Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  The story tells of her friendship with Merrill Rodin, not only “cool and chunky and blond” but as smart as she was. He was a boy who, like her, enjoyed memorizing the 626 “Köchel numbers” that cataloged Mozart’s compositions chronologically. He was a boy who loved Stravinsky enough to play a game with her: “How many more years of life for Stravinsky would justify our dying now, on the spot?” Twenty years was easy. Three years was too little to exchange their “paltry California-high-school-students’ lives.” Four, then? “Yes,” she writes. “To give Stravinsky four more years either one of us was prepared right then and there to die.”4

  Above all, Merrill was someone with whom she could share her enthusiasm for literature. When she discovered The Magic Mountain at the Pickwick Bookstore in Hollywood and “all of Europe fell into my head,” the person she wanted to share it with was Merrill. He devoured it, too, and then came up with a shockingly bold idea: they should try to meet Thomas Mann, who lived a short drive away, in Pacific Palisades. Susan was aghast; but right there, in the telephone book, was Thomas Mann, at 1550 San Remo Drive. Merrill calls, while Susan, mortified, cringes in another room. To their amazement, the woman who answers the phone is polite, and invites them to visit the great man.

  “I’d never met anyone who didn’t affect being relaxed,” Susan wrote. As the two squirming high school students sit there, the great eminence discusses difficult-sounding things: “the fate of Germany,” “the demonic,” “the abyss,” “the Faustian bargain with the Devil.” Susan tries desperately not to say anything stupid: “I had the impression (and this is the part of my recollection that is most touching to me) that Thomas Mann could be injured by Merrill’s stupidity or mine . . . that stupidity was always injuring, and that as I revered Mann it was my duty to protect him from this injury.” At last, without any horrible gaffes, the awkward encounter ends. “I doubt we spoke of it again.”

  * * *

  The story is symbolically rich, full of resonant contrasts: between Europe and America, age and youth, past and future, rigid masculinity and bubbling femininity. We meet “Ella and Nella, the dwarf sisters, who led the Bible Club boycott that resulted in the withdrawal of our biology textbook.” And Thomas Mann illustrates one of her great themes: the distance between the shadow-world of images and the wartier reality of life. “I would learn to be more tolerant of the gap between the person and the work,” she wrote. And: “This was the first time I’d met someone whose appearance I had already formed a strong idea of through Photograph.”

  But to compare “Pilgrimage” to other accounts of the meeting is to see a different meaning in the story. It is true that Susan and Merrill met Thomas Mann at his home in Pacific Palisades, but beyond that, the story has been so extensively doctored—far beyond the usual elisions that occur when memory becomes memoir—that it can only be called a memoir in the baggiest sense of the word. This is all the more striking because of the energy with which it advertises its faithfulness to detail:

  “Yeah, another woman’s voice—they both had accents—saying, ‘This is Miss Mann, what do you want?’”

  “Is that what she said? It sounds as if she was angry.”

  “No, no, she didn’t sound angry. Maybe she said, ‘Miss Mann speaking.’ I don’t remember, but, honest, she didn’t sound angry. Then she said, ‘What do you want?’ No, wait, it was ‘What is it that you want?’”

  “Then what?”

  “And then I said . . . you know, that we were two high-school students . . .”

  As both Mann’s and Sontag’s diaries record, they were, in fact, not two but three students. They were not high school but college students, and the date Sontag places at the very beginning of the story—“December, 1947”—is equally wrong. The meeting took place in December 1949, a very different time in her life, when she had been definitively freed from the drivel of the Valley and inhabited a milieu—the University of Chicago—as rarefied as even she could have wished. Perhaps she thought that the correct date would undermine the contrast between her dull suburban life and “the world in which I aspired to live, even as the humblest citizen.”

  Even in Los Angeles, high German culture was not as distant as she portrayed it. The third person in the story, the unmentioned Gene Marum, was Merrill’s best friend. He was born in Germany to a prosperous family, not Jewish. In California, where he arrived as a child, his family stayed in touch with the other members of the German colony. He dated Nuria Schoenberg, the composer’s daughter. And as it happened, his aunt Olga, as a student in Munich, had lived with a Jewish girl named Katia Pringsheim: the very same Mrs. Thomas Mann who picked up the phone on San Remo Drive. It was Gene who called, not Merrill. He spoke, of course, in German (“they both had accents”) and made an appointment to visit Mann.

  For the purposes of fiction, it is easy enough to understand why Susan would omit this crucial entrée to the god in exile. It is funnier to imagine Thomas Mann in the telephone book between “Rose Mann, Ocean Park, and Wilbur Mann, North Hollywood,”5 which emphasizes the gulf between her lowliness and the exalted winner of the Nobel Prize. Whether she knew someone who knew someone who knew Katia Mann—whether she was fourteen (in the story) or sixteen (in reality)—there is no question that such a gulf existed.

  But the story is also filled with other retouches that, because they serve no dramatic purpose and are so apparently insignificant, suggest the presence of some hidden truth. Her initial journal entry from December 28, 1949, brief though it is, reveals several discrepancies. In “Pilgrimage” they meet at four, for example, whereas in the journals they “interrogated God this evening at six.” In the journals Mann sits on a couch; in the story, on a chair. In the journals they talk in the living room; in the story they meet in “Thomas Mann’s study.”

