In a notebook from the 1970s, she maps the “obsessive theme of fake death” in her novels, films, and stories. “I suppose it all stems from my reaction to Daddy’s death,” she notes. “It seemed so unreal, I had no proof he was dead, for years I dreamed he turned up one day at the front door.”19 Then, having noted this, she exhorts herself, condescendingly: “Let’s get away from this theme.” But childhood habits, no matter how accurately diagnosed, are hard to break.
As a child, facing an awful reality, she fled into the safety of her mind. Forever after, she tried to creep back out. The friction between body and mind, common enough in many lives, became for her a seismic conflict. “Head separate from body,” a schema from her diaries announces. She noted that, if her body were unable to dance or make love, she could at least perform the mental function of talking; and divided her self-presentation between “I’m no good” and “I’m great”—with nothing in between. On the one hand “helpless (Who the hell am I . . .) (help me . . .) (be patient with me . . .) feeling of being a fake.” On the other, “cocky (intellectual contempt for others—impatience).”
With characteristic industry, she strove to overcome this division. There is something Olympian about her sex life, for example, her effort to emerge from her head into her body. How many American women of her generation had lovers, male and female, as numerous, beautiful, and prominent? But reading her diaries, speaking to her lovers, one leaves with the impression that her sexuality was fraught, overdetermined, the body either unreal or a locus of pain. “I have always liked to pretend my body isn’t there,” she wrote in her journals, “and that I do all these things (riding, sex, etc.) without it.”20
Pretending that her body wasn’t there also allowed Sontag to deny another inescapable reality: the sexuality of which she was ashamed. Despite occasional male lovers, Sontag’s eroticism centered almost exclusively on women, and her lifelong frustration with her inability to think her way out of that unwanted reality led to an inability to be honest about it—either in public, long after homosexuality ceased to be a matter of scandal, or in private, with many of those closest to her. It is not a coincidence that the preeminent theme in her writing about love and sex—as well as in her own personal relationships—was sadomasochism.
To deny the reality of the body is also to deny death with a doggedness that made Sontag’s own end unnecessarily ghastly. She believed—literally believed—that an applied mind could, eventually, triumph over death. She lamented, her son wrote, “that chemical immortality” that “we were both, though probably just barely, going to miss.”21 As she got older and managed, time and again, to beat the odds, she started to hope that, in her case, the body’s rules could be waived.
To “pretend my body isn’t there” betrays a shadowy sense of self, and to remind oneself that “Other people really do exist” is to reveal a more paralyzing fear: that she herself did not, that her self was a tenuous possession that could be misplaced, snatched away, at any moment. “It is,” she wrote in despair, “as if no mirror which I looked into returned the image of my body.”22
* * *
“The aim of all commentary on art now,” Sontag insisted in an essay contemporaneous with The Benefactor, “should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us.”
That famous essay, “Against Interpretation,” denounced the accretions of metaphor that interfered with our experience of art. Weary of the mind (“interpretation”), Sontag had grown equally skeptical of the body—“content”—that the mind’s hyperaction blurs. “It’s very tiny—very tiny, content,” the essay begins, quoting Willem de Kooning; and by the end of the essay, the notion of content comes to seem preposterous. As in Hippolyte’s dreams, one is left with no there there: the nihilism that, in Sontag’s definition, is the essence of camp.
“Against Interpretation” betrays Sontag’s fear that art, “and, by analogy, our own experience,” is not quite real; or that art, like our selves, requires some outside assistance in order to become real. “What is important now,” she insists, “is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” Assuming a numbed body desperate for stimulation, Sontag suspects that art might be the means of providing it; but what, without “content,” is art? What should it make us see, hear, or feel? Perhaps, she says, nothing more than its form—though she adds, a bit disconsolately, that the distinction between form and content is “ultimately, an illusion.”
