Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  But sexiness was not the point. “It was adult and sophisticated, and it was defying conventions,” Merrill said. “That’s what we were all about, discovering the conventions and discovering the hypocrisy of the adult world, or of the normal, everyday world, and discovering the secret world underneath.”

  The “orgy” was a far cry from the physical rebirth Susan had experienced at Berkeley, and its quality of a scientific expedition a rebuke of a line from Keats scrawled in her notebook at the beginning of the summer: “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts.”37 Now her head was separate from her body once again. She told herself to “force yourself to have sex with men,” Merrill said. “And that was one of her main projects when she went to the University of Chicago.”

  Chapter 7

  The Benevolent Dictatorship

  In those years, Susan said, the University of Chicago was “a benevolent dictatorship.” Its dictator was Robert Maynard Hutchins, a messianic figure who seems unimaginable in higher education today. He was just as remarkable then, both for his youth—thirty when named president of the University of Chicago—as for the ideas that attracted many of the leading cultural figures of a generation, both as teachers and students.

  Tall and attractive, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, Hutchins, like the Puritan founders of Harvard and Yale, saw rigorous education as a means of transforming the nation. His school was the opposite of the frivolous America of “the treacly Hit Parade, the hysterical narratings of baseball games.” And he had a flair for gestures that spread the school’s reputation for seriousness to precisely the kinds of students who, like Susan and Merrill, felt alienated from that culture. In the capital of the American Midwest, he even banned the football team—a decision of which Susan, like so many others attracted to Chicago, fondly approved. In 1942, beneath the stands of the abandoned football stadium, Enrico Fermi had built the world’s first nuclear reactor.

  Founded in 1890 by John D. Rockefeller, the university had been devoted to meritocracy from the beginning. If the eastern universities admitted students, explicitly or otherwise, on the basis of race, sex, class, and religion, Chicago admitted them through a uniform test. This excluded the possibility of “legacy” admissions, which perpetuated caste privilege. Chicago was the first major university to admit women on an equal basis with men,1 and by 1940, it had granted forty-five Ph.D.s to African Americans, more than any other university in the country.2 In an age where prestigious schools strictly limited Jewish admissions, the school was heavily Jewish, perhaps as much as half.3

  Hutchins’s University of Chicago, western, young, and democratic, was not meant, like those older universities, to serve an elite. It was meant to create one. Once inside, the students found that the curriculum, based on the classics of philosophy and literature, was the same for everyone, and all classes were required, except those from which the student had placed out.

  His instrument was a general education, known as the Common Core, based on the great books. There were no grades. Instead, said Robert Silvers, founder of The New York Review of Books, who graduated in 1947, “The University of Chicago was a series of readings. It started with Aristotle’s Physics and everyone in the college had read Aristotle’s Physics in one or two different courses. You read Aristotle’s On Aesthetics. You read Plato’s Republic. You read Augustine”—and so forth, through the whole history of Western philosophy, ending roughly with Marx and Freud. Science was an essential part of this education: “Everyone had to know some physiology. Everyone had to know some physics,” said Silvers. “Everyone was supposed to have some idea what the quantum theory was.”4

  The Chicago curriculum—essentially for Susan—was a list. “I am absolutely a defender of the mandatory curriculum, shaped by philosophical inquiry,” she later said, “and beginning with, yes, Plato and Aristotle and the Greek dramatists and Herodotus and Thucydides.” Like the lists of classics at the back of the Modern Library she found in Tucson, Chicago promised its graduates a solid foundation in culture. The difference between Chicago and the older universities, she said, was that Harvard had “a big menu and no ‘right way.’”5

  “The purpose of the university is nothing less than to procure a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution throughout the world,” Hutchins said.6 This ambition was the opposite of the narrow academic concerns Susan had recorded with a shiver a few months earlier at Berkeley. There, in the wake of the sensual revelations she was experiencing, she became “frightened to realize how close I came to letting myself slide into the academic life”—a slide that would have culminated, at sixty, when she was “ugly and respected and a full professor.”

