Thursday, September 26, 2019

In A Rising Wind



Contrary to popular belief right now, this is not a time to listen to politicians, hacks, miscreants, idiots, and narcissists.  This is the time for poets.  The demoralized and exhausted people need words to lift their spirits.  We need art, literature and culture, the kind that celebrate our humanity, our uniqueness, our spirit, our collective consciousness.

This may seem counter-intuitive.  Things are changing so fast and every moment is a “breaking news” moment.  But this is a time to look up; this is a time for the bigger picture.  Empires fall, humanity and nature remain.  We must have the patience and fortitude to see this through and know that there is a distant road, a time after all of this hoopla.  The world’s story is long and the ending has not yet been written.

In that spirit of looking up, I return to a favorite poem by Stanley Kunitz entitled “The Layers.”  Kunitz’s life was marked by tragedy even before he was born.  His father, a Russian Jew who eked out a living as a dressmaker in Massachusetts, suffered death by suicide after filing for bankruptcy.  He died in a public park after drinking acid.  His distraught mother removed all traces of her husband from the family home.  Kunitz often cited his father’s act as a defining influence on his life and work.

Financial hardship followed the family as did tragedy:  Kunitz’s stepfather died of a heart attack when his stepson was only fourteen.  The boy had several jobs in his younger years to support himself and his family.  He went on to graduate with distinction from Harvard University, however, when he inquired about enrolling for a doctoral degree, he was told that no white Protestant students would like to be taught by a Jew.  Instead, he entered the professional workforce and held a number of jobs involving writing and editing.  During the Second World War, he served in a noncombatant position after declaring himself a conscientious objector.  Mainly, he acted as a teacher, and that was the job he sought after the war.

He wrote a number of books of poetry and prose, and was named Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress twice in 1974 and 2000.  Here, then, is “The Layers”:

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.


Indeed, are we ever done with the changes?  Of change, death is just one more.  We could say, then, that change is all of life.

May we have the courage and fortitude to be moral, to have empathy, to pursue the truth.  We must find the strength, in the winds of change, to stand. There is no other way.





Friday, September 20, 2019

River of Fire


From the time of Dead Man Walking (Vintage, 1994), Sister Helen Prejean has been a force to be reckoned with on her mission to stop the death penalty and its extraordinary application to people of color, and, even more, to people who ultimately are exonerated.  Her advocacy is simple and direct:  be present as witness to the execution of a living person by the state.  She also reaches out to families and loved ones of the victims.

Her latest book, River of Fire:  My Spiritual Journey (Random House, 2019), is a memoir of her early years as a novice nun and details what led to her becoming one of the fiercest opponents of the death penalty in this country, an advocate, as she explains in the book, who has changed the position of the Catholic Church, an organization that is notoriously difficult to sway.

The book begins with an epigraph attributed to Saint Bonaventure:  “Ask not for understanding, ask for the fire.”  Prejean has done that consistently in her life, risking her support from her community, the Sisters of Saint Joseph (CSJ), and often putting herself at odds with the Church and American law and order culture.  In the book, she describes the transition of her early life from a novice to a teacher in a white suburban parish in Louisiana to working in one of the most fearsome projects in the city of New Orleans, the St. Thomas Project, an African-American low income housing facility.  She does not simply minister to the people she meets who are often living in extremis, she lives with them in poverty and crime.




For most non-Catholics, it is difficult to imagine the sea change that the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965 initiated.  Sister Helen sketches out the revolution.  Pope John XXIII called the council in an effort to address the changing world of the 1960s with the assassinations, free love, the Vietnam War and the revision of cultural norms that had been in place since the end of the Second World War.  Moving forward, the Church would conduct liturgies in the vernacular instead of Latin, that most dead of languages; nuns would be encouraged to drop their distinguishing habits for the garb of the every woman; the priest would now face the congregation during Mass; and, most disturbing to many diehard Catholic clergy, a focus on spiritual outreach and the opening up, or reframing, of the idea of Christian vocation.  Prejean explains that “Top notch holiness was no longer only for nuns and priests…everyone in the Church is called to follow the way of Christ fully and radically.  Everyone is called to be a saint.  Everyone is called to pray deeply.  Everyone is called to act boldly against injustice.”  This will have a profound effect on Prejean and her mission as a human being.

Early on in the book, though, there are some troubling issues.  As Prejean enters the novitiate, a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, she becomes a “spouse of Christ,” which she says is the most lofty “state of life for a Christian, higher than marriage and the single life.”  In her picture of the daily functioning of the novices and their superiors, she describes surrendering any sense of self at a time when most young people are coming into self-actualization:  embracing self-esteem, a healthy self-image, developing self-awareness.  She voluntarily withdraws from “the world and its temptations” to “contemplate and achieve union with God.”  She will take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, but the tension here is clear:  how to deal with being reduced to child-like status at the start of adulthood.

