Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  * * *

  In New York, Sue’s asthma worsened. In search of better treatment, Mildred turned to Tucson, whose desert climate had attracted sanatoria and hospitals since the 1920s. By then, to dispel concerns about extreme temperatures, Arizona’s boosters had already hit on their favorite cliché. It wasn’t the heat, the advertisements for the Desert Sanatorium insisted, it was the humidity. “With midsummer comes intense heat,” they allowed, “yet because of the extreme dryness of the air, sunstroke and heat prostration are unknown, and the ‘high temperatures here are decidedly less oppressive than much lower temperatures in a humid atmosphere.’”27

  Perhaps nowhere in the United States is the atmosphere less like New York than in Tucson. Its empty streets, its wild temperatures, its native populations, its distant location, its exotic flora and fauna, all left an enduring impression on Sue. “No landscape,” she had one of her characters say of the southwestern desert, “not even the swampy jungle of the Isthmus of Panama, had struck any of them as this awesomely strange.”28 Her first encounter with this landscape proved unforgettable. After the three-day train journey, Sue darted off the train and hugged the first saguaro she saw. “She had never seen a cactus before,” Judith remembered. “She was covered with spines.”29

  The Rosenblatts settled into a bungalow at 2409 East Drachman Street. Today near the center of a sprawling city, in 1943 the street was a dirt road so far from civilization that on her way to the Arizona Inn, only a couple of blocks away, Susan often encountered rattlesnakes.30 The house itself was four tiny rooms poised atop a recently poured concrete slab, contrasting so unfavorably with Mildred’s previous addresses in Tientsin and Long Island that it seems difficult to imagine she intended to stay long. She, Rosie, Judith, Susan, and their dog Lassie squeezed into the house. For the girls, the house’s size was not important: the heat drove them outdoors and even underground, into a hole—eventually the word would be capitalized—they dug in the yard, and that formed one of the enduring memories of Susan’s and Judith’s childhoods.

  As her embrace of the cactus indicates, Susan did not take easily to Tucson. She was ten; East Drachman was her eighth address in four states. She had been uprooted so often that now, plunked down in the middle of the desert, she had trouble fitting in. Many of her memories of Tucson suggest loneliness. Her first school, Catalina Junior High, was a “catastrophe.” When a girl was nice to her, she realized she simply “didn’t know how to be nice back.”31 She left for another school, the Arizona Sunshine School. The next year, when she was eleven, she entered yet another, Mansfeld Junior High.

  After Mildred died and Susan began to study her ailment, she jotted a brief phrase in her journal. “Children of alcoholics—feeling of being a visitor from another planet.”32 Lacking reliable models of human interaction, she had to look to others and imitate them. When she entered Mansfeld she made what she called her “great decision—the conscious decision I took when I was 11.” Her vow: “I will be popular.” Even then, she wrote, “I understood the difference between the outside and the inside.”33 Her acute perception of this difference could only have come from a person on the outside.

  * * *

  In his memoir of his mother, Susan’s son, David Rieff, described her greatest anxiety—after her fear of death—as a “profound, and in the end inconsolable, sense of being always the outsider, always out of place.”34 At first blush, it is a surprising comment. In the cultural world, Susan Sontag was not only an insider: she symbolized insiderness. It was to her insiderness that admirers paid homage when noting that no one could draw attention to art and artists as powerfully as she; it was her insiderness detractors acknowledged when denouncing her failing to draw attention to causes—more often than not themselves—that they hoped to advance. Like no other writer of her generation, she embodied the cultural prestige emanating from New York, and seemed to bear the very keys to Manhattan.

  Yet in Tucson she already was what she always remained in her mind: an alien, a misfit. Her most sustained memoir of Arizona came in her second novel, Death Kit, in which the protagonist dreams of a feral child “in Sabino Canyon, which lies in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains just outside Tucson.”

