Making monsters out of molehills: reading the life of Susan Sontag

In 1997, Susan Sontag, arguably America’s leading public intellectual, answered some questions for a French literary magazine. Sontag, as ever forthright, said that she was partial to the independent, non-specialist intellectual who was committed to the importance of the life of the mind, who had “certain standards of probity and responsibility” and strengthened “scepticism about received opinion.” At the same time, she took aim at the mass media and “the ideology of so-called cultural democracy: the hatred of excellence, achievement as ‘elitist,’ exclusionary.”

When the interview was published, Sontag’s place as a provocative, sometimes jarring, writer had already been evident for over 30 years. From her very first essays for Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books—with Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, her great supporters, at the helm—Sontag’s verbal style and wit were evident. She could turn a declarative sentence like no one else, giving an irrepressible aphoristic drive to her thoughts.

Her groundbreaking 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” collected two years later in Against Interpretation, set out to “snare a sensibility in words.” That work mapped the camp way of being that increasingly permeated the times: an emphasis on a certain aestheticism, a preference for the androgynous as well as exaggerated and, at least at first, an innocently transgressive air.

On the essay’s opening page, Sontag declares: “To patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas… Taste has no system and no proofs.”

Sontag’s own taste—her passion for heavyweight European writers and theorists—helped to shape a generation, perhaps even two. She had no trouble with the grand universalising tone adopted by male intellectuals. Thrusting aside any existing canon, she ranged high and low in a way unheard of at the time and set the trend for postmodern eclecticism. Her reference points stretched from Dostoyevsky to the Doors, from Simone Weil and Claude Lévi-Strauss to so-called happenings and film. In the title essay of Against Interpretation, she demands that the arts be experienced sensuously, not sifted by critics who displace excitement with over-interpretation and thus enact “the intellect’s revenge upon art.”

Sontag had the ammunition to back up her bold pronouncements: she seemed to have read everything. Her education took her from UCLA to Chicago to Harvard and gave her a grounding in philosophy as well as literature, before she moved to Columbia and the artistic hothouse of Warhol and Mailer’s New York. As the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who had lived with Sontag and her husband in the mid-1950s, apparently quipped: “she can make a theory out of a potato peel.” Asked what she liked, she once responded tersely: “I only like what I admire.”

Sontag was also beautiful: tall, graceful, poised in gesture and photogenic. Her speech, like her prose, had an Olympian assurance, with an undertow of urgent passion. She loved arguing. She loved thinking out loud. She also, unlike many celebrated female writers of her time, had no qualms about putting an opponent down or indeed being rude. She was charismatic. And she became iconic—not least through the photographs taken by Annie Leibovitz, her partner over the last 15 years of her life.

Reflecting on Against Interpretation 30 years on, Sontag characterised herself as a “pugnacious aesthete... and a barely closeted moralist. I didn’t set out to write so many manifestos, but my irrepressible taste for aphoristic statement conspired with my staunchly adversarial purposes in ways that sometimes surprised me.” By the time Sontag had vocally drawn attention to injustices—on the Vietnam War, on the Salman Rushdie affair (while she was president of American PEN), on the Bosnian conflict during which she spent months in besieged Sarajevo putting on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—her moral seriousness had taken on legendary proportions.

But none of her pronouncements would have had much heft without her writing. On Photography (1977) argued that the camera was crucial to capitalist society, defining its reality “as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).” “Social change,” she noted “is replaced by a change in images.” But to photograph people is to violate them; photography enmeshes us all in an “aesthetic consumerism,” makes us “image-junkies,” feeds our need “to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced.” In the age of Instagram, her words seem eerily prescient.

Illness as Metaphor (1978), written after her own first bout of cancer, argued that this illness, so often kept secret, wasn’t the direct product of mental states. Cancer was not an expression of a repressed sexual life; nor could it be cured by willpower alone—as some of the language around it at the time implied. If Sontag’s experimental novels were less widely read than her essays—at least until 1992’s The Volcano Lover—there were none the less seven of these as well as several films and plays.

One major book, though, she has until now not got credit for. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist was long thought to be by the social scientist Philip Rieff, the man Sontag married at the age of 17 in January 1951. He was 28 years old and her professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. They had a son, David, and lived together on and off (latterly mostly off) until 1959.

When I interviewed Sontag in 2002 for Radio 3’s Night Waves, two years before her death, I mentioned to her that I had long wondered about her involvement with that book: the prose was quite unlike anything Rieff had written later. Susan laughed. We were friendly, though hardly friends. I had met her before on a number of occasions and found her formidable, in truth a little scary, with her emphatic style and seeming certainties.

Oh, that old story, she said. (I paraphrase.) I thought it was common knowledge, well, among close friends. Philip knew a lot but had writer’s block and, well, I was always writing for him. You know how it was in those days. (I sort of did. I was younger, but not so young as to have completely missed out on the times when wives shrugged while working, and yes writing, for their husbands.) The deal was, Susan continued, that I would write his first book and he would write mine. But that never happened, she laughed merrily. Because by the time of the next book we were divorced.

Sontag’s writing of the Freud book has been trailed as one of the great revelations of Benjamin Moser’s capacious new biography. Moser, an American resident in Utrecht, is also the biographer of the great Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. In 2013, he was approached by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, and her agent, Andrew Wylie, to write an authorised life. (It’s unclear if the result is still altogether authorised.) But Moser says Sontag was long known to be the author—perhaps he means known to his sources. There are some 557 of these, though I may have miscounted.

The large number of Moser’s interviewees pinpoints one of the hurdles in writing the biography of famous near-contemporaries. Can even the best-intentioned interviews yield more than salacious gossip? After all, the responses are based on partly forgotten memories reconstituted for the biographer and sometimes sharpened by grudges or affairs that ended badly. Reports of such conversations are titillating, particularly when the subject has had relationships with an assortment of both men and—Moser stresses—even more women.

