She had a basis for thinking it wasn't hopeless when a doctor said it was. Intimidated? She had this lethal blood cancer and, basically, there was no treatment. The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. And then she died. No, I don't think so. tell funny things) in his presence. She fought her illness to the end, implicitly asking those closest to her, including her son, to lie: She didn't want anyone to tell her she was dying. They had sex on several occasions, in hotels. I knocked on the door. 80% MARRIED 80% of these people are married, and 20% are single. The dauntingly erudite, strikingly handsome woman who became a star of the New York intelligentsia when barely thirty, after publishing the essay Notes on Camp, and who went on to produce book after book of advanced criticism and fiction, is brought low in this biography. And yet, Nunez writes, I considered meeting her one of the luckiest strokes of my life., In Swimming in a Sea of Death, David Rieffs brilliant, anguished memoir of Sontags last year, he writes of the avidity for life that underlay her specially strong horror of extinctiona horror that impelled her to undergo the extreme sufferings of an almost sure-to-fail bone-marrow transplant rather than accept the death sentence of an untreated (and otherwise untreatable) form of blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome. But she is most famous for those essays she wrote in the '60s and '70s. Which was certainly true of my mother. Well, it sure doesn't help. From 2000 until 2014 I worked exclusively as a pit reporter, interviewing drivers, fans, owners and sponsor executives. Do you think her great achievement was the fiction she wrote in her last years? She refused to accept any consolation from the hope of an afterlife. It was the Dakota . Coming back to my mother's previous experience with breast cancer, I thought, "Well, don't leap to conclusions here. 1952 David Rieff is born in Boston, Massachusetts, the only son of Susan and. But I can't control how people read a book. After first describing the crisis and its . So I don't think we can just take the Christian or the Islamic model and say those visions of a personal afterlife are what religious faith is. How many of us, who did not start out with Sontags disadvantages, have taken the opportunity that she pounced on to engage with the worlds best art and thought? By David Rieff. David Rieff was born in Boston and attended Princeton University. Mosers anecdotes of the unpleasantness that she allowed herself as she grew older ring true, but recede in significance when viewed against the vast canvas of her lived experience. The other part -- that she made better use of the world -- I don't think that's self-effacing. At one point you say, "That my mother both enjoyed and made better use of the world than I have done or will do is simply a statement of fact." It's a remarkably unsentimental account. Nunez, in her memoir, set in the Straus period, wrote of the Riverside Drive apartment: Its main feature was the growing number of books, but they were mostly paperbacks, and the shelves were cheap pine board. Illness as Metaphor (1978), her polemic against the pernicious mythologies that blame people for their illnesses, with tuberculosis and cancer as prime exemplars, was a popular success as well as a significant influence on how we think about the world. They are specks on it. Then she lapsed into a kind of somnolence. But she didn't want to hear it. November 19, 2015 Letters From the December 7, 2015, Issue Quantum of. candidate who comes to New York to seek her fortune among the Partisan Review intellectuals has something of the atmosphere of nineteenth-century narratives about the rise of famous Parisian courtesans. David, the. These days, there's a lot of talk about what's called "a good death." We recommend . Well, I'm an atheist too; if anything, more militant than my mother. Your mother was an atheist. I put six questions to David Rieff. And she was somebody who desperately didn't want to die. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir. He rightly identifies Mildreds remarriage to a man named Nathan Sontag, in 1945, as a seminal event in Susans rise to stardom. No, I think that explains it. The standard time between diagnosis and death is nine months, and there are no drugs that work more than a few months to keep your blood counts where they're supposed to be. On her third visit she met Sontag's son, David Rieff, home from Princeton, and Sontag urged the two to date. When I say "in spite of," what I mean is that when I saw that I still wanted to write in my early 20s, I thought very consciously, "Oh, if I become a writer, I will spend the first 10 years of my career having anyone who reviews a book of mine say, 'David Rieff, Susan Sontag's son.'" She had no problems telling me that, Greg Chandler, an assistant of Sontags, had no problems telling Moser. Features. In work, I dont want to be reduced to my life. So they were going to appear at some point anyway. Also, I wasn't a prodigy. I felt that I had to do that, whatever my own opinion was. She reveled in being; it was as straightforward as that. All rights reserved. The world received the diaries calmly enough; there is not a big readership for published diaries. Indeed, many of the apparently rebarbative aspects of Sontags personality are clarified in light of the alcoholic family system, as it was later understood, Moser writes, and he goes on: Her enemies, for example, accused her of taking herself too seriously, of being rigid and humorless, of possessing a baffling inability to relinquish control of even the most trivial matters. by. That doesn't mean someone else who was there would agree with my account. In an essay from 2005, Wayne Koestenbaum wrote, At no other writers name can I stare entranced for hours on endonly Susan Sontags. A protector was needed, and he appeared on cue. ), this time focusing on the global food crisis. Get me rewrite! the city-room editor barks into the phone in nineteen-thirties comedies about the newspaper world. The idea that one good death fits all seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. Sontags life was, in Mosers telling, always shadowed by abject fear and insecurity. She sold her papers, including her diaries, to UCLA. Mosers biography, for all its pity and antipathy, conveys the extra-largeness of Sontags life. They weren't mine to keep. She suffered like someone being tortured. You were probably 12 or 13 at the time. Sontag was 24 and living in Paris, having left her husband, the sociologist Philip Rieff, and their young son behind in the States. I'm not a confessional writer. Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best of Our Knowledge." I interviewed your mother a couple of times late in her life. I hope she'll be remembered as a person who did good work, was serious, and didn't give in to the kind of cheap easy way outs that intellectuals in our culture so often give in to. I was one of those kids who was always writing stories and thoughts and all that. 1950 Sontag marries Philip Rieff, a young teacher at Chicago, after a 10-day courtship. I think it's the commonplace guilt of survivors. David Rieff has written a sobering and often horrifying account of his mother's final days. It's just prurient as far as I'm concerned. in history in 1978. But I didnt like her. He was, Moser writes, speaking for many others. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. . But in her lifetime, long before she was diagnosed with MDS, my mother decided they were going to be public. Thus the film scholar Don Eric Levine, a close friend of Sontags, is Mosers source for writing that when Jasper [Johns] dumped her, he did so in a way that would have devastated almost anyone. . Whatever moral or intellectual satisfaction Amry might have obtained from remembrance of his atrocity will pass on to people who were not victims . David Rieff, a New York-based journalist, is the author of eight books. She'd gone abroad to pursue postgraduate study but also to escape a lifeless marriage. So why should she have made our lives easier by going gracefully? Beginning in the 1960s, Sontag became a cultural critic with enormous range, dissecting everything from camp to Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, from photography to how illness is misread as a metaphor for patients' psychology. But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion, does the prospect of dying lead to dread? The celebrated writer demanded honesty of intellectuals -- Rieff says she loved reason and science "with a fierce, unwavering tenacity bordering on religiosity" -- yet maintained a willful delusion about her death. I think she's right. You shouldn't start to believe because it suits you. She found a physician at the great cancer center in New York, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a brilliant man who had all the human skills the first doctor did not. The simple truth is that my mother could not get enough of being alive. . In 1938, while in China, Jack died, of tuberculosis, leaving Mildred with five-year-old Susan and two-year-old Judith to raise alone. He kept her alive, professionally, financially, and sometimes physically. "My mother was a leftist," he said. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. Thanks to the cryptic style in which it is written, Sacred Order/Social Order is a tremendously difficult work to read one critic compared it to "chewing ball bearings; every once in a while there is a cherry".In it, Rieff does, finally, offer something like a schematic for his theory of culture, delivered in strange expository passages sandwiched in between his close readings of . As David Rieff points out in his illuminating study, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, by 2045 the last survivors of Nazi atrocities will be dead. I want to take the liberty of republishing here the latest missive from the journalist David Rieff, a man of the Left who despises wokeness, taken from his Substack newsletter, titled Desire and Fate. If you look at Buddhism, if you look at