  The Wolf-Boy doesn’t want to be an animal. Envies the superior suffering of human beings . . . Doesn’t want to be an animal, but has no choice.35

  This feeling of being trapped in the wrong life saturates Susan’s memories of the “long prison sentence” of her childhood.36 She tried to shape her younger sister into a companion, but Judith had other interests: “No point in trying to teach 6-year-olds that the collarbone was called the clavicle,” Susan later conceded, “or Judith the 48 capitals of the 48 states.”37 Susan nonetheless drilled her sister. “Ten sixty-six,” Judith recited seventy years later. “The Battle of Hastings.”

  In the bunk beds they shared in Tucson, Judith said, Susan inevitably was on top. “Because,” she explained, “if the bed fell apart she would be okay.”38 Noting this indifference to her demise, Judith “tortured her” with occult powers.

  I’d be lying in my bed and she’d be up there reading or something with her head practically hitting the ceiling. There was a bureau at the foot of the bed and a mirror above the bureau. I would say, “I am magic. I know what you’re doing. You raised your arm.”

  Spooked by these paranormal insights, Susan never noticed the mirror in front of her face. “She was so dumb about some really strange things,” Judith said. In fact, Susan did not learn the truth until shortly before her death when, in the hospital, the sisters sat apologizing for the wrongs they had done each other. When Judith finally confessed, Susan “loved it. She just loved it. She never figured it out.”

  * * *

  Like her attempts to make Mildred into a Hollywood heroine, her attempts to lift Judith to her intellectual level were thwarted not just by a gap in age and ambition, but by an inability to see who Judith really was. In those deathbed conversations, Susan told her she had always regretted that Judith had never pursued a professional career, insisting that she ought to have become a lawyer. “But Susan, I’m the least argumentative person in the world,” Judith objected. “I would have lost the case before I stepped into the courtroom.”

  But her failure to shape her sister meant that Susan had no one to talk to about the many things she was not dumb about. Unhappy at home, an oddball at school, dislocated geographically, she retreated inward, to reading—and, increasingly, to writing. Her journals, which eventually spanned more than a hundred volumes, began with a notebook purchased at the corner of Speedway and Country Club in Tucson, and her very first concern expressed the hope of finding a sympathetic reader. “Someday, I’ll show these to the person I will learn to love:—this is the way I was—this is my loneliness.”39

  Her loneliness was assuaged by supportive teachers. “She was not just a good student,” said a friend. “She was a champion student.”40 But though she was devouring books in ever-increasing volume, no one had oriented her reading until a Mr. Starkie (“I don’t think I ever knew his first name”41) appeared at the Arizona Sunshine School. Mr. Starkie, who had fought with Pershing in Mexico, loaned her his copies of The Sorrows of Young Werther and Theodor Storm’s Immensee, giving her a taste for German literature that stayed with her all her life. If this was an odd taste for a Jewish girl to acquire during World War II, it cannot be a coincidence that both novels concern doomed loves: “This is my loneliness” might be the motto of both.

  The actual desert in which she lived offered a ready metaphor for the intellectual aridity of her surroundings. Despite exceptions like Mr. Starkie, Tucson, she wrote, was a “cultural desert.” She discovered the Modern Library at the back of a stationery store and began reading through all the volumes in the series. 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.”42 And she discovered that mental escape might lead to
physical escape.

  Like many adventurous kids of her generation, she loved the sexy swashbuckler Richard Halliburton, one of the country’s bestselling authors, who was little more than a boy when he figured out how to trade Tennessee for Angkor Wat: how to take, as the dreamy title of one of his books put it, The Royal Road to Romance. His attitude to his Middle American origins surely appealed to Sue as much as the world into which he swam and climbed and flew. “Let those who wish have their respectability,” he declared. “I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.”43

  The phrase could be Susan Sontag’s epitaph. She described his books as “among the most important of my life,” and collected them as an adult.44 Halliburton’s terrible end would have had spooky echoes, too, for the girl who dreamed of China. In 1939, the same year Sue learned of her father’s death in Tientsin, Halliburton and his crew departed Hong Kong in a junk bound for San Francisco. The ship was never heard from again. Halliburton was thirty-nine, only slightly older than her father. But he left his mark on a girl destined to become a great traveler, and gave her an aspiration to orient her life. He was “my first vision of what I thought had to be the most privileged of lives, that of a writer: a life of endless curiosity and energy and countless enthusiasms. To be a traveler, to be a writer—in my child mind they started off as the same thing.”45 To write would be to escape.

