THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 59
sumed to be inviolate when they allowed
you to know them? Whatever the an-
swer is in the higher reaches of philos-
ophy, the particular instance of Nunez’s
violation provides a valuable corrective
to Moser’s bleak portrait. Rieff, in his
introduction to the second volume of
the diaries (“As Consciousness Is Har-
nessed to Flesh”), writes that Sontag
“tended to write more in her journals
when she was unhappy, most when she
was bitterly unhappy, and least when
she was all right.”
Nunez—who comes across as modest
and likable—gives us wonderful
glimpses of Sontag when she was all
right. She writes of the double dates
that she and David went on with Susan
and the poet Joseph Brodsky. “David
had a car then, and I remember the four
of us driving around Manhattan, four
cigarettes going, the car filled with
smoke and Joseph’s deep, rumbling voice
and funny, high-pitched laugh.” She re-
members Sontag’s “big, beautiful smile.”
She writes of trips that Sontag took her
and David on whose sole purpose was
enjoyment. She does not suppress her
glimpses of Sontag when she was not
all right—when she was at her most
painfully fearful and miserable and im-
possible. And yet, Nunez writes, “I con-
sidered meeting her one of the lucki-
est strokes of my life.”
I
n “Swimming in a Sea of Death,”
David Rieff ’s brilliant, anguished
memoir of Sontag’s last year, he writes
of the avidity for life that underlay her
specially strong horror of extinction—a
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 un-
treatable) form of blood cancer called
myelodysplastic syndrome. “The sim-
ple truth is that my mother could not
get enough of being alive. She reveled
in being; it was as straightforward as
that. 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.”
Moser’s biography, for all its pity and
antipathy, conveys the extra-largeness
of Sontag’s life. She knew more peo-
ple, did more things, read more, went
to more places (all this apart from the
enormous amount of writing she pro-
duced) than most of the rest of us do.
Moser’s anecdotes of the unpleasant-
ness that she allowed herself as she grew
older ring true, but recede in signifi-
cance when viewed against the vast can-
vas of her lived experience. They are
specks on it. The erudition for which
she is known was part of a passion for
culture that emerged, like a seedling in
a crevice in a rock, during her emotion-
ally and intellectually deprived child-
hood. How the seedling became the
majestic flowering plant of Sontag’s ma-
turity is an inspiring story—though per-
haps also a chastening one. How many
of us, who did not start out with Son-
tag’s disadvantages, have taken the op-
portunity that she pounced on to en-
gage with the world’s best art and
thought? While we watch reruns of
“Law & Order,” Sontag seemingly read
every great book ever written. She
seemed to know that the opportunity
comes only once. She had preternatu-
ral energy (sometimes enhanced by
speed). She didn’t like to sleep.
T
he writer Judith Grossman, who
knew Sontag slightly at Oxford,
remembered her as “the dark prince,”
who strode through the colleges dressed
entirely in black. And Katie Roiphe also
thought of royalty when she wrote of
“tall and elegant” David Rieff ’s “slight
air of being crown prince to a country
that has suddenly and inexplicably gone
democratic.” The mother
and son bear a strong, not
entirely physical, resem-
blance to each other. An
atmosphere surrounds
them that wafts in from
the same faraway kingdom.
The dedication to “The
Volcano Lover” reads “For
David, beloved son, com-
rade.” Not many parents
think of their offspring as
comrades. 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. Moser wheels
on witness after witness who testifies
to Sontag’s neglect of the baby and child
David, and to her sometimes unwin-
ning behavior toward him when he was
an editor at Farrar, Straus. He is not above
quoting interviewees who saw fit to ques-
tion David’s devotion to Sontag during
her horrible last year.
In “Swimming in a Sea of Death,”
Rieff confesses that “my relations with
my mother in the last decade of her
life ... 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 in-
tensity of Rieff ’s feeling of (survivor’s)
guilt. The book gives the illusion of life
that good novels do—an illusion that
no novel of Sontag’s was ever able to
achieve. Sontag’s pencilled notes in a
banal brochure of the Leukemia & Lym-
phoma Society inspire Rieff ’s reflection
on “that astonishing mix of gallantry
and pedantry that was one of her hall-
marks.” He notes “my own grave fail-
ings as a person (above all, I think, my
clumsiness and coldness).” The voices
of the two characters fuse in a terrify-
ingly assonant duet. The mother pleads
with the son to tell her that the excru-
ciating treatment is worth enduring be-
cause it will save her life. He, knowing
that the treatment has almost no chance
of succeeding, tells her what she wants
to hear. 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 poi-
soned 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 was
the smartest girl in the
class, but she couldn’t figure
out why she—we—had to
die. If she had survived the
bone-marrow transplant
(as she had survived the
dire treatments for two ear-
lier bouts of advanced can-
cer), “would she have been
reconciled to dying of something else
later on?” Rieff asks. “Are any of us, when
it’s our turn?”
In 1973, Sontag wrote in her journal:
In “life,” I don’t want to be reduced to my
work. In “work,” I don’t want to be reduced to
my life.
My work is too austere
My life is a brutal anecdote