Prejean must ask permission to drive a community car, she must clarify where she is going when she leaves the convent, she must clear her friendships, and, most alarming, she writes:  “When you become a nun, you can never again step into your family home—not for a meal or a family reunion or a marriage or anything except for the death of one of your parents, and even then, if they live in a city away from the convent, you may have to decide whether you’ll visit before they die so you can say farewell or wait and attend the funeral.  As a nun you are strictly forbidden to sleep away from the convent.”

Some of this is attributable to what Prejean takes from her order’s founding in Le Puy-en-Velay, France that “to attain union with God demanded nothing less than ‘annihilation of self.’”  How can someone make her way in the world, fight against injustices, stand up and bear witness against oppression and discrimination, if she has no sense of self?  It seems paradoxical, but one would need a sense of self first before becoming selfless.  Nuns do not have money to purchase books and must ask the order for the funds and permission.  Nuns need the okay of the community to do the things many of us take for granted as adults in the world.  Becoming a nun, in Prejean’s account, means renouncing one’s independence and adulthood to take vows that effectively render them children.

This is never more clearly contradictory than in the chapters where Prejean describes two significant friendships in her life.  One is a fellow sister with whom she develops a life-long bond.  It is, in her words, a special friendship.  Although there is nothing overtly sexual in Prejean’s accounting, it is more like a partnership.  The two women often find themselves living apart, but they vacation together and see each other when Prejean goes to Louisiana for community meetings and activities.  The other relationship is with a priest, Father William, a fiercely intelligent yet deeply flawed man who really enters into a romantic liaison with Prejean that spans decades.  The fact that they cannot consummate the relationship in sexual love, much less marriage, makes him a tragic figure in the story.  Their union also seems to stretch the borders of chastity—they call it the “third way,” which is where a priest and a nun commit to love each other with a “preferential love” but stay in their vocations and remain celibate.  There is no sex, but the terms are really a matter of semantics in regards to commitment and fidelity.  Is not the vow of celibacy so the priest or nun can devote him or herself fully to God and the people?

The other issue here involves what Sister Helen takes as her life’s work:  opposing the death penalty.  She writes early on in the book that “For sixteen centuries the Catholic Church has unerringly taught…that the state has the right—indeed, the duty—to keep society safe by imposing the death penalty on violent criminals.”  Later on she writes that in her younger years, this support sounded “morally right” to her.  Obviously, this is building toward her awakening and realization of her life’s work, but how can a person who believes in the Imago Dei, the image of God in every person, support the execution of that person?  The Catholic Church vigorously opposes abortion of a fetus, a person or, as science tells us, a group of cells that cannot survive outside the womb.  Yet, it advocates killing a living, breathing human being because he or she is a danger to society when that same person could be locked up for the remainder of his or her life.  To me, it is a failure of critical thought:  the Church should advocate that all life is sacred.  This means coming out against abortion, but also opposing capital punishment, protecting nature, and recognizing climate change.  All life is sacred, or it isn’t.

Thankfully, though, Sister Helen Prejean had her great awakening, and her advocacy for death row inmates has led to changes in the law in some states, and changes to the policies of the Catholic Church.  There is still more work to be done, and there will need to be others who step up and take the courageous position Prejean has taken.  She, however, is not resting with that one issue.  She ends the book with a letter to Pope Francis advocating for the respect and dignity of women.  She writes:  “I am saddened to encounter over and over a very deep wound at the heart of the Church, a wound which, I am convinced, infects and weakens every aspect of Church life.  That wound…is the way the Church treats women.”

River of Fire lacks the intensity of her other books, but it does show us how the woman became the advocate.  There are some troubling issues here, but Sister Helen Prejean is a good storyteller with a good story.  It is history, culture and religion, but most of all, it is human.



Friday, September 13, 2019

Sontag


Susan Sontag is the closest we have in America to a public philosopher; she is our Jean- Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir rolled into one.  Benjamin Moser gives her to us again in his new, massive biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco, 2019).  He does a masterful job with a prickly and reticent subject who in life, managed to stymie anyone who dared to write about her.  In her interviews, she was combative and argumentative even though she reveled in her status as an intellectual and preeminent woman of letters.  Moser reveals to us that Sontag, who died in 2004, was not the self-assured novelist and essayist we remember, but someone with deep and abiding insecurities that she struggled with all her life.  As he writes, Sontag waivers between the self-lacerating “I’m no good,” and the conceited and self-absorbed “I’m great.”  Moser, drawing from Sontag’s hundreds of journals, exhaustive interviews with family and intimates, her published writings, and speeches and letters, gives us a woman struggling most of her life to define herself and shake off her feelings of inadequacy and depression.

