Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  She was only fifteen; all year, she hesitated. It was a momentous decision for one so young, and Susan was strongly tempted by familiarity. “How I long to surrender! How easy it would be to convince myself of the plausibility of my parents’ life! If I saw only them and their friends for a year, would I resign myself—surrender? . . . For I can feel myself slipping, wavering—at certain times, even accepting the idea of staying home for college.”

  Her reluctance was bound with her passionate entanglement with her mother. Susan—not Nat—could help her, Mildred let her know. Susan alone could comfort her. Susan always believed it.

  All I can think of is Mother, how pretty she is, what smooth skin she has, how she loves me. How she shook when she cried the other night—she didn’t want Dad, in the other room, to hear her, and the noise of each choked wave of tears was like a giant hiccup.11

  At the end of 1948, she graduated from North Hollywood High. By then, she had given up on Chicago and elected, after all, UCLA, just over the hills from Sherman Oaks. But then a compromise candidate emerged: Berkeley, the flagship of the University of California. It was close—but not too close—to home. “UCLA vs. Cal,” she wrote a few months later. “Cal meant a complete uprooting of myself—new city, new environment, new people—an immediate opportunity to leave home. Emotionally, I wanted to stay. Intellectually, I wanted to leave. As always, I seemed to enjoy punishing myself.”12

  The masochism that would characterize most of her important relationships had first been established with Mildred. In a lightly fictionalized memoir, she recalled being “obsessed with longing to grow up” and longing, too, “for more affection from her silent dark handsome mother.” That affection only came gushing forth when her mother was about to lose her, rebounding “with a suddenly awakened flow of maternal love and dependence.” This, in turn, prompted Susan to flee.13

  But she did not do so without guilt, including toward her sister, whom she offered to Mildred in atonement. More than a decade later, she apologized. “Do you know I have never ceased to feel guilty about ‘leaving home,’” she wrote her sister in a confessional letter. “At my age! And after so many years! But Judith, I reasoned—mainly unconsciously—Judith is there, Judith is holding the fort. So I sacrificed you—any thought about what might have been good for you—to my feeling of guilt toward her. . . . You have every reason not to trust me at all, or to like me very much.”14

  Thirty-seven years after she left home, shortly after Mildred’s death, Susan still blamed herself for the failed relationship. “I’ve always felt guilty for leaving home/M. So she had a right to treat me so coldly, so ungenerously.”15

  * * *

  This guilt hung over her first weeks in Berkeley. “Well, I’m here,” she sighed to her notebook. “It’s no different at all; it seems it never was a matter of finding more felicitous surroundings, but of finding myself—finding self-esteem and personal integrity. I’m no happier now than I was at home.”16 The challenge—“finding self-esteem and personal integrity”—was the same. A university might have seemed to invite the same solutions she found in high school, immersion in literature and music. But Berkeley had another experience in store for her, and her academic life soon took a back seat.

  During her first months, she read as intensely as ever, confessing her initial disappointment with Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, castigating herself for being snobbish about Robert Browning, declaiming passages from Christopher Marlowe, feeling disappointed with Hermann Hesse’s “childishness of conception,” and making summer plans “to concentrate on Aristotle, Yeats, Hardy, and Henry James.”17 She was also brooding about an unrequited crush on a girl named Irene Lyons, and dabbling in sex with men in order to “prove, at least, that I am bisexual,” only to confess that she felt “nothing but humiliation and degradation at the thought of physical relations with a man.”18

  In April, she read Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Published in 1936, this was one of the few contemporary works of literary merit that openly discussed gay lives. (For men, there were the journals of André Gide, which Susan and Merrill read, and Death in Venice, which might explain some of her attachment to Thomas Mann.) Nightwood came with a preface by T. S. Eliot that praised its “brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” For many who read it, the novel was a turn-on, sexual and artistic: “not just a read, an enchantment.”19

