamented over his youngest son, Colm, “Poor little bugger, he doesn’t deserve this. Doesn’t deserve my wanting to die” (184).

Nearly a decade earlier his gorgeous poem “Fern Hill” expressed the sentiment a drinking buddy recalled hearing from Thomas, “I’ve got death in me” (191). Far more than a recognition of his mortality, this was the hopeless theme of his life. The final lines of “Fern Hill” demonstrate the alluring beauty of his morbid musings.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Roiphe sums up her assessment of Thomas, “Is this what Thomas was? A self-destroyed escapologist” (193).

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.

Roiphe concludes, “It is this paradox, this morbidity mingled with celebration, the great seductive virile power of nature, combined with a constant awareness of its killing that is the essence of Thomas” (194).

Maurice Sendak is famous for his children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, winner of the 1964 Caldecott Medal for the Most Distinguished Picture Book of the Year. Sendak was both author and illustrator. “Maurice had always been obsessed with death. He drew through his obsession and used it” (203). His fame—more than is usual for a children’s book author—never relieved him of his obsession. When asked how it felt to be famous, he responded, “I still have to die” (217). So his obsession with work staved off death. He admitted to being crazy because “that’s the very essence of what makes my work good” (219). Sendak was always feeling surrounded by a hostile world. The death of his dog Jennie suffuses Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life (1967).

The darkness threatened to engulf him, and he tried to draw his way through it …. Along the way, the odd, whimsical story gives voice to a very high level of bleakness, of nearly giving up…. Tony Kushner writes of the book’s ending: “ ‘Pop! Stop! Clop! Chop! The End.’ Samuel Beckett couldn’t have put it more succinctly.” (221, 222, 224)

Sendak found Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books reassuring (227). But what he found most reassuring of all was knowing that “people love him best of all” (234). But he hated many things: adults, hospitals, Christmas, and snow—it showed in his books, as one little girl complained about Outside Over There, “Why did you write this book? This is the first book I hate.” (255).

Sendak’s cynicism was tempered by his childlike imagination and the sentimental hope the invisible realm of angels stimulated. Faith for him was a purely psychological reality.

Maurice [Sendak] liked the idea of believing, even though he didn’t believe. He didn’t believe in an afterlife. He didn’t believe in God. When an interviewer asked him, at eighty-three, what came next, he said, “Blank. Blank. Blank.” (259)

Such a sad tale brings new poignancy to Paul’s declaration of the state of the Ephesian Christians before they believed: “having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).

James Salter is the only subject of the book of whom I had never heard. He is an American novelist and short story writer. Roiphe is surprised at Salter’s claim that at eighty-nine he does not think about death, despite the fact that his fiction is obsessed with transience. “Everything he writes is elegy, a paean to a moment as it is in the process of being lost. Dusk is his language” (263–64). A West Point graduate and World War II veteran, “he took a masculine, romantic view of death” (265). Salter followed Updike’s example of writing until he died, “He wrote through anything” (269).

But Roiphe discovers chinks in the armor. He admitted that once when on a flying exercise as a cadet he was low on fuel and lost. “He tried reciting Invictus: ‘I am the master of my fate …’ He didn’t want to pray, but finally said a few prayers” (273). Out of control, his plane crashed. He ended up unharmed, but full of nightmares.

Black and white photographs of the writing desk—or in Sendak’s case drawing board—of each writer add considerable interest to the text. A Dominique Nabakov photo of each writer would have been a nice addition. On the last page Roiphe shows us her writing environment as well. It made me wonder how she will face her own end. She tells us.

The reason she calls the last chapter on Salter an epilogue is because it contains her own reflections on how she faces death. Remember, she faced death at age twelve.

When the terror of death blows through you, what do you do? … When Salter’s daughter died, he recited the only psalm he could mostly remember…. Updike kept The Book of Common Prayer next to his bed and prayed with Martha and the reverend who visited him. Even Sontag, a passionate atheist, called Peter Perone to pray with her one morning. (274)

It turns out that literature is Roiphe’s comfort.

To me, religion has never been consoling. I can’t get anything out of even the cadences of it. It feels like a foreign language. I sometimes find the reassurance I imagine other people getting from religion in passages of novels, in poems (274)

Roiphe latches onto Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which promises “an eternal world of art” (275–76). She tries to tell herself that these death stories are okay.

They are not really okay, because in each case someone dies, and there may, in fact, be no less-okay thing than that. But it’s okay for this reason: If you have to let go, you can. You can find or manufacture a way to…. The fear returns, or it never goes away. (277–78)

Her tragic conclusion:

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. (283)

In the end Roiphe agrees with Salter’s proverb, “We make our own comfort” (285, 287). Cold comfort, indeed. This book is valuable to church officers as it brings us face to face with the reality of the world’s tragic emptiness and desperation. It reminds me of Blaise Pascal’s sage aphorism, “Men despise religion: they hate it, and fear it is true.” We must seek opportunities to tell them that if they believe Christianity is true and trust it, their fears will be quenched and their hope well founded. Let us hope they will ask.

But in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. (1 Pet. 3:15–16)

Endnotess

[1] John Updike, from “Hospital 11/23–27/08,” in Endpoint and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 23. I have added the two lines, underlined, that Roiphe edited out with an ellipsis.

[2] Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Dover Beach blog, accessed July 9, 2016, https://lifeondoverbeach.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/malcolm-muggeridge-on-sex-and-materialism.

Gregory E. Reynolds serves as the pastor of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant.