Once she died, I asked the other people in the room to leave. A SHORTER "DAY'S JOURNEY" May 1986 By David Rieff. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best of Our Knowledge." It wasn't long before Nunez moved in, beginning what would be a complicated relationship with both Sontag and her son. You call her book of photos -- which included pictures of your mother as she was dying and after her death -- "carnival images of celebrity death." Sontag was accused of humorlessness, but in fact she was guilty only of high-mindedness. He kept her alive, professionally, financially, and sometimes physically. by. They're stand-alone projects. Well, I'm an atheist too; if anything, more militant than my mother. In her later years, she had a relationship with Annie Leibovitz, whom Rieff avoids discussing in his memoir, except for. Moser in no way substantiates his claim. Women in particular talked about her enormous cultural significance. Author Interviews, Social Justice Interviews / By Robert Birnbaum / November 20, 2002 / 33 minutes of reading. He is not above quoting interviewees who saw fit to question Davids devotion to Sontag during her horrible last year. Why is she going to pick up her son? No, I think that explains it. ", "At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. I think [her 1992 novel] "The Volcano Lover" is the best thing she ever did. While pregnant with their son, David, she began co-writing Rieff's first book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Given who she was, there was no other way. There is no question David Rieff is the most famous & most loved celebrity of all the time. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features. She'd gone abroad to pursue postgraduate study but also to escape a lifeless marriage. The occasion is Sontags thrillingly good essay Fascinating Fascism, published in The New York Review of Books in 1975 and reprinted in the book Under the Sign of Saturn, in which she justly destroyed Leni Riefenstahls newly restored reputation, showing her to be a Nazi sympathizer in every bone. Mildred, Susans mother, who accompanied Jack on these trips, was a vain, beautiful woman who came from a less raw Jewish immigrant family. She beat cancer in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, but third time around she wasn't so lucky. Susan Sontag, New York, August 29, 1977. And the idea that one is going to think the same thing at 68, or whenever you did the interview, as one did at 31 would suggest lack of growth. It's just that she changed her mind about the novel. . I wouldn't have said. The of course says it all. Via NYRB. How many times have I reviled myself for that, which is only a little less offensive than my habit of name-dropping (how many times did I talk about Allen Ginsberg last year, while I was on Commentary?).. The marriage lasted eight years during which their son, David Rieffa writer and editor of his mother's personal journalswas born. They asked her to say I, to say my body: to come out of the closet. Moser cannot forgive her for her refusal to do so. eBook. Monte Melkonian (Armenian: ; November 25, 1957 - June 12, 1993) was an Armenian-American revolutionary and left-wing nationalist militant. To be blunt, I took off her shirt. 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. . The journals document, sometimes in excruciatingly naked detail, the torment and heartbreak of these liaisons. Besides his wife and son, of New York, a journalist and author who specializes in foreign affairs, Dr. Rieff is survived. When did you first hear your mother had this form of blood cancer? She sold her papers, including her diaries, to UCLA. 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. by David Rieff, David Reiff ( 24 ) $13.99 In a shocking and deeply disturbing tour de force, David Rieff, reporting from the Bosnia war zone and from Western capitals and United Nations headquarters, indicts the West and the United Nations for standing by and doing nothing to stop the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims. In work, I dont want to be reduced to my life. But she didn't want to hear it. It was. At a time when homosexuality was still being criminalized, Rich had acknowledged her lesbianism, while Sontag was silent about hers. He merely believes that a pretentious creep like Rieff could not have written it. People have different temperaments. So that's the price I paid. However, Mosers exasperation with Sontag is fuelled by something that lies outside the problematic of biographical writing. Then she lapsed into a kind of somnolence. She lived up to that fabulous appellation. Would Koestenbaum have stared entranced at the name Susan Rosenblatt? Midway through the biography, he drops the mask of neutral observer and reveals himself to beyou could almost say comes out asan intellectual adversary of his subject. Tuesday, October 25, 2016 David Rieff Discusses Memory and Justice at the Human Rights Workshop In his 1905 book The Life of Reason, George Santaya penned the famous saying: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Human rights activists generally agree. I found a way to be present but not look at the way she had become physically. She gave me no instructions of any kind. . I understand that viscerally. If she had survived the bone-marrow transplant (as she had survived the dire treatments for two earlier bouts of advanced cancer), would she have been reconciled to dying of something else later on? Rieff asks. Sontags pencilled notes in a banal brochure of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society inspire Rieffs reflection on that astonishing mix of gallantry and pedantry that was one of her hallmarks. He notes my own grave failings as a person (above all, I think, my clumsiness and coldness). The voices of the two characters fuse in a terrifyingly assonant duet. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies 160. by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. Your mother was an atheist. So not just her papers, but the books, too? Straight talk to blacks and whites about the realities of racism. by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. He married his 17 year-old student Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s. Also, I wasn't a prodigy. 1950 Sontag marries Philip Rieff, a young teacher at Chicago, after a 10-day courtship. She was the smartest girl in the class, but she couldnt figure out why shewehad to die. Intimidated? Which was certainly true of my mother. She knocked on the door, and who opened the door? All rights reserved. But why she became so celebrated, what the combination of elements were -- her public role in the anti-Vietnam movement and other political events; her looks -- I'm sure it was a complicated combination. She wanted to be lied to. David. It's just prurient as far as I'm concerned. She seemed to know that the opportunity comes only once. A journalist who has frequented global hotspots and an analyst of humanitarian policy (as well as curator of the collected and posthumous writings of his mother, Susan Sontag), Rieff advances his. But he says, I am anything but certain that I did the right thing, and, in my bleaker moments, wonder if in fact I might not have made things worse for her by endlessly refilling the poisoned chalice of hope., In the end, Rieff realizes that the story he is telling is about ends, the brute fact of mortality. Sontag was not alone in her bafflement about extinction. How should she be remembered? Herausgekommen ist kein Buch ber das Sterben, sondern eines ber . More books from this author: David Rieff . I never got to say goodbye. 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. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong after the transplant. That Norman Mailer has orgies? 80% MARRIED 80% of these people are married, and 20% are single. So I don't think she was at all unique. She had Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread into her lymph system. 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 other part -- that she made better use of the world -- I don't think that's self-effacing. He notes Rieff's "caution and misgivings", and finds especially compelling the essay where Rieff laments the gap between the misery and violence "outside the gates of the Western world" and the obstacles that prevent the West from assembling the strength, whether military or moral, to resolve the problems. Not only is there a sense of inner peace, but the dying person often has meaningful and profound conversations with friends and family. Sontag gave birth to David when she was only nineteen, and it gave her pleasure when, as a young adult, he was taken for her brother. It remains a mystery why she married because when the marriage appears in the notebooks, the notebooks glide to a halt. She refused to accept any consolation from the hope of an afterlife. Sontag married Rieff when she was 17 and left him seven years later. 1. Pathologically so. But she is most famous for those essays she wrote in the '60s and '70s. "At seventeen I met a thin, heavy-thighed, balding man who talked and talked, snobbishly, bookishly, and called me 'Sweet.'. That doesn't seem right to me. In the last days, she kind of withdrew. 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. Thank you for signing up, fellow book lover! Do you think it's not an accident that the area you carved out for yourself as a writer -- going to war-torn countries and covering foreign affairs -- was very different from what your mother wrote about? Sontags love life was unusual. The chances were indeed stacked against her. ), this time focusing on the global food crisis. [12], Rieff has one child, a daughter (born 2006).[13]. She writes of the double dates that she and David went on with Susan and the poet Joseph Brodsky. That Matthiessen was queer. 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 agree with you entirely that she captured the imagination of a certain time and became famous, and then I think did really good work and backed it up. David Rieff, a New York-based journalist, is the author of eight books. Moser takes Sontag at her word and is as unillusioned about her as she is about herself. No one I have ever known loved life so unambivalently. And: It may sound stupid to put it this way, but my mother simply could never get her fill of the world.. There is, but it's contained in that sentence. 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. 