  There are fake barons; people with names like Frau Mann, Duchess of Broadback; and sentences of a rococo gayness that has rarely been surpassed: “Like a painting by the douanier Rousseau, she seemed to lie like a jungle trapped in a drawing room.”20 As Partisan Review introduced her to an intellectual language that Susan longed to master, Nightwood brought her a language for her erotic aspirations. Its self-conscious style is often incomprehensible—“Ho, nocturnal hag whimpering on the thorn, rot in the grist, mildew in the corn”21—a language that flaunts its impenetrability. The entire book reflects a concept, derived from Wilde, Huysmans, and their nineteenth-century decadents, of homosexuality as aristocracy. Barnes employs the traditional settings of this world (the Left Bank) along with the sexual frankness (“in the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor”) that express contempt for bourgeois proprieties. At its core, this is the concept that conventional life is not available to homosexuals—and neither do homosexuals want it to be. “One’s life is peculiarly one’s own,” Barnes wrote in a sentence that must have thrilled Susan, “when one has invented it.”22

  Yet there is also, in Nightwood, a vision of homosexuals as sick, deranged, maddened by indecent lust: “Look for the girls [i.e. gay men] also in the toilets at night, and you will find them kneeling in that great secret confessional crying between tongues, the terrible excommunication.”23 Lesbian life is no more edifying, Barnes suggests with a brutal metaphor: “Like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to contemplate, head-on and eye to eye, until death.”24

  * * *

  “Have you read Nightwood?” Harriet Sohmers asked a “gorgeous,” “truly beautiful” sixteen-year-old Susan Sontag, who was browsing in the Berkeley bookstore. It was nearly the end of the semester, and Harriet, a junior from New York, stood chatting with another employee, a gay man who saw Harriet checking the girl out: “the prettiest thing,” she remembered, “adorable.”

  “Go get her,” he commanded.25

  Five years older than Susan, Harriet was a New Yorker already sophisticated in the ways to which Susan aspired: she had spent two years at NYU and a summer at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she met important avant-garde artists, including John Cage and Merce Cunningham. There, she also met Peggy Tolk-Watkins, later famed as “queen of the dykes” in San Francisco, where she owned a legendary lesbian bar on the Embarcadero called the Tin Angel. Peggy was Harriet’s first gay relationship, and introduced her to the San Francisco underground. To this world Harriet now introduced Susan.

  Their affair would last, on and off, for most of a decade. Its first three weeks would be essential to Susan’s future life—and she immediately knew it. On May 23, 1949, she wrote that those weeks were, “perhaps, the most important space of time—(important to whatever I will be as a whole person)—I’ve known.” On the cover page of the diary, she wrote: “I AM REBORN IN THE TIME RETOLD IN THIS NOTEBOOK.”26 Reborn in the sense of discovering love and sex with the full force of a passionate adolescent; reborn because, in that discovery, she glimpsed a solution to the division she had already diagnosed as the great challenge of her life: “my greatest unhappiness, the agonized dichotomy between the body and the mind.”27 In Harriet, she saw a way to overcome that dichotomy. Rather than a depressing reality to be avoided by flight into the mind, the body itself could be the source of the self-esteem she hoped to find when she left home.

>   A sense of fun, of relief and release, permeates her account of the last weeks of the semester. The world she was discovering in the bars of San Francisco thrilled her, and she recorded it carefully in her diaries. “The singer was a very tall and beautiful blonde in a strapless evening gown,” she wrote, “and even though I wondered about her remarkably powerful voice, Harriet—smilingly—had to tell me she was a man.” On another occasion, “C bought a gun and threatened to shoot them both . . . The other two women were a couple named Florence and Roma . . . Harriet had had an affair with Florence . . . At one point C began to laugh and asked us if we realized what a parody of Nightwood this all was.”