Sontag devoted so much of her life to “interpretation” that it is hard to know how much of this she believed. Is all the world a stage, and life but a dream? Is there no distinction between form and content, body and mind, a person and a photograph of a person, illness and its metaphors?
A weakness for rhetorical pizzazz led Sontag to make statements whose phrasing could trivialize profound questions about “the unreality and remoteness of the real.”23 But the tension between these purported opposites gave her the great subject of her life. “Camp, which blocks out content,” was an idea she could only ever half endorse.24 “I am strongly drawn to Camp,” she wrote, “and just as strongly offended by it.” For four decades after the publication of The Benefactor and “Against Interpretation,” she vacillated between the extremes of an always-divided vision, journeying from the dreamworld toward whatever it was—her opinions varied wildly—that she could call reality.
* * *
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. Her journals betray an uncanny understanding of her character, a self-awareness—though it slipped as she aged—that anchored a chaotic life. Her “head and body don’t seem connected,” a friend observed in the sixties. Sontag answered: “That’s the story of my life.”25 She set about to improve herself: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”26
Though she found the effort exhausting, she vigorously set to work to escape the dreamworld. She would banish anything that fogged her perception of reality. If metaphors and language interfered, then she, like Plato expelling poets from his utopia, would cast them out. In book after book, from On Photography to Illness as Metaphor to AIDS and Its Metaphors to Regarding the Pain of Others, she moved away from her earlier, “camp” writings. Instead of insisting that the dream was all that was real, she asked how to look at even the grimmest realities, those of sickness, war, and death.
Her thirst for reality led to dangerous extremes. When, in the 1990s, the need to “see more, to hear more, to feel more” brought her to besieged Sarajevo, she was bewildered that more writers were not volunteering for a trip she described as “a bit like what it must have been to visit the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1942.”27 The trapped Bosnians were grateful, but wondered why anyone would want to participate in their suffering. “What was her reason?” an actor wondered, two decades later, amid another horror. “How would I, now, go to Syria? What do you have to have inside of you to go to Syria now and share their pain?”28
But Sontag was no longer forcing herself to look reality in the face. She was not simply denouncing the racism that had horrified her since she saw the pictures of the Nazi camps. She came to Sarajevo to prove her lifelong conviction that culture was worth dying for. This belief propelled her through a miserable childhood, when books, movies, and music offered her an idea of a richer existence, and brought her through a difficult life. And because she had committed her life to that idea, she became famous as a one-woman dam, standing fast against relentless tides of aesthetic and moral pollution.
Like all metaphors, this one was imperfect. Many who encountered the actual woman were disappointed to discover a reality far short of the glorious myth. Disappointment with her, indeed, is a prominent theme in memoirs of Sontag, not to mention in her own private writings. But the myth, perhaps Sontag’s most enduring creation, inspired people on every continent who felt that the principles she insisted up
on so passionately were precisely those that elevated life above its dullest or most bitter realities. “Je rêve donc je suis” was not, by the time she got to Sarajevo, a decadent catchphrase. It was an acknowledgment that the truth of images and symbols—the truth of dreams—is the truth of art. That art is not separate from life but its highest form; that metaphor, like the dramatization of the Armenian genocide in which her mother participated, could make reality visible to those who could not see it for themselves.