Judaism, neither has an afterlife in that sense. And I was too unwilling to pay that price, so it took me a long time to become a writer and pay that price, which I did. No, I think that's something people say to console themselves. I don't want to write a memoir of our relationship. Coming out is at issue, in fact. Nevertheless, he has so thoroughly convinced himself of it that when he quotes from The Mind of the Moralist he performs the sleight of hand of saying she writes or Sontag notes. By Mosers lights, every writer who has been heavily edited can no longer claim to be the author of his work. Advertisement "She was brilliant," said Turnbow, who. I have a big library. He, knowing that the treatment has almost no chance of succeeding, tells her what she wants to hear. So I'm not sure it's faith vs. atheism. I never got to say goodbye. Learn How rich is He in this year and how He spends money? I wouldn't have said. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. There was tremendous intellectual affinity between Sontag and Rieff. The mother pleads with the son to tell her that the excruciating treatment is worth enduring because it will save her life. Why do you think she was so dismissive of her essays? Mosers story of the good-looking young ex-faculty wife/Ph.D. Rieff (who did not credit her) got a job at Brandeis University, and in the. Sontags love life was unusual. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, and a past contributor to Salon, he's reported on war-ravaged countries and carved out his own reputation as an acute analyst of foreign policy. That's above my pay grade to say. Simultaneously, she wrote of her disgust at the thought of sex with men: Nothing but humiliation and degradation at the thought of physical relations with a manThe first time I kissed hima very long kissI thought quite distinctly: Is this all?its so silly. Less than two years later, as a student at the University of Chicago, she marrieda man! As you say, lots of students simply will ignore/be indifferent to the whole debate. There seems to be a good deal of bitterness packed into that short sentence. She lies, she cheats, she betrays confidences, she pathetically seeks the approval of others, she fears others, she talks too much, she smiles too much, she is unlovable, she doesnt bathe often enough. I can't stop people from writing biographies after her death, any more than she could stop any number of biographies, one of them extremely disobliging, from appearing during her lifetime. That doesn't seem right to me. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. He said, "Well, the best place to have this transplant would be at the Fred Hutchinson Center at the University of Washington Hospital in Seattle.". I'm just not prepared to talk in any seriously honest and self-revealing way about my relationship with my mother. Tradues em contexto de "chronicled her" en ingls-portugus da Reverso Context : Newspapers chronicled her every appearance and activity. But I know it's preposterous. So I don't think she was at all unique. I didn't think it was particularly odd. By sixteen, he had worked his way up in the company to a position of responsibility sufficient to send him to China to buy hides. "Way to never give upBelieve & Achieve!! Do you know why that was? by David Rieff To accuse President Obama of being exceptional in his refusal to embrace American exceptionalism has been a perennial staple of discourse among hawkish conservatives intent on. "At seventeen I met a thin, heavy-thighed, balding man who talked and talked, snobbishly, bookishly, and called me 'Sweet.'. When the diaries resume, it is in a mood of settled frustration with the misalliance. Another answer is that if I had her journals in my possession after she died, and they were simply mine to dispose of as I wished, I don't think I would have published them. Via NYRB. I don't know whether you believe it or not. ISBN-13: 978-0300182798. In fact, she sometimes went further, claiming to have written the entire book herself, every single word of it. I took this to be another one of her exaggerations.. I've also met lots of people who aren't. She'd sold them. Rieff chose to bury her in Paris' Montparnasse cemetery, steps from Simone de Beauvoir, and in the posthumous company of Jean-Paul Sartre, Emile Cioran, and Raymond Aron. If I'm going to edit stuff about her life in the '50s, I'm the only one alive who would know about it directly. Nov. 7, 2011. Aren't you being awfully hard on yourself? Not only did you write this memoir, you're also editing her diaries and helping put out some of her unpublished essays. But you know there will be future biographies of Susan Sontag. Mosers account is largely derived from Susans writings: from entries in her journal and from an autobiographical story called Project for a Trip to China. Moser also uses a book called Adult Children of Alcoholics, by Janet Geringer Woititz, published in 1983, to explain the darkness of Sontags later life. In most cases, the motive is benign: the informant wants to be helpful, wants to share