  * * *

  Isolated in its desert, East Drachman Street was nonetheless no stranger to world events. “Didn’t we play War a great deal?” Judith later asked her.46 The street had its own reporter, twelve-year-old Sue Rosenblatt. In the Cactus Press, she analyzed world affairs, announcing a “Shakeup in the Jap Navy” and piously reminding her readership that “the executed Fascist leaders were our enemies. But the Italian people are not.”47 In the mimeographed purple ink of the paper, sold for a nickel, one can see how closely Sue followed the war’s events. In this, she was no different from millions of other children; but what is most remarkable is how perfectly she aped the hokey language of American war reporting. This attention to language would characterize her later writings about one of her great subjects: not simply the facts of war, violence, and pain, but the words in which they were described.

  The war brought an important change in their lives. On November 10, 1945, Mildred slipped across the Mexican border and married Nathan Stuart Sontag in Nogales. The event came as a shock to Judy and Sue, who were hurt not to learn of it until after it had happened. In a story Susan wrote as a young woman, she remembered the moment she found out about the impending nuptials:

  You know what I want to tell you, darling.

  I think I do, mother. (WHAT IS IT?)

  You do want a father, don’t you, Ruth? What do you think of him, darling?

  (GOD, WHO IS IT?) I think he’s swell, mother. Anyway, what you want to do is most important.48

  Sue’s confusion was understandable. Surrounded by “uncles,” flirty Mildred may have seemed like a promiscuous merry widow. But her choice of Nat Sontag proves that nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Five days after D-Day, Captain Sontag was shot down over France. Wounded, he was sent for treatment to the giant Davis-Monthan Army Air Field outside Tucson. While in town, he met the enchanting Mildred. Her choice from among her many other suitors struck some as odd. “I never found him to have what she had,” said Paul Brown. “She longed for the pretentious high-end lifestyle, and Nat could never provide that for her. He was kind of a bourgeois, middle-class guy. They were like buddies, though, really tight friends.” In contrast to Mildred, Nat “didn’t have star quality at all, period. She did.”

  The marriage would have seemed even more odd if their friends had known what Judith was shocked to discover many years later. This concerned the nature of his wartime injuries, which were never specified to the girls and which Susan seems never to have learned. Mildred told her daughter later that his injuries had left Nat sexually incapacitated. “I don’t think she was much into sex,” Judith said wryly.

  But Nat “doted on her,” Brown said. He was handsome enough to satisfy Mildred’s need for a presentable surface—“somebody on her arm.”49 And he met another need that went far deeper than sensuality. Loving her but not her lover, Nat provided motherless Mildred with a parent. “With my stepfather she was baby,” Judith remembered. “Nat Sontag called my mother ‘Baby.’” The endearment is common enough, but Nat’s role in the relationship was maternal, and he cooked and cleaned for her like the Chinese servants she remembered.

  The relationship seemed strange to many who knew them. Himself bisexual, Paul Brown was struck, many years later, that Nat would try to hook him up with men. Once, Mildred urged him to marry a black female employee at his salon, giving him a book about a gay man and a lesbian who pursued private interests while publicly in a heterosexual marriage. “The black thing was just becoming fancy,” Brown said. Mildred, with an eye for publicity, realized the same thing, telling him that the alliance would get “huge press.” Brown knew she was right. But he was not interested in a dishonest relationship, and the black woman was straight. Mildred imperiously brushed aside his objections, and made Brown wonder if a similar dynamic might be at work in the Sontag marriage.