  I was looking through the English Dept. publications in the library today—long (hundreds of pages) monographs on such subjects as: The Use of “Tu” and “Vous” in Voltaire; The Social Criticism of Fenimore Cooper; A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines + Newspapers of California (1859–1891). Jesus Christ! What did I almost submit to?!?7

  * * *

  Many classmates never forgot their first glimpse of Susan Sontag. “A Chicago woman wasn’t supposed to call attention to her physical attractiveness,” a professor said, “but there was nothing Sontag could do not to.”8 A friend remembered the opening reception. “People were standing around and she walked into the room, all of the men . . . Whoa!”9 On campus, “scruffy 17-year-old girls in blue jeans were the norm,” wrote another, when Susan Sontag turned up in silk stockings, high heels, silky dresses, and a California suntan. “It was assumed she was somehow associated with the term ‘Movie Star.’”10

  The high heels and the silky dresses seem not to have lasted much longer than it took her to hustle Mildred back off to Los Angeles: jeans were her norm, too. But her kind of beauty found fervent admirers at Chicago. She stood out on campus. “It attracted the brightest kids from the littlest ponds,” said the painter Martie Edelheit, who attended the camp from which Susan had absconded as a girl. Some graduates from those years—Philip Roth, Philip Glass, Robert Silvers, Carl Sagan, Mike Nichols, Susan Sontag—would be noticed in far bigger ponds. But the pressure was such, Edelheit said, that suicides were frequent:

  You get a thirteen-, fourteen-year-old kid who’s been the brightest kid in their town and they’re dumped into a setting like the University of Chicago. We had a dorm mother who was a twenty-two-year-old kid, who didn’t know her ass from her elbow and didn’t have a clue as to what she was supposed to be doing. There was nobody to talk to, and there was no real supervision.11

  If they were left to their own devices socially and emotionally, the students found that the “benevolent dictatorship” gave them a clear road map. In Hutchins, at Chicago, Susan found relentless standards to match her own. “Hutchins despised holidays, despised breaks,” wrote George Steiner, another illustrious alumnus. “He was a workaholic, and no one was ashamed of trying to be one after him. He hated sloppiness, mediocrity, cowardice; he made no secret of his standards.”12 These standards were so Himalayan that no one who adopted them could ever measure up, one scholar, James Miller, said with reference to Sontag.

  The question of whether she can measure up to the true teacher, and the true teacher is Socrates. . . . [Chicago students] want to measure up to this classic ideal of moral perfection. And they also want to be encyclopedic. They want to master the whole great books. So exemplary is on the one hand knowing a bunch of stuff. And on the other hand it’s being a perfect kind of soul. And people who don’t share this ambition, because they’re crass, money-grubbing schlubs and capitalists, because Hutchins had contempt for such people, are like the vermin of the earth. . . . It is an absolutely rigorously punishing ideal. And if you take it seriously, which I think Susan Sontag did, it means you have no choice but to have contempt for yourself.13

  Among all these overachievers, Susan Sontag stood out. She looked like a movie star and had a weight of learning behind her that awed even students accustomed to being the smartest k
ids in every class. Martie Edelheit recalled Susan’s dorm room: “I had gone to music and art high school, I had been a music student, I had read a fair amount, I thought,” she said, “and then I walked into her room and she had a wall of bookshelves in her room. Here was this sixteen-year-old kid who’d already had a year at Berkeley and who had this wall of books, and I was bowled over.”