  In the story, they also discuss his forthcoming Doctor Faustus. The novel is filled with the German dialect of the sixteenth century, Mann explains, and he fears it will not readily be understood by an American public. And in fact they did talk about the book, but not in this way, since the book appeared in English in 1948. By setting the meeting in 1947, though, Susan can anticipate a discussion of this work. “Ten months, later, within days of the appearance” of the book, she and Merrill were at the Pickwick Bookstore: “I bought mine and Merrill his.”

  Another stray diary entry, in a long list of childhood memories, tells another story.

  “Being caught at the Pickwick Bookstore for stealing Doctor Faustus.”6

  * * *

  In the journals of Susan’s years in Los Angeles, a fear emerges, time and again, that she is a liar, a fake, a fraud. In June 1948, she doodled a tombstone in her notebook and wrote upon it the words

  Here Lies

  (as she did throughout life)

  Susan Sontag

  1933—195?7

  Some of this resulted from her “great decision,” taken in Tucson, to be popular, which she managed to pull off “more capably” at North Hollywood High. She reproached herself for not standing up for her beliefs—

  The kids were saying the most abysmally stupid and prejudicial things, particularly in relation to Negroes—I said a few things in my homey, slangey, let’s-be-friends–I’m-a-right-guy manner and returned to my seat completely frustrated and longing desperately to tell them all to go to hell.

  —including when she sought confirmation of her popularity by running for student council. “If only I could say honestly that I wish I had not won the election!” she wrote. “And then, the girl who came up to me and said that she was happy I won because she didn’t want any Jews—I hate them so—I’m being eaten up inside—Oh, to be beautifully, chastely, cleanly, perfectly sincere!—with myself, with all the world!”8

  The frustration was manifested toward the end of her life, when she offered advice to a graduating class at Vassar: “Don’t take shit. Tell the bastards off.”9 For her as for anyone, this was easier said than done. But beyond a wish to tell off racists, a feeling of inauthenticity
haunts the journals of these years. She notes “a mad frustrated longing for absolute honesty”10 and wonders, rereading her earlier journals in 1947, “when and if a person ever tells the truth.”

  —So far I have written only what upholds the ideal of what I would wish to be—calm, patient, understanding,—a stoic (I must always be suffering!!!) and, last but not least, a genius. That person who has been watching me as long as I can remember is looking now—it would be swell if “it” kept me from doing the wrong things but instead I don’t do the right things.11

  A feeling of posing, of straining to come across as something she was not, pervades these writings. There is a gap not only between the person she is and the person others perceive, but also, more acutely, between herself and some higher power watching over her. Striking a pose: it is not a coincidence that Susan Sontag was one of the most photogenic public figures of her generation, nor that in her finest novel, The Volcano Lover, the protagonist is a specialist in “attitudes.” Renowned for her masterful talent for mimicry, Lady Hamilton can summon, with a gesture or a tone, a whole host of figures from mythology and history.

  Sontag often spoke of her capacity for admiration, and this was one of her most appealing characteristics. But her fascination with figures like Thomas Mann was, in part, an attempt to force herself to be that better self of whose standards she was always falling short. Mann was a “god” in the sense of a great and admirable figure. He was also a god in the sense of a judgmental father who, if he only could see through her, would surely dash her asunder. “All that I say is with the feeling that it is being recorded,” she wrote in 1948. “All that I do is being watched.”12

  Mildred Sontag demanded that she be shielded from reality, and early on enlisted Susan to help her. 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. “Everyone was charmed by Mother,” Susan’s sister, Judith, said. “I don’t know how she managed it, because she did not charm her daughters.”13

  Mildred’s second marriage, her encouragement to other people to lie, including about their sexuality, reflects her own loss, her mother’s death, and a strange association that she had always retained from it. When Susan was around fourteen, a drunk propositioned her on the street, prompting a scandalized Mildred to declare she felt “positively unclean.” Susan, in her journal, replied: “Your horror is ugly and unclean—You and the memory of your mother’s buckle-like contraception lying on the table—your mother dying on a clean hospital bed—dying, in your mind, of Sex.”

  This was Susan’s heritage. “Everything that reminds her of the sex act is unclean—and I have been permeated with that disease.”14

  * * *

  Her mother encouraged her to lie, especially about sex. And from the time she was quite young, she realized she had something to lie about. “Just as I was once terrifiedly and neurotically religious and thought I should one day become a Catholic,” she wrote almost a year to the day before her visit to Mann, “so now I feel that I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this)—”15 A few months later, she mentions “the incipient guilt I have always felt about my lesbianism—making me ugly to myself.”16

  Even without her mother’s encouragement, she would have needed to lie at a time when homosexuals were commonly seen as perverts and criminals: laws against homosexual behavior were not overturned in all the United States until 2003. She would never quite lose the reluctance she expressed about those “lesbian tendencies,” but her sexuality was the key to the single-mindedness with which she pursued her vocation. “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality,” she wrote. “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

  * * *

  A decade later, in 1959, Susan wrote that “the only kind of writer I could be is the kind who exposes himself.”18 The masculine pronoun stands in instructive contradiction to the rest of the sentence. Indeed, a frequent criticism of Susan Sontag would be that she placed the intellectual above the physical or the emotional and thereby distanced herself from her subjects. That is what she did in “Pilgrimage,” in which all sorts of curious edits betray the historical accuracy the label of memoir demands.

