Sontag
Page 1
End Papers
The Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:8.2313. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
The Morgan Library & Museum, 2013.108:8.2314. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Dedication
For
ARTHUR JAPIN
To the memory of
MICHELLE CORMIER
Epigraph
Q: Do you succeed always?
A: Yes, I succeed thirty percent of the time.
Q: Then you don’t succeed always.
A: Yes I do. To succeed 30% of the time is always.
—FROM THE JOURNALS OF SUSAN SONTAG, NOVEMBER 1, 1964
Contents
Cover
End Papers
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Auction of Souls
Part I
Chapter 1: The Queen of Denial
Chapter 2: The Master Lie
Chapter 3: From Another Planet
Chapter 4: Lower Slobbovia
Chapter 5: The Color of Shame
Chapter 6: The Bi’s Progress
Chapter 7: The Benevolent Dictatorship
Chapter 8: Mr. Casaubon
Chapter 9: The Moralist
Chapter 10: The Harvard Gnostics
Part II
Chapter 11: What Do You Mean by Mean?
Chapter 12: The Price of Salt
Chapter 13: The Comedy of Roles
Chapter 14: All Joy or All Rage
Chapter 15: Funsville
Chapter 16: Where You Leave Off and the Camera Begins
Chapter 17: God Bless America
Chapter 18: Continent of Neurosis
Chapter 19: Xu-Dan Xôn-Tăc
Chapter 20: Four Hundred Lesbians
Chapter 21: China, Women, Freaks
Chapter 22: The Very Nature of Thinking
Chapter 23: Quite Unseduced
Part III
Chapter 24: Toujours Fidèle
Chapter 25: Who Does She Think She Is?
Chapter 26: The Slave of Seriousness
Chapter 27: Things That Go Right
Chapter 28: The Word Won’t Go Away
Chapter 29: Why Don’t You Go Back to the Hotel?
Chapter 30: Casual Intimacy
Chapter 31: This “Susan Sontag” Thing
Chapter 32: Taking Hostages
Chapter 33: The Collectible Woman
Part IV
Chapter 34: A Serious Person
Chapter 35: A Cultural Event
Chapter 36: The Susan Story
Chapter 37: The Callas Way
Chapter 38: The Sea Creature
Chapter 39: The Most Natural Thing in the World
Chapter 40: It’s What a Writer Is
Chapter 41: A Spectator of Calamities
Chapter 42: Can’t Understand, Can’t Imagine
Chapter 43: The Only Thing That’s Real
Epilogue: The Body and Its Metaphors
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Benjamin Moser
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Auction of Souls
Auction of Souls, Sarah Leah Jacobson and daughter Mildred. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
In January 1919, in a dry riverbed north of Los Angeles, a cast of thousands gathered to re-create a contemporary horror. Based on a book published a year before by a teenage survivor of the Armenian massacres, Auction of Souls, alternatively known as Ravished Armenia, was one of the earliest Hollywood spectaculars, a new genre that married special effects and extravagant expense to overwhelm its audience. This one would be all the more immediate, all the more powerful, because it incorporated another new genre, the newsreel, popularized in the Great War that had ended only two months before. This film was, as they say, “based on a true story.” The Armenian massacres, begun in 1915, were still going on.
The dry sand bed of the San Fernando River near Newhall, California, turned out to be the “ideal” location, one trade paper said, to film “the ferocious Turks and Kurds” driving “the ragged army of Armenians with their bundles, and some of them dragging small children, over the stony roads and byways of the desert.”1 Thousands of Armenians participated in the filming, including survivors who had reached the United States.
For some of these extras, the filming, which included depictions of mob rapes, mass drownings, people forced to dig their own graves, and a sweeping panorama of women being crucified, proved too much. “Several women whose relatives had perished under the sword of the Turk,” the chronicler continued, “were overcome by the mimic spectacles of torture and infamy.”
The producer, he went on to note, “furnished a picnic luncheon.”
* * *
One image from that day shows a young woman in flowery garb with a large carpetbag on her arm. Amid makeshift refugee tents, and with an afflicted expression on her face, she stands comforting a girl. Neither dares look at the sinister shadows approaching, invisible men with upraised arms, aiming something at them. Perhaps the women are about to be shot. Perhaps, given the panoply of available tortures, death by gunshot is the least painful option.
Gazing at this devastated corner of Anatolia, we are relieved to recall that it is, in fact, a film location in Southern California, and that the long shadows belong not to marauding Turks but to photographers. Despite press releases to the contrary, the Armenians being filmed were not all Armenians: this pair, for example, turns out to be a Jewish woman named Sarah Leah Jacobson and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Mildred.
If knowing that the picture is staged makes it less poignant, another fact, which neither subjects nor photographers could have known, does not. Though they returned home to downtown Los Angeles after playing their part in the “mimic spectacles of torture and infamy,” Sarah Leah would be dead a little more than a year later, aged thirty-three. This picture of bereavement would be the last surviving image of her with her daughter.
