Sontag: Her Life and Work

by Benjamin Moser

To deny the reality of the body is also to deny death with a doggedness that made Sontag’s own end unnecessarily ghastly.

One of Susan Sontag’s strengths was that anything that could be said about her by others was said, first and best, by Susan Sontag.

Rather than seeing this as lying, Mildred saw omitting details as courtesy, tact: a consideration she extended to others and expected them to extend to her. “Lie to me, I’m weak,” Susan imagined her saying. She was, she insisted, too fragile for the truth, and believed that “honesty equaled cruelty.” Once, when Susan attacked Judith for speaking honestly to her mother, Mildred seconded the reproach: “Exactly,” she said.

The fear of abandonment—and its corollary, the urge to abandon those she feared were about to abandon her—became a hallmark of Susan’s personality.

In later life, and for a variety of reasons, Susan denounced “labels.” She declined invitations to be included in anthologies of women writers. She told Darryl Pinckney not to dwell on blackness and Edmund White not to dwell on gayness: she believed that a writer should strive to be so individual as to become universal.

“I think, I know,” said Judith, referring to this attack, “that Susan hated labels.”24 It was natural for her to despise and avoid them: labels, particularly the unsolicited kind referring to ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, were dangerous.

In literature, she found an escape from “the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.”

Her equation of sleep with death would never change. Associating sleep with sloth, she tried to avoid it, and was often ashamed to reveal that she slept at all.

Susan noted that she had inherited from her mother the idea that honesty equaled cruelty; and she also must have learned from Mildred the art of presenting one face in public and another in private, a skill Mildred had perfected and that only the people closest to her could see through.

“I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me—I feel—a license. . . . Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable. It increases my wish to hide, to be invisible—which I’ve always felt anyway.”17

The facts were fake. But the shame was real.

homosexuality as aristocracy.

Homosexuality and Judaism are intertwined with theatricality and aristocracy in a dreamworld in which nothing is what it seems, Sontag writes:

The notion that happiness is possible in intellectual but not sexual endeavors reveals Sontag’s experience as surely as hopes for an antirepressive society mirror Taubes’s and Marcuse’s.

The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it 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.

This reasoning was typical of Susan’s resort to intellectual excuses to justify the emotional reactions of which she was ashamed.

Like an “eye,” empathy and intuition are hard to learn, as she would show when the tables were turned.

“That’s one of the things that Paul Thek and Irene brought to her,” said Koch. “That you could be a dazzling artist and know practically nothing.”39

The refusal of reality—setting the dream on a pedestal to lord over the waking world—would become as much a hallmark of the new decade as it would of Sontag’s work. “The world is, ultimately, an aesthetic phenomenon,”

Even when she was fourteen, she rued her tendency to primp for future biographers: “If I could just stop writing for posterity for a minute and make sense!!!”6 In an essay from 1962, Sontag asked why writers’ journals are interesting, and part of her answer was that in the journal “we read the writer in the first person; we encounter the ego behind the masks of ego.” She must have known how extreme an example her own journals would furnish of the distance between the ego and its masks. But: “Is that what is always wanted, truth?” she asked in 1963.

All the things that I despise in myself are X: being a moral coward, being a liar, being indiscreet about myself + others, being a phony, being passive.27

But perhaps even more than the constantly recurring violence against women, the implied equation of homosexuality with fascism is the most disturbing aspect of The Benefactor—and one that will recur.

To see the world as an aesthetic phenomenon is to exclude the impact of politics, ideology, human action—and human evil—upon it.

It did not assert equality or distance but superiority and authority—a shift that, not coincidentally, assigned the city of New York a new status as the cultural capital of the world.

Homosexuality a criticism of society—a form of internal expatriation. Protest against bourgeois expectations. . . .

The camp sensibility undermined hierarchies. She attributes to Oscar Wilde, to whom the essay is dedicated, “an important element of the Camp sensibility—the equivalence of all objects.” This meant an attack on critical authority: in their own house organ, an attack on the Family.

The idea that gay people were inferior to straight people was as generally unquestioned as the idea that women were inferior to men, or blacks to whites. And it was this that made “Notes on ‘Camp’” as threatening as black nationalism was to white supremacy or the birth control pill—approved in 1960—to male supremacy. To see gay people taking charge of aesthetics meant they would be in charge of the ways they would be seen, another of the “revolutions of feelings and seeing.”

there is no incompatibility between the exploration of inner space and the rectification of social space.

