Do you see it that way? [Pause] I took it for granted in the world that I grew up in. As you say, lots of students simply will ignore/be indifferent to the whole debate. 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. As you look back over your mother's career, how do you think she'll be remembered? It's all at UCLA. were often strained and at times very difficult. None of this diminishes the force that the memoir conveys of the deep currents of love that flowed between mother and son and of the intensity of Rieffs feeling of (survivors) guilt. to violate the privacy that friends, dead or alive, assumed to be inviolate when they allowed you to know them? 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 . His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. Not only is there a sense of inner peace, but the dying person often has meaningful and profound conversations with friends and family. He invited her to a New Years Eve party and then left, without a word, with another woman. Moser adds, The incident goes unmentioned in her journals. In another unmentioned incident (until Moser mentions it), Levine is surprised when Sontag tells him that she is going to pick up her son from a schoolmates house: This is not Susan. Nunez, in her memoir, set in the Straus period, wrote of the Riverside Drive apartment: Its main feature was the growing number of books, but they were mostly paperbacks, and the shelves were cheap pine board. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong after the transplant. 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. I understand that viscerally. They divorce in 1958. Explore David Rieff Wiki Age, Height, Biography as Wikipedia, Wife, Family relation. And the idea that one is going to think the same thing at 68, or whenever you did the interview, as one did at 31 would suggest lack of growth. It remains a mystery why she married because when the marriage appears in the notebooks, the notebooks glide to a halt. Although he wasn't a Christian, his work remains one of the greatest giftseven if a complicated and challenging oneto Christians living today. It was a complicated experience. 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. Read an excerpt of this book! Ad Choices. She spoke a lot during her life about how horrified of cremation she was. How much did that contribute to her dread? Yeah, it's an even more lethal cancer, and yeah, she's even 30 years older, but maybe she'll beat the odds." It was important to have that on the record. Why have you taken this active role in your mother's work? . When she said, "I'm not interested in quality of life," she meant it. I have a big library. Sontag married Rieff when she was 17 and left him seven years later. It was. To be blunt, I took off her shirt. He also edited her journals and notebooks, which contained the following rules. . So I felt what I needed to do was not give the false impression that somehow our relations had been very good, but instead to say they were very complicated. 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. Of course, some people of faith find it easier. ), this time focusing on the global food crisis. There were very good times and very bad times between us. So I don't buy it. He said, "If you want to fight, if what matters to you is not quality of life" And my mother said, "I'm not interested in quality of life." 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. 80% MARRIED 80% of these people are married, and 20% are single. Sontags pencilled notes in a banal brochure of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society inspire Rieffs reflection on that astonishing mix of gallantry and pedantry that was one of her hallmarks. He notes my own grave failings as a person (above all, I think, my clumsiness and coldness). The voices of the two characters fuse in a terrifyingly assonant duet. Nunez, who was twenty-three-year-old David Rieffs twenty-five-year-old girlfriend and lived in the apartment with him and Sontag for more than a year, stresses that the time Im talking about was beforebefore the grand Chelsea penthouse, the enormous library, the rare editions, the art collection, the designer clothes, the country house, the personal assistant, the housekeeper, the personal chef., Nunezs short book (its a hundred and forty pages) raises the ethical question that Nunez herself must have wrestled with: Is it ever O.K. 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. She was happy to trade in her jeans for silk trousers and her loft apartment for a penthouse. But I don't think she would have repudiated a lot of the essays she wrote. You were probably 12 or 13 at the time. One time, weren't the odds incredibly stacked against her? Why is she going to pick up her son? I would've liked to have said certain things to her. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, and a past contributor to Salon, he's reported on war-ravaged countries and carved out his own reputation as an acute analyst of foreign policy. in history in 1978. 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. Once she died, I asked the other people in the room to leave. But she was one to whom it was just terrible news. 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." 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. Susan Sontag married Rieff the following year. But I also decided that I was going to leave out certain things. There was. My mother was a prodigy as a child. It turned out that if she wanted to try something rather than palliative care during the last months of her life, there was one possibility. David Rieff is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. There's no gushing between mother and son or deathbed reconciliations. . Which was certainly true of my mother. If Mosers feelings about Sontag are mixedhe always seems a little awed as well as irked by herhis dislike for Philip Rieff is undiluted. Learn How rich is He in this year and how He spends money? He was a commander in the Armenian army in Nagorno-Karabakh fighting Azerbaijan during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the early 1990s.. Melkonian left the United States and arrived in Iran in 1978 during the beginning of . But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion, does the prospect of dying lead to dread? 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! . Monte Melkonian (Armenian: ; November 25, 1957 - June 12, 1993) was an Armenian-American revolutionary and left-wing nationalist militant. Features Lord of the Ring November 1996 By Gay Talese. 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. 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. By David Rieff. When the diaries resume, it is in a mood of settled frustration with the misalliance. A pair of pliers sat on top of the TV setfor changing channels since the knob for that purpose had broken off. In the end, I chose to do that. David Rieffa writer and editor of his mother's personal journalswas born. 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. The New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson explains how they began, and what will happen if the planets great green lung continues to burn. Named Fulbright Professor University Munich, 1959-1960, Guggenheim fellow, 1970, Sometime fellow All Souls College, Oxford. Chronik eines angekndigten Todes: David Rieff, der Sohn von Susan Sontag, erzhlt von dem Kampf seiner Mutter gegen den Tod. I'm not a confessional person. Rieff chose to bury her in Paris' Montparnasse cemetery, steps from Simone de Beauvoir, and in the posthumous company of Jean-Paul Sartre, Emile Cioran, and Raymond Aron. 