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My wife, Susan Rieff, has devoted herself unstintingly to this book.
- Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), acknowledgments
Susan Sontag
In Remembrance
- Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks (2006), dedication
A NEAR HALF century of estrangement is disguised by the bland ceremonial formality of my epigraphs. These words constitute, as far as I know, the only ones Philip Rieff ever published concerning the woman he married after a ten-day courtship in late November 1950 at the University of Chicago: she was a seventeen-year-old student and he a twenty-eight-year-old sociology instructor. "I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness" are the ominous words Sontag jotted in her diary. The marriage would produce a son in 1952 (the writer David Rieff) and would formally reach a miserable end in 1958, though the year before, Sontag, who was never Susan Rieff save on the acknowledgments page of the first edition of her husband's Freud book, left by herself for England to take a fellowship at Oxford. After a few months, she escaped to Paris and there resumed an affair with a former female lover and experienced an intellectual awakening to what she deemed "new standards of beauty, style, and taste" that by 1965 she would christen "the new sensibility."
In sober contrast to his wife's adventurism - "Z can do anything! . . .I am infinite - I must never forget it" she declared in early diary entries - Rieff resembled more than a little his depiction of his hero Freud, whose "tired wisdom" and "stoic rationality" assures us of nothing "except perhaps, having learned from him, the burden of misery we must find strength to carry will be somewhat lighter." Upon return to her husband and child in 1958 Sontag promptly unburdened herself, asking and receiving a divorce and eventually winning custody of her son. What was left to the devastated Rieff was the bitter irony of earlier having urged Susan, bored at Oxford, to "go to Paris, it must be great fun." This was his "innocence," as his wife described his naïveté to a friend, who responded: "he doesn't know, then, he is cutting his own throat." Life was nastily imitating art: "I have been...