In November, at the end of a newsy letter, Susan wrote her mother: “I sound very busy, but don’t forget for a minute that I’m just as miserable as I’ve always been.”30 Lonely and insecure, Susan would soon rush into one of the most fraught relationships of her life. Merrill urged her to sit in on a sociology lecture taught by a young instructor named Philip Rieff. She had placed out of the class but went anyway—and when, at the end, Rieff asked if anyone wanted to help with some research, Joyce Farber said, “up went her hand, and that’s how she met him.”
Chapter 8
Mr. Casaubon
Philip Rieff joked grimly that his epitaph ought to read: “Book smart, life stupid.”1 It was an acknowledgment of failure. Unlike the shattered figures in the pages of Dickens and Balzac, Rieff never quite failed; he died, in fact, bedecked with a grand title—Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology and University Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania—in a grand Philadelphia house. That house, where he lived with his second wife, the lawyer Alison Douglas Knox, had an important collection of British art, and Rieff had a devoted coterie of faithful admirers among his former students.2
Yet the journey from his origins was so arduous that Rieff was never entirely reconciled to it. Having left the world he came from, he found the world to which he had aspired every bit as unsatisfactory. Susan, “only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,” found a paragon of that ideal in Philip Rieff. Philip started life as a boy from the slums. By car or by tram, Rogers Park to Hyde Park—the north side of Chicago to the south, where the university was located—is a short journey down Lake Shore Drive. In terms of class—the terms that came to matter to Philip—it was as dramatic as the leap Jack Rosenblatt had made, in the same amount of time, from the griminess of the Lower East Side to the leafiness of Great Neck.
In later life, an Ivy League grandee, Philip would become known for a mannered donnishness. His model was the British gentleman in a bespoke suit, with a bowler hat, a gold watch fob, and a walking stick. He spoke in an accent of his own invention that was somewhere to the east of the mid-Atlantic English of American patricians. On a radicalized American campus, the apparel branded him as a reactionary, a label he embraced: he once remarked that walls should be erected around the entire perimeter of the University of Pennsylvania in order to bar entrance to those not, like himself, properly attired.3 Susan Sontag was accused of being a popularizer, but no such accusation would ever be leveled at Philip Rieff: “He once claimed that only seventeen people in the world could really read him,” a reviewer said, “and he wrote at times as if he were trying to whittle that number down.”4
This reviewer, astonishingly enough, was an admirer. Those who did not admire Rieff found his interest in status, in class—in what he eventually called “order”—as obnoxious as his clothes. But such a rigorous insistence on order, which he later assigned the dignity of a sociological principle, could only have come from one profoundly unsure of his own place. And as it happened, this sense of order was precisely what proved irresistible to the young Susan Sontag.
* * *
“The accent I grew up with is ugly,” his son imagined his father saying, to explain his affected speech. As for the clothes: well, where he grew up, “the clothes people wore were not very nice.”5 On both accounts, he was surely right. Like so many of the Jewish writers of Sontag’s generation, Philip Rieff was the child of folks-yidn, “regular Jews” hounded from Europe into the proletarian neighborhoods of American cities. These people stayed connected to each other and to their homelands by their language, Yiddish, and by their associations, from burial societies to synagogues, that even in America were organized according to their origins in the tiny villages of Ukraine and Poland and Romania. In a famous book, Irving Howe called this the “World of Our Fathers.” But for Susan, that world was far more remote—the world, at best, of her grandfathers. In terms of assimilation into America, Philip was two generations behind her.
Susan’s grandparents immigrated as small children; Philip was nearly not even born in America at all. His parents came from a village in Lithuania and reached America in November 1921. People who left Eastern Europe in the years of catastrophe following the First World War and the Russian Civil War were more refugees than immigrants; Philip was born in Chicago on December 15, 1922, and his brother Martin followed two years later. His mother was named Ida Horwitz; his father was named Gabriel—at least until he arrived at Ellis Island. There, petty officials, “being in a hurry, wrote him down as a Joseph,” Rieff said at the end of his life. “So, at an American stroke, he found himself with an American name that meant nothing to him. His own search for meaning in his life in America, his appearance as a man, was harmed by this stroke of American fate.”