  As so often in her life, this fun had to do with the discovery of a new language. Martin Eden kept vocabulary lists, and so, throughout her life, did Susan. Her notes show how much she had to learn:

  Homosexual = gay

  Heterosexual = jam (West Coast), straight (East)28

  Her diary carried many other terms, sexual and otherwise, from the subculture of gay San Francisco:

  “86,” “he 86’d me,” “I was 86’d” (throw out)

  act “swishy,” “I’m swish tonight” (effeminate)

  “I’m fruit for—” (I’m crazy about—)

  the “head,” the “john” (toilet)

  T.S. (tough shit)

  “he’s gay trade,” “take it out in trade” (one-night stands)

  “go commercial,” “I’m going commercial” (for money)

  “get a (have a) head on” (have an erection)

  “a chippie” (a one-night-stand woman—just for sex—no money)

  “fall off the roof” (menstrual period)29

  These lists were the beginning of another list, the fifty-eight theses of “Notes on ‘Camp,’” that she published nearly fifteen years later. That list described, with a nearly anthropological meticulousness, a mode of homosexual sensibility that Susan started observing at Berkeley and that she, more than any other writer, first brought to the awareness of a heterosexual public. She confessed that it was a sensibility that alternately attracted and repelled her, but at Berkeley she clearly sensed its liberating potential. If longing for a woman nearly ruined her, “congealing the incipient guilt I have always felt about my lesbianism—making me ugly to myself—I know the truth now—I know how good and right it is to love.”30

  It was an erotic revelation in the broadest sense of the term. Just before she met Harriet, she went on a date with a man, during which the topics under examination seemed almost parodically Sontagian—“We discussed everything from Bach cantatas to Mann’s Faustus to pragmatism to hyperbolic functions to the Cal Labor School to Einstein’s theory of curved space”—and during which she realized “I had rejected more than I had ever had: the totality of wandering and laziness and sun and sex and food and sleep and music.” Now, an embrace of her sexuality gave her the possibility of integrating that voracious mind with an equally hungry body. “I’ll begin right by going out and grabbing at experience, not waiting for it to come to me—I can do that now because the Great Barrier is down—the feeling of sanctity about my body—I have always been full of lust.”31 Berkeley meant “accepting my self, aye, rejoicing in my self—The really important thing is not to reject anything—When I think how I wavered about actually coming up to Cal! That I actually considered not accepting this new experience!”32

  As she wrote this, however, she was getting ready to leave. She had not given up her dream of the University of Chicago, and on May 28 she learned that she had been accepted, with a scholarship of $765.

  Her Berkeley idyll was over. She left feeling reborn, but Harriet returned to New York unsure of the totality of Susan’s transformation. “Sexually it was a dud,” she said. “She was beautiful, but she was not sexual. There’s a big difference.” Indeed, in a pattern she would often repeat with her lovers, Susan looked up to Harriet as a teacher, learning from her everything she could. “I always thought it was because she was too intellectual,” Harriet said of the problems in their relationship. “If we went to a movie, she would wait to hear if I liked it. If I didn’t like it, she didn’t like it.”

  Susan was still plagued by the insecurity she had come to Berkeley to combat. “She was such a weakling,” Harriet said of Susan in the first weeks of their relationship. “She was so impressionable and easy to intimidate, and unsure of herself. Everything that came later is sort of a killing of that child that she was, because she was really very unsure of who she was.” Nonetheless, Harriet knew Susan was extraordinary. “I remember being with her in the train that went from San Francisco to Sausalito and saying to her: ‘You have a great destiny.’”33

  * * *

  Shortly after the sexual revolution of Berkeley, Susan’s mind reasserted itself over her body. She returned to Los Angeles for the summer, where she got a job as a file clerk at Republic Indemnity Company of America, and where she met up with Merrill Rodin. At her urging, he, three years older, had gone to the University of Chicago the year before. “That was the greatest intellectual experience of my life,” he said, “and a kind of awakening for me.”

  Back in California, they took up their old friendship. “Hesitatingly at first,” she told him “about these experiences she had at Berkeley that she would never be able to tell her parents,” who “would be shocked and horrified if they ever knew.”34 They spent the whole summer “exploring the gay life, the underground, very underground gay life in Los Angeles. And we were fascinated by it.” In the world they came from, the only gay people were those displayed as tourist attractions, like circus dwarves. Merrill’s mother once told him that she and his father “went to the Flamingo Club and saw the fairies,” he said. “And that was the first time I heard of fairies.”

