Confession Perhaps if Teddy Had Tried Again She Would Have Said Yes Excerpt
Female parent superior Susan Sontag photographed in 1972 by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
When the writer shacked upwards with Susan Sontag's son, and his brainy mom, in 1976, 3 was not company.
I kickoff met Susan Sontag in jump, 1976, when she was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help type her correspondence. I had been recommended past the editors of The New York Review of Books, where I'd worked as an editorial assistant. I had recently finished graduate schoolhouse at Columbia and was living on W 106th Street, not far from Susan'due south apartment at 340 Riverside Drive.
We worked in her bedroom, I at her desk, typing on her massive I.B.M. Selectric while she dictated, either pacing the room or lying on her bed. I remember being surprised at how laid-dorsum and chatty she was, much more similar someone my own age than someone of my mother's generation. But she was always this way with young people, and I would find in that location wasn't the usual generational distance between her and her son, either. A year younger than I, David, who'd dropped out of Amherst, had recently returned to school and was now a sophomore at Princeton. He had a place to stay in Princeton, just near of the week he lived with his mother. His (soon to be our) bedroom was right next to hers.
I'g pretty certain it was the third time I went to "340" that I first met David. I was leaving just equally he was coming dwelling house, and Susan briefly introduced u.s.a.. I was surprised when, a day or so later, she called to inquire me to come back — not the following calendar week, as we'd planned, only rather that same afternoon. I said yes, of course, no problem. She'd sounded urgent. I didn't want to permit her down. But the truth was, I was in bad shape. I had simply discovered that my fellow, with whom I'd been living for about two years, had started seeing someone else. At the time, both he and the new girlfriend were working at The New York Review, where the thing was an open up secret. I didn't want Susan to hear about it. What I didn't know was that she'd already heard about it. That was why she'd called.
It turned out that the last fourth dimension I'd been to 340, subsequently Susan had introduced David and me and I had gone home, he had asked her if I had a beau and she'd told him yep. Merely so almost immediately she heard from one of her friends at the Review that that relationship was probably over. She encouraged David to phone call me. He was shy. She was not. Instead of working that day, she took us out for a pizza.
My boyfriend and I broke up, and I rented a room in the apartment of a couple of students nearby. My plan was to stay there merely for the summer and so find a identify of my own. Meanwhile, David and I started dating. He was about shockingly smart — at times he could seem even smarter than Susan — but, even more appealing, he was relentlessly, brilliantly funny. Similar me, he wanted to be a writer. That summer, during most of which Susan was away in Paris, David and I spent more and more than fourth dimension together. By September, I had moved in with him.
At that time, partly because of her highly regarded and popular series of essays on photography, and partly because of her outspokenness most having cancer, Susan was riding a 2d wave of glory (the beginning, of course, having crested in the '60s, with the advent of her get-go critical essays, most famously "Notes on 'Camp' "). The phone rang all day long, and Susan had no want to become an answering machine or service. I had heard before I ever saw information technology that Susan's apartment was a famous crash pad. While I lived at 340, there was oftentimes someone sleeping in the living room, and there was a steady stream of visitors. Susan loved to go out, but she also loved to have people, including those she was coming together for the first fourth dimension, come to her. It seemed to me I was forever opening the door to some stranger, or coming home to find someone waiting for her (sometimes for up to an hour) in the kitchen, where, though information technology was the smallest room in the house, she tended to receive guests.
3rd person From far left: the author Sigrid Nunez in 1977 with Susan Sontag, who had an especially close relationship
with her son, David Rieff (correct).
David, of course, was used to his female parent's busy, people-filled life. As she liked to say, he had grown upwards "on coats," significant she had dragged him forth to the many parties and "happenings" and other events she had non wanted to miss simply because she had a young kid. (She would besides accept him to the movies and allow him slumber in his seat while she watched a double feature.) In fact, though he had a much stronger sense of privacy than Susan did, similar her he grew bored and restless when things were too repose. Both he and she disapproved of the monkish streak in me; in their eyes information technology showed a sure lack of vitality and curiosity — very bad in a would-exist writer! To David it suggested a kind of weakness; a weakness that, if indulged, would make me wearisome. Susan believed that the reclusive type was, at center, cold and selfish. I should modify.
And I did try to change. For a time, I tried very hard to keep up. After all, information technology wasn't that I didn't enjoy going out, too. And of course I was excited to see the many vivid writers and artists that Susan knew.
Merely, when y'all're in honey, what is it that you want more than anything else in the world? Looking back, I can hardly remember times when David and I were alone. Once or twice I went and stayed with him for a night in the room he rented in Princeton, and I recall wishing dolefully that we could be there all the time.
Susan used to say how much easier it was for her to work in her room if she knew at that place were other people elsewhere in the apartment. But the merely time I could work seemed to exist when the apartment was empty.