Mildred would never forgive her mother for abandoning her. But abandonment was not Sarah Leah’s only legacy. In her short life, she traveled from Białystok, in eastern Poland, where she was born, to Hollywood, where she died. Mildred, too, would be adventurous. She married a man born in New York who reached China by nineteen, where he traveled into the Gobi Desert and bought furs from Mongolian nomads. Like Sarah Leah’s, his precocious start was cut short; he, too, died at thirty-three.
Their daughter, named Susan Lee in an Americanized echo of Sarah Leah, was five when her father died. She only knew him, she later wrote, as “a set of Photograph.”2
* * *
“Photograph,” Mildred’s daughter Susan wrote, “state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction.”3 That most people standing before the lens are not thinking about their impending destruction makes pictures more, rather than less, affecting: Sarah Leah and Mildred, acting out a tragedy, did not see that their own was so swiftly approaching.
Neither could they have known how much Auction of Souls, meant to commemorate the past, looked to the future. It is spookily appropriate that the last photograph of Susan Sontag’s mother and grandmother should be connected to an artistic reenactment of genocide. Troubled all her life by questions of cruelty and war, Sontag would redefine the ways people look at images of suffering and ask what, if anything, they do with the images they see.
The problem,
for her, was not a philosophical abstraction. As Mildred’s life was shattered by the death of Sarah Leah, Susan’s, by her own account, was also split in two. The breach occurred in a Santa Monica bookstore, where she first glimpsed Photograph of the Holocaust. “Nothing I have seen—in Photograph or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously,” she wrote.4
She was twelve. The shock was so great that for the rest of her life she would ask, in one book after the next, how pain could be portrayed, and how it could be endured. Books, and the vision of a better world they offered, saved her from an unhappy childhood, and whenever she was faced with sadness and depression, her first instinct was to hide in a book, head to the movies or the opera. Art might not have made up for life’s disappointments, but it was an indispensable palliative; and toward the end of her life, during another “genocide”—the word invented to describe the Armenian calamity—Susan Sontag knew exactly what the Bosnians needed. She went to Sarajevo, and she put on a play.
* * *
Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star, a flashback to a time when writers could be, more than simply respected or well regarded, famous. But never before had a writer who bemoaned the shortcomings in Georg Lukács’s literary criticism and Nathalie Sarraute’s theory of the nouveau roman become as prominent, as quickly, as Sontag did. Her success was literally spectacular: played out in full public view.
Tall, olive-skinned, “with strongly traced Picasso eyelids and serene lips less curled than Mona Lisa’s,” Sontag attracted the cameras of the greatest photographers of her age.5 She was Athena, not Aphrodite: a warrior, a “dark prince.” With the mind of a European philosopher and the looks of a musketeer, she combined qualities that had been combined in men. What was new was that they were combined in a woman—and for generations of artistic and intellectual women, that combination provided a model more potent than any they knew.
Her fame fascinated them in part because it was so unprecedented. At the beginning of her career, she was incongruous: a beautiful young woman who was intimidatingly learned; a writer from the hieratic fastness of the New York intellectual world who engaged with the contemporary “low” culture the older generation claimed to abhor. She had no real lineage. And though many would fashion themselves in her image, her role would never be convincingly filled again. She created the mold, and then she broke it.
Sontag was only thirty-two when she was spotted at a table of six at a posh Manhattan restaurant: “Miss Librarian”—her name for her bookish private self—holding her own alongside Leonard Bernstein, Richard Avedon, William Styron, Sybil Burton, and Jacqueline Kennedy.6 It was the White House and Fifth Avenue, Hollywood and Vogue, the New York Philharmonic and the Pulitzer Prize: as glitzy a circle as existed in the United States, and indeed the world. It was one Sontag would inhabit for the rest of her life.
Yet the camera-ready version of Susan Sontag would always remain at odds with Miss Librarian. Never, perhaps, had a great beauty worked less hard at being beautiful. She often expressed her astonishment at encountering the glamorous woman in the Photograph. At the end of her life, seeing a picture of her younger self, she gasped. “I was so good-looking!” she said. “And I had no idea.”7
* * *
In a lifetime that coincided with a revolution in how fame was acquired and perceived, Susan Sontag, alone among American writers, followed all its permutations. She chronicled them, too. In the nineteenth century, she wrote, a celebrity was “someone who gets photographed.”8 In the age of Warhol—not coincidentally, one of the first to recognize Sontag’s star power—getting photographed was no longer enough. In a time when everyone got photographed, fame meant an “image,” a doppelgänger, a collection of received ideas, often but not exclusively visual, standing in for whoever it was—eventually it no longer mattered who it was—crouching behind them.
Raised in the shadow of Hollywood, Sontag sought recognition and cultivated her image. But she was acidly disappointed by the price her double—“The Dark Lady of American Letters,” “The Sibyl of Manhattan”—exacted. She confessed that she’d hoped “being famous would be more fun,”9 and constantly denounced the dangers of subsuming the individual into the representation of the individual, of preferring the image to the person it showed, and warned of everything that images distort and omit. She saw the difference between the person, on the one hand, and the person’s appearance, on the other: the self-as-image, as photograph, as metaphor.