Susan Sontag was born in New York City in 1933.  Her family life was not stable, so Sontag retreated into the world of books and literature.  She also loved opera and films.  Art was her secret world free of sadness and depression.  From an early age, she kept journals, two volumes of which were published in 2008 and 2012, edited by her son, David Rieff.  These journals reveal someone who was self-aware from the start.  She wanted to be a novelist, but instead, much of her fame came to rest on her essays, the depth and breadth of which made her a critic with sharp views on aesthetics and a keen eye for moral pollution.  She often told people she never had a childhood, and as a result, she retreated into books.  She learned to read by two or three.  Adding to her isolation, she suffered from asthma which may have been triggered by her neurotic sensibilities.  Her goal in life was always to be a writer and she felt that writing would extend the escape she found in reading.  Of course, reading and writing go hand in hand, but early on, Sontag was a voracious and precocious reader, consuming thousands of novels in her childhood.  One that had a profound effect on her at age nine, according to Moser, was her five-volume set of the Victor Hugo novel Les Miserables.  Sontag said the reading of that novel made her a “conscious socialist.”



Sontag and her family moved around frequently, and Susan attended high school in Los Angeles, North Hollywood High School, to be accurate, and the family lived for a time in Sherman Oaks.  Moser calls this the “wife-swapping capital” of Los Angeles.  I find fault with Moser’s portrayal of this enclave, having gone to school and lived therefor most of my 55 years.  I wonder if Moser visited this area when researching the book.  His wife-swapping information comes from an interview with someone named Uwe Michel, but Sherman Oaks during Sontag’s time was a predominantly Jewish and upper middle class area of Los Angeles.  Today, it is not so wealthy, containing a diverse population including a large homeless population, and a few porn shops have taken over leases on Ventura Boulevard, the main drag, amid the trendy eateries and boutique shops.  Maybe I was blissfully ignorant of any swapping going on behind the scenes, but the neighborhood of Woodland Hills or the northwestern San Fernando Valley has been characterized in the past as the porn capital of the industry since many films are made there in otherwise vacant homes.  I have not heard such anecdotes about Sherman Oaks.  If I were to attribute Sontag’s intellectual development to a city, it would be New York or Paris (where she is buried) over Tucson or Sherman Oaks, where she lived as a child, but this is a minor quibble.

Moser also goes to great lengths to stress that Sontag was less than meticulous about her personal hygiene.  He tells us, several times, that she did not bathe regularly and slept as little as possible, even resorting to amphetamines to make her more productive and sleep even less.  She wanted to be calm, patient and understanding, a stoic, and a genius, as she says in her journal.  She wanted to be a great writer who held court in a cultural mecca, and in that, she was mostly successful.  Her life was plagued by several bouts of cancer to which she finally succumbed.  She did not always face her disease with a brave face, and she could be impatient with those she considered less than her own intellectual level.  Throughout her life, she was an avid student and scholar, and this is what made her such a fascinating personality.

One early influence was Robert Maynard Hutchins, the father of the Great Books curriculum which Sontag studied at the University of Chicago.  This curriculum stresses reading the great works of intellectual history in their native form, not revised and reformulated in textbooks.  There were no grades at this university, and this method of study set Sontag’s course for life.  Moser quotes Hutchins:  “The purpose of the university is nothing less than to procure a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution throughout the world.”  This might be Sontag’s own mission statement that she followed her entire life.

Moser thoroughly discusses Sontag’s sexuality, which over the years, she hid from the public.  This became a serious criticism of her during the years of the AIDS epidemic and raging homophobia.  Definitely, her sexuality was difficult to label in light of her obfuscation.  She married Philip Rieff, one of her college professors, and had a son with him, the aforementioned David.  In Moser’s accounting, mother and son had an interesting relationship:  he was her everything, but as he became older and a writer himself, they had a competitive connection that to some seemed almost incestuous.  David struggled to define his own art and life in the shadow of such a famous and public parent.  During her marriage to Rieff, the two had trouble keeping friendships because they were both so critical of others.  The early romantic notion of dating the professor soon grew tired and contentious, Moser reveals.  Sontag wrote in her journal on marriage, “The best [marriage] aims for is the creation of strong mutual dependencies.  Quarrels eventually become pointless, unless one is always prepared to act on them—that is, to end the marriage.  So after the first year, one stops ‘making up’ after quarrels—one just relapses into angry silence, which passes into ordinary silence, and then one resumes again.”  Not exactly an endorsement of married life.

Throughout her life, Sontag had numerous lovers who were women.  Moser details each of these relationships and the consequential impact each had on his subject.  Often, Sontag looked for parent figures in these women in addition to wanting their attention and loyalty.  Like Sontag herself, the relationships were difficult and fraught with acrimony.  It took Sontag a long time to come out of the closet, a metaphor Moser fully defines and explains.  She was reluctant, always, to reveal her sexuality.  This is strange for someone who often lived so extraordinarily in the public spotlight.  What seemed easily acceptable in society was not so with Sontag herself.

