His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. 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. I was one of those kids who was always writing stories and thoughts and all that. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. R2P, R.I.P. There was tremendous intellectual affinity between Sontag and Rieff. While we watch reruns of Law & Order, Sontag seemingly read every great book ever written. (en) dbo:wikiPageExternalLink Of course, he intends to be discreet, to keep some things to himself. Eventually, I did enough work so people got bored connecting me to my mother. Thank you for signing up, fellow book lover! 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. At a time when homosexuality was still being criminalized, Rich had acknowledged her lesbianism, while Sontag was silent about hers. But she is most famous for those essays she wrote in the '60s and '70s. 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.. 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. 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 do wish that. I felt lots of things, not all of them resting easily together. 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. 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? Her first novel, The Benefactor (1963), is a very advanced kind of experiment in unreadability. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. So she was going to fight for every breath, no matter how much suffering that entailed. By David Rieff. The wonderful doctor and writer Jerome Groopman likes to quotes Kierkegaard that life can only be understood retrospectively but has to be lived prospectively. [11], Peter Rose, reviewing Rieff's 2008 book Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir, compares it favourably to Simone de Beauvoir's 1964 A Very Easy Death; he considers the latter "perhaps the finest of filial memoirs. Wasn't there a kind of existential dread? 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. 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. How should she be remembered? I've also met lots of people who aren't. When Max Brod wrote the famous first biography of Kafka, every future biographer has tried to point out what Max Brod left out. We recommend . As. Thus the film scholar Don Eric Levine, a close friend of Sontags, is Mosers source for writing that when Jasper [Johns] dumped her, he did so in a way that would have devastated almost anyone. Are any of us, when its our turn?. Education: Princeton University, A.B., 1978. By David Rieff Trade Paperback LIST PRICE $18.95 PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! 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. She knocked on the door, and who opened the door? My father had a big library. . 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. 1950 Sontag marries Philip Rieff, a young teacher at Chicago, after a 10-day courtship. SALON is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. 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." [7], Rieff has written about the Bosnian War. 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! . You say your mother had a horror of cremation. 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. Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947 - 1963, the newly published intimate ruminations of Susan Sontag. What I've left out, people will be able to go to UCLA and read. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. The simple truth is that my mother could not get enough of being alive. When did you first hear your mother had this form of blood cancer? She hoped that I and other people in her life would give her reason to hope. At fifteen, she wrote in her journal of the lesbian tendencies she was finding in herself. eBook. He published every one of her books. 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.. Philip Rieff, American sociologist. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. You're saying that's not how she should be remembered in the future? In 1938, while in China, Jack died, of tuberculosis, leaving Mildred with five-year-old Susan and two-year-old Judith to raise alone. Treacherous, Eva Kollisch, a pissed-off girlfriend from the sixties, tells Moser, as if she had been expecting his call for half a century. She gave me no instructions of any kind. But I wasn't going to say anything more. Sept. 9, 2007 12 AM PT. She was somebody for whom extinction -- death -- was unbearable. Her father, Jack Rosenblatt, the son of uneducated immigrants from Galicia, had left school at the age of ten to work as a delivery boy in a New York fur-trading firm. 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. 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 . Publisher: Yale University Press. 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." She became the model of an intellectual woman who had both great flair and moral profundity. The book gives the illusion of life that good novels doan illusion that no novel of Sontags was ever able to achieve. Although he was not a Christian, his work remains a great gifteven if a complicated and . 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. Mosers account is largely derived from Susans writings: from entries in her journal and from an autobiographical story called Project for a Trip to China. Moser also uses a book called Adult Children of Alcoholics, by Janet Geringer Woititz, published in 1983, to explain the darkness of Sontags later life. in history in 1978. Before the transplant, I thought the odds were bad. Father: Gabriel Rieff Mother: Ida (Hurwitz) Rieff Spouse: Alison Douglas Knox Spouse: Susan Sontag child: David Rieff . If there's one thing I'm vain about, it's that I'm willing to stare facts in the face. 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. 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. He married his 17 year-old student Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s. Parents to their parents, forbidden the carelessness of normal children, they [children of alcoholics] assume an air of premature seriousness. 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. You could set the record straight. In Swimming in a Sea of Death, Rieff confesses that my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life. But in her lifetime, long before she was diagnosed with MDS, my mother decided they were going to be public. And over that decade, they had very high highs and very low lows. Vanity Fair Archive. But you know there will be future biographies of Susan Sontag. Once she died, I asked the other people in the room to leave. Rieff refers to writing as "the family olive oil business." 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. And she went on to say that she no longer liked to write essays, saying, "I can do so much more as a novelist." Everything that could go wrong did go wrong after the transplant. 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. We know no one in life the way biographers know their subjects. I don't know if I would have destroyed them or simply left them for other people to deal with after I'm dead. It's a weird thing in this age of the Internet. Refresh and try again. Statistics for all 11 David Rieff results: 48 yrs AVERAGE AGE 29% are in their 40s, while the average age is 48. to violate the privacy that friends, dead or alive, assumed to be inviolate when they allowed you to know them? But she didn't want to hear it. First of all, I think that argument does a real disservice to human variety. 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. I think the latter comment is in the context of talking about guilt that I think all survivors feel. I never got to say goodbye. She didnt like to sleep. by. Herausgekommen ist kein Buch ber das Sterben, sondern eines ber . Did not telling her the truth about her condition take a toll on you? "[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". There's something obscene about sitting at a desk, in a chair that corrects the posture, sipping warm, sugary tea, yawning or scratching, barely . In her later years, she had a relationship with Annie Leibovitz, whom Rieff avoids discussing in his memoir, except for one loaded comment about the photographer's "carnival images of celebrity death.". On the contrary, she was very pleased that I was a writer and encouraged me in every way. . I never thought about it. It's a long shot: an adult stem-cell transplant, a bone-marrow transplant. But I don't think she would have repudiated a lot of the essays she wrote. The idea that one good death fits all seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. But I didnt like her. He was, Moser writes, speaking for many others. 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). She wanted to live at any price. No, I think I became a writer in spite of her. 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 also edited her journals and notebooks, which contained the following rules. It wasn't terrible. 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. . It was. 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