  Like so many others, Joyce Farber never forgot her first glimpse of Susan. “I remember the first time I came down for breakfast,” she said, the image still clear almost seventy years later. “There she is sitting at the head of the table. She’s almost sixteen and everybody was hanging on every word. They don’t know anything about her. I can still see her there.”14

  She awed her professors, too. Robert Boyers, a friend later in Sontag’s life, recalled “two enormously different people” from that time, Philip Rieff, whom Sontag would marry, and David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd. “And both attest to the fact that she was, at age seventeen, the most brilliant student they had ever met. Precociously, obviously, unmistakably brilliant. And she had read more than any other seventeen-year-old they had ever met.”15

  * * *

  “Now, what do you see as the central point? What do you think? How would this apply to some problem?” Robert Silvers recalled the questions in a typical Chicago seminar.16 “We weren’t expected to turn in papers,” Susan said, “any more than Socrates’s students were expected to turn in papers.”17

  Yet some of Sontag’s papers from this time survive, including one she wrote for Kenneth Burke. One of the great eminences of Chicago, Burke was hardly well known outside it. When, at the beginning of one class, he wrote his name—“Mr. Burke”—on the blackboard, he had no reason to suspect that any undergraduate would know him. Then, after class, a girl asked his first name. The surprised professor wondered why she wanted to know.

  “Because I wondered if you might be Kenneth Burke.”

  He said, “How do you know who I am?”

  And I said, well, I’ve read Permanence and Change and Philosophy of Literary Form and A Grammar of Motives, and I’ve read . . .

  He said, “You have?”18

  Like everyone else at Chicago, Kenneth Burke was a scholar of great reputation. Unlike everyone else at Chicago, he had a direct connection to two legends of the literary bohemia of Greenwich Village. There, he had once shared an apartment with Hart Crane, the poet who killed himself in despair that he could never “correct” his homosexuality, and Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood. For Susan, Burke was a direct connection to the world to which she aspired. For him, she was “the best student I ever had.”19

  For him, she wrote a paper on Nightwood. It shows her boldness in challenging even the most august opinions. If T. S. Eliot discovered in the book a quality “very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy,” Sontag writes, correctly, that the fin de siècle decadents are the work’s true antecedents: “Nightwood’s wit and passion have no affinity to the ‘wholesomeness’ of an Elizabethan tragic plot,” she objects. “It is Pater’s style, rather than Marlowe’s or Webster’s, that Miss Barnes’s hyper-conscious refinement of perception resembles.” She further relates this refinement to a more literal decadence, referring to Barnes’s “apprehension of decay in the form of an initiation into the mysteries of disintegration, grotesquely equivalent to the successive steps in a mystic’s development toward absolute communion.”

  The disintegration that Barnes’s characters undergo has a philosophical purpose, too. A mystic must move away from the life of the “world” in order to find some greater truth beyond it: the positive meaning of disintegration. But this disintegration is only “grotesquely” equivalent because the world of Nightwood is not a spiritual world. It is more closely linked, at the one extreme, to the Sade of La philosophie dans le boudoir, and at the other to the basically Buddhist notions that absorbed so many of Sontag’s contemporaries, such as John Cage or Jasper Johns.

  Written and published as conspiratorial anti-Semitism was reaching its hysterical climax, Djuna Barnes’s book also makes much of Jews as frauds, sexually limp and fundamentally incapable of authenticity. It is a combination that would make the book, written by almost any other author, seem racist. But in Sontag’s writing about it, her affinity with this theme reinforces her—always unspoken—identification with the lesbian themes throughout: “Ultimately, the Jew as persecuted, outcast, reinforces the theme of the ‘questionable,’ as the sexual abnormalities previously noted represent unsanctioned behavior generally, i.e. the life of the socially estranged.”20 Homosexuality and Judaism are intertwined with theatricality and aristocracy in a dreamworld in which nothing is what it seems, Sontag writes:

  These masquerades are so integral a part of this world that Frau Mann, who calls herself the Duchess of Broadback, is astonished when, in the company of Matthew O’Conner, Felix asks her if Count Altamonte is really a Count. ‘Herr Gott!’ says the Duchess. ‘Am I what I say? Are you? Is the doctor?’ The reader wonders if Herr Gott is, either!

