Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  * * *

  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. But though few were as forcefully individual as Susan Sontag, she remained, almost to the point of caricature, the adult child of an alcoholic, with all of their weaknesses—as well as their strengths.

  Cancer, Susan would later insist, strikes people regardless of their sterling character, or their degree of sexual repression, or the elaborate euphemisms they employ to deny it. Cancer is simply a disease. And there is a common saying that alcoholism, too, is a disease—because it has symptoms. As in any other pathology, these follow predictable patterns.

  Predictable, too, are the ways it affects the children of alcoholics—but these were not fully understood until Susan was much older. “I wasn’t ever really a child!” Susan wrote in her late twenties.18 This single exclamation sums up the core of the problem. “When is a child not a child?” asked an early specialist in this syndrome, Janet Woititz. “When the child lives with alcoholism.”19

  Susan was given to understand that she held her mother’s life in her hands, and children like her typically try frantically to be perfect—Susan was “exceptionally well behaved,” her mother said20—terrified that they cannot live up to those responsibilities. Aware of her failings, the child of the alcoholic is plagued by low self-esteem, always feeling, no matter how loudly she is acclaimed, that she is falling short. Unable to take love for granted, she becomes an adult dependent on affirmation from others—only to reject that affirmation when it is given.21

  Indeed, many of the apparently rebarbative aspects of Sontag’s personality are clarified in light of the alcoholic family system, as it was later understood. Her enemies, for example, accused her of taking herself too seriously, of being rigid and humorless, of possessing a baffling inability to relinquish control of even the most trivial matters. But “the young child of the alcoholic was not in control,” Woititz explained. “He needed to begin taking charge of his environment.”22 Such children are often liars: aware that they cannot tell others how things really are at home, they construct elaborate masks, then take refuge in these same fantasies. Parents to their parents, forbidden the carelessness of normal children, they assume an air of premature seriousness. But often, in adulthood, the “exceptionally well behaved” mask slips, and reveals an out-of-season child.

  * * *

  Mildred, “the queen of denial,” would flee reality, and so would Susan. But her flight was more productive. The “resident alien” at home,23 she wanted nothing more than to escape. Among her earliest memories was the desire to flee. “Whose voice is the voice of the person who wants to go to China?” she asked. “A child’s voice. Less than six years old.”24 She imagined “a teeming world of oppressed coolies and concubines. Of cruel landlords. Of arrogant mandarins, arms crossed, long fingernails sheathed inside the wide sleeves of their robes.”25

  Part of this was longing for her father. But the novelistic phrasings of these imaginings were thanks to her mother. Mildred made Susan want to escape, and gave her the means to do so. In a rare but essential example of maternal solicitude, Mildred taught her daughter to read. “She would put her name on a chalkboard,” Paul Brown remembered. “She would say ‘Susan,’ and point to her. She would sound it. Then she’d put another word on. Then when she got that other word she’d put another word on and then another word. Then she started verbalizing. Susan was reading when she was two or three.”26

  Reading gave Susan a way to recast reality, to aestheticize it—as when Little Lord Fauntleroy inspired her to call her otherwise unfathomable mother “darling.” When she needed to escape, books let her close the door: “When you didn’t like something,” Mildred wrote, “you’d just go into your room and read.”27 A happier child might never have become such an accomplished reader. Mildred encouraged her to take up residence in a fairy-tale world.

  * * *

  “Absolutely intimidated” by Susan’s precocious intellectualism,28 her mother, like so many after her, feared Susan’s judgment. When, for example, she was ambushed reading Redbook, a magazine for middle-class housewives, Mildred would shamefacedly shove it beneath the bedcovers.29 Loath to embarrass her, Susan wordlessly agreed not to see. “I,” Susan wrote, “obligingly, do my best not to look, not to record in consciousness or ever consciously use against her what I see.”30

  “I grew up trying both to see and not to see,” she wrote.31 Pretending not to see her mother, she eventually became actually unable to see her, veering between “slavish thralldom”32 and its opposite. “My mother was a horrible person,” she told a friend after Mildred’s death.33 “I had no mother,” she told another, with whom she discussed alcoholism at great length. “What I had was this ice-cold—it was just depressing. I always tried to get her attention, to get her love. I had no mother.”34

  This was as much of a caricature as Susan’s childish notion of her as a romantic heroine. “She was never able to know what goes on in another person,” one of her lovers said. “I mean the sensitivity that we exercise in everyday life all the time. Like ‘What are you thinking, what are you feeling, where are you in this?’ Susan was not sensitive.”35 Unable to see the disappointments that led her mother to seek reprieve from real life, she seems not to have made the connection between “the master-lie about how and what [her mother] is”36 and what she herself was. She denounced the feeling of “fraudulence” the lie gave her. But though she tried to distance herself (“I hate anything in me—especially physical things—that’s like her”), the connection, even disowned, remained.37 Another lover told Susan she was “ruled by a family image of myself: being my mother’s daughter.”38

  Chapter 3

  From Another Planet

  Among the fragments of memories Susan conserved from the period after her father’s death was a question that gives a recognizable glimpse, in the five-year-old Sue Rosenblatt, of the future Susan Sontag: “Do you know the difference between the trachea and the esophagus?”1

  Other fragments also suggest Sue’s state of mind. She remembered her uncle Sonny’s taking her far out into the water, leaving her a mild but enduring phobia; she recalled a spider in a backyard tent and the stink of urine in the basement of an insane asylum.2 Her anxieties may also have manifested as the asthma that appeared at this time. This disease is often triggered by emotional turmoil, and the experience of suffocation, terrifying enough for an adult, can only be more so for a child: the first disease in a life that would be full of them.

