ONE OF THE CURSES of the modern age is the terminal diagnosis. We live each day knowing that we will die, but most of us find it easy enough, and more than congenial, to forget about it. To be told that you have two years or one year or six months left is to be excused from a paradise of ignorance into rude knowledge. And yet to have this appointment in Samarra inked on your schedule is also a kind of blessing or special power. We expect that those facing death ought to live a little differently because of it. They have an opportunity, or so we think — to put things right, to make reparations and bequests and ‘‘arrangements.’’ To book a special experience, long desired but deferred. To prepare a statement. For artists, the knowledge that the end is beckoning may provoke a last surge of inspiration to begin or complete final works, works that invariably come to acquire an extra significance, no matter how flawed the works themselves.
Every age believes itself to be in a special relationship to the end of everything, but the threats that we live with now — from foreign dictators as well as more local demagogues — have heightened our appreciation of the closure a final work brings. And it helps that recently, many artists have delivered late-career achievements just before dying. Leonard Cohen, discussing his 14th and final studio album, ‘‘You Want It Darker,’’ which came out less than three weeks before his death in 2016, spoke of the luxury of having ‘‘a chance to put your house in order.’’ He described hearing a divine voice that goaded him on in making his last work. He had heard this voice all his life, but now it spoke with more compassion: ‘‘At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, ‘Leonard, just get on with the things you have to do.’ ’’ If Cohen had lived, he would have continued to create. But he knew that he was dying of cancer when he made ‘‘You Want It Darker,’’ which bestows the work with both a dismal grandeur and a somber authority.
When an artist knows he or she is dying, the last work that they put into the world comes to be something that is at once a bequest, a memorial and a breakup letter. It has a charge that surpasses reality. The writer Denis Johnson died in May from liver cancer, a few weeks after finishing a short story collection, ‘‘The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.’’ According to Samuel Nicholson, Johnson’s editor, although some of the stories were written or begun years ago, the book as a whole is a meditation on old age and mortality. The characters are haunted by what Johnson called ‘‘hungry ghosts,’’ and are concerned, as the author must have been, with understanding the arc of one’s life.
Final works have, or take on, a special tone — a melancholy triumph, or, in some cases, a furious haste. Now is the time, they seem to suggest: This is what I have to say. Often what one has to say, while dying, is concerned with death. One thinks of a tubercular D. H. Lawrence writing ‘‘Apocalypse’’ in the winter of 1929-30, or John Huston directing ‘‘The Dead’’ in 1987 while ridden with emphysema. (Pauline Kael: ‘‘Huston directed the movie, at 80, from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator.’’) Extraordinary energy must be required to complete a final work — perhaps it is the exertion that keeps the artist alive a little longer. Robert Altman was so sick with leukemia during the filming of ‘‘A Prairie Home Companion’’ that insurers required that he have a stand-by director (Paul Thomas Anderson) at all times on set. The cheerfully morbid ‘‘Prairie Home Companion’’ is about the last episode of a fictional radio show based on the long-running variety show, and features as a character a white-trench-coated angel of death. Altman died in 2006, five months after the film premiered.
Those who die midwork leave survivors in a difficult situation. Will instructions to destroy incomplete manuscripts be obeyed, as may soon happen with Edward Albee, who left behind drafts of an unfinished project when he died in 2016, or flouted, as in the case of Nabokov? Suicide is a special case, but can present similar complications. Sylvia Plath’s ‘‘Ariel’’ was edited and reordered by her husband, Ted Hughes; Leonard Woolf appended a note to Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published ‘‘Between the Acts,’’ saying that he did not believe his wife would have made ‘‘any large or material alterations’’ to the manuscript, although Woolf, in her depressive malaise, had described the novel in a letter to her publisher as ‘‘too silly and trivial.’’ Of course, if a suicide follows a completed work, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the work was made as a ‘‘final work,’’ in the way of ‘‘You Want It Darker.’’ Not all suicides are planned. There are situations, as was apparently the case with David Foster Wallace, when things go very suddenly to pieces. But it is possible to imagine a person suffering from serious depression aware, in some way, that they are going to die of it. And regardless of the intention, suicide lends a special, distressed urgency to an artist’s last work. It calls out for explanation. It is impossible to watch Chantal Akerman’s ‘‘No Home Movie’’ — a documentary about her mother’s last months — and forget that the director killed herself a few months after it premiered in 2015. We, the audience, become detectives, searching for clues and messages.
WE TEND TO EXPECT artists to be martyrs for their craft, and indeed, some artists meet their ends head-on, documenting their illnesses, such as the artist Hannah Wilke, who photographed her body as she underwent chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant. ‘‘Cancer memoirs’’ have become so common that they now comprise a genre. (‘‘There are no novel responses possible,’’ Jenny Diski wrote in ‘‘In Gratitude,’’ her own contribution to the form.) And there are other examples, farther afield. In 1979, the German filmmaker Wim Wenders came to New York to make a movie with Nicholas Ray, the director of ‘‘Rebel Without a Cause’’ and ‘‘In a Lonely Place,’’ who had cancer. Their project turned into 1980’s ‘‘Lightning Over Water,’’ a collaborative documentary about Ray’s final months. The film shows Ray as a pugnacious, nattily dressed skeleton who never stops smoking. He coughs gruesomely. The camera lingers on his pink, tufted head.
The documentary approach has the merit of reminding the viewer or reader that the artist has a body as well as a mind, that death is more than a metaphysical problem. ‘‘I was getting very confused,’’ Wenders says in a voice-over in ‘‘Lightning Over Water.’’ ‘‘Something was happening each time the camera was pointing at Nick, something that I had no control of. . . . Like a very precise instrument, the camera showed clearly and mercilessly that his time was running out. No, you couldn’t really see it with your bare eyes. There was always hope. But not in the camera.’’
Could it be that art has the power to reveal death, as well as to document it? Every body of work comes to an end, and any work could be the last one. W. G. Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 after suffering a heart attack while driving. ‘‘Austerlitz,’’ a novel about the titular protagonist’s life after fleeing Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on a Kindertransport, was his final book. It is nonsense to say that “Austerlitz” is haunted or fateful, but it is hard to shake the sense of something uncanny surrounding this novel that already circles Theresienstadt and is so haunted by death.
Or take the more recent example of David Bowie, whose record ‘‘Blackstar’’ was released two days before he died of liver cancer in 2016. Bowie knew he was ill when he began making the album. According to the music video director John Renck, he ended treatments for his illness the same week he shot the video for ‘‘Lazarus,’’ which depicts him prone in a hospital bed. Did Bowie believe that he, like Lazarus, would rise again, or only that he would live on through his music? Whatever he thought he was doing, we hear it as a goodbye. Death’s grip is too strong. All works are saturated in how they were made, but it is easier to forget when one is in health. Middles are much less captivating than endings.
Old age is its own terminal illness, and sometimes silence is the only statement one can make. ‘‘O my soul, keep the rest unknown!’’ wrote Thomas Hardy in ‘‘He Resolves to Say No More,’’ his last published poem. He died of a heart attack at age 87. ‘‘I’ll let all be,’’ he wrote, ‘‘And show to no man what I see.’’ We will all of us get there soon enough.
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