Like so many readers, she took delight in Freud’s case studies. His interpretations are as exciting as those of his contemporary Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes scoured the rubbish heap to discover clues that seem, in retrospect, to have been hiding in plain sight; and to read Freud on Michelangelo—“What are the fingers of Moses’ right hand doing in the ‘mighty beard’ with which they are in contact?”16—is to await, as in detective stories, a startling denouement. It is also to discover new possibilities for criticism that, Sontag emphasizes, elevate the interpretation to a position superior to the original work. As the meaning of the dream escapes the dreamer, the meaning of a work of art will as necessarily escape its creator. “In radical opposition to constitutional psychology, Freud puts language before body,” she writes, which method “raises the art of interpretation to the highest relevance.”17
It is a vision of the critic masked as the artist. And it is all the more meaningful in this highly masked work: Sontag writing under another name; Sontag subsuming personal concerns into a portrait of another intellectual. It is a procedure to which she would often resort. In the 1950s, her personal writings—her diaries—all but disappear. But that does not mean she had stopped writing about herself. In contrast to Montaigne, creator of the autobiographical essay, or to Freud, who unflinchingly interpreted his own dreams, Sontag’s most personal works are precisely those in which she most determinedly elides the “I.” But as the unconscious reveals itself in dreams and in speech, the self unconsciously leaks into her writings.
* * *
Her criticisms of Freud’s method of interpretation developed a polemical force in the next decade that is absent here. She does aim some aphorisms at him: “All direction is erection,” she writes, for example, summarizing his tendency to see sexual imagery in unlikely places.18 Her most searching criticisms are, in fact, reserved for Freud’s writings on sexuality, the heart of the psychoanalytic theory. She dwells on his idea of the erotic as a conflict between the longing for freedom and the repression both individual and society require in order to function. This notion relates to other tensions Freud identified: between reason and spontaneity, following the German Romantics; between the scientific and the artistic imaginations, following Kant. These were questions to which Sontag would return again and again.
Freud believed that these more visible tensions overlay the fundamentally “sexual” tension looming beneath the surface of every life. It was the threat of chaos, the skull grinning in on the banquet, a “humiliation of the highest possessions of civilization,”19 to which repression, both political and personal, was an appropriate, indeed indispensable, response. But repression also lent sexuality its sadomasochistic character. “Freud traced love back to the parental fact of domination,” Sontag wrote. “Power is the father of love, and in love one follows the paternal example of power, in a relation that must include a superior and a subordinate.”20
Somewhat mystifyingly, given Freud’s vision of ideal love as a relation between equals, this vision did not include a vision of women as equals to men. “Freud shows condescension toward his female patients,” Sontag notes. She was hardly the first to attack this misogynist bias, but she does so along interesting lines. She mentions such notions as penis envy and the Oedipus complex, inherently problematic from the female perspective, but invests most of her energy in addressing the idea that women, and particularly educated women, are divided between their minds and their bodies. “Freud faced the great problem created by the emancipation of women,” she writes. “‘Intellectual training’ may cause them ‘to depreciate the feminine role for which [they are] intended.’”
The mind is only developed at the expense of the task biology has assigned them:
In thus charging that [the] sexual and intellectual are incompatible in women, Freud exhibits again his belief that the two qualities are basically opposed. This opposition between sex and intellect remained an unquestioned part of Freud’s doctrine of human nature.21
This opposition makes women particularly susceptible to sexual frustration, Freud wrote. But he offers little consolation. “He contrasts the job of psychoanalysis with male patients—to develop their capacities, sexual and otherwise—with the more limited aim, in the case of women patients, of resigning them to their sexuality.”22 This attitude shaped a culture in which sexual and intellectual life were, for women, far more fraught than for men, as Sontag was quick to note: “That the great critical figures in modern philosophy, literature, psychology—Nietzsche, Lawrence, Freud—were misogynists is a fact the significance of which has not yet been properly assessed.”23
But another side of Freud did offer Sontag consolation, and that was his attitude toward homosexuality. If, viewed today, his writings hardly make him seem progressive, he was, in many ways, by the standards of his day. His arguments offered scientific fortification to early movements for gay rights. “By discovering a universal disposition to bisexuality,” Sontag wrote, “Freud assaulted prevailing prejudices by showing ‘normality’ in its accepted meaning to be another name for the conventional.” The implication, she writes, “is greater tolerance for those who aim perversely.”24
* * *
Susan claimed she wrote “every single word” of The Mind of the Moralist. Philip belatedly allowed that she was its “co-author.”25 And it is in certain passages, on women and homosexuality, that Susan’s voice can be most clearly distinguished. Perhaps their divorce darkened Philip’s view of women, particularly of gay women. But even as a young man, as when he forbade Susan and Joyce Farber to go to the movies in jeans, his notions of female propriety had raised eyebrows.