But Sontag, who so keenly perceived the intermixture of darkness and light in herself, could not bring such a nuanced reading to her own country.

Perhaps, as Freud postulated, that reality is less important than the reality of his conscience, whose guilt echoes another old fear of Susan’s: that she was fraudulent, inauthentic, unreal.

She loved the access fame brought—to Hollywood, to the White House—but fame meant sharpening the split between the simulacrum, the metaphor, the mask, the persona, and the self found in silence. And so it was toward the cell that she gravitated. Austerity, seriousness, purity—values that had always attracted her—were the backbone of Styles of Radical Will, her second book of essays.

The loss of self that heterosexuality implied was, like immersion in celebrity culture, another form of untruthfulness, of fraudulence. The idea terrified her, since she knew that holding on to herself—whatever that meant—was a matter of life and death.

Increasing knowledge meant the progressive destruction of the consolations that once held out hope.

“We lack words, and we have too many of them,” she wrote.

This was pornography as a literary discourse. As such—like so much of the art that interested her—it was an aestheticization of “real life”: an attempt to speak the ineffable, to express the radical will.

What she sees in sexuality is the master-slave dynamic, and in this kind of pornography a reflection of her “Project: to destroy the will.”

Susan ignored the possibility of their existence, refusing to view even the most outlandish claims of another government with the skepticism she brought to her own.

Perhaps all this is true, but these assertions are offered as just that, assertions, without much evidence. As in her essay on North Vietnam, we never learn what the Swedes themselves think. Would they have been surprised to hear that they have “a relatively weak drive toward differentiation as individuals,” for example?48 What did they think of her statement that “the ruling class of this country is genuinely benevolent and filled with good intentions”?49 We never learn—any more than we hear whether “the Swedes want to be raped.”50

A decade before, Bernard Donoughue said that politics, for Susan, meant “questioning all establishments and disliking all regimes.” Now, she wrote that for the New Left, “the starting point is the view that psychic redemption and political redemption are one and the same thing.”

Goodman described the hopelessness behind the facade of American prosperity: how young people were trivialized, demoralized, and desexualized—shoved, after a bad education, into meaningless work, condemned to lives far more depressing than those a better society might have offered.

These stories illustrate, in a strangely literal way, how even the most highly developed mind could find itself alienated from the body that circumscribes it. For Sontag, it would be no easy thing to unite the beastly body to the intellectual realm, the realm of language, metaphor, and art.

At the same time, it is also a portrait of the State of Israel as a mental hospital, haunted by pogroms and gas chambers, so perverted by its own suffering that it became unable to regard the pain of others.

A photograph, after all, is a metaphor—one thing standing for another—and Susan had an instinctive aversion to metaphors.

Art, for her, had been a means of increasing sensation: “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” Behind her attack on Arbus was a fear that this art would make her feel less, glossing over reality, aestheticizing it, reifying it: “To the painful nightmarish reality out there,” Sontag wrote, “Arbus applied such adjectives as ‘terrific,’ ‘interesting,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘fantastic,’ ‘sensational’—the childlike wonder of the pop mentality.”

She had seen how metaphors demoralized and even killed her fellow patients, forcing them to

evince “disgust at their disease and a kind of shame.” They were “in the grip of fantasies about their illness by which I was quite unseduced.”34

“Man’s greatest enemy is not Communism, not Socialism, not Capitalism,” Brodsky wrote, “but rather the vulgarity of the human heart, of human imagination.”25

But if her interest in Riefenstahl reflects the thorny relationship between ethics and aesthetics, it also reflects an almost sexual desire to be ravished, exalted, overwhelmed by art. This was what Riefenstahl’s films provided: art that was a means of escaping the melancholy of selfhood.

reveals a weakness of Sontag’s writings about two subjects, sex and politics, whenever they appeared outside the pages of books. Both could be aestheticized, but were not aesthetic. Sexual play, after all, was hardly a secret. Pornography was widely available and did not need to resort to the kind of coding Sontag discovered in SS Regalia

His election, and then his resounding reelection, was a rebuff to the political world that Susan had inhabited for more than twenty years, the world that seemed victorious during the feminist meeting with Norman Mailer. In that world, said Norman Podhoretz, “the right wing did not exist. It wasn’t even on the radar.”11 In those days, the enemy of radicalism was not conservatism but liberalism, and “the fights were all sectarian.” The event of Reagan proved how much those battles had blinded the Left to a resurgent Right, and rendered them unprepared for people just as opposed to liberalism as they were, but from the opposite side.