Habits of Hope (The Australian, 10/05/2008)

David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir
MUP; $27.95; 180pp

‘During the months I watched my mother die,’ writes David Rieff in this haunting memoir, ‘I was increasingly at a loss as to how I could behave toward her in ways that actually would be helpful. Mostly, I felt at sea.’

‘Mostly, I felt at sea’: the last phrase introduces the metaphor of which the book’s title is an elaboration, but also enacts the feeling it describes: when things get tough, we fall back on cliché, and the clichés surrounding death are legion.

Swimming in a Sea of Death is the story of how two intelligent people confront both death and its attendant clichés, be they medical euphemisms such as ‘quality of life’ or the hackneyed inanities of the self-help crowd. This confrontation is all the more affecting for the fact that Rieff’s mother was Susan Sontag, whose life’s work it was to challenge the cliché, the a priori, the taken-for-granted. Indeed, in one of her most famous essays, ‘Illness as Metaphor’ (1978), she trained her laser-like intelligence on the very subject of disease and its meanings, suggesting that society tends to ascribe a moral significance to certain illnesses (tuberculosis in the nineteenth century; cancer, and later AIDS, in the twentieth). Here, however, it is not the meanings society ascribes to particular illnesses but the concrete fact of illness itself with which she has intellectually to contend. The spectacle is a harrowing one. Determination doesn’t get any grimmer than this.

The author of At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (2005), Rieff is a journalist and policy analyst who, in March 2004, was returning from the Middle East, where he was researching a piece on the Palestinians. At Heathrow Airport, he phones his mother, who tells him that a recent blood test has shown up positive for cancer cells. The next day, they visit a cancer specialist. The news is not good. In fact, it’s terrible: Sontag has myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a form of blood cancer that will, over time, ‘convert’ to acute myeloid leukaemia (AML).

Like Elias Canetti, whose books she revered, Sontag was entirely unreconciled to death. Having survived breast cancer in the 1970s and a uterine sarcoma in the 1990s, her faith in medicine was adamantine. ‘My mother loved science, and believed in it … with a fierce, unwavering tenacity bordering on religiosity.’ Thus she determined, in Dylan Thomas’s words, to ‘rage against the dying of the light’ – not in any spurious, power-of-positive-thinking way, but by doing what she’d always done – by attempting to master, to ‘absorb’, the facts and, having done so, turn them to her advantage. Nevertheless, Rieff wonders if this approach was not, in the end, just another form of emotional avoidance, of ‘magical thinking’ – more reasoned faith than faith in reason. Certainly, it led to regrettable decisions. Sontag elected for a bone marrow transplant, an impossibly painful operation with little chance of success in her case. As Rieff puts it, I think most movingly: ‘the habits of hope survived her loss of it’.

Rieff’s descriptions of the end are unsparing. Bone marrow cancer stripped his mother of both ‘physical dignity and mental acuity’. ‘If, as I believe, she had imagined herself special, my mother’s last illness cruelly exposed the frailty of that conceit. It was merciless in the toll of pain and fear that it exacted.’ Elsewhere, he writes:

Bedridden in the aftermath of her bone marrow transplant, her muscles soon so flaccid and wasted that she was unable even to roll over unaided, her flesh increasingly ulcerated, and her mouth so cankered that she was often unable to swallow and sometimes unable even to speak, she dreamt (and spoke, when she could speak, that is) of what she could do when she got out of hospital and once more took up the reins of her life.

‘[T]ook up the reins’: again, the cliché seems to announce the underlying hopelessness.

Much has been written about death recently. Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores are only the highlights in a long list of books to tackle the subjects of death and dying. Perhaps it is a feature of a secular society that its inhabitants tend to be fixated on extinction – not swimming in a sea of death, precisely, but up to their ankles in icy water, gazing out on that featureless expanse. Whatever the reason, it has led to some fine literature, of which this book is a fine example.