The new country robbed his father of his identity, literally, and emasculated him in the process. The immigrant, in every country, does become someone else. For some the experience is traumatic; for others liberating. For his father, Rieff said, the change of name rendered him “a profoundly uncomfortable man. I have certainly transferred some of that self-discomfort to myself.”6
The Rieffs were packed into an apartment so tiny that one person always had to sleep in the bathtub.7 Gabriel/Joseph was a butcher, a lowly profession; the family was not much interested in learning. “They were synagogue-attending people,” Rieff’s son said, “so I suppose they could read something, but they didn’t read, there were no books in the house.” Philip’s ambition was exceptional. His brother Martin, following the family tradition, spent his life working in the meat department at Safeway, a local supermarket. Philip, on the other hand, pursued his academic interests at the University of Chicago.
* * *
For an uprooted person plagued by “self-discomfort,” that university gave him, as it gave Susan, a right way. Susan would later say that she “had the good fortune” to have been elevated by “the most successful authoritarian program of education ever devised in this country.”8 The school, however, only reinforced a streak of authoritarianism already conspicuous in Rieff’s personality. But in the first flush of their acquaintance, he appeared to Susan as a guide to an author who had absorbed her at least since high school. The subject was Freud; he was teaching Moses and Monotheism and Civilization and Its Discontents.
On November 25, 1950, she wrote her fourteen-year-old sister to advise her to watch All About Eve (“an excellent movie”) and to study classical mythology (“Certainly, this is a subject any educated person must know very well”) and then mentioned her new project:
I’m a research assistant to a professor of economics named Philip Rieff who is writing a book. . . . Naturally this is a great honor for me + it would be an education in itself. Besides the work I will do on this book (research + writing) I will take over most of the book-reviewing that Rieff does for various popular + scholarly journals: I’ll read the book + make a précis of it + write the review. Then I’ll give him the précis + the review, which saves him the trouble of reading the book + he corrects what I have written + submits it under his own name. In other words, I’m a ghost writer!9
Only a few days later, she wrote her mother that
I am seeing a great deal of Philip Rieff, + suddenly I am aware that this is really something—a relationship entirely different from any I’ve ever known—Don’t laugh! he’s not handsome—he’s tall + thin with a skeletal face + a receding hairline—he’s frightfully unbohemian + respectable—BUT he’s amazingly brilliant + very kind + a whole lot of things that seem beautiful to me—Can you believe that your icy-hearted offspring is actually feeling these hackneyed emotions??10
Later that very day, Philip “proposed to Susan . . . in the name of our children.”11
She was seventeen. He was twenty-eight. They had known each other slightly more than a week.
* * *
During the Christmas break, Philip followed her to Los Angeles. On January 3, 1951, they were married by a justice of
the peace in Burbank. “Susan and I giggled a little in the middle of it,” Judith said. “We were trying to behave as best we could, but we caught each other’s eyes and we giggled.” Mildred expressed no opinion about the match, and the nuptials were celebrated with a visit to the Big Boy in Glendale, a hamburger joint symbolized by its big-eyed, rosy-cheeked trademark. In her diary, Susan wrote: “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.”