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. You were probably 12 or 13 at the time. There was. Death disinhibits the. Rieff (who did not credit her) got a job at Brandeis University, and in the. The book is so excellent in so many ways, so complete a working-out of the themes that marked Susan Sontags life, that it is hard to imagine it could be the product of a mind that later produced such meager fruits, Moser writes. 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. December 1985 By David Rieff. It is an unholy practice, the telling of a life story that isnt ones own on the basis of oppressively massive quantities of random, not necessarily reliable information. So she was going to do everything she could to survive. The early years of Sontags marriage to Rieff are the least documented of her life, and theyre a little mysterious, leaving much to the imagination. Philip Rieff, American sociologist. They wrote her off in the '70s. Although Nathan did not adopt Susan and her sister, Susan eagerly made the change that, as Moser writes, transformed the gawky syllables of Sue Rosenblatt into the sleek trochees of Susan Sontag. It was, Moser goes on, one of the first recorded instances, in a life that would be full of them, of a canny reinvention.. It is a book about dying, grieving and what it means to survive the death of a loved one. I hope it has some relevance to people who've never heard of Susan Sontag, let alone of me. That's a fact. I don't think that's a particularly strange or masochistic thing to say. He, knowing that the treatment has almost no chance of succeeding, tells her what she wants to hear. 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. It's just the way of the world. 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. Also learn how He earned most of networth at the age of 68 years old? It wasn't terrible. As you look back over your mother's career, how do you think she'll be remembered? It was a complicated experience. And my mother enjoyed the world more than I do. But she was one to whom it was just terrible news. There's something obscene about sitting at a desk, in a chair that corrects the posture, sipping warm, sugary tea, yawning or scratching, barely . Rieff was educated at the Lyce Franais de New York and attended Amherst College as a member of the class of 1974, where he studied under Benjamin DeMott. So the suffering was extraordinary. If you look at Buddhism, if you look at Judaism, neither has an afterlife in that sense. 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. So after I'm gone, nobody is going to be able to publish them. in history in 1978. But I'm sure it's true. By the time of Susans birth, in 1933, he had his own fur business and was regularly travelling to Asia. Rich had been punished for her bravery (by coming out publicly, [she] bought herself a ticket to Siberiaor at least away from the patriarchal world of New York culture), while Sontag had been rewarded for her cowardice. "My mother was a leftist," he said. Her early essays are addressed to the ten or twenty people in the English-speaking world who would not blanch at sentences like these, from her essay on the philosopher E.M.Cioran: One recognizes, in this Roumanian-born writer who studied philosophy at the University of Bucharest and who has lived in Paris since 1937 and writes in French, the convulsive manner characteristic of German neo-philosophical thinking, whose motto is: aphorism or eternity. Among them was the lie she told about the price of her apartment on Riverside Drive, because she wanted to seem like she was an intellectual who drifted into a lovely apartment and did not spend a lot of money on real estate, like a more bourgeois, ordinary person. But by the time of Annie Leibovitzs protectorship her self-image had changed. You're saying that's not how she should be remembered in the future? There was tremendous intellectual affinity between Sontag and Rieff. I put six questions to David Rieff. Treacherous, Eva Kollisch, a pissed-off girlfriend from the sixties, tells Moser, as if she had been expecting his call for half a century. Vanity Fair Archive. Moser wheels on witness after witness who testifies to Sontags neglect of the baby and child David, and to her sometimes unwinning behavior toward him when he was an editor at Farrar, Straus. Biographers often get fed up with their subjects, with whom they have become grotesquely overfamiliar. But I didnt like her. He was, Moser writes, speaking for many others. And I decided, finally, that I would tell the truth about anything that I could tell the complete truth about. Jackie Onassis. Rieff's brave, passionate, and unsparing witness of the last nine months of her life, from her initial diagnosis to her death, is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a . I never thought about it. But I know it's preposterous. He said, "If you want to fight, if what matters to you is not quality of life" And my mother said, "I'm not interested in quality of life." 