He is not above quoting interviewees who saw fit to question Davids devotion to Sontag during her horrible last year. People visiting for the first time were clearly surprised to find the celebrated middle-aged writer living like a grad student. By contrast, it would seem that your mother had anything but a good death. David Rieff. Do you think you became a writer because of your mother's example? Amry was not wrong. Which was certainly true of my mother. The world received the diaries calmly enough; there is not a big readership for published diaries. And she went on to say that she no longer liked to write essays, saying, "I can do so much more as a novelist." 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. I've heard that your mother had a wonderful and vast collection of books in her apartment. People have different temperaments. 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. It's a striking contrast. She spoke a lot during her life about how horrified of cremation she was. 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. 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. There's no gushing between mother and son or deathbed reconciliations. There is, but it's contained in that sentence. It's just that she changed her mind about the novel. As you say, lots of students simply will ignore/be indifferent to the whole debate. No, I don't think so. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. Although he wasn't a Christian, his work remains one of the greatest giftseven if a complicated and challenging oneto Christians living today. Philip Rieff, American sociologist. . I'm just not prepared to talk in any seriously honest and self-revealing way about my relationship with my mother. It was. 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. And then she died. In February, 1960, she lists all the things that I despise in myself. My father had a big library. In the last days, she kind of withdrew. If that's what it is, there's nothing I can do about it. David Rieff net worth is $1.2 Million David Rieff Wiki: Salary, Married, Wedding, Spouse, Family David Rieff (/?ri?f/; born September 28, 1952, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American polemicist and pundit. No, not intimidated. The simple truth is that my mother could not get enough of being alive. 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. Twice before, your mother had cancer and survived. In Washington these days, people talk a lot about the collapse of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that existed during the Cold . So I don't think she was at all unique. But I shall not write a biography. 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. 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. 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. But I'm fairly certain I would not have published them. Usually this means someone who accepts dying and stops fighting it. And she didn't embargo them. though in the book Blam is spared not because he flees Novi Sad in time but rather because he is married to a Christian and has converted to Christianity. Education: Princeton University, A.B., 1978. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir is published by Granta, 12.99. That Norman Mailer has orgies? Her essays emanated authority, but her fiction betrayed an aching sense of uncertainty. And that may be because I didn't want to have a fight with somebody, because I didn't want to offend somebody, because I thought I'd hurt somebody's feelings, or because I just preferred that something not be known. Penguin to publish "classic" Roald Dahl books after backlash - CBS News. 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! 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. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. "[1], G. John Ikenberry, reviewing Rieff's 2005 book At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention for Foreign Affairs, called him "one of the most engaging observers of war and humanitarian emergencies in such troubled places as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq". The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. However, Mosers exasperation with Sontag is fuelled by something that lies outside the problematic of biographical writing. I come from a line of people who have private libraries. An atmosphere surrounds them that wafts in from the same faraway kingdom. My mother had a big library. [6], Rieff has published articles in newspapers and journals including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, El Pais, The New Republic, World Affairs, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The Nation. But the actual death was comparatively easy in the sense that she didn't seem to be in pain. . I don't think, however, that the fact that she became famous has very much to do with the quality of her work. She wanted to live at any price. Is there anything Susan Sontag doesnt want to know? R2P, R.I.P. SALON is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. After a few months at Oxford, she went to Paris and sought out Harriet Sohmers, who had been her first lover, ten years earlier. In the end, I chose to do that. And I decided, finally, that I would tell the truth about anything that I could tell the complete truth about. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. She knocked on the door, and who opened the door? But she is most famous for those essays she wrote in the '60s and '70s. As. In any case, Tima himself saw neither the Novi Sad massacre nor Auschwitz. Then I flew back. For the next four decades, Sontags life was punctuated by a series of intense, doomed love affairs with beautiful, remarkable women, among them the dancer Lucinda Childs and the actress and filmmaker Nicole Stphane. 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. You call this book a "son's memoir," but of course it is a memoir in which your mother is the subject - in her final, painful march to death. You could set the record straight. There's a certain grace that can follow. 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. Copyright 2023 Salon.com, LLC. I don't believe a word of what you just said. By David Glenn. I mean, she didn't want to be lied to, but she wanted to live. 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. It's just the way of the world. By the time of Susans birth, in 1933, he had his own fur business and was regularly travelling to Asia. . 2023 Cond Nast. In Mosers world, rewrite becomes write. It was in the spring of 2004. Well, I'm an atheist too; if anything, more militant than my mother. Can you tell me about your mother's last days? It's a remarkably unsentimental account. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies 160. by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. Why do people speak to biographers about their late famous friends? 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. Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention. 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.". So I don't buy it. "My mother was a leftist," he said. Conversations about the past. 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. It exacted a tremendous price. In her feisty debut book, Oluo, essayist, blogger, and editor at large at the Establishment magazine, writes from the perspective of a black, queer, middle-class, college-educated woman living in a "white supremacist country." The daughter of a white single mother, brought up in largely white Seattle, she sees race as "one . Eventually, I did enough work so people got bored connecting me to my mother. He writes of him with utter contempt. I have a big library. So she was going to do everything she could to survive. Penguin to publish "classic" Roald Dahl books after backlash. It wasn't long before Nunez moved in, beginning what would be a complicated relationship with both Sontag and her son. . 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. The physician was not a very empathetic guy. They had sex on several occasions, in hotels. 3.29 avg rating 537 ratings published 2007 19 editions. 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. During this time, I began my transition to the . 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. He, knowing that the treatment has almost no chance of succeeding, tells her what she wants to hear. Arts Fair Beckett's Eire December 1986 By David Rieff. 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? A protector was needed, and he appeared on cue. There were very good times and very bad times between us. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. I think it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith purely in the interest of consoling herself. 100% CAUCASIAN Our ethnicity data indicates the majority is Caucasian. . 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). David Rieff. Nunez, who was twenty-three-year-old David Rieffs twenty-five-year-old girlfriend and lived in the apartment with him and Sontag for more than a year, stresses that the time Im talking about was beforebefore the grand Chelsea penthouse, the enormous library, the rare editions, the art collection, the designer clothes, the country house, the personal assistant, the housekeeper, the personal chef., Nunezs short book (its a hundred and forty pages) raises the ethical question that Nunez herself must have wrestled with: Is it ever O.K. Clear rating. 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. 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 . There seems to be a good deal of bitterness packed into that short sentence. Now republished by New York Review Books, it was first released just weeks before its author's early death in 1969. There are certainly religious traditions that don't believe in an afterlife. If you have a grave and your bones are there, it's somehow less confirming of extinction. Jan 2000 - Dec 201516 years. 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. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. I would have liked to have gone beyond those before she left us. Moser accepts her grievances at face value and weaves them into his unsparing narrative. His father, whom Sontag divorced, was Philip Rieff, author of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. His second wife and widow Alison Douglas Knox died December 12, 2011. After a 30-year silence, the gloomy social theorist Philip Rieff is back with four books. It's not for me to say how she should be remembered. A bit of self-importance may be involved: the interviewee is flattered to have been asked to the party. . She was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, where many famous writers are buried. You say your mother had a horror of cremation. Parents to their parents, forbidden the carelessness of normal children, they [children of alcoholics] assume an air of premature seriousness. Was it a heady experience to get that kind of attention for a boy at your age? The book gives the illusion of life that good novels doan illusion that no novel of Sontags was ever able to achieve. So I'm not sure it's faith vs. atheism. 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. It's like saying all human beings should be cheerful. David. I'm sure you were aware of that mystique as you were growing up, the fact that your mother cut such a distinctive figure. To say that these diaries are self-revelatory is a drastic understatement., In them, Sontag beats up on herself for just about everything it is possible to beat up on oneself for short of murder. 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. To use a word you scorn in your book, there is some "closure." He is working on a book about the global food crisis. Features Lord of the Ring November 1996 By Gay Talese. The idea that one good death fits all seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. From 2000 until 2014 I worked exclusively as a pit reporter, interviewing drivers, fans, owners and sponsor executives. 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?).. I don't know if I would have destroyed them or simply left them for other people to deal with after I'm dead. She gave me no instructions of any kind. 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. Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922 - July 1, . Do you lie? All public knowledge, to be sure, but who the hell am I to go advertising other peoples sexual habits? 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 they were going to appear at some point anyway. . When she said, "I'm not interested in quality of life," she meant it. Fortunately, I don't keep my journals. She seemed to know that the opportunity comes only once. They are what you could call her years in the wilderness, the years before her emergence as the celebrated figure she remained for the rest of her life. At fifteen, she wrote in her journal of the lesbian tendencies she was finding in herself. He merely believes that a pretentious creep like Rieff could not have written it. 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. Rieff is the only child of Susan Sontag,[1] who was 19 years old when he was born. In Swimming in a Sea of Death, Rieff confesses that my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life. She flew back to New York when it was clear the leukemia had become full-blown and the transplant had failed, and spent the last six or seven weeks of her life in Memorial Sloan-Kettering. 