By David Rieff. After giving the essay its due, Moser suddenly swerves to the side of the poet Adrienne Rich, who wrote a letter to the Review protesting Sontags en-passant attribution of Riefenstahls rehabilitation to feminists who would feel a pang at having to sacrifice the one woman who made films that everybody acknowledges to be firstrate. Moser holds up Rich as an intellectual of the first rank who had written essays in no way inferior to Sontags and as an exemplar of what Sontag might have been if she had had the guts. But I know it's preposterous. 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. I felt that I had to do that, whatever my own opinion was. 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. Is there anything Susan Sontag doesnt want to know? They don't have to feel so bad that the person is going. Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922 - July 1, . I've heard that your mother had a wonderful and vast collection of books in her apartment. The simple truth is that my mother could not get enough of being alive. This is all very new territory to me. Was it a heady experience to get that kind of attention for a boy at your age? In the literary world, their relationship was a source of fascination: of envy for writers who longed for a protector as powerful and loyal; of gossip for everyone who speculated about what the relationship entailed. By contrast, it would seem that your mother had anything but a good death. However, Mosers exasperation with Sontag is fuelled by something that lies outside the problematic of biographical writing. Are any of us, when its our turn?. It's a striking contrast. She sold her papers, including her diaries, to UCLA. She wanted to be lied to. I mean, she didn't want to be lied to, but she wanted to live. 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. You also write that you wish you'd complied more with her wishes during her life and suppressed more of your own. A pair of pliers sat on top of the TV setfor changing channels since the knob for that purpose had broken off. It's not for me to say how she should be remembered. September/October 2016 Published on August 10, 2016 In this slender volume bristling with erudition, Rieff wrestles with one of the most explosive forces of modern times: mythologized historical "memories" that encourage people to cultivate old grudges and settle historical scores. What I discovered was unexpected,. 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. I think it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith purely in the interest of consoling herself. Twice before, your mother had cancer and survived. Moser in no way substantiates his claim. (Examples: the philosophical aphorisms of Lichtenberg and Novalis; Nietzsche of course; passages in Rilkes Duino Elegies; and Kafkas Reflections on Love, Sin, Hope, Death, the Way.). I had very complicated feelings, as one does about one's parents. She'd sold them. I would have liked to have gone beyond those before she left us. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. Then she lapsed into a kind of somnolence. He kept her alive, professionally, financially, and sometimes physically. So I don't buy it. by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. So I'm not sure it's faith vs. atheism. 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. Clear rating. . David Rieff was born on 28 September, 1952 in Boston, MA, is a Non-fiction writer, policy analyst. Wasn't there a kind of existential dread? So the suffering was extraordinary. . A bit of self-importance may be involved: the interviewee is flattered to have been asked to the party. 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 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. Her arm is draped over your shoulder. ------------------------------------------. There is no question David Rieff is the most famous & most loved celebrity of all the time. 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." 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. 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. In work, I dont want to be reduced to my life. Eventually, I did enough work so people got bored connecting me to my mother. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Did not telling her the truth about her condition take a toll on you? 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." Her novel The Volcano Lover (1992), a less universally appreciated work, became a momentary best-seller. People are very different in their lives and very different in their deaths. I think it's the commonplace guilt of survivors. But for the first time, their love affair is laid bare, as Sontag's son David Rieff admitted: "They were the worse couple I've ever seen in terms of unkindness, inability to be nice, held. All public knowledge, to be sure, but who the hell am I to go advertising other peoples sexual habits? David Rieff ( / rif /; born September 28, 1952) is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. Now republished by New York Review Books, it was first released just weeks before its author's early death in 1969. But in her lifetime, long before she was diagnosed with MDS, my mother decided they were going to be public. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) 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. 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. She was happy to trade in her jeans for silk trousers and her loft apartment for a penthouse. 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. 