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. It's a long shot: an adult stem-cell transplant, a bone-marrow transplant. Of course she knew who was opening the door. When I asked her about one of her early critiques of the novel, in which she wrote, "I could not stand the omnipotent author showing me that's how life is, making me compassionate and tearful," she called that comment "juvenilia," and said, "It's really hard to be nailed to what one wrote 35 or 40 years ago." Your book is remarkably self-effacing. I'm not a confessional writer. The son of Sontag and sociologist Philip Rieff ("pop," below), whom Sontag married at 17 then divorced in 1958, David has written a memoir of Sontag's painful final days. Get me rewrite! the city-room editor barks into the phone in nineteen-thirties comedies about the newspaper world. No, I think that's something people say to console themselves. She wanted to live at any price. This is a fascinating portrait of Miami's Cuban population, the most successful group of immigrants to settle in the United States since the Jews of the nineteenth century.David Rieff has provided an engrossing look at a group exiled from its homeland, showing how America has affected these immigrants, and what it means to become an American in the late twentieth century. His second wife and widow Alison Douglas Knox died December 12, 2011. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. David, the. Do you think her great achievement was the fiction she wrote in her last years? 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. She applied for and received a fellowship at Oxford, and left husband and child for a year. They were. Sure. I interviewed your mother a couple of times late in her life. People are very different in their lives and very different in their deaths. On her third visit, Nunez met Sontag's son, David Rieff, and shortly thereafter the two began dating. I don't want to write a memoir of our relationship. "I am not a confessional person," Rieff insisted. But my mother wasn't a person of faith. American non-fiction writer and policy analyst, International Center for Transitional Justice, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, "Soros Foundations Network 2002 Annual Report", "David Rieff, Melbourne University Press", "Muscular Utopianism: I used to be a liberal interventionist. . Usually this means someone who accepts dying and stops fighting it. She had preternatural energy (sometimes enhanced by speed). But in her lifetime, long before she was diagnosed with MDS, my mother decided they were going to be public. I would've liked to have said certain things to her. I mean, this book may be of interest because people have heard of my mother. The erudition for which she is known was part of a passion for culture that emerged, like a seedling in a crevice in a rock, during her emotionally and intellectually deprived childhood. I came across a photo of you and your mother that ran many years ago in Vogue magazine. In her later years, she had a relationship with Annie Leibovitz, whom Rieff avoids discussing in his memoir, except for one loaded comment about the photographer's "carnival images of celebrity death.". I was told by her doctors that she would die quite soon. For the first 10 years of my career, that's indeed what happened. . I come from a line of people who have private libraries. 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. This is not a portrait of Rieff's relationship with Sontag, though at one point he refers to their "strained and at times very difficult" relations. As. Publisher: Yale University Press. Why have you taken this active role in your mother's work? 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. How the seedling became the majestic flowering plant of Sontags maturity is an inspiring storythough perhaps also a chastening one. But I wasn't going to say anything more. I think it's the commonplace guilt of survivors. She wasn't focused on the present or any of us. She took more pleasure in the world than I do. There was tremendous intellectual affinity between Sontag and Rieff. 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 the end she couldn't even roll over unassisted. 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! David Rieff: His mother "was no more reconciled to extinction at 71 than she had been at 42." Sigrid Estrada When she was diagnosed with cancer for the third time, the writer Susan Sontag. Because I don't think it's anybody's business. Father: Gabriel Rieff Mother: Ida (Hurwitz) Rieff Spouse: Alison Douglas Knox Spouse: Susan Sontag child: David Rieff . But you know there will be future biographies of Susan Sontag. Photograph by Richard Avedon/ The Richard Avedon Foundation, Grande soy latte for This Is a Robbery., The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. They are specks on it. Later in the book, Moser can barely contain his rage at Sontag for not coming out during the AIDS crisis. I didnt say anything. Conversations about the past. 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. 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. [7], Rieff has written about the Bosnian War. Who does she think she is?. David Rieff. 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. Coming out is at issue, in fact. I have a library anyway. Why do you think she was so dismissive of her essays? But I also decided that I was going to leave out certain things. She had a basis for thinking it wasn't hopeless when a doctor said it was. When the diaries resume, it is in a mood of settled frustration with the misalliance. 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