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.
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| 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.
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| Susan Sontag in death (Annie Leibovitz) |