  The hidden drama in “Pilgrimage” has nothing to do with the question of who placed the phone call to the Mann house, or whether Susan went with one or two friends, or whether they turned up at four or six. It has to do with her sexuality—which, she implies throughout the piece, is heterosexuality. She mentions her friend Peter Haidu: “A boyfriend had to be not just a best friend but taller, and only Peter qualified.” She describes how attractive Merrill was and declares that she “wanted to merge with him or for him to merge with me,” but Merrill was disqualified: “he was several inches shorter than I was. The other barriers were harder to think about.”

  She does not talk about these other barriers. The real barrier was that Merrill was every bit as gay as she was—as, of course, was Thomas Mann. And that is the genuine theme of the story, which she originally titled “Aria About Embarrassment”:19 “Everything that surrounds my meeting with him has the color of shame,” it begins. Similar words recur so frequently that there can be no mistaking their importance. She speaks of the “faintly shameful disease” of which her father had died. She writes that when Merrill suggested the visit “my joy turned to shame.” She describes the phone call as “mortifying” and herself as a “coward.” She was “awash in shame and dread” and refers to “further embarrassment” and “more embarrassment” and “how embarrassing” the situation was and feeling “ashamed, depressed” and “illicit, improper” and recalls the visit as “the memory of embarrassment” and “something shameful.”

  What, though, was she so ashamed of? The words seem a bit melodramatic to describe an ancient moment of teenage awkwardness. So often in Sontag’s writings the great artists appear not simply as models to emulate but as admonishing superegos before whom she must humbly abase herself: people who might see through her and discover her unworthiness, her ugliness, her lies. Thomas Mann was the first in this genealogy of gods, and that her shame in his presence was sexual emerges from a metaphor she uses at the end of the story. She and Merrill scurry away from San Remo Drive “like two teen-age boys driving away after their first visit to a brothel.”

  And this, despite the elaborate lies, is why “Pilgrimage” rings true. The facts were fake. But the shame was real.

  Chapter 6

  The Bi’s Progress

  I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,” Susan wrote in 1971.1 If the desire for transformation can derive from a lack of positive self-satisfaction, it is also the enemy of self-satisfaction in the negative sense, of smugness and complacency. In “Pilgrimage,” she mentions her “model of condescending to present time in favor of the better future.” As her mother, forever pining for her Chinese servants, looked to the past, Susan looked to the future. “I want to write—I want to live in an intellectual atmosphere—I want to live in a cultural center where I can hear a great deal of music.”2 She was fourteen when the principal of North Hollywood High told Nat and Mildred that Susan had read more books than her English teacher.3 And she soon learned where she could find the intellectual atmosphere she sought.

  In an article in Collier’s magazine, she read about the University of Chicago, “which didn’t have a football team, where all people did was study, and where they talked about Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas day and night. I thought, that’s for me.”4 Mildred, however, was not having it. On a cross-country trip in the summer of 1948, Susan’s first visit to New York s
ince departing for Tucson five years before, the family stopped in Chicago: “It looks as if the Plaisance hotel, across from the University, is as close as I’ll ever get to said educational institution!” she groaned in June. “Hell and damnation—just an immovable wall that I cannot beat down with any argument.”5

  This was not the story Mildred put about in later years. “I thought that anyone who was bright should do as she damn pleased,” she told a reporter.6 “She had a lilt in her voice,” a neighbor said, “when she told me Susan defied Nat”—who in this telling forbade Susan to leave—“and went on to the University of Chicago.”7 But Mildred and Nat were on the rocks: Susan mentions that “the strong possibility of a divorce includes the chance of Mother moving back to NY.” One of the subjects they disagreed on was allowing Susan to go away for college.8 Mildred and Nat patched things up. By September, with Nat’s help, Susan had broken down the immovable wall: “A tearful discussion with Mildred (damn it!). She said, ‘You should be very happy I married Nat. You would never be going to Chicago, rest assured of that! I can’t tell you how unhappy I am about it.’”9

  * * *

  Susan waited until a year after Mildred’s death, in 1986, to publish “Pilgrimage.” In it, Susan portrayed her “bony, morose” mother without affection, emphasizing only how desperate she was to leave home. As when Mildred told the story, that was only part of the truth, because as much as she felt oppressed by her mother, as much as she longed to find her way in the world, Susan was also aware of the “magical powers” her mother had granted her, the powers without which—she had been given to understand—Mildred would die. It was not easy for either to cut the tie. “I know that I must get away from home,” she wrote in May, “although I like LA and would not mind living here under other circumstances—the promise of a car is tempting, but hardly enough for me to continue this prostitution.”10