“That was big gossip on campus,” said her friend Minda Rae Amiran, when word reached Chicago. “Marrying your professor was kind of a dream for an academically minded young woman.”12 For a few weeks, they lived a great passion, physical as well as intellectual. In an unpublished memoir written in the third person, Susan wrote of these early days: “They stayed in bed most of the first months of their marriage, making love four or five times a day and in between talking, talking endlessly about art and politics and religion and morals. She anatomized her family and he his; he showed her how worthless her friends were, and confessed that he had none of his own.”13
But early on, Susan started having doubts. “2 days after marriage—he makes a mess of opening soft-boiled egg in cup, shatters (instead of shears) shell—she is repelled.”14 In a diary entry a few years later, she remembered him as “a completely inept unworldly man, whom I had to tutor—to show how to stay in hotels, to call for Room Service, to have a checking account.”15 If it is easy to imagine her contempt for someone who did not know how to perform such basic middle-class operations, it is also easy to imagine his shame when his slum background was revealed to his worldly and beautiful young wife.
Philip, however, had his own clear notions of propriety—and enforced them, already at this young age. His rigor alienated Susan’s friends. Joyce Farber testifies that Philip’s sartorial intransigence was already apparent in his twenties. The three were driving around Chicago, on their way to see The Red Shoes. But Philip refused to go until the ladies changed from blue jeans into skirts. “It was just crazy,” said Joyce. “We never went to see the movie. It stayed in my mind all these years.”
* * *
Susan’s diaries fall uncharacteristically silent during the first years of her marriage. But its first months were significant. She graduated from Chicago at the end of the semester, having spent just two years there. In the summer, she and Philip sailed for Europe. Perhaps already loath to be left alone with him, she invited Joyce along on their honeymoon: Joyce considered going, until her mother put a stop to the plan.
They visited London and Paris. It is unfortunate that almost nothing remains of Susan’s first impressions of the city with whose high culture she would come to be identified, the city where she would be buried. She does not mention the trip at all in her short memoir of this time. She spoke her first words of French at the Gare Saint-Lazare—“La Sorbonne, s’il vous plaît!” she told a cabdriver—and stayed in the Hôtel des Étrangers in the rue Racine, on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, in the heart of the student quarter. It was the hotel where Rimbaud and Verlaine first met, and there Philip and Susan spent their “mute summer,”16 intimidated by the foreign language, inhibited by Philip’s fastidiousness. His social awkwardness made it difficult for him to make friends, as Susan frequently noted: she, throughout her life, was always surrounded by people. Paris was the center of the avant-garde and stood for everything progressive and cosmopolitan, the opposite of conventional Middle America or the red scare then sweeping the country. It was where an American who was not understood at home could become a writer. When the Statendam arrived back in New York, Philip had Henry Miller’s famously scandalous and famously banned Tropic of Cancer in his luggage, the words “Not to Be Imported into Great Britain or U.S.A.” printed prominently on its cover. Because he was a professor, he was not searched at customs.17
“The first of the blows that was to destroy” their marriage came soon after their return. To her horror, Susan realized she was pregnant. “She wept that her life would be over and she must have an abortion,” she wrote in her memoir. “After ugly quarrels and tears and humiliating inquiries among rude and unhelpful acquaintances, an address was found on North State St.” Abortion would not be legal throughout the United States until 1973, and women frequently died of botched procedures. “The era was barbaric,” Joyce Farber said. Susan told her friend that instead of anesthesia the abortionist “turned up the radio loudly” so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her scream.
The volume on the radio was another reminder of Susan’s association of sex with pain, of the disease of her mother’s that had “permeated” her. The episode reminded Mildred of her own childhood traumas, and she was among the “unhelpful acquaintances.” When a panicked Susan called to ask for financial help for the abortion, “my mother went hysterical,” said Judith. Instead of offering her daughter aid or comfort, she handed the phone to fifteen-year-old Judith. Then, as so often in her life, the queen of denial stepped out of the room.
“That really changed their relationship forever,” said Judith, “that refusal of help.”18 From then on, Susan would occasionally try to reconnect, but the days of helpless attachment were over, and by the end no vestige of affection remained.