what he knows of the subject, believing that the particulars he and only he is privy to will contribute to the fullness of the portrait. But I'm fairly certain I would not have published them. Conversations about the past. In any case, Tima himself saw neither the Novi Sad massacre nor Auschwitz. But often, in adulthood, the exceptionally well behaved mask slips and reveals an out-of-season child. Rieff, David 1952- views 2,396,422 updated RIEFF, David 1952- (David Sontag Rieff) PERSONAL: Born September 28, 1952, in Boston, MA; son of Philip Rieff (a university professor) and Susan Sontag (a writer and critic). In the end, I chose to do that. You also write that you wish you'd complied more with her wishes during her life and suppressed more of your own. In fact, I think once you write a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. I don't think, however, that the fact that she became famous has very much to do with the quality of her work. You write that it wasn't just that she desperately wanted to live, she was also terrified of dying. CAREER: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., At seventeen I met a thin, heavy-thighed, balding man who talked and talked, snobbishly, bookishly, and called me Sweet. After a few days passed, I married him, she recalled in a journal entry from 1973. It was a complicated experience. It's not for me to say how she should be remembered. Surely, that would have been the most terrible therapeutic use of faith, and a disgrace in terms of faith. In a tender account of her final illness, her son David Rieff recalls how he colluded with his mother's fantasy that she wasn't dying - and what this ultimately cost him after she had gone, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, America, 1967: David Rieff and mother Susan Sontag. People are very different in their lives and very different in their deaths. But I wasn't going to say anything more. You're saying that's not how she should be remembered in the future? David Rieff (/rif/; born September 28, 1952) is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. Other choices include Bach's moving . She had preternatural energy (sometimes enhanced by speed). The book publisher had received criticism for removing passages related to weight, mental health, gender and race. Those are all facts. One answer is because I'll probably do a better and more responsible job than someone who didn't know her. But I also decided that I was going to leave out certain things. You say your mother had a horror of cremation. The dedication to The Volcano Lover reads For David, beloved son, comrade. Not many parents think of their offspring as comrades. Associated Press articles: Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. It's too obvious not to be true. What I'm saying is that the right way for one person to die may not be the right way for another person to die. Ad Choices. People visiting for the first time were clearly surprised to find the celebrated middle-aged writer living like a grad student. I don't know. Married Alison Douglas Knox, December 31, 1963. Near the end of the book, you say, "I have preferred to write as little as possible of my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life, but suffice it so say that they were often strained and at times very difficult." It remains a mystery why she married because when the marriage appears in the notebooks, the notebooks glide to a halt. It's just the way of the world. Whatever the answer is in the higher reaches of philosophy, the particular instance of Nunezs violation provides a valuable corrective to Mosers bleak portrait. It was important to have that on the record. It's just that she changed her mind about the novel. In the last days, she kind of withdrew. It was. He writes of him with utter contempt. It's a weird thing in this age of the Internet. She knew more people, did more things, read more, went to more places (all this apart from the enormous amount of writing she produced) than most of the rest of us do. She wanted to live at any price. I didn't feel that my interests could be put ahead of that. Two years go missing. Both a memoir and an investigation, Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer. The solid literary achievement and spectacular worldly success that we associate with Sontag was, in Mosers telling, always shadowed by abject fear and insecurity, increasingly accompanied by the unattractive behavior that fear and insecurity engender. I would have liked to have gone beyond those before she left us. In life, I dont want to be reduced to my work. Do you think you became a writer because of your mother's example? [12], Rieff has one child, a daughter (born 2006).