Review: Ann Kjellberg on Susan Sontag, Part I
The work that first brought critic Susan Sontag attention, and teed her up to join the unenviable (in the end) circle of those “famous for being famous,” were essays she wrote in her twenties for the small magazine Partisan Review, a place that perhaps tops the list of upstart American journals punching above their weight in influence. The PR talent pool was fed by two streams of postwar American opinion: immigrants and the children of immigrants who hungrily lapped up the opportunity for higher education, and formidably learned refugee intellectuals who had fled the inferno of Europe in the thirties and forties. Sontag herself had willed her way out of a sleepy provincial childhood presided over by a negligent widowed mother (born in Los Angeles, in 1904, to Jewish immigrants from Białystok) into the University of Chicago, a haven for the above two contingents, as a teenager, having read her way through the Modern Library volumes she found at the back of a Tucson drugstore, and after that every book she could find. She joined a generation anxious to distill the ponderous edifice of Western Civilization into the voice of a democracy outgrowing its skin.
Her cohort—most of the rest of whom are passed over in Benjamin Moser’s new cinderblock of a biography—tended to get a bus ticket to New York as soon as they could escape their uncomprehending parents and emerged in due course to become known as “New York intellectuals.” Sontag herself first encountered the Partisan Review as a suburban high school student and, sensing its significance for her, became, as she records in a notebook, determined to “crack the code.”
One of the problems with literary biography is the short shrift it inevitably gives to literary experience, which is solitary and, for long stretches, leaves no visible trace: but fundamentally the lives of literary people are inexplicable without the lived experience of reading and writing—its frustrations, its digressions, its adventures, its expansive essence. This defect is acutely felt in the case of Moser’s biography, because there are so many powerful distractions from what Sontag specifically thought and wrote—among them her eventual fame, her beauty, and her gregariousness, which leave behind a trail of voluble witnesses with colorful stories. Sontag herself, as this biography poignantly records, suffered from these distractions. Moser’s assemblage of this social residue amounts to a very interesting book, deeply gossipy, with its vital thread drawn out. To cite just one example, the relationships based mostly on talking and thinking and writing that Moser identifies as among the most important to her—the intense early period of her marriage to sociologist Philip Reiff, her friendships with the poet Joseph Brodsky and her publishers Roger Straus and Robert Silvers—are nearly invisible. It almost seems like the subject of this book is all the things pulling Sontag away from what she was supposed to be famous for.
Two noisy signals command the biographer’s attention. The first is the crowd of Sontag’s witnesses and interlocutors. As her friend Jamaica Kincaid astutely notes of Sontag’s almost compulsive socializing, “She was afraid of silence. And I have always thought the kind of thinking she admired came out of silence.” Sontag did not treat her friends well and left many disgruntled and baffled bystanders ready to claim the narrative. The second is Sontag’s voluminous trove of notebooks, carefully accumulated over the decades on a shelf in her closet. Moser takes these at face value. But anyone with a notebook or two that they might not relish sharing knows that one’s notebooks tend like flypaper to accrue turmoil. Furthermore, any writer keeping such a document is well aware that the self preserved therein is a provisional one. Sontag said as much when she wrote about other writers’ diaries. Of Albert Camus, for example: a writer’s journal is where he builds up, “piece by piece,” for himself, his identity; “the journal is where a writer is heroic to himself.” (Sontag: “Give me strength, tall lonely walker of my journals.”) The centrality of Sontag’s self-fashioning to her intellectual output is often remarked on in this memoir-friendly era; her notebooks are her self-fashioning workshop. Although she surely expected on one level that they would in due course be read, we note with a sinking heart that she sold them on terms making them comprehensively and immediately available because she needed the money.
The Sontag who emerges from these sources is needy, insecure, narcissistic, negligent, unfocused. Author and reader are quick to judge. And yet how long would the catalogue be of male writers be who neglect children or treat lovers poorly? Does one even ask these questions of male writers? And how many women who try to make a mark are afflicted with both bravado and insecurity? Sontag is surely not the only creative person who eschews food, sleep, and hygiene when working alone, especially when young, which Sontag, having gotten such an early start, was for so much of her career, and especially before writing was domesticated by the departments.
Sontag touchingly discloses in her journal that “I valued professional competence + force, think (since age four?) that that was, at least, more attainable than being lovable ‘just as a person.’” Many women trying to make something of themselves might recognize such feelings. Sontag had an affair with and married her college professor at seventeen and had a child by the time she was nineteen. A noted prodigy, she turned to graduate studies in philosophy at twenty-two because English literature was “too easy.” Observing the dearth of female philosophers of her generation, one wonders, had the academy been more hospitable to a young woman and mother, how might she have contributed to that field? How is it that her ex-husband secured the services of her own childhood nanny and she was left caring for a child alone with no money? These are questions Moser doesn’t ask. Sontag may have gone a bit far, but I know other working women of Sontag’s generation, pulling away from the strictures of fifties domesticity and operating with almost no supportive infrastructure, who look askance at today’s hyper-vigilant ideals of motherhood and find themselves at times over-solicitous toward their grown children, at once defensive and remorseful.
Moser yokes Sontag’s turbulent emotional history to her hidden and sometimes tormented homosexuality (a potent theme of the journals and posthumous reminiscence, though also not unheard of among people of her generation) and makes these central to her literary project. Moser construes the fact that Sontag sought to forge her prodigious learning into a new model for a thinking being—not a stuffy and obscure scholiast but a living and breathing person engaging with art and culture as part of a whole personality—as being about “the body” in some sort of narrowly literal sense, and pronounces it fundamentally compromised by her struggles with accepting her sexuality and arriving at a livable form of domestic life. But how many great artists and intellectuals had thwarted personal and sexual lives for whatever reason and yet were able in their work powerfully to engage with art (and life)? Just because Sontag herself (as one would) expressed fears that her troubled intimate life limited her as a person does not mean we should accept these darker-hour recriminations. It is in the nature of having both a mind and a body that the two can be found to be at cross-purposes. Why is it a surprise that a brilliant young woman, indeed, a lesbian, growing up in the fifties, thought she had fundamentally—almost physically—to remake herself in order to have the authority to produce important work? There something dispiriting about a compromised relationship with “the body” inevitably emerging at the center of the imagined life of a powerful woman …
[Read Part II here]
Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post. She worked for Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, and Sontag’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in the late 1980s, and for Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books for many years following.
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Coming soon: Elaine Blair on Oyinkan Braithwaite, Mona Simpson on Lewis Hyde.
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Splendid, splendid--I cannot wait for part 2!
I echo April’s thoughts