Susan Sontag and her son, David Rieff

Fashioning herself as public intellectual, Sontag took as her role models, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt.  Both women Sontag considered courageous and attuned to the suffering of the world.  However, in her most personal work, her journals, Sontag avoided writing about world events.  The obsessive “I” became the focus of this writing, even as she omitted the first person in her published essays and criticism.  Her philosophy of journal writing revealed the true person, “the ego behind the masks of ego,” as she put it.  However, Moser believes she wanted the journals to be read someday by others.  In a fit self-absorption, she believed if they read her journals they would feel even more close to her.  As for her public image of the intellectual, Weil and Arendt were her role models.

Moser recounts how, over the years, many people felt abused and used by Sontag.  She was, in his research and clearly in the book, a difficult person.  Her aforementioned personal habits—being messy, not bathing, her forgetting to eat and then, at other times, gorging—and then her turning on friends, seeking out protégés and then dumping them, having spats, imaginary and real, with other writers and intellectuals, all show her obtuse and often histrionic nature.  Her journals were unsparing in their analysis of her persona, but the focus was always on her.  They were not journals of observation, or like her fellow critic, Alfred Kazin, journals of rough drafts of later essays.  She was highly critical of herself in a way that was absent from her published work, Moser writes.  She did not want to write for publication about herself; she was never a Joan Didion or even a Norman Mailer, whom she cites as someone who successfully wrote nonfiction with himself as the main character.

Her views on herself in the pantheon of writer-philosophers is interesting as well, and Moser does an excellent job of bringing in different voices who knew her, loved her, hated her, et cetera.  He tells us she was not the best public speaker:  she was often late and when she did arrive, she was flat out boring.  She believed that no writer could speak better than she could write.  This is true, for the most part, because of revision.  A writer could revise; a public speaker could not—once it was out there, that was the end of it.  Late in life, she thought of herself not as a critic, but a novelist, a fictionalist, especially with her novels The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999).  However, Moser states that she never escaped being an outsider in the world.  Even with her volumes of essays and novels, she often was financially dependent on others and never had the kind of sales that would give her that freedom.  Her relationship with photographer Annie Leibovitz gave her the most financial security along with a windfall from her publisher, Roger Straus, both of whom she had times of difficulty and estrangement.  In Leibovitz, Moser reports, Sontag was looking for a parent figure, someone to take care of her.  That the relationship eventually became strained is a product of Sontag’s pattern of becoming more and more insulting with people who cared about her.  In her own critical analysis, she could never see this, Moser makes clear.  Sontag needed constant affirmation, and her insensitivity and self-involvement were legendary.  Her public persona masked a terrible sense of inadequacy, writes Moser.

Throughout her life, Sontag did not suffer fools.  Once, in the former Yugoslav Republic, a reporter asked her what she thought was an asinine question.  Sontag pounced:  “Young man, don’t put stupid questions.  I am a serious person.”  In her relief work in Sarajevo, she thought of herself as a hero, similar to Joan of Arc.  She produced and directed theater there, and worked to help alleviate the suffering and misery.  Other literary and political celebrities flew in, but Sontag stayed and returned repeatedly to be with the people.  Late in life, she found yet another mission to fulfill beyond being just a public intellectual.

Moser digs into her writing and public speaking, detailing some of the successes and failures Sontag had with her work.  One area he discusses towards the end of the book is her plagiarism.  Sontag had a liberal view regarding using the work of others.  In her career, she was often accused of plagiarism which she dismissed out of hand.  The last speech she gave in her life contained phrases from the work of critic Laura Miller.  Ironically, it was a speech about morality and literature.

Her library, 20,000 volumes at the time of her death, was also a source of pride for Sontag.  She called it, according to Moser, the greatest private library in the world, something that bibliophiles disputed:  it was a general library lacking a specialty.  Book collector Leon Wieseltier tells Moser that her library is too general to have been a great private library.  Sontag’s papers and her library were purchased by UCLA in 2002 for $1.1 million and remain in the archive there.



Susan Sontag comes alive in Moser’s writing, and it is abundantly clear what a great thinker, writer, philosopher, and feminist she was.  It is also clear that she needed constant affirmation, constant praise, constant exultation as a patron saint of critical thinking.  Her life required public acclaim to validate her status as an American icon of arts and letters.  Benjamin Moser is exhausting in his research and thorough in his writing, and through his book, we know the woman behind it all as well as the small child inside the woman who was born Sue Rosenblatt but went on to become Susan Sontag.

This book will be released on Tuesday, September 17, 2019.

Susan Sontag in death (Annie Leibovitz)