Susan seems to have had less influence over his thesis, “Freud’s Contribution to Political Philosophy,” accepted at Chicago in 1954. There, the “traditional man” approvingly ascribed to Freud the belief that “there is an inevitable inequality in even the happiest marriages,” in which love becomes “a relation of obedience to authority.”26 The interest in domination and authority, certainly present in Freud’s thought, is also present in The Mind of the Moralist. But there it is subjected to a strong feminist reading absent from Philip’s thesis.
In his later career, he was notorious for refusing to direct the dissertations of women students.27 As for homosexuals—to whom he referred as “homosexualists”28—they were “disgusting.”29 Love, for them, was impossible:
Bisexuality is as powerful a perversion and rebellion against reality and its commanding truths of resistance as is homosexuality. For love in the sexual mode must be across the sexes in order to be true.30
Rieff’s late works are so eccentric—this one warns that the hip-hop group 2 Live Crew was “a matter of world conquest” and includes condescending remarks about Abraham Lincoln—that it is hard to take them seriously, no matter how seriously they take themselves. Perhaps it is enough to note the distance between Philip Rieff’s opinion on bisexuality and the call for tolerance voiced in The Mind of the Moralist.
* * *
The book from which the above quote was taken, My Life Among the Deathworks, was published in 2006, the year Philip Rieff died. It includes an understated, tender dedication: “Susan Sontag in remembrance.”
This was a marked change of tone from the acknowledgments included in The Mind of the Moralist. When it was published in 1959, he thanked “my wife, Susan Rieff, who devoted herself unstintingly to this book.” Even this grudging nod would be removed from subsequent editions, but it raised eyebrows when it appeared. “Boy, he hates her,” Joyce Farber thought when she saw the book. “She never in her whole life used that name, ever.”31 It was an attempt to colonize her identity, to shove his wife back into the traditional role: to reassert his authority, to get back on top.
As in her later writings about illness, in which the vigor of Sontag’s polemics swept aside the doubts she herself harbored, her assertions of a woman’s need for an independent identity masked an equally eager need to submit. Freud, and Philip, were no
t alone in believing that every relationship “must include a superior and a subordinate.” Whether this statement applies to all love relationships is dubious, but it would prove sadly germane to Susan Sontag’s. Her inability to abandon what Freud calls “the sadistic conception of coitus” doomed one relationship after another; and his proffered solution, “an ideal love purged of parental influences, an exchange of equals,”32 proved impossible for her to achieve. Her parental influences—what she called her “profoundest experience”—were of affection given and withdrawn.
The result was “conceiving all relationships as between a master and a slave,” she wrote a few years after her marriage ended. “In each case, which was I to be? I found more gratification as a slave; I was more nourished. But—Master or slave, one is equally unfree.”33
Chapter 10
The Harvard Gnostics
Susan seems to have been contemplating escape from thralldom to the traditional family almost from the moment she reached Massachusetts. David was born in September 1952. The following June, they moved from Arlington to 29 Chauncy Street, in Cambridge, only a few blocks from Harvard. At the end of the summer, she began graduate school in English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
Unlike the private University of Chicago or the public University of California, the University of Connecticut was a modest institution. It began as the Storrs Agricultural School in 1881 and had only assumed its more imposing current name fourteen years before Susan arrived. Storrs was a town that was “a crossroads . . . in the middle of a cornfield,” said a classmate, Hardy Frank. The town lacked so much as a drugstore, and the university lacked much permanent architecture: “Our offices and our classes were in Quonset huts,” Frank said.