Yet such personal anecdotes do not always add up to a significant portrait, especially when the subject is no simple celebrity, even if she did dine with Jackie Onassis. Sontag, as she herself stressed, was primarily a writer. A great deal of time in a writing life is spent writing. That’s rarely a chartable act, even by the writer herself, no matter how many journals are kept—as Sontag did from early on.

The process of writing is difficult to describe and far more boring to read about than sex, snarls, bad behaviour and break-ups. Inevitably, the (im)balance of such a biography creates deep suspicions about any subject. Intimacy is the fertile ground of exposé. In Sontag’s case, the seeming monstrosity Moser reveals—her bad temper, her “lack” of everyday empathy for her partners, her occasional inattention to and then over-identification with her son, her insensitivity, her rudeness in public, her obliviousness to her body, her way of leaping into the general—leaves you wondering whether a writer’s literary reputation can ever altogether override the outrageous personal stories.

Sontag herself was the master of the concise literary portrait. Here she is on Roland Barthes soon after his death in 1980: “One felt that he could generate ideas about anything. Put him in front of a cigar box and he would have one, two, many ideas—a little essay. It was not a question of knowledge… but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention. There was always some fine net of classification into which the phenomenon could be tipped.”

Such gems are sadly absent from Moser’s biography. For a good part of this book, he seems irritated that his subject hasn’t lived up to his ideal of the good life.

Another temptation for the modern biographer rests in the over-reductive application of a Freudian paradigm. We have all had childhoods and most have had parents. Something bad or misunderstood has always happened. It may help account for some unhappiness: it doesn’t, however, shape all of our behaviour through a long life. To one of his French analysands, Freud apparently said on a first meeting: “So I know you had a mother and a father, now tell me something interesting.”

Susan’s mother, Mildred, was widowed in 1938 when her husband Jack Rosenblatt died in China, where husband and wife had lived together glamorously. Along with five-year-old Susan and her three-year-old sister Judith, from whom the death was kept for several months, she moved from Long Island to Arizona, California, New York, Florida and back again to the area in Los Angeles known as the Valley. Susan was 12 when her mother married Captain Nat Sontag, from whom she took her surname.

Moser tells us Mildred was an alcoholic—beautiful, vain, flirtatious, sometimes cruel, blotting out reality with vodka and pills. She treated the precociously literary Susan almost like a lover, alternately courting her and then paying no attention; and Susan, according to her own journal, loved her back, idealised her and then hated her. She learned from that experience to abstract from the real, to deny it—a characteristic Moser uses, somewhat tendentiously, to underscore a host of unhappy traits in later life, but also to explain what he sees as Sontag’s favouring of representation over the real. The over-emphasis made me wonder whether anyone had found a parental source for Kant’s categorical imperative.

In the spirit of exposé, Moser makes much of Sontag’s repetition of some maternal patterns in her adult life, drawing on psychological manual-speak to diagnose her. It’s implied that Sontag’s love of women followed her love/hate of her mother, and since her affairs, many short-lived, flared into melodrama and rejection, that too becomes linked to Mildred’s treatment of young Susan. None of what Moser describes is necessarily wrong, but its over-statement leaves a bad taste.

The search for an explanation for her apparent bad behaviour leads to pat diagnoses. Sontag, we are asked to believe, goes down the same destructive path as other children of alcoholics. Or, to make the point with a different diagnosis, Sontag is the monstrous Sontag because she suffers from amphetamine addiction. Yes, she may well have taken too many amphetamines, speeding up her abilities and leading her to behave cruelly to some of her lovers and her son—but so did many others in her generation who had few of her other talents.

Moser’s ultimate problem with Sontag is that she never publicly came out as gay, not even during the Aids crisis (she wrote Aids and its Metaphors in 1988), when it could have made a political difference. She may well have misjudged the moment. But there is also a historical misapprehension here—she wasn’t around for our contemporary debates on identity politics. She considered herself bisexual and, perhaps of equal importance, her sexuality was a private (not secret) matter and not for public consumption. Though she wrote about misogyny often enough, she did not think of herself as a woman writer. She was a writer, full stop. As she said in one of her late essays, the word “I” was one she had been taught not to use. The confessional was only for her journals.

Moser’s biography—once he leaves Sontag’s childhood, marriage and early life—picks up momentum and becomes more graceful. We hear of the support Sontag was given by her publisher, Roger Straus, the high life in New York and Paris, her illness, her dramatic relationship with Leibovitz, her period in Sarajevo. Also the moment when her punchy contribution to a piece in the New Yorker responding immediately to the 9/11 attacks—“whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter,” she wrote, “they were not cowards”—led to calls for her to be stripped of her citizenship. (The New Republic began a piece on her with “What do Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Susan Sontag have in common?”) And of her joy in the success of her last two novels, The Volcano Lover and In America, her encouragement of younger writers and her terrible struggle to hold on to life in her final years.

“A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster,” Angela Carter wrote in The Sadeian Woman. Moser’s Sontag is something of a monster. His life edges one towards a hypothetical scenario. If Susan Sontag had been Samuel Sontag, this book might well have had an altogether different emphasis. Many of the things Moser “reveals” and holds against her would have been ordinary enough in a man. Certainly such characteristics were common among the male big hitters of American literature.

Her marriage over, Sontag mostly refused to behave like a pleasing secondary being. That she’s a woman makes her “morally” no worse than other writers of her generation, but perhaps makes her achievement—certainly as a public voice—all the greater.

Benjamin Moser's Sontag: Her Life (£30) is published by Allen Lane