About six square feet of kitchen space were taken up by an old freezer that hadnt worked in years. In work, I dont want to be reduced to my life. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies 160. by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. There's no gushing between mother and son or deathbed reconciliations. 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." So she was going to do everything she could to survive. Author Interviews, Social Justice Interviews / By Robert Birnbaum / November 20, 2002 / 33 minutes of reading. Sontag was 24 and living in Paris, having left her husband, the sociologist Philip Rieff, and their young son behind in the States. In 1938, while in China, Jack died, of tuberculosis, leaving Mildred with five-year-old Susan and two-year-old Judith to raise alone. It's a striking contrast. It wasn't conscious but it certainly makes sense. 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. I felt that I had to do that, whatever my own opinion was. Oh, you never set the record straight. Mosers biography, for all its pity and antipathy, conveys the extra-largeness of Sontags life. 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). ", "At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. Those are all facts. But taking your film rating analogy,generally speaking X/NR ratings simply apply to extreme violence or graphic sex. Because I don't think it's anybody's business. A new book is as unillusioned about the writer as she was about herself. 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? "I am not a confessional person," Rieff insisted. Yeah, it's an even more lethal cancer, and yeah, she's even 30 years older, but maybe she'll beat the odds." She emerges from it as a person more to be pitied than envied. SALON is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. Biography [ edit] Rieff is the only child of Susan Sontag, [1] who was 19 years old when he was born. The book publisher had received criticism for removing passages related to weight, mental health, gender and race. Nov. 7, 2011. Why do people speak to biographers about their late famous friends? 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. It's too obvious not to be true. 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. "Way to never give upBelieve & Achieve!! David Rieff (/rif/; born September 28, 1952) is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. Her arm is draped over your shoulder. Susan was very interested in being morally pure, but at the same time she was one of the most immoral people I ever knew. I wouldn't have said. That doesn't mean someone else who was there would agree with my account. Wildfires have long occurred in the Amazon rain forest, but never on this scale. She was a cultural critic of renown who had fascinating things to say about art and the avant-garde, not to mention various writers. In my experience, lots of people are terrified of dying. Mildred, Susans mother, who accompanied Jack on these trips, was a vain, beautiful woman who came from a less raw Jewish immigrant family. She was somebody for whom extinction -- death -- was unbearable. My mother was a prodigy as a child. 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. Why do you think she was so dismissive of her essays? 3 David Rieff, "The Cult of Memory: W hen H istor y Does More Harm Than Good ", The Gua rdian, March 2, 1916. To be blunt, I took off her shirt. There was tremendous intellectual affinity between Sontag and Rieff. Named Fulbright Professor University Munich, 1959-1960, Guggenheim fellow, 1970, Sometime fellow All Souls College, Oxford. 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. All rights reserved. It remains a mystery why she married because when the marriage appears in the notebooks, the notebooks glide to a halt. Herausgekommen ist kein Buch ber das Sterben, sondern eines ber . I don't think that's a particularly strange or masochistic thing to say. You could set the record straight. I found a way to be present but not look at the way she had become physically. I think it's the commonplace guilt of survivors. Nevertheless, he has so thoroughly convinced himself of it that when he quotes from The Mind of the Moralist he performs the sleight of hand of saying she writes or Sontag notes. By Mosers lights, every writer who has been heavily edited can no longer claim to be the author of his work. 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. 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. My mother had a big library. This is all very new territory to me. He also edited her journals and notebooks, which contained the following rules. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. Of course, he intends to be discreet, to keep some things to himself. Be consistent. apple.news. But on the other hand, I'm a realist. 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. 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. 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! And my mother enjoyed the world more than I do. Your mother was an atheist. Do you think her great achievement was the fiction she wrote in her last years? David. 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. There is no question David Rieff is the most famous & most loved celebrity of all the time. So that's the price I paid. He has also been a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science & Religion. Even though she did say, "Don't lie to me.". What happened to those books? No, I don't think so. From 2000 until 2014 I worked exclusively as a pit reporter, interviewing drivers, fans, owners and sponsor executives. Do you think you will ever write about your relationship with your her? When she said, "I'm not interested in quality of life," she meant it. At the age of 82, after two . Usually this means someone who accepts dying and stops fighting it. 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. So it's wrong for me to read into this that you wish you had put some of your own needs aside and accommodated your mother more? Is there anything Susan Sontag doesnt want to know? That's above my pay grade to say. 80% MARRIED 80% of these people are married, and 20% are single. [2], Rieff was a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux from 1978 to 1989. 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. !" Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention. It wasn't long before Nunez moved in, beginning what would be a complicated relationship with both Sontag and her son. Help me believe I might make it." Left to my own devices, he writes, I would have waited a long time before publishing them, or perhaps never published them at all. But because Sontag had sold her papers to the University of California at Los Angeles, and access to them was largely unrestricted, either I would organize them and present them or someone else would, so it seemed better to go forward. However, he writes, my misgivings remain. In 2004, his mother, Susan Sontag, died from a brutal form of blood cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome. When did you first hear your mother had this form of blood cancer? David Rieff on the Novelist Aleksandar Tima, Whose Writing Was an Antidote to Banality and Kitsch. Did not telling her the truth about her condition take a toll on you? One of our more tiresome national cliches holds that the Irish can never forget while the . 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? Susan Sontag married Rieff the following year. I'm sure you were aware of that mystique as you were growing up, the fact that your mother cut such a distinctive figure. It's a remarkably unsentimental account. Coming back to my mother's previous experience with breast cancer, I thought, "Well, don't leap to conclusions here. People visiting for the first time were clearly surprised to find the celebrated middle-aged writer living like a grad student. Sontags love life was unusual. Surely, that would have been the most terrible therapeutic use of faith, and a disgrace in terms of faith. I'm not Solon the law giver. ------------------------------------------. Of her marriage to Philip Rieff, she claimed that "not only was I Dorothea [from George Eliot's Middlemarch] but that I had married Mr. Causaubon." A comic touch in connection with their divorce is that Rieff and Sontag apparently came to blows over who would get to keep the couple's collection of back issues of Partisan Review. Associated Press articles: Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. Sontag will be remembered as a philosopher. You write that it wasn't just that she desperately wanted to live, she was also terrified of dying. All rights reserved. But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion, does the prospect of dying lead to dread? 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 . Fortunately, I don't keep my journals. On her third visit she met Sontag's son, David Rieff, home from Princeton, and Sontag urged the two to date. So the suffering was extraordinary. [12], Rieff has one child, a daughter (born 2006).[13]. 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. By David Rieff Trade Paperback LIST PRICE $18.95 PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! David Rieff has written a sobering and often horrifying account of his mother's final days. . She knocked on the door, and who opened the door? Why is she going to pick up her son? Whatever the answer is in the higher reaches of philosophy, the particular instance of Nunezs violation provides a valuable corrective to Mosers bleak portrait. 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. The marriage lasted eight years during which their son, David Rieffa writer and editor of his mother's personal journalswas born. I knocked on the door. CAREER: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., By David Rieff. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. 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. It seems that something has changed for you, and you wanted to engage with your mother more directly in print. That's a good question. Rieff refers to writing as "the family olive oil business." And she was just a sore. David Rieff is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. 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. David Rieff @davidrieff Feb 03, 2023 @timothycbaker @keatsandchapman Point taken. 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. Of course she knew who was opening the door. 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. Her memoir, Sempre Susan, chronicles those few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff. by. Refresh and try again. Why have you taken this active role in your mother's work? And that's all I propose to say about Annie Leibovitz. Publisher: Yale University Press. It's indisputable, as you say, that that's what brought her to national and then international attention. "[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". Add to Wishlist. 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. 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. November 11, 2005. Well, I'm an atheist too; if anything, more militant than my mother. It's just the way of the world. 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. 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. Your book is remarkably self-effacing. in history in 1978. Jackie Onassis. You're wearing a John Lennon cap. Features. 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. While pregnant with their son, David, she began co-writing Rieff's first book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 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. 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. 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 hope the book is helpful in that way. Welcome; Issues; The next morning, I picked her up and accompanied her to the doctor who gave her the test results. 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. to violate the privacy that friends, dead or alive, assumed to be inviolate when they allowed you to know them? 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 last days, she kind of withdrew. No, I think I became a writer in spite of her. . David Rieff. Do you know why that was? It's all at UCLA. On her third visit, Nunez met Sontag's son, David Rieff, and shortly thereafter the two began dating. By the time of the marriage, in 1951, she had discovered that sex with men wasnt so bad. . by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. A SHORTER "DAY'S JOURNEY" May 1986 By David Rieff. Near the end of the book, you say, "I have preferred to write as little as possible of my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life, but suffice it so say that they were often strained and at times very difficult." But all the decisions about her burial are decisions that I made, trying to think through what I thought she wanted. Ber das Sterben, sondern eines ber is no question David Rieff has one child, a daughter ( 2006! 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