For a while I tried getting up very early on, before I had to go to my job, and locking myself in the quondam maid's room that I used for a study. Just equally shortly as Susan was awake she would knock and ask me to bring together her in the kitchen. She couldn't bear to take her morning coffee or read the newspaper alone. In fact, fresh out of bed she seemed especially in need of an ear. She would talk nonstop, almost whatever came into her head, and for some reason at that hour she was frequently roiling with indignation. Something about her life that was bothering her, or mayhap something she saw on the front page of The Times, would ready her off. David found this morning Susan difficult. He'd sit at the kitchen counter with his back turned, deep in the paper, face concealed by his long dark hair.
She had always hated beingness alone. For her, having to practice certain things, such as eat a meal, without company was like a punishment. She would rather accept gone out to dinner with someone she didn't even much treat than eat in alone.
Information technology wasn't enough that she had spent the evening out with friends. When she came home, though it was tardily, though David and I might be already in bed, she would knock. "May I come up in?" (The shyness in her vocalization through that closed door was heartbreaking.) David and I slept on a mattress on the flooring. A small sofa stood near information technology. She would settle on the sofa, light a cigarette and begin telling the states about her evening. I sometimes fell asleep while she was still talking.
Only in fact, there had probably never been a fourth dimension in her life when she feared being alone as much every bit she did then. Not just had she been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer; she was also slowly breaking up with the adult female who'd been her companion for many years. She fabricated no attempt to hide how devastating information technology would exist for her if David were to move out. But she ever insisted that it was non primarily neediness but rather dear that made her want to keep her son with her forever. Theirs had never been an ordinary mother-son human relationship, she said. In fact, she told me she had never really wanted David to recollect of her equally his mother. "I'd rather he see me as — oh, I don't know — his goofy large sister." ("More than like my brother" and "my best friend" was how she said she unremarkably thought of him.) Afterwards all, she had been only 19 when he was born.
To David she became "Susan" while he was still a boy, and his father, the sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff, was "Philip"; David told me he could not imagine calling them Mom and Dad. And whenever Susan spoke to David nigh his father, whom she had divorced when David was vi, she referred to him equally Philip also. David rarely said "my mother" when speaking of her, and I would have felt strange proverb "your mother." It was sempre Susan.
At that place was nothing wrong with the three of usa sharing a roof, she said. Indeed, in other cultures an arrangement like ours would have been mutual. And, tell her, please: What was so terrific about the nuclear family? Hadn't she publicly pronounced information technology "a disaster"? (She also oftentimes railed against couples: no matter how interesting one or both people might be when you saw them separately, when you saw them together they were invariably boring.)
"Don't be and so conventional," she said when I expressed doubts almost the three of u.s.a. ever being together. "Who says we accept to alive like everyone else?" (The truth was, I had grown up in a very unconventional household, and ordinary conservative existence was, I confess, not only attractive only frankly exotic to me.)
What did it thing what other people said?
She was correct: I should non have cared what other people said. But I did care. And what they said was shocking. People felt free to say things to me they would never have dared say to her. That there was feverish prurient involvement swirling around 340 was something I already knew. Before I always met Susan or David, I'd heard the talk. Now people came straight out and asked the absurd: Was information technology truthful? Had they had sex together? Sometimes, rather than being asked, I was told: They must accept had sexual activity together. My presence in the household seemed to intensify speculation, bringing the pot to a eddy. (The fact of Susan's bisexuality was, of course, highly pertinent.) What was going on up there?
I found it difficult that Susan wanted to talk and so much about her and David'due south history, and that that history was filled with and so much disharmonize and resentment. She would tick off all the things she had done for David, her confront flushed, her voice rising. With great bitterness she would bring up her own mother: a cold, narcissistic animal of a woman who Susan said had totally neglected her. Susan'south father had died when she was 5. Because she barely knew him, she had had to invent him. Naturally, she idealized him. She imagined him, though he had not been highly educated, endowed with a good mind and other qualities she could adore. She liked to think that, had he lived, he would take been a practiced begetter to her. Her husband, of course, had been a terrible father. But she believed that her son would make not just a good simply a great father. This was something she said all the time — as she said all the time that she believed that she had been a great female parent.
When she asked me in one case if I thought I'd brand a skillful mother and I told the truth — I didn't know — she was put off. "How tin can you say such a thing about yourself?" It was every bit if I'd just confessed to being a bad person. She said she had never had any doubts about herself in this regard. In fact, not having had more children was ane of her biggest regrets. She spoke of the "criminal" feeling she experienced every fourth dimension she saw a infant or a young child. "I want to kidnap them!" Even the sight of a baby animal could wrench her. She once saw a baby elephant upwards close, she said, and was and then overwhelmed "I sobbed and sobbed."
