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)