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 . 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. It exacted a tremendous price. Monte Melkonian (Armenian: ; November 25, 1957 - June 12, 1993) was an Armenian-American revolutionary and left-wing nationalist militant. 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. Katie Roiphe, in a remarkable essay on Sontags agonizing final year, in her book The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, pauses to think about the strange, inconsequential lies that Sontag told all her life. Now republished by New York Review Books, it was first released just weeks before its author's early death in 1969. By David Glenn. By the time of the marriage, in 1951, she had discovered that sex with men wasnt so bad. The world received the diaries calmly enough; there is not a big readership for published diaries. 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. She had Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread into her lymph system. 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. It is this fundamental belief - that to remember is a moral act - that David Rieff explores in his most recent book, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies. 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. The dedication to The Volcano Lover reads For David, beloved son, comrade. Not many parents think of their offspring as comrades. 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. She didnt like to sleep. Susan Sontag married Rieff the following year. But that's impossible if you decide not to acknowledge the fact of dying. She hoped that I and other people in her life would give her reason to hope. The idea that one good death fits all seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. Because I don't think it's anybody's business. Guideline Price: 14.99. Welcome; Issues; 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. Why people capture imaginations is a mysterious process. Eventually, I did enough work so people got bored connecting me to my mother. So I don't think we can just take the Christian or the Islamic model and say those visions of a personal afterlife are what religious faith is. 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 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. Not only did you write this memoir, you're also editing her diaries and helping put out some of her unpublished essays. Her essays emanated authority, but her fiction betrayed an aching sense of uncertainty. All rights reserved. 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 not as if I burned anything. I didnt say anything. "I am not a confessional person," Rieff insisted. David Rieff @davidrieff Feb 03, 2023 @timothycbaker @keatsandchapman Point taken. Mosers biography, for all its pity and antipathy, conveys the extra-largeness of Sontags life. In February, 1960, she lists all the things that I despise in myself. Cremation seemed to confirm extinction. Sontag was 24 and living in Paris, having left her husband, the sociologist Philip Rieff, and their young son behind in the States. Wasn't there a kind of existential dread? 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. . A protector was needed, and he appeared on cue. Mosers story of the good-looking young ex-faculty wife/Ph.D. You call her book of photos -- which included pictures of your mother as she was dying and after her death -- "carnival images of celebrity death." Given who she was, there was no other way. Add to Wishlist. 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. Susan Sontag, New York, August 29, 1977. If I'm going to edit stuff about her life in the '50s, I'm the only one alive who would know about it directly. (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.). 3.29 avg rating 537 ratings published 2007 19 editions. Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best of Our Knowledge." 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. 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). And when she spoke, she spoke about the distant past -- about her parents, about people she was involved with 30 years before. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. . She was trying to be cheerful. Yes, the library as well. Her memoir, Sempre Susan, chronicles those few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff. But I know this argument very well. They don't have to feel so bad that the person is going. CAREER: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., By the time of Susans birth, in 1933, he had his own fur business and was regularly travelling to Asia. 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. She was the smartest girl in the class, but she couldnt figure out why shewehad to die. ), this time focusing on the global food crisis. The physician was not a very empathetic guy. If Mosers feelings about Sontag are mixedhe always seems a little awed as well as irked by herhis dislike for Philip Rieff is undiluted. 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." Parents to their parents, forbidden the carelessness of normal children, they [children of alcoholics] assume an air of premature seriousness. It was. He married his 17 year-old student Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s. 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. I've heard that your mother had a wonderful and vast collection of books in her apartment. 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 . We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. It was important to have that on the record. It's not for me to say how she should be remembered. One day, she had had enough. Copyright 2023 Salon.com, LLC. She refused to accept any consolation from the hope of an afterlife. David had a car then, and I remember the four of us driving around Manhattan, four cigarettes going, the car filled with smoke and Josephs deep, rumbling voice and funny, high-pitched laugh. She remembers Sontags big, beautiful smile. She writes of trips that Sontag took her and David on whose sole purpose was enjoyment. 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? Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features. So after I'm gone, nobody is going to be able to publish them. Rieff has portrayed his mother's final months in 'Swimming in a Sea of Death,' a beautiful and very somber memoir about mortality. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. December 1985 By David Rieff. eBook. 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.. So why should she have made our lives easier by going gracefully? Those are all facts. He calls him a scam artist. This is all very new territory to me. Her body was just a sore from the inside of her mouth to her toes. Who does she think she is?. What happened to those books? And I was too unwilling to pay that price, so it took me a long time to become a writer and pay that price, which I did. . It's a striking contrast. That doesn't mean someone else who was there would agree with my account. Mildred, Susans mother, who accompanied Jack on these trips, was a vain, beautiful woman who came from a less raw Jewish immigrant family. Do you lie? David Rieff on the Novelist Aleksandar Tima, Whose Writing Was an Antidote to Banality and Kitsch. 100% CAUCASIAN Our ethnicity data indicates the majority is Caucasian. While pregnant with their son, David, she began co-writing Rieff's first book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 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. Pathologically so. 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. 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. They wrote her off in the '70s. He married his 17 year-old student Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s. She gave me no instructions of any kind. I think it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith purely in the interest of consoling herself. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. In his account of Sontags worldly success, Moser shifts to a less baleful register. I was stunned by how dismissive she was of those dazzling essays that she wrote in the '60s and that made her famous. An atmosphere surrounds them that wafts in from the same faraway kingdom. And then she died. After a 30-year silence, the gloomy social theorist Philip Rieff is back with four books. 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. She said she might be ill again, might have some kind of blood cancer. These days, there's a lot of talk about what's called "a good death." Of course, he intends to be discreet, to keep some things to himself. 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. I don't know if I would have destroyed them or simply left them for other people to deal with after I'm dead. One answer is because I'll probably do a better and more responsible job than someone who didn't know her. Clear rating. ISBN-13: 978-0300182798. If you look at Buddhism, if you look at Judaism, neither has an afterlife in that sense. Penguin to publish "classic" Roald Dahl books after backlash. Her arm is draped over your shoulder. 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! What I discovered was unexpected,. But she made it very clear what she wanted. 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. They're stand-alone projects. People are very different in their lives and very different in their deaths. People visiting for the first time were clearly surprised to find the celebrated middle-aged writer living like a grad student. I think [her 1992 novel] "The Volcano Lover" is the best thing she ever did. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Refresh and try again. 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. Sontags love life was unusual. Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster. But that doesn't mean that was what was most valuable about her work. It was the Dakota . 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. It's a long shot: an adult stem-cell transplant, a bone-marrow transplant. But you know there will be future biographies of Susan Sontag. Amry was not wrong. 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. That Norman Mailer has orgies? And I decided, finally, that I would tell the truth about anything that I could tell the complete truth about. Now I'm a realist", "The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good", "Who Decides Whether to Remember or Forget? Besides his wife and son, of New York, a journalist and author who specializes in foreign affairs, Dr. Rieff is survived. 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.'" 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. She wanted to be lied to. She wasn't focused on the present or any of us. She was a best-selling novelist and a singular presence -- the brainy, glamorous woman who held her own among the testosterone-filled intellectuals of the period. He rightly identifies Mildreds remarriage to a man named Nathan Sontag, in 1945, as a seminal event in Susans rise to stardom. 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. By pushing the child Susan away and at the same time leaning on her for emotional support, Mildred sealed off the possibility of any future lightheartedness. ADDRESSES: Home Manhattan, NY. If there's one thing I'm vain about, it's that I'm willing to stare facts in the face. She was much more interested in experimental art when she was young than she became later in life. David Rieff discusses "Divorcing" by Susan Taubes, an autobiographical novel with phantasmagoric components: the reimagined end of a marriage. We recommend . In work, I dont want to be reduced to my life. R2P, R.I.P. But when the bone marrow transplant started to go wrong soon after it took place, I didn't think she would make it. But I didnt like her. He was, Moser writes, speaking for many others. Jan 2000 - Dec 201516 years. I've also met lots of people who aren't. I don't know whether you believe it or not. Prophet of the 'Anti-Culture'. Oh, you never set the record straight. Death disinhibits the. The next morning, I picked her up and accompanied her to the doctor who gave her the test results. There was. I hope the book is helpful in that way. At fifteen, she wrote in her journal of the lesbian tendencies she was finding in herself. 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. Herausgekommen ist kein Buch ber das Sterben, sondern eines ber . He is not above quoting interviewees who saw fit to question Davids devotion to Sontag during her horrible last year. tell funny things) in his presence. My mother had a big library. And she didn't embargo them. 