  To “the asthmatic’s recurrent nightmare of being interred alive”3 she added another, her mother’s inability to face difficult situations. In an unpublished memoir fictionalized only by changing the names, she wrote that during her asthmatic attacks Mildred “was always most inadequate, not being able to bear watching her daughter push off the sheets that covered her, and kneel on top of the bed, stretching toward the ceiling in the effort to find breath.”4

  Mildred could not stay in the room. But she was not indifferent to Susan’s illness. In 1939, for the third time in little more than a year, she uprooted herself and her family, including Nellie and Rosie, and bundled them into a train to Florida. Of Susan’s few memories of this time was a question she asked along the way: “Mother, how do you spell pneumonia?”5

  She was trying to put her mind around the incomprehensible disease that, Mildred had told her, had killed her father: tuberculosis was as yet unpronounceable. But as she was gasping for breath, the knowledge that her disease—like his—was seated in the lungs must have been scary. And though she wrote almost nothing about her time there, in Miami Beach she would have occasion to grow better acquainted with lung diseases and with an institution, the sanatorium, that would resonate throughout her life.

  Of
Florida she remembered “coconut palms and white houses decorated with imitation-Moorish stucco”6 and a visit from her grandma Rosenblatt, who told her that there was no Santa Claus.7

  * * *

  Miami’s humidity was bad for asthma, and the family stayed less than a year. Mildred dragged them back to New York in 1940, and they alighted, temporarily, in Woodmere, Long Island. Just past Idlewild Golf Course—today John F. Kennedy International Airport—Woodmere does not seem to have left an impression on Susan. But in Forest Hills, where Mildred moved the family in 1941, Susan herself left an impression.

  Walter Flegenheimer, an older classmate at PS 144, where Susan spent fifth and sixth grades, was accosted on the playground by a younger girl who demanded to know whether he and a friend were enrolled in the “Intellectually Gifted Children” program. She had arrived too late in the school year to join and breathed a sigh of relief when she heard they were. “Can I talk to you?” she asked. “Because the kids in my class are so dumb I can’t talk to them.”

  Sue was funny, and her wit attracted the older boys. They became pals, Flegenheimer said, and were surprised to discover she was two years younger. “She was certainly our equal intellectually—and we were smart.” They hung out on the playground and visited the Rosenblatts’ apartment, where they got a glimpse of “a very glamorous lady,” Mildred, “strikingly more sophisticated than the other mothers I was familiar with.”

  “I don’t recall her being particularly interested in or talking about literature or writing,” Flegenheimer said. What he did recall was her overwhelming charisma. Sue was “always on”—sometimes “trying a little too hard” but with a “star quality” that made it obvious that she was destined for greatness.

  When I was in my twenties and thirties I used to look for the name Sue Rosenblatt in some context, because I knew she’d become famous. And then after I didn’t find Sue Rosenblatt, I went: “Oh, I guess she didn’t become famous.”8

  * * *

  On the playground of PS 144, Sue was not yet talking about books. But as her opening salvo to Walt reveals, she was already aware of herself as a misfit. Bored at school, unhappy at home, in fragile health, she aspired to better things. But the woman who would inspire bookish girls everywhere had few models when she herself was a bookish girl.

  The feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun has written that, until very recently, the only women deemed worthy of biography were “royal women or women celebrated as events in the lives of famous men.” Women whose importance resided in their own achievement were invisible. “Only the female life of prime devotion to male destiny had been told before; for the young girl who wanted more from a female biography, there were, before 1970, few or no exemplars.”9 Even a writer of such apparently unquestionable eminence as Virginia Woolf was, in the 1960s, dismissed by one of the deans of American criticism, Lionel Trilling.10 His own wife bitterly joked that no matter how substantial her own accomplishments, her obituary would inevitably read: “Diana Trilling Dies at 150. Widow of Distinguished Professor and Literary Critic Lionel Trilling.”11

  In the memoirs of women intellectuals of Sontag’s generation, one great exception was mentioned time and again. In 1937, Eve Curie published Madame Curie, which Susan read soon after, when she was seven or eight. “That made me want to be a bio-chemist and win the Nobel Prize,” she said. (Her failure to do so was less poignant than Eve’s, whose mother, father, husband, sister, and brother-in-law all won Nobel Prizes—her mother, twice.) “I didn’t know it was supposed to be difficult for women,”12 Susan later said.

