And he told her the bad news. 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. Of course she knew who was opening the door. I was told by her doctors that she would die quite soon. When she said, "I'm not interested in quality of life," she meant it. You also write that you wish you'd complied more with her wishes during her life and suppressed more of your own. 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. Be consistent. Rieff (who did not credit her) got a job at Brandeis University, and in the. To be blunt, I took off her shirt. If you look at Buddhism, if you look at Judaism, neither has an afterlife in that sense. For the first 10 years of my career, that's indeed what happened. It was important to have that on the record. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. I didnt say anything. Rieff is the only child of Susan Sontag,[1] who was 19 years old when he was born. I understand that viscerally. The physician was not a very empathetic guy. Author: David Rieff. 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. 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. I put six questions to David Rieff. The marriage lasted eight years during which their son, David Rieffa writer and editor of his mother's personal journalswas born. She'd sold them. 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. Sontags love life was unusual. After a 30-year silence, the gloomy social theorist Philip Rieff is back with four books. Sure. Copyright 2023 Salon.com, LLC. Associated Press articles: Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. November 11, 2005. She had no problems telling me that, Greg Chandler, an assistant of Sontags, had no problems telling Moser. Sontag was accused of humorlessness, but in fact she was guilty only of high-mindedness. Via NYRB. The mother pleads with the son to tell her that the excruciating treatment is worth enduring because it will save her life. A renowned war correspondent and author, he has written on a vast array of topics including issues of immigration, humanitarian crises and other global struggles . . made Susans career possible. 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. But I usually check in once I get out. Her arm is draped over your shoulder. Yeah, it's an even more lethal cancer, and yeah, she's even 30 years older, but maybe she'll beat the odds." The standard time between diagnosis and death is nine months, and there are no drugs that work more than a few months to keep your blood counts where they're supposed to be. : Simon & Schuster, 2005, 288 pp. As you look back over your mother's career, how do you think she'll be remembered? She was trying to be cheerful. 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. 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. I'm not Solon the law giver. 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.'" It's too obvious not to be true. 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. Mildred, Susans mother, who accompanied Jack on these trips, was a vain, beautiful woman who came from a less raw Jewish immigrant family. I felt that I had to do that, whatever my own opinion was. I think it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith purely in the interest of consoling herself. So I felt either they would leak out in one way or another or I could try to edit them to make them coherent. It's like saying all human beings should be cheerful. 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. A new book is as unillusioned about the writer as she was about herself. 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. I don't want to write a memoir of our relationship. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir is published by Granta, 12.99. 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. She followed Rieff to the places of his academic appointments (among them Boston, where Sontag did graduate work in the Harvard philosophy department), became pregnant and had a then perforce illegal abortion, became pregnant again, and gave birth to her son, David. Chronik eines angekndigten Todes: David Rieff, der Sohn von Susan Sontag, erzhlt von dem Kampf seiner Mutter gegen den Tod. 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. David Rieff ( / rif /; born September 28, 1952) is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. 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. David Rieff was born in Boston and attended Princeton University. . Whatever the answer is in the higher reaches of philosophy, the particular instance of Nunezs violation provides a valuable corrective to Mosers bleak portrait. 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. 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. What I discovered was unexpected,. But I can't control how people read a book. . [Pause] I took it for granted in the world that I grew up in. "My father was to the right of. I don't know whether you believe it or not. But in her lifetime, long before she was diagnosed with MDS, my mother decided they were going to be public. Rieff is a distinguished author in his own right. People visiting for the first time were clearly surprised to find the celebrated middle-aged writer living like a grad student. Sontag married Rieff when she was 17 and left him seven years later. . "I am not a confessional person," Rieff insisted. Not only is there a sense of inner peace, but the dying person often has meaningful and profound conversations with friends and family. Who does she think she is?. It's a remarkably unsentimental account. Aren't you being awfully hard on yourself? We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. He also edited her journals and notebooks, which contained the following rules. 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. [8][9] His 2016 article in The Guardian, "The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good"which argues that some mass atrocities are better forgotten[10]sparked a debate at the International Center for Transitional Justice. Twice before, your mother had cancer and survived. He is not above quoting interviewees who saw fit to question Davids devotion to Sontag during her horrible last year. David Rieff. So they were going to appear at some point anyway. 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. 1950 Sontag marries Philip Rieff, a young teacher at Chicago, after a 10-day courtship. . Then I flew back. 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. 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 chances were indeed stacked against her. Jackie Onassis. 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