It seems that something has changed for you, and you wanted to engage with your mother more directly in print.
I wanted to engage with her death in print. But I shall not write a biography. I will write prefaces to these journals, which will contain biographical material, and a future biographer may find them somewhat useful. 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.
Do you think you will ever write about your relationship with your her?
God, I hope not.
Why not?
Because I don't think it's anybody's business. It's just prurient as far as I'm concerned.
But you know there will be future biographies of Susan Sontag. You could set the record straight.
Oh, you never set the record straight. People write what they want to write. When Max Brod wrote the famous first biography of Kafka, every future biographer has tried to point out what Max Brod left out. Anyway, I don't want to write a biography of my mother. I don't want to write a memoir of our relationship. But on the other hand, I'm a realist. 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's just the way of the world.
Your book is remarkably self-effacing. 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." You also write that you wish you'd complied more with her wishes during her life and suppressed more of your own. Aren't you being awfully hard on yourself?
No, I don't think so. I think the latter comment is in the context of talking about guilt that I think all survivors feel. 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. 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. I hope the book is helpful in that way.
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?
I do wish that. But I know it's preposterous. I think it's the commonplace guilt of survivors. The wonderful doctor and writer Jerome Groopman likes to quotes Kierkegaard that life can only be understood retrospectively but has to be lived prospectively. That seems just right. The other part -- that she made better use of the world -- I don't think that's self-effacing. That's a fact. If there's one thing I'm vain about, it's that I'm willing to stare facts in the face. And my mother enjoyed the world more than I do. She did more things in the world than I do. She took more pleasure in the world than I do. Those are all facts. I don't think that's a particularly strange or masochistic thing to say.
As you look back over your mother's career, how do you think she'll be remembered? How should she be remembered?
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. 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's above my pay grade to say.
I interviewed your mother a couple of times late in her life. I was stunned by how dismissive she was of those dazzling essays that she wrote in the '60s and that made her famous. 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." And she went on to say that she no longer liked to write essays, saying, "I can do so much more as a novelist." Why do you think she was so dismissive of her essays?
It's funny. I think she's right. 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.
Do you think her great achievement was the fiction she wrote in her last years?
I think [her 1992 novel] "The Volcano Lover" is the best thing she ever did.
But she is most famous for those essays she wrote in the '60s and '70s. She was a cultural critic of renown who had fascinating things to say about art and the avant-garde, not to mention various writers. You're saying that's not how she should be remembered in the future?
It's not for me to say how she should be remembered. I'm not Solon the law giver. I don't think, however, that the fact that she became famous has very much to do with the quality of her work. It's indisputable, as you say, that that's what brought her to national and then international attention. But that doesn't mean that was what was most valuable about her work. But I don't think she would have repudiated a lot of the essays she wrote. It's just that she changed her mind about the novel. She was much more interested in experimental art when she was young than she became later in life. She didn't want to be an essay writer, but she continued to write essays, although they came harder and harder throughout her career.
Your mother was an iconic figure in intellectual circles, not just because of what she wrote but how she looked and acted. Women in particular talked about her enormous cultural significance. She became the model of an intellectual woman who had both great flair and moral profundity. Why do you think she gained that stature?
Why people capture imaginations is a mysterious process. 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. But why she became so celebrated, what the combination of elements were -- her public role in the anti-Vietnam movement and other political events; her looks -- I'm sure it was a complicated combination.
I'm sure you were aware of that mystique as you were growing up, the fact that your mother cut such a distinctive figure. Did you feel privileged? Intimidated?
No, not intimidated. It was a complicated experience. I felt lots of things, not all of them resting easily together. I had very complicated feelings, as one does about one's parents. I mean, this book may be of interest because people have heard of my mother. If that's what it is, there's nothing I can do about it. I hope it has some relevance to people who've never heard of Susan Sontag, let alone of me. But I can't control how people read a book. In fact, I think once you write a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore.
I came across a photo of you and your mother that ran many years ago in Vogue magazine. You were probably 12 or 13 at the time. Her arm is draped over your shoulder. You're wearing a John Lennon cap.
Yeah, it's an Irving Penn picture.
Was it a heady experience to get that kind of attention for a boy at your age?
You mean the Macaulay Culkin syndrome? [Pause] I took it for granted in the world that I grew up in. I didn't think it was particularly odd. I knew children of well-known people in my school and other places. "Heady?" I wouldn't have said.
Do you think you became a writer because of your mother's example?
No, I think I became a writer in spite of her. I don't mean in the sense that she opposed it. On the contrary, she was very pleased that I was a writer and encouraged me in every way. I was one of those kids who was always writing stories and thoughts and all that. Fortunately, I don't keep my journals. So after I'm gone, nobody is going to be able to publish them. Also, I wasn't a prodigy. My mother was a prodigy as a child.
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.'" And I didn't want to go through that. 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. For the first 10 years of my career, that's indeed what happened. Eventually, I did enough work so people got bored connecting me to my mother.
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?
It wasn't conscious but it certainly makes sense. I never thought about it. But I'm sure it's true. It's too obvious not to be true.
I've heard that your mother had a wonderful and vast collection of books in her apartment. What happened to those books?
They were sold to UCLA.
So not just her papers, but the books, too?
Yes, the library as well. It's all at UCLA.
You didn't want the books yourself?
They weren't mine to keep. She'd sold them. I have a library anyway. I come from a line of people who have private libraries. It's a weird thing in this age of the Internet. My mother had a big library. My father had a big library. I have a big library. They're stand-alone projects.
About the writer
Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best of Our Knowledge."
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