  That club, on La Brea, was closed to tourists on Sunday afternoons, when real gay people, including Susan and Merrill, turned up. In all of enormous Los Angeles, there were “fewer than five” places where homosexuals gathered: besides the Flamingo Club, Merrill remembered Tropic Village in Ocean Park and a place on the beach in Santa Monica, “a whole different world—parallel but underneath the real world.”

  Significantly for Susan’s intellectual development, that parallel underworld included avant-garde culture. In the Coronet Theater on La Cienega Boulevard, they saw the films of Maya Deren, who had been making experimental movies in Los Angeles since 1943. At the Coronet, they also saw the homoerotic short Fireworks by Kenneth Anger. (It showed a young man dreaming about dreaming, a theme that would recur in Sontag’s later work.) Only a few years older than Susan and Merrill, Anger had been greatly influenced by Deren; his film, a mere fourteen minutes long, led to his arrest on obscenity charges. The case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of California, which finally ruled that the film could be exhibited; but the scandal indicated the climate in which gay artists had to work, even in great urban centers such as Los Angeles.

  Like the characters in Nightwood, the inhabitants of this parallel homosexual world formed a cultural elite, as people like Susan were proudly aware. But they were also aware that that world meant constant danger: to young people exposed to “shocked and horrified” families; to artists like Kenneth Anger, the objects of public scandal; to anyone who frequented the places Susan and Merrill frequented. “They were raided all the time,” he said. “They were illegal. They were risky.”

  Even without a mother who encouraged her to think of sex as dangerous and dirty, it would not have been surprising if Susan, after the rush of liberation she felt at Berkeley, had started to feel misgivings. With Harriet gone, she fretted about accepting permanent membership in this society. In Tucson, she had “understood the difference between the outside and the inside”—and gayness was practically the definition of the outside. As she had succeeded in becoming popular at North Hollywood High, she now tried to rejoin the mainstream.

  Merrill’s best friend, Gene Marum, who would phone Thomas Mann at the end of the year, spent much of the summer
with Merrill and Susan. Gene was straight, though he shared their interest in the gay world, stealing André Gide’s journals for Susan; but he also offered Susan some practical advice. “If you don’t want to be gay,” he explained to her, “this is what you have to do. You have to force yourself to go out with men; you have to suck their penises, and it’s going to be hard, but it’s the only way to overcome being a lesbian.”35

  This advice was perfectly calibrated for an insecure girl whose faith in self-transformation was all that had brought her through an unhappy childhood. It is at this time that Susan, who only a few months earlier had confessed she felt “nothing but humiliation and degradation at the thought of physical relations with a man,” began to describe herself, privately, as bisexual, and to apply herself, with the studious dedication that made her so outstanding academically, to taking Gene’s advice.

  * * *

  An astonishing document survives from this time. Entitled “The Bi’s Progress,” it is a single page listing her sexual encounters, from “Xmas Eve 1947 (age 14) to 8/28/50 (age 17).”36 The list is noteworthy for several reasons. The first is the sheer quantity of people she had managed to sleep with by her second year in college: thirty-six. The second is the number of one-night stands, people with single names, from Yvonne to “Phil” to the alarming “Grandma.” But the most remarkable aspect of this list is the pedagogical mind-set its title reveals. “The Bi’s Progress” shows that Susan had taken Gene’s advice and was trying to train herself into heterosexuality by increasing the proportion of heterosexual encounters. Perhaps she could master heterosexuality as she mastered vocabulary words: by dint of practice.

  These efforts were not crowned with success. Susan, Gene, and Merrill decided to prove that they “were so uninhibited about sex that we could have our own private orgy.” They rented a room at the Normandie Village motel on the Sunset Strip, drank a beer, and stripped. They saw each other’s naked bodies, then didn’t quite know what to do with them. Merrill was circumcised; Gene was not. Susan was intrigued by the difference, which made the proceedings “scientific, and not at all erotic,” for Merrill. For Gene, it was simply “disgusting.”