  * * *

  At Chicago, she was engaged in her own masquerade, widening the gulf between the real Susan and the Susan others saw. In high school she already thought of herself as a liar, and in Chicago she pursued her campaign to reinvent her origins. “She let one know that she came from a glamorous background,” said one classmate, “wealth, big convertibles, Hollywood suntan, important people.”21 This background was further embroidered by stories about Mildred—who, she told one friend, was half Irish—and Nat, who was so consumed with jealousy that he tried to kill Susan by running her over with a car.22

  These fictions reveal deeper truths. There is the wish for a different, happier origin. There is the recurrence of “the master-lie” about her mother. The notion that Mildred was Irish was a rather literal rendering of Susan’s desire not to see her as she really was, a desire that appears in their letters from this time. Susan is still the concerned parent—“I hope nothing that I said in our phone conversation disturbed you,” she told Mildred in October 1950—keeping up her campaign to educate the by-all-accounts-indifferent Mildred: “I began and finished Washington Square,” she wrote, “which is really marvelous—you must read it—did you finish the Thackeray?”23 A mother who read Henry James and Thackeray may have been Susan’s ideal parent; but that was not the parent she had. Finally, and most painfully: if Nat was jealous of her to the point of wanting to murder her, that meant that Susan—not he—was the one Mildred really loved. At Berkeley, Harriet saw that Susan “was clearly in love with her mother.” At Chicago, a girl said “she never saw anybody who adored anybody as much as Susan adored her mother.”24

  But her taste for invented truths lost her the friendship of Merrill Rodin, who had started at Chicago a year before. After her first semester in Chicago, they returned to Los Angeles, where they visited Thomas Mann. At some point, Merrill told her about a professor named Joseph Schwab. Schwab, who taught nearly every course in the Chicago curriculum, embodied its universalizing ideals; Susan later called him “the most important teacher I ever had.”25 In the coming months, Merrill said, “she kind of took over with him in a way that made me competitive or jealous.” The final straw came when Susan, in a display of her own scrupulousness, confessed to Mrs. Schwab, who worked in the bookstore, that she and Merrill had stolen books.

  “I got the feeling that she wanted to emerge as repentant and purged,” Merrill said—“absolved, but make me incriminated somehow. Making an intellectual issue out of something that was emotional and personal for her, and throwing me under the bus without caring about me or my feelings.”

  * * *

  The real conundrum, which she skirts even in her paper on Nightwood, is sexuality. At Chicago, many of the teachers, like many of the students, were young, and experimentation was in the air: “We invented all that stuff that later on was called the sexual revolution,” said another friend from this time.26 Indeed, to read about Chicago in these years is to see many id
eas taking shape nearly a generation before “The Sixties.” Some were not new—the avant-garde of every American generation tried, and failed, to reject consumerism—but some were, particularly the emphasis on sexual liberation that became one of the great movements of the postwar period. At Chicago, full of adolescents in a rush to grow up, sex was as much a part of education as Socrates, and incoming students rushed to shed their unwanted virginity. For the girls, there was even a “professional cherry picker,” a good-looking guy named Dick Lynn. (After this promising start, he pursued a career in insurance.)27

  At Chicago, Susan had several affairs, including with women—and with Dick Lynn. But she was increasingly rejecting the “rebirth” she had experienced in Berkeley. In November 1950, shortly after writing her Nightwood paper for Burke, she reread Martin Eden and acknowledged the disillusion it brought her: this was when she noted that she had “grown up literally never daring to expect happiness.” The happiness she experienced with Harriet had faded and she found herself debating “the dichotomy of sex and affection,” feeling “neurotic anxiety about death,” and writing that “sex has been a secret, silent, dark admission of affectional need, which must be forgotten when vertical.”28

  And she wrote of a confession that sounds like the kind of confession she made to Mrs. Schwab: “My need to ‘confess’ to Mother was not commendable at all—it does not show me to be upright and honest but 1) weak, seeking to strength[en] the only affectional relationship I have, + 2) sadistic—since my illicit activities are an expression of rebellion; they are not efficacious unless known!”29