Even before her pregnancy, she was already struggling to reestablish the primacy of mind over body, which, at Berkeley, she had begun to equalize: “I reject weak, manipulative, despairing lust. I am not a beast, I will not be a futilitarian.”19 After the abortion, she writes, “they ceased to make love as often, he much more than she haunted by the fear of another pregnancy.”20
* * *
Upon their return from Europe, they did not go back to Chicago. Instead, they headed north, to Madison, where Philip was working at the University of Wisconsin with the prominent German sociologist Hans Gerth. Like many of the professors at Chicago, Gerth was a Hitler exile, and his connections to one of the founders of sociology, Max Weber, fascinated Susan and Philip both. “I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not known him,” she said, many years later, upon hearing of his death.21
He gave her mimeographed translations of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, a full decade before critical theory made them household names in humanities departments everywhere.22 Adorno was not old—in his late forties—and though he spent the war in Pacific Palisades, he did not belong to the constellation of Los Angeles exiles—Mann, Stravinsky, Schoenberg—who had great reputations before the war, and whose proximity enthralled the young Susan. The year she went to Wisconsin, he published Minima Moralia, which showed the essayistic potential of the aphoristic style that already characterized her notebooks.
Philip and Susan had a tiny apartment in Madison and ate every night in a diner by the railroad, where they could get a steak for less than a dollar.23 In Madison she had her abortion; in Madison they started working on Freud: first on Philip’s dissertation, “Freud’s Contribution to Political Philosophy,” and then on a book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. This interlude of reading and working was short, since Susan almost immediately became pregnant again. She wanted to go back to the abortionist, but Philip, afraid the operation would kill her, refused. “Then followed a terrible scene in which she banged her head on the floor and begged [Philip] to get out.”24
* * *
They left Madison in June and spent the summer at the senior Rieffs’ apartment in Rogers Park. Susan never wrote about this summer, but for Philip it must have been awkward to be thrown back into the gritty milieu of his childhood, particularly in the company of his pregnant wife. One anecdote survives to give a flavor of the surroundings: one day, when Susan came in, everyone was yelling at Philip’s mother, who, despite her heart condition, was tottering on a ladder as she vigorously scrubbed the ceiling. The reason she gave for this burst of activity was that a house cleaner was coming. “I couldn’t let her think I had a dirty house,” Ida Rieff explained.25
In later years, Philip suggested that the standard bourgeois family was what he ha
d in mind when he married Susan. “I was a traditional man,” he said. “I thought marriage was for having children, a traditional family. I just couldn’t adjust to the kind of family life she wanted. You see, there are families and anti-families. Ours was the latter, I suppose.”26
For all its poverty and lack of polish, the Rieff household was the kind of traditional family—parents and children under one roof—that Susan had never known. The idea of being trapped in that structure terrified her. Though she rarely published the stories she wrote about her own life, she did write them, often in many versions. And she wrote about her marriage most of all, keenly aware, even then, that this precarious time would determine the shape of her life. Once she was married, her will seemed to waver, and the momentum that sped her through her early life began to sputter and ebb. And the loss of control—the loss of self—she experienced in these years was a conundrum all the more intractable because it was one she herself had sought.
So often, in her early years, she had expressed the desire for precisely the kind of relationship, the submissive wifely role, that she found with Philip. “I seem to enjoy punishing myself,” she wrote before leaving home; and, around the same time: “How I long to surrender!” She expressed her feeling toward a high school friend by writing, “My feeling for her is too much of awe, of fear, of being ‘not good enough.’”27 Philip appealed to the side of her that always felt “not good enough.”
One benefit of the authoritarian education Hutchins designed, with its “absolutely rigorously punishing ideal,” was its promise—to students smart enough, to those willing to put in the hours—to equip them to contend with the entire range of civilized thought. Leo Strauss, another émigré who deeply impressed Susan and Philip both, was typical of its great teachers, “such a forceful personality,” said Susan’s friend Stephen Koch, “and so erudite and so polymathically informed that you felt like getting the key to Leo Strauss, you got the key to culture.”28
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