  This “supreme heroine of my earliest childhood”13 held a lifelong fascination. In her last decade, she considered writing a novel about her.14 The lofty and intimidating Madame Curie made Sue wonder whether she had the kind of intelligence rewarded with Nobel Prizes. But she realized early on that her own brand of intelligence—“trying a little too hard”—was a great strength. “I did think that I could do whatever I set my mind to (I was going to be a chemist, like Madame Curie), that steadfastness and caring more than the others about what was important would take me wherever I wanted to go.”15

  * * *

  From reading, Sue was also deriving an idea of social duty as socialist heroism. In Forest Hills, she read a comic book about the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, a Communist who served in the Spanish Civil War before traveling to China, where he died, an exemplary martyr of socialist internationalism, in the service of Mao.16 And she read two books about desperate prison escapes, Lewis Lawes’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing and Victor Hugo’s great drama of injustice and redemption, Les Misérables. At nine, she told an interviewer, she “lived for months of grief and suspense” in her five-volume edition of Les Misérables. “It was the chapter in which Fantine is obliged to sell her hair that had made a conscious socialist out of me.”17

  There was another reason for her identification with the oppressed. During the family’s years in Forest Hills, a hitherto unimaginable catastrophe was sweeping the Jews of Europe; and if the full extent of the Nazi horror would not be understood until after the war, the Jewish community certainly knew its outline. The city was swelled with thousands of refugees, including Sue’s friend Walter Flegenheimer, born in Germany.

  During her life, her attitude toward her background would prove as unsettled as her attitude to other aspects of her identity. She told the Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk that she was “first a Jew, second a writer, and third an American.”18 This “shocked” Kaniuk, because “there had been nothing about her that he associated with Jews.” Others agreed. “Susan didn’t come on Jewish,” the film scholar Don Eric Levine said—allowing that “insofar as she was trying to come on Jewish, she was trying to come on as Hannah Arendt.”19 Jarosław Anders, a Polish writer who traveled through Poland with a group of American writers, remembered John Ashbery’s crying at Auschwitz. “She did not. And she talked about it, about this manipulation of history, and this hiding of certain aspects of Jewish suffering, but it was an intellectual challenge for her, and an issue, but not a personal one.”

  Sometimes, as with the Israeli Kaniuk, she emphasized her Jewish background. At other times she downplayed it. She told an Italian friend that the first shul she ever set foot in was the suitably opulent Great Synagogue of Florence—though her stepfather founded a synagogue in the far less glamorous San Fernando Valley.20 She told the writer Jonathan Safran Foer, “I’ve no Jewish background, and have never celebrated Pesach”21—though the family held seders every year, her sister remembers, and celebrated the other Jewish holidays as well. Her grandmother ate only in kosher restaurants; Mildred taught Hebrew school on their porch; Susan gave blood for Israel.22

  None of this suggests a household aflame with religious fervor. (Mildred, in fact, allowed the girls a Christmas tree, and let them accompany Rosie to church.) It suggests, instead, a perfectly normal Jewish childhood in middle-class America, and raises the question of why she would deny it.

  * * *

  For a child born two weeks before Hitler came to power, another aspect of a normal Jewish childhood was fear. No matter how remote she felt from her origins, she knew they endangered her. Even if she was only nominally Jewish, “nominally,” she realized, “was enough for Nazis.” During the war, she “was beset by a recurrent nightmare in which Nazi soldiers had escaped from the prison and had made their way downstate to the bungalow on the outskirts of the town where I lived with my mother and sister and were about to kill me.”23

  The danger was not limited to dreams. One day, on her way home from school in Forest Hills, she was called a dirty Jew and hit on the head with a rock. Her injuries required stitches, and left other scars as well. “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.

  Yet a fear of being labeled does not necessarily mean that Jewish suffering
was merely “an issue, but not a personal one.” Throughout her life, the more personal the issue, the more energetically she strove to recast it intellectually. Disguised or abstracted, these emotional undercurrents lent her examinations of apparently dry questions an unexpected urgency. In her book on cancer, Illness as Metaphor, she never once mentions her own cancer. And many of her intellectual interests relate directly to the experience of Jewish suffering, like the Holocaust Photograph that, she wrote, split her life in two.

  Just after the war—perhaps just after seeing those Photograph—she wrote a poem summing up many of her later questions about how to remember: how, in her later phrase, to regard the pain of others.

  Ashes of those who were burnt in the camps,

  bodies starved, shot, beaten, maimed in the camps,

  resume to me what befell you, O allow me to remember you . . .

  I do not think your ashes will nourish and fructify anything, I do not think your deaths had any meaning, or that any good will be seen served from them:

  Forgive me for not having the power—had I the right—to transmute them.

  Aware of the obscenity of looking at these maimed bodies, she is, at age twelve or thirteen, determined to look anyway. But she is also determined not to demean the victims by tacking a happy ending onto their suffering, and struggles with the question of how to remember. “If there is any tact possible in such painful imaginings I will search for it,” she promised.25 For the rest of her life she did. But she would not do so by embracing the blunt identities that, she feared, had created the catastrophe. Instead, she wrote, “I try abstractly.”26