In On Photography, she noted how easy it was, given “the choice between the photograph and a life, to choose the photograph.” In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the essay that made her notorious, the word “camp” stood for the same phenomenon: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” What better illustration of camp than the gap between Susan Sontag and “Susan Sontag”?
Her personal experience of the camera made Sontag keenly aware of the difference between voluntarily posing and exposing oneself, without consent, to the eye of the voyeur. “There is aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” she wrote.10 (The resemblance to Turkish vigilantes or the men pointing their cameras at Sarah Leah and Mildred is not accidental.) “A camera is sold as a predatory weapon.”11
Beyond the personal consequences of being looked at too often, Sontag insistently posed the question of what a picture says about the object it purports to show. “A suitable photograph of the subject is available,” her secret FBI file noted.12 But what is “a suitable photograph of the subject,” and for whom? What can we really learn—about a celebrity, about a dead parent—from “a set of Photograph”? Early in her career, Sontag asked these questions with a skepticism that often sounded dismissive. An image perverts the truth, she insisted, offering a fake intimacy. What, after all, do we know about Susan Sontag when we see the camp icon “Susan Sontag”?
The gulf between a thing and a thing perceived was accentuated in Sontag’s time. But that such a gulf existed had been remarked as early as Plato. The search for an image that would describe without altering, for a language that would define without distorting, absorbed the lives of philosophers: the medieval Jews, for example, believed that the dissociation of subject from object, of language from meaning, caused all the ills of the world. Balzac regarded cameras superstitiously almost as soon as they were invented, believing that they stripped their subjects down, Sontag wrote, “used up layers of the body.”13 His vehemence suggests that the interest of this problem was not primarily intellectual.
Like Balzac’s, Sontag’s reactions to Photograph, to metaphors, would be highly emotional. To read her examinations of these themes is to wonder why questions about metaphor—the relationship between a thing and its symbol—were so viscerally important to her, to wonder why metaphor bothered her so much. How had the apparently abstract relation of epistemology to ontology eventually become, for her, a matter of life and death?
* * *
“Je rêve donc je suis.”
This paraphrase of Descartes (“I dream therefore I am”) is the first line of Sontag’s first novel.14 As the opening sentence, and the only one in a foreign language, it stands out, a strange opening to a strange book. The Benefactor’s protagonist, Hippolyte, has renounced every normal ambition—family and friendship, sex and love, money and career—in order to devote himself to his dreams. His dreams alone are real, but his dreams are not interesting for the usual reasons, “in order to understand myself better, in order to know my true feelings,” he insists. “I am interested in my dreams as—acts.”15
Thus defined—all style, no substance—Hippolyte’s dreams are the essence of camp. And Sontag’s rejection of “mere psychology” is a refusal of the questions of the connection of substance to style, and, by analogy, of the connection of body to mind—thing to image—reality to dream—that she would later so profitably explore. Instead, at the very beginning of her career, she claims that the dream itself is the only reali
ty. We are, as she says in her very first sentence, our dreams: our imaginings, our minds, our metaphors.
The definition is almost perversely calculated to thwart the aims of the traditional novel. If there is nothing to be learned about these people from excursions into their subconscious, why embark on these excursions at all? Hippolyte acknowledges the problem, but assures us that there is another attraction. His mistress, whom he sells into slavery, “must have been aware of my lack of romantic interest in her,” he writes. “But I wished she had been aware of how deeply, though impersonally, I felt her as the embodiment of my passionate relationship to my dreams.”16 Her protagonist is interested in another person, in other words, to the complete exclusion of reality, and only to the extent that she embodies a figment of his imagination. It is a way of seeing that remits to Sontag’s own definition of camp: “seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”17
But the world is not an aesthetic phenomenon. There is a reality beyond the dream. At the beginning of her career Sontag described her own ambiguous feelings about Hippolyte’s worldview. “I am strongly drawn to Camp,” she said, “and almost as strongly offended by it.” Much of her later life was devoted to insisting that there is a real object beyond the word that describes it, a real body beyond the dreaming mind, a real person beyond the photograph. As she would write decades after, one use of literature is to make us aware “that other people, people different from us, really do exist.”18
* * *
Other people really do exist.
It is an astonishing conclusion to reach, an astonishing conclusion to need to reach. For Sontag, reality—the actual thing shorn of metaphor—was never quite acceptable. From the time she was very young, she knew that reality was disappointing, cruel, something to be avoided. As a child, she hoped her mother would stir from her alcoholic stupor; she hoped to dwell, instead of in a humdrum suburban street, upon a mythic Parnassus. With all the power of her mind, she wished away pain, including the most painful reality of all, death: first her father’s, when she was five—and then, with hideous consequences, her own.