But she e'er spoke of her own childhood as a fourth dimension of complete colorlessness, a misery she could non look to be over. I have always had trouble understanding this (how could anyone's childhood, even a less than happy 1, exist described as "a total waste"?), merely she had wanted David's babyhood to be over as speedily as possible, too. (And as it turned out, he likewise would wait back on his childhood as a miserable time, using the very phrase Susan oftentimes used in describing her ain: a prison sentence.) It was as if somehow she didn't really believe — or, perhaps, better to say, she saw no value — in childhood.
And for all her pride in her motherhood, and for all her laments about non having had more kids, she was not maternal. From the time she learned she was significant till the twenty-four hours she went into labor, she never saw a dr.. ("I didn't know you were supposed to.") And she told this story: "When I was writing the last pages of 'The Benefactor,' I didn't consume or sleep or modify dress for days. At the very cease, I couldn't even stop to light my own cigarettes. I had David stand up by and calorie-free them for me while I kept typing." When she was writing the last pages of "The Benefactor" information technology was 1962, and David was 10.
She was not a mom. Every once in a while, noticing how dirty David's spectacles were, she'd pluck them from his confront and wash them at the kitchen sink. I remember thinking how information technology was the only momish thing I ever saw her exercise.
People who'd known Susan for years, who'd watched David grow upwardly, said they didn't believe she would e'er let him become. It had nothing to practice with cancer, they said; she would never allow another person come first in her son'south life. She herself said that, because of the intense, complicated nature of their relationship, "David and I have e'er needed to have a third person around." She didn't like the word "girlfriend" much; she preferred "friend," though she sometimes referred to me jovially as David's consort. She referred to the three of u.s. as the duke and duchess and duckling of Riverside Bulldoze. I knew that wasn't skilful. Information technology didn't help, either, that whatsoever fun thing David wanted to do she wanted to do with him: lawn tennis lessons; motorcycle lessons. And although she kept telling me she would be happy to support non simply David and me but any child of ours as well, she also said that for David to become a male parent anytime presently would ruin his life.
Why don't we ii just stick to oral sex? she suggested. "And so you lot won't have to worry near birth command." There was a 4th person at the lunch table the day Susan said this, and it was he who broke the silence. "Looks similar Susan doesn't want to be a grandmother."
She took a deep jiff before she spoke. "David tells me yous're thinking of moving out and that it's because of me." Information technology was a year and a half later, and we were where it all began: in her room, I sitting on her desk-bound chair, she on her bed. "I'k sorry," she said, modulating her vocalism and hitting her consonants every bit she did when she wished to sound in control, "but I cannot take that responsibility."
There really wasn't much I could say to that.
She said, "My beloved, yous haven't thought this through. You don't go from being a couple that lives together to a couple that lives apart. Y'all're making a huge error."
I'd have only myself to blame if we broke upwardly.
We would have broken up anyhow. We would accept lasted longer, definitely. But in the finish, things would not have worked out. Susan could have lived on the moon, and David and I would not accept worked out. I've known this for a long time. What I don't know is how nosotros managed to stagger on for another year and a half after I moved out.
When I was packing, Susan told me I could take anything I wanted. I took two toys I had plant in the depths of David'south closet: a Raggedy Andy doll and a pocket-size brownish bear with one eye missing. (Years later, Susan would laugh off an interviewer'south annotate regarding David's complaints near his unhappy childhood, saying she remembered his room being full of toys, and challenge: "I still have his teddy bear.")
In the years after David and I broke upward, I had more contact with Susan than I had with him, though it never amounted to much. Once, not long afterward David had finally moved into a place of his own, she talked to me most being in therapy — a huge surprise, for I remembered how much disdain she in one case had for people who resorted to therapy, or, worse, took antidepressants. Among people she knew, the ones she seemed to respect about were the ones who, no matter how unhappy they were, had resisted therapy. Simply, in her early 50s, her own chronic irritability and discontent shaded into something darker. She establish herself crawling back into bed soon after getting up, and her retention and concentration were at times so poor that, she said, "I actually idea I might accept had a mini stroke." She consulted a neurologist who fix her straight: no stroke, just your typical midlife clinical depression. She'd started seeing a psychiatrist; for a while she'd even taken Elavil. And now, psychotherapy had become one of her enthusiasms.
She talked at length almost her sessions, in her open, confiding way, sharing what she'd told the therapist and what the therapist had told her — amidst other things, that one of Susan'southward bug was that she was surrounded by narcissists whom she didn't sympathize because she was non a narcissist herself. ("What nearly y'all?" she asked me earnestly. "Are you a narcissist?")
The therapist also wondered: Why did you try to make a father out of your son?
At starting time when she heard this, Susan said, she was shocked. She didn't know where the therapist could have come up with that! But so it hit her, she said: she had tried to do that. And we both started to cry.
Adapted from ''Sempre Susan,'' to be published in Apr by Atlas & Co.
Source: https://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/suddenly-susan/
0 Response to "Confession Perhaps if Teddy Had Tried Again She Would Have Said Yes Excerpt"
Post a Comment