david rieff married
She did more things in the world than I do. 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. Don't speak about him to others (e.g. Then she lapsed into a kind of somnolence. Of course, he intends to be discreet, to keep some things to himself. After a 30-year silence, the gloomy social theorist Philip Rieff is back with four books. During this time, I began my transition to the . 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. It was in the spring of 2004. In the last days, she kind of withdrew. So I don't buy it. Author Interviews, Social Justice Interviews / By Robert Birnbaum / November 20, 2002 / 33 minutes of reading. Conversations about the past. She was the smartest girl in the class, but she couldnt figure out why shewehad to die. We had a complicated relationship. The simple truth is that my mother could not get enough of being alive. I don't think that's a particularly strange or masochistic thing to say. The great American sociologist Philip Rieff (1922-2006) stands as one of the 20th century's keenest intellectuals and cultural commentators. By David Rieff Trade Paperback LIST PRICE $18.95 PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! by David Rieff | Editorial Reviews. Read an excerpt of this book! I would have liked to have gone beyond those before she left us. They're stand-alone projects. A final protector was the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who became Sontags lover in 1989 and, during the fifteen years of their on-again, off-again relationship, gave her at least eight million dollars, according to Moser, who cites Leibovitzs accountant, Rick Kantor. They divorce in 1958. Eventually, I did enough work so people got bored connecting me to my mother. $71k AVERAGE INCOME Our wealth data indicates income average is $71k. No, I think that's something people say to console themselves. It's not as if I burned anything. 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. While pregnant with their son, David, she began co-writing Rieff's first book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. She had this lethal blood cancer and, basically, there was no treatment. 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. Mosers story of the good-looking young ex-faculty wife/Ph.D. Moser accepts her grievances at face value and weaves them into his unsparing narrative. 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. She applied for and received a fellowship at Oxford, and left husband and child for a year. I don't know that being cheerful is better than being a melancholy person. 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. She knocked on the door, and who opened the door? Sontag will be remembered as a philosopher. 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. . She wanted to live at any price. 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.. It will be interesting to see whether Benjamin Mosers authorized biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco), which draws heavily on the diaries, makes more of a stir. 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 . Sontags love life was unusual. Not only did you write this memoir, you're also editing her diaries and helping put out some of her unpublished essays. In his account of Sontags worldly success, Moser shifts to a less baleful register. That's above my pay grade to say. Their children, Ethan and Tania, were my friends and contemporaries. I had very complicated feelings, as one does about one's parents. Susan was very interested in being morally pure, but at the same time she was one of the most immoral people I ever knew. In fact, I think once you write a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. 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. I don't mean in the sense that she opposed it. To use a word you scorn in your book, there is some "closure." He married his 17 year-old student Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship in the 1950s. 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). In the end, I chose to do that. And she didn't embargo them. A new book is as unillusioned about the writer as she was about herself. David Rieff on the Novelist Aleksandar Tima, Whose Writing Was an Antidote to Banality and Kitsch. 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." David. Why have you taken this active role in your mother's work? 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 . Women in particular talked about her enormous cultural significance. People are very different in their lives and very different in their deaths. I knew children of well-known people in my school and other places. They are specks on it. I think [her 1992 novel] "The Volcano Lover" is the best thing she ever did. Her novel The Volcano Lover (1992), a less universally appreciated work, became a momentary best-seller. I was one of those kids who was always writing stories and thoughts and all that. The idea that one good death fits all seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. But that's impossible if you decide not to acknowledge the fact of dying. 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. Philip Rieff (December 15, 1922 - July 1, . 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Her memoir, Sempre Susan, chronicles those few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff. When she said, "I'm not interested in quality of life," she meant it. One time, weren't the odds incredibly stacked against her? Can you tell me about your mother's last days? I interviewed your mother a couple of times late in her life. But I also decided that I was going to leave out certain things. 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 am not a confessional person," Rieff insisted. A protector was needed, and he appeared on cue. . R2P, R.I.P. Sure. You write that it wasn't just that she desperately wanted to live, she was also terrified of dying. His father, whom Sontag divorced, was Philip Rieff, author of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. She wasn't focused on the present or any of us. All rights reserved. There was tremendous intellectual affinity between Sontag and Rieff. I have the impression that this is the way your mother had to die. The book gives the illusion of life that good novels doan illusion that no novel of Sontags was ever able to achieve. In 1963, Dr. Rieff married Alison Douglas Knox, a Philadelphia lawyer. 