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. The mother pleads with the son to tell her that the excruciating treatment is worth enduring because it will save her life. They had sex on several occasions, in hotels. 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. She had a basis for thinking it wasn't hopeless when a doctor said it was. 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. Married Alison Douglas Knox, December 31, 1963. Why do people speak to biographers about their late famous friends? Welcome; Issues; David Rieff was born on 28 September, 1952 in Boston, MA, is a Non-fiction writer, policy analyst. Rieff (who did not credit her) got a job at Brandeis University, and in the. His father, the sociologist Philip Rieff, wrote his own masterpiece, "The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud." Coming out is at issue, in fact. You could set the record straight. tell funny things) in his presence. He mocks his fake upper-class accent and fancy bespoke-looking clothes. 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. Yes, the library as well. I will write prefaces to these journals, which will contain biographical material, and a future biographer may find them somewhat useful. And I really looked. On the contrary, she was very pleased that I was a writer and encouraged me in every way. I think the latter comment is in the context of talking about guilt that I think all survivors feel. During this time, I began my transition to the . Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster. Sontag did not want to be an academic; she wanted only to write. 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. That seems just right. They weren't mine to keep. How should she be remembered? But I didnt like her. He was, Moser writes, speaking for many others. In my experience, lots of people are terrified of dying. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. Arts Fair Beckett's Eire December 1986 By David Rieff. They're stand-alone projects. By the time of Susans birth, in 1933, he had his own fur business and was regularly travelling to Asia. 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. I was coming back from about a month in Israel/Palestine, where I was trying to do a story on Yasser Arafat. 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. They don't have to feel so bad that the person is going. He married his 17 year-old student Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s. In the preface to the first volume, published in 2008, under the title Reborn, Rieff confesses his uncertainty about the project. Vanity Fair Archive. And I decided, finally, that I would tell the truth about anything that I could tell the complete truth about. So after I'm gone, nobody is going to be able to publish them. In fact, I think once you write a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. No, I think that explains it. But when the bone marrow transplant started to go wrong soon after it took place, I didn't think she would make it. So I don't think she was at all unique. I don't want to romanticize the end of life, but we never had the kinds of conversations I would've liked to have had with her. 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. They are specks on it. But that doesn't mean that was what was most valuable about her work. Via NYRB. In the end she couldn't even roll over unassisted. If the journals authenticate Mosers dire portrait, his interviews with friends, lovers, family members, and employees deepen its livid hue. So not just her papers, but the books, too? In his account of Sontags worldly success, Moser shifts to a less baleful register. He married his 17 year-old student Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s. 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. In 1938, while in China, Jack died, of tuberculosis, leaving Mildred with five-year-old Susan and two-year-old Judith to raise alone. 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? The world received the diaries calmly enough; there is not a big readership for published diaries. Among them was the lie she told about the price of her apartment on Riverside Drive, because she wanted to seem like she was an intellectual who drifted into a lovely apartment and did not spend a lot of money on real estate, like a more bourgeois, ordinary person. But by the time of Annie Leibovitzs protectorship her self-image had changed. 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. It's just that she changed her mind about the novel. 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. Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best of Our Knowledge." Advertisement "She was brilliant," said Turnbow, who. I think it's the commonplace guilt of survivors. Sontag gave birth to David when she was only nineteen, and it gave her pleasure when, as a young adult, he was taken for her brother. Help me believe I might make it." Do you think you became a writer because of your mother's example? Why do you think she was so dismissive of her essays? What I've left out, people will be able to go to UCLA and read. It's funny. By David Rieff. Get me rewrite! the city-room editor barks into the phone in nineteen-thirties comedies about the newspaper world. His father, whom Sontag divorced, was Philip Rieff, author of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 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." . People visiting for the first time were clearly surprised to find the celebrated middle-aged writer living like a grad student. 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 have a library anyway. That's a fact. We had a complicated relationship. 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? Mildred, Susans mother, who accompanied Jack on these trips, was a vain, beautiful woman who came from a less raw Jewish immigrant family. But my mother wasn't a person of faith. In 2004, his mother, Susan Sontag, died from a brutal form of blood cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome. Rieff did sociology on a grand scalesociology as prophecydiagnosing the ills of Western society and offering a prognosis and prescription for the future. Do you think her great achievement was the fiction she wrote in her last years? 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. She'd sold them. I felt that I had to do that, whatever my own opinion was. At a time when homosexuality was still being criminalized, Rich had acknowledged her lesbianism, while Sontag was silent about hers. David Rieff. 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. 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. Then I flew back. Although he was not a Christian, his work remains a great gifteven if a complicated and . As David Rieff points out in his illuminating study, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, by 2045 the last survivors of Nazi atrocities will be dead. She had preternatural energy (sometimes enhanced by speed). Biography [ edit] Rieff is the only child of Susan Sontag, [1] who was 19 years old when he was born. It's a long shot: an adult stem-cell transplant, a bone-marrow transplant. By David Rieff Trade Paperback LIST PRICE $18.95 PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! Pathologically so. They wrote her off in the '70s. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir is published by Granta, 12.99. I don't know. I hope the book is helpful in that way. Sontags love life was unusual. Education: Princeton University, A.B., 1978. He, knowing that the treatment has almost no chance of succeeding, tells her what she wants to hear. 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