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. I hope the book is helpful in that way. Moser also quotes from a manuscript he found in the archive which he believes to be a memoir of the marriage: They stayed in bed most of the first months of their marriage, making love four or five times a day and in between talking, talking endlessly about art and politics and religion and morals. The couple did not have many friends, because they tended to criticize them out of acceptability.. 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. Geniuses are often born to parents afflicted with no such abnormality, and Sontag belongs to this group. She didnt like to sleep. I don't think that's a particularly strange or masochistic thing to say. December 1985 By David Rieff. Her body was just a sore from the inside of her mouth to her toes. Given who she was, there was no other way. 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. Mosers story of the good-looking young ex-faculty wife/Ph.D. But I know this argument very well. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. Those are all facts. She suffered like someone being tortured. were often strained and at times very difficult. None of this diminishes the force that the memoir conveys of the deep currents of love that flowed between mother and son and of the intensity of Rieffs feeling of (survivors) guilt. They were. It was a complicated experience. 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. 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. I'm not Solon the law giver. I think she's right. But all the decisions about her burial are decisions that I made, trying to think through what I thought she wanted. I found a way to be present but not look at the way she had become physically. Refresh and try again. She wasn't focused on the present or any of us. The demands this makes on the practitioners powers of discrimination, as well as on his capacity for sympathy, may be impossible to fulfill. Philip Rieff is remembered todayif at allas the one-time husband of his former student Susan Sontag, and a crankily conservative observer of American society, which he saw as violent, stupid . When did you first hear your mother had this form of blood cancer? in history in 1978. I never got to say goodbye. That's a fact. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. In addition to her graduate work, and caring for David, Sontag helped Rieff with the book he was writing, which was to become the classic Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. She grew increasingly dissatisfied with the marriage. Death disinhibits the. I understand that viscerally. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) So I felt either they would leak out in one way or another or I could try to edit them to make them coherent. 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. Mildred, Susans mother, who accompanied Jack on these trips, was a vain, beautiful woman who came from a less raw Jewish immigrant family. 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. Your mother was an iconic figure in intellectual circles, not just because of what she wrote but how she looked and acted. 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. I'm not a confessional writer. When you say "grace," it lets family members off the hook. I never thought about it. These days, there's a lot of talk about what's called "a good death." I have the impression that this is the way your mother had to die. You're saying that's not how she should be remembered in the future? I would've liked to have said certain things to her. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Why do you think she gained that stature? made Susans career possible. 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 . But that's impossible if you decide not to acknowledge the fact of dying. 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." We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. I was coming back from about a month in Israel/Palestine, where I was trying to do a story on Yasser Arafat. Do you insist on telling the truth when it's perfectly clear the person doesn't want to know the truth? In work, I dont want to be reduced to my life. 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. The wonderful doctor and writer Jerome Groopman likes to quotes Kierkegaard that life can only be understood retrospectively but has to be lived prospectively. Sontag will be remembered as a philosopher. To be blunt, I took off her shirt. Susan Sontag, New York, August 29, 1977. His mother is essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and political activist Susan Sontag, as iconic an intellectual as our resolutely anti-intellectual culture is ever likely to recognize. 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. She lived up to that fabulous appellation. Would Koestenbaum have stared entranced at the name Susan Rosenblatt? She refused to accept any consolation from the hope of an afterlife. 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. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir. A SHORTER "DAY'S JOURNEY" May 1986 By David Rieff. eBook. 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. There was much she could have done, and gay activists implored her to do the most basic, most courageous, most principled thing of all, he writes. The great American sociologist Philip Rieff (1922-2006) stands as one of the 20th century's keenest intellectuals and cultural commentators. Are all about the way biographers know their subjects to get that kind of attention for a boy your. Our User Agreement and Privacy policy and Cookie Statement and your bones there... 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Philip Rieff is the way biographers know their subjects person of faith purely in the '60s and '70s she! Moser accepts her grievances at face value and weaves them into his unsparing narrative second wife widow... Fair Beckett & # x27 ; s JOURNEY & quot ; may 1986 by David Rieff and... Or I could tell the complete truth about anything that I made, trying to think through I! And sponsor executives knowing that the treatment has almost no chance of succeeding, tells her what wants. Their subjects above quoting interviewees who saw fit to question Davids devotion to Sontag during her horrible year... Stars 3 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars of. Is there anything Susan Sontag doesnt want to be present but not look at the top of Ring... Beings should be remembered at the way your mother had anything but good... Novels doan illusion that no novel of Sontags was ever able to achieve majority is CAUCASIAN middle-aged!

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