  Perhaps, with Mildred’s remarriage, Susan was happy to be relieved of the duty of parenting her parent. But with a mother who encouraged repression and dissimilation to this degree, Susan, too, would always have trouble knowing what to reveal and what to keep private. And with a dead father and a mother who was herself a child, she, too, would turn lovers into parents.

  * * *

  Nat Sontag’s most enduring contribution was his name, which transformed the gawky syllables of Sue Rosenblatt into the sleek trochees of Susan Sontag. He never adopted the girls, but the decision to take his name was partly inspired by anti-Semitism. “The incident of being hit in the head and called a dirty Jew left an imprint,” Judith said. At Mansfeld Junior High in Tucson, Susan remembered being called a kike.50

  When she herself married, Susan, in one of the rare documents signed “Susan Rieff,” wrote about changing names. Rosenblatt, she said, sounded too Jewish. “I’ve no loyalty to his name,” she wrote. “I gave it up when my mother re-married, and not because she or my step-father asked me to. I wanted to. I always wished my mother would remarry. I wanted a new name, the name I had was ugly and foreign.”51

  “Sontag” was Jewish, too, but it did, in fact, ring less “foreign.” It made Sue less easy to label. Her change of name is of a piece with her resolution to be popular, taken around the same time. These were decisions to shed her outsider status, the first recorded instances, in a life that would be full of them, of a canny reinvention. They also betrayed an ambition—never subsequently manifested—to blend into Middle America. The change was not merely cosmetic, she wrote in her final novel, In America: “Impossible to feel sincere while having one’s photograph taken. And impossible to feel like the same person after changing one’s name.”52

  Susan Sontag did not want to feel like asthmatic, helpless, unpopular Sue Rosenblatt. Soon she would leave behind the scene of that girl’s humiliation. When, as an adult, she was visiting nearby Phoenix, her friend Larry McMurtry invited her to Tucson, where he lived. She refused. Once she left, she never returned.53

  Chapter 4

  Lower Slobbovia

  The family left Arizona in the summer of 1946, a few months after Nat and Mildred’s marriage. Their destination was Los Angeles, where Nat found a job selling clocks with advertising slogans printed on them.1 It was the city where Mildred grew up, the city where her mother was buried. And as Mildred had passed from adolescence to middle age in the intervening twenty-five years, the city, too, had changed beyond recognition. Only the perfect weather remained the same.

  When she left, Los Angeles was a provincial place, isolated by its mountains a
nd deserts. When she returned, it had become one of the preeminent symbols of a triumphant America. It was a symbol of American industrial power and American military power and, especially, of American cultural power. In the days of Auction of Souls, Hollywood meant a modest suburb of a distant city. By the end of the war, it was one of the most recognizable words in the world. The glamour of Hollywood and the apparently endless wealth of Southern California made Los Angeles an American dream even for Americans themselves. “America has its America,” Sontag wrote in her final novel, “its better destination where everyone dreams of going.”2

  Many headed for Los Angeles’s own paradise, the San Fernando Valley, separated by mountains from the Los Angeles Basin. Through television shows like The Brady Bunch and Leave It to Beaver, the Valley eventually became a metonym for prosperous Middle America. With its neat bungalows and freshly clipped lawns, its blue skies and swaying palms, the great latifundium of Southern California was being divvied up to people like Nat Sontag: middle-class home buyers, often veterans, who bought houses on streets that, in Mildred’s youth, had been orange and lemon groves.

  The Valley meant everything clean and new about America. It also meant everything white, conformist, and nationalistic about “the deep America she came from and which she both feared and despised,” Susan’s son, David, wrote.3 Her contempt seeps through in the essay “Pilgrimage,” published in 1987. In it, she recalled scenes of postwar suburbia: “sirloins and butter-brushed corn tightly wrapped in tinfoil on the patio barbecue”; “the weekly comedy shows festooned with canned laughter, the treacly Hit Parade, the hysterical narratings of baseball games and prize fights.” She felt obliged to “ward off the drivel,” the materialist airheadedness later symbolized by the Valley Girl.4