And so, in her final years, Sontag brought metaphors to Sarajevo. She brought the character of Susan Sontag, symbol of art and civilization. And she brought the characters of Samuel Beckett, waiting, like the Bosnians, for a salvation that never quite came. If the people of Sarajevo needed food, heating, and a friendly air force, they also needed what Susan Sontag gave them. Many foreigners opined that it was frivolous to direct a play in a war zone. To that, a Bosnian friend, one of the many who loved her, answers that she is remembered exactly because her contribution was so oblique. “There was nothing direct about people’s emotions. We needed it,” she said of Sontag’s production of Waiting for Godot. “It was full of metaphors.”29
Part I
Susan in cheongsam dress. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Chapter 1
The Queen of Denial
Until she died, Susan Sontag kept two home movies that were made with such ancient technology that she never was able to view them. She cherished these talismans because they contained the only moving images of her parents together: when they were young, embarking on adventurous lives.1
The shaky footage shows Peking, as the Chinese capital was then known: pagodas and shops, rickshaws and camels, bicycles and trams. It briefly shows a group of Westerners standing on the opposite side of a barbed-wire fence from a gathering of curious Chinese. And then, for a couple of seconds, Mildred Rosenblatt appears, looking so much like her daughter that it is no surprise that they were later mistaken for sisters. Her handsome husband, Jack, turns up for a couple of seconds, so badly lit that it is hard to see more of him than to note the contrast he forms—tall, white, in foreign clothes—with the Chinese onlookers.
The film was made around 1926, when Mildred was twenty. The second was made around five years later. It begins on a train in Europe, and then moves to the upper deck of a ship. There, a group of passengers—Jack and Mildred and another couple—is tossing a ring over a net, laughing. Mildred is wearing a summery white dress and a beret, smiling broadly and talking to whoever is behind the camera. A game of shuffleboard begins, and about halfway through the film, thin, gangly Jack appears in a three-piece suit and a beret of his own. He and the other man vigorously compete, and then their friends start making faces and horsing around as Mildred leans on a doorway, nearly breathless from laughter. Together, the films are less than six minutes long.
* * *
Mildred Jacobson was born in Newark on March 25, 1906. Though her parents, Sarah Leah and Charles Jacobson, were born in Russian-occupied Poland, both reached the United States as children: Sarah Leah in 1894, at seven, and Charles the year before, at nine. Unusually for Jews in that age of mass immigration, Mildred’s parents both spoke unaccented English. And—ironically for the most Europeanized American writer of her generation—their granddaughter was perhaps the only major Jewish writer of that generation with no personal connection to Europe, no experience of the immigrant background that defined so many of her fellow writers.
Though born in New Jersey, Mildred grew up on the other side of the continent, in California. When the Jacobsons moved to Boyle Heights, a Jewish neighborhood east of downtown, Los Angeles was a town on the cusp of becoming a big city. The first Hollywood film was made in 1911, around the time the Jacobsons arrived. Eight years later, when Mildred and Sarah Leah appeared in Auction of Souls, the city was already home to a large-scale industry. The nascent film colony attracted sleaze: Mildred loved to tell people that she had gone to school with the notorious gangster Mickey Cohen, one of the early kingpins of Prohibition-era Las Vegas.2 And it attracted, and exuded, glamour: Mildred would always strike people as beautiful, vain, and sophisticated in a Hollywood way. Susan once likened her to Joan Crawford; others would compare Susan to the same diva.3
“She was always made up,” said Paul Brown, who knew Mildred in Honolulu. In that city of hippies and surfers, where she spent the last part of her life, she stood out. “Her hair was always done. Always. Like a New York Jewish princess who wears Chanel suits and was too thin.” She retained her Hollywood mannerisms all her life. She answered the phone with a throaty “Yeeeeees?” and forbade her daughters to cross the living room rug until expressly summoned by a manicured hand.4 Mildred “had this better-than-thou attitude, like royals,” said Paul Brown, who saw her difficulty in dealing with the real world. “Like somebody who didn’t know how to find the light switch.”5
* * *
When she sailed off to China, beautiful Mildred seemed headed for a dazzling destiny. Her shipboard companion was Jack Rosenblatt, whom she had met while working as a nanny at Grossinger’s. This was one of the giant summer resorts of the Catskills, the “Jewish Alps.” For a middle-class girl like Mildred, Grossinger’s was a summer job. For someone like Jack, Grossinger’s was a step up.
