By David Rieff
Granta, £12.99
‘In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings,” wrote Susan Sontag when receiving chemotherapy for breast cancer 30 years before her death. “Be cheerful, be stoic, be tranquil.” Facing her last illness, Sontag was none of these things, and David Rieff records his complicity with his mother’s denial of the fatality of her condition. Sontag, famous intellectual, critic and writer, could neither imagine a world without her in it, nor summon up any reserves of spiritual strength for that final journey.
Jews share some concepts of a “world to come”, if only the shady spectre of Sheol. But, however hazy we are on the next life, we share a strong sense of meaning in this life, with a moral imperative to make the world a better place, le’shem shamayim. Susan Sontag, though Jewish, shared none of this. It might have helped her cope since, for her, being alive was about ideas, new sensations, less a sense of purpose towards others, more a sense of what had to be experienced, written, analysed.
Her anger and her despair after the diagnosis of MDS are well chronicled by David Rieff. But the book’s main theme is his collusion with her denial of her impending death. Pervading the whole volume is the sneaking sense that being truthful might have been easier for those left behind.