She was trying to be cheerful. 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. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. 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. [2] ADDRESSES: Home Manhattan, NY. By David Rieff Trade Paperback LIST PRICE $18.95 PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! It was a complicated experience. Your mother was an atheist. That Matthiessen was queer. 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. And Katie Roiphe also thought of royalty when she wrote of tall and elegant David Rieffs slight air of being crown prince to a country that has suddenly and inexplicably gone democratic. The mother and son bear a strong, not entirely physical, resemblance to each other. 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. David Rieff. One day, she had had enough. But you know there will be future biographies of Susan Sontag. 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. Parents to their parents, forbidden the carelessness of normal children, they [children of alcoholics] assume an air of premature seriousness. November 19, 2015 Letters From the December 7, 2015, Issue Quantum of. I have a big library. 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. It's all at UCLA. The simple truth is that my mother could not get enough of being alive. It's not for me to say how she should be remembered. In 1963, Dr. Rieff married Alison Douglas Knox, a Philadelphia lawyer. I knocked on the door. 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. He published every one of her books. 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! . Are any bluntly Jewish appellations fabulous? So I felt either they would leak out in one way or another or I could try to edit them to make them coherent. She sold her papers, including her diaries, to UCLA. There's a certain grace that can follow. "My father was to the right of. The most important thing I thought was: It's her death, not mine. 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. It's just that she changed her mind about the novel. Against Interpretation and Other Essays, the book of criticism that followed (Notes on Camp appeared in it), three years later, brought her acclaim but hardly made her rich. But that doesn't mean that was what was most valuable about her work. Sontags love life was unusual. On her third visit, Nunez met Sontag's son, David Rieff, and shortly thereafter the two began dating. 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 . Death disinhibits the. Rieff, in his introduction to the second volume of the diaries (As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh), writes that Sontag tended to write more in her journals when she was unhappy, most when she was bitterly unhappy, and least when she was all right., Nunezwho comes across as modest and likablegives us wonderful glimpses of Sontag when she was all right. In 1938, while in China, Jack died, of tuberculosis, leaving Mildred with five-year-old Susan and two-year-old Judith to raise alone. In "Swimming in a Sea of Death," Rieff wrestles with how to be a dutiful son to his dying mother while being true to himself. The chances were indeed stacked against her. 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. People have different temperaments. Copyright 2023 Salon.com, LLC. When the diaries resume, it is in a mood of settled frustration with the misalliance. It's a weird thing in this age of the Internet. Certainly, this doesnt reflect well on Rieff, but it hardly proves that Sontag wrote The Mind of the Moralist. Mosers interviews with contemporaries who knew that Sontag was working on the book dont prove her authorship, either. The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. Sontag would later write in a more accessible, though never plain-speaking, manner. But when the bone marrow transplant started to go wrong soon after it took place, I didn't think she would make it. I knew children of well-known people in my school and other places. Rieff is the only child of Susan Sontag,[1] who was 19 years old when he was born. As you look back over your mother's career, how do you think she'll be remembered? The awareness (after-awareness) of how programmed I am, how insincere, how frightened. In February, 1960, she writes, How many times have I told people that Pearl Kazin was a major girlfriend of Dylan Thomas? Although he wasn't a Christian, his work remains one of the greatest giftseven if a complicated and challenging oneto Christians living today. Those are all facts. 2023 Cond Nast. . When did you first hear your mother had this form of blood cancer? 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. Roger Deutsch, another friend, reported, If somebody like Jackie Onassis put in $2,000for a fund to help Sontag when she was ill and had no insuranceSusan would say, That woman is so rich. No, I think that's something people say to console themselves. . tell funny things) in his presence. Features DEBRA WINGS IT February 1987 By Arthur Lurow. I would have liked to have gone beyond those before she left us. There is, but it's contained in that sentence. I'm not a confessional person. 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. I mean, she didn't want to be lied to, but she wanted to live. Before the transplant, I thought the odds were bad. They weren't mine to keep. . 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?).. How should she be remembered? I have the impression that this is the way your mother had to die. In Washington these days, people talk a lot about the collapse of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that existed during the Cold . Via NYRB. What happened to those books? to violate the privacy that friends, dead or alive, assumed to be inviolate when they allowed you to know them? Yet every signal she was giving me was, "Give me hope. Still, throughout our interview, he displayed his own brand of remarkable candor. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features. In the end, David Rieff goes the distance with his mother, taking her body back to Paris to be buried at Montparnasse Cemetery among her kind: artists and thinkers and trophy intellectuals. I don't think, however, that the fact that she became famous has very much to do with the quality of her work. One of our more tiresome national cliches holds that the Irish can never forget while the . But she is most famous for those essays she wrote in the '60s and '70s. A new biography of Susan Sontag is set to claim that the American writer was the true author of her first husband Philip Rieff's seminal work Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.. Out in September . Did you feel privileged? So I felt what I needed to do was not give the false impression that somehow our relations had been very good, but instead to say they were very complicated. Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best of Our Knowledge." David Rieff was born on 28 September, 1952 in Boston, MA, is a Non-fiction writer, policy analyst. How much did that contribute to her dread? But often, in adulthood, the exceptionally well behaved mask slips and reveals an out-of-season child. She does not suppress her glimpses of Sontag when she was not all rightwhen she was at her most painfully fearful and miserable and impossible. Lauren Bacall., I loved Susan, Leon Wieseltier said. And my mother enjoyed the world more than I do. 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. It's indisputable, as you say, that that's what brought her to national and then international attention. Discover David Rieff's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. 4 Benedict A nderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread . You have been a writer for many years, but to my knowledge, it's only been quite recently that you've written this directly about your mother. SALON is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. I wanted to engage with her death in print. The following year, she began sleeping with women and delighting in it. I had to change planes at Heathrow Airport in London, so I called my mother. He reports that at the time of her death, in 2004, Sontag had given no instructions about the dozens of notebooks that she had been filling with her private thoughts since adolescence and which she kept in a closet in her bedroom. So she was going to do everything she could to survive. But I shall not write a biography. I put six questions to David Rieff. Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster. When Max Brod wrote the famous first biography of Kafka, every future biographer has tried to point out what Max Brod left out. In my experience, lots of people are terrified of dying. 100% CAUCASIAN Our ethnicity data indicates the majority is Caucasian. . Clear rating. Despite his initial support of the tenets of Liberal internationalism, he was critical of American policies and goals in the Iraq War. A protector was needed, and he appeared on cue. And I didn't want to go through that. To use a word you scorn in your book, there is some "closure." 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." She was somebody for whom extinction -- death -- was unbearable. 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." A lot of what I describe in this book has nothing to do with the particular personality of David Rieff, or the particular personality, let alone celebrity, of Susan Sontag. And she went on to say that she no longer liked to write essays, saying, "I can do so much more as a novelist." Then she lapsed into a kind of somnolence. 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. Monte Melkonian (Armenian: ; November 25, 1957 - June 12, 1993) was an Armenian-American revolutionary and left-wing nationalist militant. I don't mean in the sense that she opposed it. Publisher: Yale University Press. You could set the record straight. Penguin to publish "classic" Roald Dahl books after backlash. I hope it has some relevance to people who've never heard of Susan Sontag, let alone of me. Sontags life was, in Mosers telling, always shadowed by abject fear and insecurity. Moser cites a document that he found among Sontags unpublished papers in which she lists thirty-six people she had slept with between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and which included men as well as women. By all reports, she was a terrible mother, a narcissist and a drinker. He invited her to a New Years Eve party and then left, without a word, with another woman. Moser adds, The incident goes unmentioned in her journals. In another unmentioned incident (until Moser mentions it), Levine is surprised when Sontag tells him that she is going to pick up her son from a schoolmates house: This is not Susan. There's something obscene about sitting at a desk, in a chair that corrects the posture, sipping warm, sugary tea, yawning or scratching, barely . 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. And she didn't embargo them. 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. Rieff, Philip 1922-2006 PERSONAL: Born December 15, 1922, in Chicago, IL; died of heart failure, July 1, 2006, in Philadelphia, PA; son of Joseph Gabriel and Ida Rieff; married Susan Sontag, 1950 (divorced, 1958); married Alison Douglas Knox, December 31, 1963; children: (first marriage) David. I think the latter comment is in the context of talking about guilt that I think all survivors feel. : Simon & Schuster, 2005, 288 pp. 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. "Way to never give upBelieve & Achieve!! She had this lethal blood cancer and, basically, there was no treatment. . I never thought about it. He has also been a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science & Religion. All public knowledge, to be sure, but who the hell am I to go advertising other peoples sexual habits? The next morning, I picked her up and accompanied her to the doctor who gave her the test results. David Rieff. "Heady?" CAREER: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., PARIS The decision by the U.N. Security Council and NATO to end military operations in Libya on Oct. 31 concludes what appears to be the most . As far as the relevance or importance of her work in the context of the long history of literature and criticism, I think history will sort that out. Sontag married Rieff when she was 17 and left him seven years later. made Susans career possible. By contrast, it would seem that your mother had anything but a good death. She gave me no instructions of any kind. She seemed to know that the opportunity comes only once. She was fully aware that she would not have had the life she had if he had not taken her under his protection when he did. The wonderful doctor and writer Jerome Groopman likes to quotes Kierkegaard that life can only be understood retrospectively but has to be lived prospectively. You're saying that's not how she should be remembered in the future? Get me rewrite! the city-room editor barks into the phone in nineteen-thirties comedies about the newspaper world. Her memoir, Sempre Susan, chronicles those few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff. . 