[13]. One of her duties, she tells Judith, was to read and then write reviews of both scholarly and popular books that Rieff had been assigned to review and was too busy or too lazy to read and write about himself. Within a few months Nunez moved into Rieff's bedroom, and Sontag gave her a private study for her work and the promise of a mentor-student relationship. My father had a big library. She took more pleasure in the world than I do. I come from a line of people who have private libraries. While we watch reruns of Law & Order, Sontag seemingly read every great book ever written. It will be interesting to see whether Benjamin Mosers authorized biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco), which draws heavily on the diaries, makes more of a stir. But I know this argument very well. By David Glenn. By all reports, she was a terrible mother, a narcissist and a drinker. Did not telling her the truth about her condition take a toll on you? Be consistent. It was in the spring of 2004. A final protector was the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who became Sontags lover in 1989 and, during the fifteen years of their on-again, off-again relationship, gave her at least eight million dollars, according to Moser, who cites Leibovitzs accountant, Rick Kantor. Because I don't think it's anybody's business. I think it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith purely in the interest of consoling herself. Sigrid Nunez, in her memoir Sempre Susan, contributes what may be the last word on the subject of the authorship of The Mind of the Moralist: Although her name did not appear on the cover, she was a full coauthor, she always said. Was it a heady experience to get that kind of attention for a boy at your age? The writer Judith Grossman, who knew Sontag slightly at Oxford, remembered her as the dark prince, who strode through the colleges dressed entirely in black. . David. So I don't buy it. D avid Rieff Granta, 16.00 IN TRYING to pay a fitting tribute to his mother, Susan Sontag, David Rieff offers a partial and self-centred account of her final years. If Mosers feelings about Sontag are mixedhe always seems a little awed as well as irked by herhis dislike for Philip Rieff is undiluted. Do you insist on telling the truth when it's perfectly clear the person doesn't want to know the truth? Pathologically so. But I shall not write a biography. People write what they want to write. What I will say, though, is that when I wrote this book, I thought a lot about what I'd say and what I wouldn't say. Rieff has at various times been a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research,[2] a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University,[3] a board member of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch,[4] of the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute,[5] and of Independent Diplomat. I never thought about it. David Rieff was born on 28 September, 1952 in Boston, MA, is a Non-fiction writer, policy analyst. By David Rieff. The New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson explains how they began, and what will happen if the planets great green lung continues to burn. It's all at UCLA. And I didn't want to go through that. She wanted to be lied to. As you look back over your mother's career, how do you think she'll be remembered? By David Rieff Trade Paperback LIST PRICE $18.95 PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! She lived up to that fabulous appellation. Would Koestenbaum have stared entranced at the name Susan Rosenblatt? Her memoir, Sempre Susan, chronicles those few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff. She had Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread into her lymph system. I do wish that. She seemed to know that the opportunity comes only once. The child of the alcoholic is plagued by low self-esteem, always feeling, no matter how loudly she is acclaimed, that she is falling short, he writes. Straight talk to blacks and whites about the realities of racism. You mean the Macaulay Culkin syndrome? I knew children of well-known people in my school and other places. Both a memoir and an investigation, Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer. He completed college at Princeton University, graduating with an A.B. Not only is there a sense of inner peace, but the dying person often has meaningful and profound conversations with friends and family. It's indisputable, as you say, that that's what brought her to national and then international attention. Parents to their parents, forbidden the carelessness of normal children, they [children of alcoholics] assume an air of premature seriousness. He merely believes that a pretentious creep like Rieff could not have written it. I have a habit -- a superstition, really -- of not calling people I'm close to while I'm on an assignment that could be dangerous. . Add to Wishlist. Vanity Fair Archive. I think [her 1992 novel] "The Volcano Lover" is the best thing she ever did. From my experience in hospital wards, talking to family members of dying people, I think that a lot of what I describe is the common experience of people. Rieff, whose most recent book was a memoir about the death of his mother, Susan Sontag (Swimming in a Sea of Death, 2008), has returned to the broader themes of his earlier books (At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, 2005, etc.