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. But I wasn't going to say anything more. But on the other hand, I'm a realist. The mother pleads with the son to tell her that the excruciating treatment is worth enduring because it will save her life. 3.29 avg rating 537 ratings published 2007 19 editions. He, knowing that the treatment has almost no chance of succeeding, tells her what she wants to hear. Although he wasn't a Christian, his work remains one of the greatest giftseven if a complicated and challenging oneto Christians living today. Oh, you never set the record straight. On her third visit, Nunez met Sontag's son, David Rieff, and shortly thereafter the two began dating. Moser takes Sontag at her word and is as unillusioned about her as she is about herself. 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." (en) dbo:wikiPageExternalLink 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.". R2P, R.I.P. 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 was in the spring of 2004. But I usually check in once I get out. But there isnt much of a living in the kind of things that she wrote. She had no problems telling me that, Greg Chandler, an assistant of Sontags, had no problems telling Moser. His father, whom Sontag divorced, was Philip Rieff, author of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Mosers biography, for all its pity and antipathy, conveys the extra-largeness of Sontags life. She wanted to live at any price. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. 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. . Publisher: Yale University Press. So after I'm gone, nobody is going to be able to publish them. 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. I come from a line of people who have private libraries. . 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. $71k AVERAGE INCOME Our wealth data indicates income average is $71k. But I also decided that I was going to leave out certain things. 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. . People have different temperaments. 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. 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. tell funny things) in his presence. She took more pleasure in the world than I do. Once she died, I asked the other people in the room to leave. No, I think that's something people say to console themselves. There seems to be a good deal of bitterness packed into that short sentence. I'm sure he's a good doctor, but his human skills were not exactly brilliant. By David Rieff Trade Paperback LIST PRICE $18.95 PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! For the first 10 years of my career, that's indeed what happened. 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. At the age of 82, after two . Cremation seemed to confirm extinction. After first describing the crisis and its . Statistics for all 11 David Rieff results: 48 yrs AVERAGE AGE 29% are in their 40s, while the average age is 48. She had a basis for thinking it wasn't hopeless when a doctor said it was. 80% MARRIED 80% of these people are married, and 20% are single. David Rieff. Intimidated? He was Philip Rieff, a twenty-nine-year-old professor of sociology, for whom she worked as a research assistant, and to whom she stayed married for eight years. 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. 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.'" As. Despite his initial support of the tenets of Liberal internationalism, he was critical of American policies and goals in the Iraq War. She'd gone abroad to pursue postgraduate study but also to escape a lifeless marriage. Treacherous, Eva Kollisch, a pissed-off girlfriend from the sixties, tells Moser, as if she had been expecting his call for half a century. Why do people speak to biographers about their late famous friends? Photograph by Richard Avedon/ The Richard Avedon Foundation, Grande soy latte for This Is a Robbery., The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. While pregnant with their son, David, she began co-writing Rieff's first book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Yes, the library as well. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong after the transplant. Can you tell me about your mother's last days? We recommend . She was somebody for whom extinction -- death -- was unbearable. Herausgekommen ist kein Buch ber das Sterben, sondern eines ber . Of course she knew who was opening the door. What happened to those books? 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. 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. That Norman Mailer has orgies? apple.news. Refresh and try again. "I am not a confessional person," Rieff insisted. In the end she couldn't even roll over unassisted. Tradues em contexto de "chronicled her" en ingls-portugus da Reverso Context : Newspapers chronicled her every appearance and activity. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. And when she spoke, she spoke about the distant past -- about her parents, about people she was involved with 30 years before. Chronik eines angekndigten Todes: David Rieff, der Sohn von Susan Sontag, erzhlt von dem Kampf seiner Mutter gegen den Tod. Other choices include Bach's moving . Why do you think she was so dismissive of her essays? 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. Sontag was accused of humorlessness, but in fact she was guilty only of high-mindedness. There's no gushing between mother and son or deathbed reconciliations. Rieff has portrayed his mother's final months in 'Swimming in a Sea of Death,' a beautiful and very somber memoir about mortality. 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. His second wife and widow Alison Douglas Knox died December 12, 2011. It's funny. 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. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. It's a weird thing in this age of the Internet. He rightly identifies Mildreds remarriage to a man named Nathan Sontag, in 1945, as a seminal event in Susans rise to stardom. 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? She did more things in the world than I do. But the actual death was comparatively easy in the sense that she didn't seem to be in pain. My mother had a big library. They were. I mean, this book may be of interest because people have heard of my mother. Whatever moral or intellectual satisfaction Amry might have obtained from remembrance of his atrocity will pass on to people who were not victims . After a 30-year silence, the gloomy social theorist Philip Rieff is back with four books. That seems just right. That doesn't mean someone else who was there would agree with my account. "Heady?" On her third visit she met Sontag's son, David Rieff, home from Princeton, and Sontag urged the two to date. By David Glenn. I didnt say anything. Simon & Schuster, 179 pages, $21. David Rieff, a New York-based journalist, is the author of eight books. At fifteen, she wrote in her journal of the lesbian tendencies she was finding in herself. The following year, she began sleeping with women and delighting in it. "My father was to the right of. I felt lots of things, not all of them resting easily together. 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. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features. [7], Rieff has written about the Bosnian War. So they were going to appear at some point anyway. And I didn't want to go through that. Why have you taken this active role in your mother's work? 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. And she didn't embargo them. I was stunned by how dismissive she was of those dazzling essays that she wrote in the '60s and that made her famous. One day, she had had enough. And I decided, finally, that I would tell the truth about anything that I could tell the complete truth about. I came across a photo of you and your mother that ran many years ago in Vogue magazine. November 19, 2015 Letters From the December 7, 2015, Issue Quantum of. But I didnt like her. He was, Moser writes, speaking for many others. I'm not a confessional writer. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies 160. by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion, does the prospect of dying lead to dread? 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. And over that decade, they had very high highs and very low lows. 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. "My mother was a leftist," he said. 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. He is working on a book about the global food crisis. Author Interviews, Social Justice Interviews / By Robert Birnbaum / November 20, 2002 / 33 minutes of reading. 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. I will write prefaces to these journals, which will contain biographical material, and a future biographer may find them somewhat useful. 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. 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. 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. 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 . She lived up to that fabulous appellation. Would Koestenbaum have stared entranced at the name Susan Rosenblatt? The idea that one good death fits all seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. I don't want to write a memoir of our relationship. ), this time focusing on the global food crisis. A protector was needed, and he appeared on cue. David Rieff was born in Boston and attended Princeton University. . Still, throughout our interview, he displayed his own brand of remarkable candor. Features Lord of the Ring November 1996 By Gay Talese. Yet every signal she was giving me was, "Give me hope. It's indisputable, as you say, that that's what brought her to national and then international attention. It's just the way of the world. Born in 1952, Mr. Rieff was brought to New York at age 6 from California, after his parents went through an acrimonious divorce. What I've left out, people will be able to go to UCLA and read. She didn't want to be an essay writer, but she continued to write essays, although they came harder and harder throughout her career. Mosers story of the good-looking young ex-faculty wife/Ph.D. 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. He mocks his fake upper-class accent and fancy bespoke-looking clothes. Jan 2000 - Dec 201516 years. But I'm sure it's true. And I really looked. She refused to accept any consolation from the hope of an afterlife. The courtesan analogy may be less ludicrous when applied to the Annie Leibovitz period than to the Roger Straus one. It's too obvious not to be true. She knocked on the door, and who opened the door? So what do you do, as the person who's close to someone who wants to live at any price, when you think this fight isn't worth it? Aren't you being awfully hard on yourself? Your mother was an iconic figure in intellectual circles, not just because of what she wrote but how she looked and acted. But I'm fairly certain I would not have published them. I don't mean in the sense that she opposed it. [2] I don't know that being cheerful is better than being a melancholy person. Her first novel, The Benefactor (1963), is a very advanced kind of experiment in unreadability. If that's what it is, there's nothing I can do about it. She applied for and received a fellowship at Oxford, and left husband and child for a year. were often strained and at times very difficult. 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