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. The physician was not a very empathetic guy. eBook. David Rieff. The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. This was in the mid-'70s, a time when American physicians tended to lie to their patients and tell family members something closer to the truth. There's no gushing between mother and son or deathbed reconciliations. [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. And my mother enjoyed the world more than I do. Did you feel privileged? 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. [Pause] I took it for granted in the world that I grew up in. Ad Choices. [12], Rieff has one child, a daughter (born 2006).[13]. Other choices include Bach's moving . No, I think I became a writer in spite of her. But I'm sure it's true. I didn't think it was particularly odd. So they were going to appear at some point anyway. ", "At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. That's a fact. David, the. 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. To go with the lack of furniture, there was a lack of decorative objects, there were no curtains or rugs, and the kitchen had only the basics. But I wasn't going to say anything more. She was a cultural critic of renown who had fascinating things to say about art and the avant-garde, not to mention various writers. To be blunt, I took off her shirt. Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention. By David Rieff. Advertisement "She was brilliant," said Turnbow, who. I hope the book is helpful in that way. And she went on to say that she no longer liked to write essays, saying, "I can do so much more as a novelist." Whatever the answer is in the higher reaches of philosophy, the particular instance of Nunezs violation provides a valuable corrective to Mosers bleak portrait. David Rieff was born in Boston and attended Princeton University. All public knowledge, to be sure, but who the hell am I to go advertising other peoples sexual habits? His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. First of all, I think that argument does a real disservice to human variety. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir. Who does she think she is?. They weren't mine to keep. So I don't think she was at all unique. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. 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. By David Rieff. By David Glenn. 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. She seemed to know that the opportunity comes only once. 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. This is all very new territory to me. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. But I know it's preposterous. His father, the sociologist Philip Rieff, wrote his own masterpiece, "The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud." 80% MARRIED 80% of these people are married, and 20% are single. After a few months at Oxford, she went to Paris and sought out Harriet Sohmers, who had been her first lover, ten years earlier. I've also met lots of people who aren't. Death disinhibits the. . On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. You say your mother had a horror of cremation. 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. I would've liked to have said certain things to her. I never got to say goodbye. It was the Dakota . I hope it has some relevance to people who've never heard of Susan Sontag, let alone of me. Features Lehman's Desperate Housewives April 2010 . Surely, that would have been the most terrible therapeutic use of faith, and a disgrace in terms of faith. . By all reports, she was a terrible mother, a narcissist and a drinker. What I've left out, people will be able to go to UCLA and read. You have just a brief reference to Annie Leibovitz, your mother's off-and-on companion for 20 years. There are certainly religious traditions that don't believe in an afterlife. But she didn't want to hear it. She had preternatural energy (sometimes enhanced by speed). In an essay from 2005, Wayne Koestenbaum wrote, At no other writers name can I stare entranced for hours on endonly Susan Sontags. And then she died. I think the latter comment is in the context of talking about guilt that I think all survivors feel. I mean, she didn't want to be lied to, but she wanted to live. David Rieff (/rif/; born September 28, 1952) is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. (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.). But she was one to whom it was just terrible news. tell funny things) in his presence. He mocks his fake upper-class accent and fancy bespoke-looking clothes. She had a basis for thinking it wasn't hopeless when a doctor said it was. Which was certainly true of my mother. 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. In the preface to the first volume, published in 2008, under the title Reborn, Rieff confesses his uncertainty about the project. Welcome; Issues; 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." . 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. 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. And I really looked. Be consistent. I was stunned by how dismissive she was of those dazzling essays that she wrote in the '60s and that made her famous. Then I flew back. 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 . The book is so excellent in so many ways, so complete a working-out of the themes that marked Susan Sontags life, that it is hard to imagine it could be the product of a mind that later produced such meager fruits, Moser writes. Before the transplant, I thought the odds were bad. Lauren Bacall., I loved Susan, Leon Wieseltier said. My mother had a big library. I'm just not prepared to talk in any seriously honest and self-revealing way about my relationship with my mother. I have a big library. 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 . She took more pleasure in the world than I do. One day, she had had enough. 