Like thousands of poor immigrants, Jack’s parents, Samuel and Gussie, had squeezed into the Lower East Side of Manhattan, then perhaps the most notorious slum in America. Born in Krzywcza, in Galicia, a part of Poland under Austrian rule, the Rosenblatts were markedly more plebeian than the “middle-class and suburban” Jacobsons, who were “nothing at all like first-generation Jews,” Susan once told an interviewer.6 In private, she said that her father’s family was “horribly vulgar.”7
Perhaps Samuel and Gussie’s disregard for learning made their granddaughter look down on them. Born in New York on February 1, 1905, Jack had a fourth-grade education. He dropped out of school at ten, and headed to work as a delivery boy in the fur district, on the West Side of Manhattan, where his energy and intelligence were soon noted. He had a flawless photographic memory: his daughter’s memory would likewise be exceptional.8 Elevating him from the mailroom, his superiors shipped him off to China when he was just sixteen. There, he braved the Gobi Desert on camelback, bought furs from Mongolian nomads,9 and eventually set up his own business, the Kung Chen Fur Corporation, with offices in New York and Tientsin. It was the beginning of a busy life: in the eight years they were married, Jack and Mildred built a prosperous international business, went to China several times, traveled to Bermuda, Cuba, Hawaii, and Europe, moved house at least three times, and paused to have two children.
When Susan Lee Rosenblatt came into the world on January 16, 1933, the couple was living in a smart new building on West Eighty-Sixth Street, in Manhattan. That summer, the family moved to Huntington, Long Island; and around the time Judith was born, in 1936, they were installed in a suburban idyll in Great Neck. This was the town immortalized as West Egg in The Great Gatsby, and Jack Rosenblatt’s arrival there was a testament to the success of a slum dropout. In class terms, Great Neck was as far from the sweatshops and the tenements of the Lower East Side as it was from China. It was the kind of ascension that might have cost a lifetime of hard work. Jack Rosenblatt achieved it by the time he was twenty-five.
* * *
A rise that rapid could only have been accomplished by a driven man; and Jack knew he had to hurry. When he was eighteen, two years after his first journey to China, he had his first attack of tuberculosis. In literary terms, as Susan later wrote, this was “a disease apt to strike the hypersensitive, the talented, the passionate.”10 In nonliterary terms, it would fill his lungs with fluid and drown him.
To all appearances, the man Mildred met at Grossinger’s was vigorous and athletic, rich and about to get richer. But the spots on his lungs gave her pause; his mother had brought him to Grossinger’s, in fact, in
the hopes that the country air might bring relief.11 Mildred realized that their life together might not be long. Perhaps she reasoned that his infection might not blossom into full-fledged tuberculosis: the bacillus could linger harmlessly for years. But there was, as yet, no treatment. (Penicillin, discovered in 1928, would not be widely available until after World War II.) But Mildred was passionately in love with Jack. In 1930, they married and headed to China, setting up shop in Tientsin.
The major port closest to Beijing, Tientsin, now usually written Tianjin, was one of the “treaty ports” forced upon China after its defeat in the Opium Wars. There, foreign traders could operate outside of the constraints of Chinese law; for them, Susan wrote, this meant “villas, hotels, country clubs, polo grounds, churches, hospitals, and protecting military garrison.” For the Chinese, it meant “a closed space, bounded by barbed wire; all who live there must show a pass to enter and leave, and the only Chinese are domestic servants.”12
These servants were always chief among Mildred’s memories of China. As the land was being devoured by Japanese invasion and civil war, the newlywed Rosenblatts were enjoying a golden age. “She loved the lifestyle,” her friend Paul Brown remembered. “The servants. Having someone cook and serve. Just living like that in the beautiful clothes and the beautiful things, the embassy parties.”13 For the rest of her life, Mildred would distribute Chinese knickknacks to favored friends. “She had some things that were just amazing,” Brown said. “Beautiful Chinese stuff made with little Chinese hands.” But her romantic memories were not to everyone’s taste: “Even as a child,” her daughter Judith wrote, “I was disgusted at her stories of all the people who waited on her for this and that in China.”14
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