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. Sontag will be remembered as a philosopher. Yes, the library as well. By David Rieff. It wasn't conscious but it certainly makes sense. I don't know if I would have destroyed them or simply left them for other people to deal with after I'm dead. by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. Can you explain why they were difficult? "My mother was a leftist," he said. Geniuses are often born to parents afflicted with no such abnormality, and Sontag belongs to this group. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. being a moral coward, being a liar, being indiscreet about myself + others, being a phony, being passive. In August, 1966, she writes of a chronic nauseaafter Im with people. You mean the Macaulay Culkin syndrome? By David Rieff Sisal Creative illustration for Foreign Policy; Sean Money and Elizabeth Fay for Foreign Policy April 9, 2018, 8:00 AM There is no doubt that the human rights movement is facing. . What I've left out, people will be able to go to UCLA and read. David Rieff on the Novelist Aleksandar Tima, Whose Writing Was an Antidote to Banality and Kitsch. The mother pleads with the son to tell her that the excruciating treatment is worth enduring because it will save her life. In the early 1950s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Taubes and her then husband, the rabbi and philosopher of ideas Jacob Taubes, were the closest friends of my parents, Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff. I think she's right. 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. We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. Was it a heady experience to get that kind of attention for a boy at your age? Mildred, Susans mother, who accompanied Jack on these trips, was a vain, beautiful woman who came from a less raw Jewish immigrant family. 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. Twice before, your mother had cancer and survived. The hardest piece of evidence that Moser offers for his thesis is a letter that Sontag wrote to her younger sister, Judith, in 1950, about her exciting new job as Rieffs research assistant. 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. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. 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. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. apple.news. And I really looked. In Mosers world, rewrite becomes write. It seems that something has changed for you, and you wanted to engage with your mother more directly in print. 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. But I didn't want to write a book about my relationship with my mother, about her relations with other people, or a literary account of her work. She had a basis for thinking it wasn't hopeless when a doctor said it was. He was an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux until 1989 and has been on the faculties of Skidmore, The City University of New York, and New York University. 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. Prophet of the 'Anti-Culture'. 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 felt lots of things, not all of them resting easily together. The marriage lasted eight years during which their son, David Rieffa writer and editor of his mother's personal journalswas born. There are certainly religious traditions that don't believe in an afterlife. Why have you taken this active role in your mother's work? But in the sixties Sontag struggled to survive as a writer who didnt teach. Do you think you will ever write about your relationship with your her? She had no problems telling me that, Greg Chandler, an assistant of Sontags, had no problems telling Moser. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories, Two volumes of Susan Sontags diaries, edited by her son, David Rieff, have been published, and a third is forthcoming. David. Do you see it that way? David Rieff is a passionate fan of Early music, and his choices include the 16th-century composer Orlando di Lassus, and Alfred Deller singing Purcell. 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). Father: Gabriel Rieff Mother: Ida (Hurwitz) Rieff Spouse: Alison Douglas Knox Spouse: Susan Sontag child: David Rieff . Cremation seemed to confirm extinction. I've heard that your mother had a wonderful and vast collection of books in her apartment. Rieff has portrayed his mother's final months in 'Swimming in a Sea of Death,' a beautiful and very somber memoir about mortality. Add to Wishlist. She did more things in the world than I do. 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. 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 . Why do people speak to biographers about their late famous friends? And she was just a sore. While pregnant with their son, David, she began co-writing Rieff's first book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. We had a complicated relationship. 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. Usually this means someone who accepts dying and stops fighting it. To go with the lack of furniture, there was a lack of decorative objects, there were no curtains or rugs, and the kitchen had only the basics. David Rieff (/rif/; born September 28, 1952) is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. So not just her papers, but the books, too? Sontag married Rieff when she was 17 and left him seven years later. 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. Moser accepts her grievances at face value and weaves them into his unsparing narrative. Susan was very interested in being morally pure, but at the same time she was one of the most immoral people I ever knew. Who does she think she is?. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir. I'm sure you were aware of that mystique as you were growing up, the fact that your mother cut such a distinctive figure. She took more pleasure in the world than I do. He could be terse when fielding questions about his relationship with his mother, and he became angry at the notion she suffered a "bad death." Married Alison Douglas Knox, December 31, 1963. 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