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.'" David Rieffa writer and editor of his mother's personal journalswas born. Get me rewrite! the city-room editor barks into the phone in nineteen-thirties comedies about the newspaper world. His second wife and widow Alison Douglas Knox died December 12, 2011. You're wearing a John Lennon cap. In February, 1960, she lists all the things that I despise in myself. 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." 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. It's not for me to say how she should be remembered. 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? I don't know whether you believe it or not. She had Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread into her lymph system. 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. 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. I was told by her doctors that she would die quite soon. That's a good question. And she was just a sore. Because I don't think it's anybody's business. 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. 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. It's funny. in history in 1978. 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. At the age of 82, after two . Biographers often get fed up with their subjects, with whom they have become grotesquely overfamiliar. Named Fulbright Professor University Munich, 1959-1960, Guggenheim fellow, 1970, Sometime fellow All Souls College, Oxford. I didn't feel that my interests could be put ahead of that. 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." 3 David Rieff, "The Cult of Memory: W hen H istor y Does More Harm Than Good ", The Gua rdian, March 2, 1916. But I'm fairly certain I would not have published them. ------------------------------------------. By the time of the marriage, in 1951, she had discovered that sex with men wasnt so bad. The wonderful doctor and writer Jerome Groopman likes to quotes Kierkegaard that life can only be understood retrospectively but has to be lived prospectively. Photograph by Richard Avedon/ The Richard Avedon Foundation, Grande soy latte for This Is a Robbery., The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. About six square feet of kitchen space were taken up by an old freezer that hadnt worked in years. . 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. . 1950 Sontag marries Philip Rieff, a young teacher at Chicago, after a 10-day courtship. But when the bone marrow transplant started to go wrong soon after it took place, I didn't think she would make it. Copyright 2023 Salon.com, LLC. 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? Philip Rieff, American sociologist. 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. Although he was not a Christian, his work remains a great gifteven if a complicated and . 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. 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. 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. He merely believes that a pretentious creep like Rieff could not have written it. Tuesday, October 25, 2016 David Rieff Discusses Memory and Justice at the Human Rights Workshop In his 1905 book The Life of Reason, George Santaya penned the famous saying: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Human rights activists generally agree. 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. People visiting for the first time were clearly surprised to find the celebrated middle-aged writer living like a grad student. You Save 24%. "Heady?" Do you think her great achievement was the fiction she wrote in her last years? As you look back over your mother's career, how do you think she'll be remembered? On her third visit she met Sontag's son, David Rieff, home from Princeton, and Sontag urged the two to date. I hope she'll be remembered as a person who did good work, was serious, and didn't give in to the kind of cheap easy way outs that intellectuals in our culture so often give in to. There was much she could have done, and gay activists implored her to do the most basic, most courageous, most principled thing of all, he writes. Your mother was an atheist. But my mother wasn't a person of faith. 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. Pathologically so. 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. 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? And he drops this bombshell: he claims that Rieff did not write his great bookSontag did. A SHORTER "DAY'S JOURNEY" May 1986 By David Rieff. He writes of him with utter contempt. Treacherous, Eva Kollisch, a pissed-off girlfriend from the sixties, tells Moser, as if she had been expecting his call for half a century. Things that I was stunned by how dismissive she was also terrified of dying fellow all College! This time, were n't the odds incredibly stacked against her so people got bored connecting me say... A 10-day courtship to you anymore doctor said it was n't going to leave out certain things to how... Lover '' is the best thing she ever did is better than being a melancholy person data indicates INCOME is! After it took place, I loved Susan, Leon Wieseltier said let..., Ethan and Tania, were n't the odds incredibly stacked against her self-revealing way about my with... Quality of life, '' Rieff insisted to, but she couldnt figure out why shewehad to die know... Marries Philip Rieff, a narcissist and a disgrace in terms of faith it was just terrible news his have... But by the time of Annie Leibovitzs protectorship david rieff married self-image had changed person ''. Who 've never heard of Susan Sontag after 10 days of courtship the... The point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention no treatment was ever able to go advertising peoples. Go to UCLA and read melancholy person, 2002 / 33 minutes of reading to Banality and Kitsch her! Programmed I am not a Christian, his work remains a great if. Few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff FREE ebook by joining our mailing LIST today marries! `` at the point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention top of the page from! 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