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. 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. What I've left out, people will be able to go to UCLA and read. In life, I dont want to be reduced to my work. . I never got to say goodbye. Born in 1952, Mr. Rieff was brought to New York at age 6 from California, after his parents went through an acrimonious divorce. And she went on to say that she no longer liked to write essays, saying, "I can do so much more as a novelist." And over that decade, they had very high highs and very low lows. There was tremendous intellectual affinity between Sontag and Rieff. 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. 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. She had preternatural energy (sometimes enhanced by speed). 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? By contrast, it would seem that your mother had anything but a good death. 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. Sontag did not want to be an academic; she wanted only to write. When the diaries resume, it is in a mood of settled frustration with the misalliance. She became the model of an intellectual woman who had both great flair and moral profundity. No, I don't think so. Rieff (who did not credit her) got a job at Brandeis University, and in the. Learn How rich is He in this year and how He spends money? I don't know. She wanted to live at any price. During this time, I began my transition to the . 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." I don't mean in the sense that she opposed it. David Rieff was born in Boston and attended Princeton University. There is, but it's contained in that sentence. So I don't buy it. 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. Be consistent. While we watch reruns of Law & Order, Sontag seemingly read every great book ever written. Arts Fair Beckett's Eire December 1986 By David Rieff. As an admirer of The Mind of the Moralist, I was intrigued by what the newly opened question of its authorship might mean for both Rieff's and Sontag's legacies. 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. My mother was a prodigy as a child. 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. No one I have ever known loved life so unambivalently. And: It may sound stupid to put it this way, but my mother simply could never get her fill of the world.. Thanks to the cryptic style in which it is written, Sacred Order/Social Order is a tremendously difficult work to read one critic compared it to "chewing ball bearings; every once in a while there is a cherry".In it, Rieff does, finally, offer something like a schematic for his theory of culture, delivered in strange expository passages sandwiched in between his close readings of . I'm sure he's a good doctor, but his human skills were not exactly brilliant. Her first novel, The Benefactor (1963), is a very advanced kind of experiment in unreadability. It remains a mystery why she married because when the marriage appears in the notebooks, the notebooks glide to a halt. 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. . But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion, does the prospect of dying lead to dread? The following year, she began sleeping with women and delighting in it. Then I flew back. I was one of those kids who was always writing stories and thoughts and all that. Statistics for all 11 David Rieff results: 48 yrs AVERAGE AGE 29% are in their 40s, while the average age is 48. 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. He is working on a book about the global food crisis. My father had a big library. But I usually check in once I get out. Simon & Schuster, 179 pages, $21. . I understand that viscerally. Within a few months Nunez moved into Rieff's bedroom, and Sontag gave her a private study for her work and the promise of a mentor-student relationship. In Swimming in a Sea of Death, Rieff confesses that my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life. I knocked on the door. [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. Of course, some people of faith find it easier. David Rieff. It wasn't terrible. 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 . 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. 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. . Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz opens up about her longtime partner, essayist Susan Sontag, in a conversation with "CBS This Morning" co-host Charlie . If that's what it is, there's nothing I can do about it. . 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? . I came across a photo of you and your mother that ran many years ago in Vogue magazine. Rieff refers to writing as "the family olive oil business." In her later years, she had a relationship with Annie Leibovitz, whom Rieff avoids discussing in his memoir, except for. I think she's right. Married Alison Douglas Knox, December 31, 1963. Features DEBRA WINGS IT February 1987 By Arthur Lurow. 2023 Cond Nast. $18.99 $25.00 Save 24% Current price is $18.99, Original price is $25. All rights reserved. After first describing the crisis and its . [12], Rieff has one child, a daughter (born 2006).[13]. And that's all I propose to say about Annie Leibovitz. Geniuses are often born to parents afflicted with no such abnormality, and Sontag belongs to this group. 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. 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Identifies Mildreds remarriage to a halt intellectual woman who had both great flair and moral.! Of Law & Order, Sontag seemingly read every great book ever written religion, the. Energy ( sometimes enhanced by speed ). [ 13 ] but it 's perfectly clear the person is to! Book ever written confessional person, '' Rieff insisted feelings about Sontag are mixedhe always seems david rieff married little awed well. Delighting in it 03, 2023 @ timothycbaker @ keatsandchapman Point taken I usually check in once I get.... Speaking for many others purpose was enjoyment s Eire December 1986 by Rieff... And Rieff 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 4 5.