But the state was investing in building a real university from a school whose previous ambitions were “just enough to teach the farmhands to read.” The recruits “were very bright, interesting men who were making their way up the ladder,” Frank said.1 As part of this effort, the school sought recent graduates to teach freshman composition. That is how Susan Sontag, still only twenty years old, became “the youngest college instructor in the United States.”2
She rarely mentioned her time in Storrs. She was not keeping a journal, and the only description of her reasons for going there are in a letter to her mother. “Since I knew how competitive a thing it was to get into Harvard-Radcliffe, and since I knew my Chicago degree (not that it isn’t the best school, but it isn’t a B.A. that takes 4 full years) counted heavily against me in the competition, I felt my only chance was to apply to the English Dept., where I could add as evidence my year of part-time teaching to the abbreviated work I had done as an undergraduate.”3
David was not yet a year old when Susan started her graduate work at Storrs, and she had arranged to spend Monday through Friday in the women’s dormitory. She only returned home on weekends. All her life she had longed for more attention from her part-time mother. “I hardly saw her as a child,” Susan said after Mildred’s death. “She was always away.”4 But she would often be away for her own child. “Susan was using it as an escape,” said Frank. “To get away from getting trapped looking after the baby.”
* * *
In 1954, she was accepted into the Harvard English Department. This, though English “never seemed to me an entirely legitimate academic study,” she wrote Mildred. Instead, it was “a field which attracts a great many unserious students; it is notoriously easy, as compared with math or anthropology or physics or history.”5 She was, in fact, unhappy in English. “I loathed last year’s studies,” she told her mother in 1955. “They were shallow, boring, and ridiculously easy.” At Harvard, moreover, she faced a hurdle she had not mentioned in her previous universities: a deep-rooted misogyny that made the English Department “extremely unwelcoming to women,” said Minda Rae Amiran. “It was hard to meet any other women there. They weren’t admitted.”6
Amiran was one of the rare women who made it past this barrier. She remembered Susan from Chicago and was happy to meet her again at Harvard. They became close, together suffering the indignities meted out to women. The sexism went beyond the presumption that the wives would pass around the canapés at receptions, a task that Professor Rieff’s wife, Amiran recalled, dutifully performed. A prominent professor, Harry Levin, told Susan that he did not “believe” in female graduate students, making her decision to leave a field she already held in low regard all that much easier.7 In 1955, at the beginning of the fall semester, she attended two days of classes in English, was “bored and disgusted,” rushed to the Philosophy Department, “practical considerations be damned,” and threw herself on the mercy of the far more sympathetic chairman, Morton White, who immediately saw her “great intelligence and a prodigious amount of learning for one her age.”8 The department was far better suited to her.
Once she had made the change, she wrote her mother: “I am completely happy and for the first time find graduate school not a chore.”
* * *
In one of the unpublished memoirs she wrote of these years, she observed that she and Philip “had great difficulty making friends. They tended to criticize them out of acceptability.”9 This was the impression she conveyed to Hardy Frank in Connecticut: “You had the sense that she was perpetually judging and perpetually judging unfavorably.”10 She was not the only one. Memoirs of her Harvard circle are replete with sexism, snobbery, fraudulence, and one-upmanship. The word that most frequently recurs may be “condescension.” The contrast with the Chicago of Hutchins, which many alumni remembered as a great moment in their lives, could not be more striking. Philip and Susan were not the only members of this circle who were as talented as they were insecure. The result of constant competition was an atmosphere redolent of the Versailles of Saint-Simon, a court whose inhabitants were constantly menaced by a crash into le ridicule. One, Jacob Taubes, struck his colleagues as too self-important, and so they invented a “medieval scholastic, whose thinking constituted an interesting hybrid of the Thomistic and Scotistic schools.”
Taubes took the bait.
After the first exchange of views, during which Taubes had listened without commenting, as if he were thoroughly acquainted with the subject, he spoke brilliantly about Bertram of Hildesheim’s psychology and astonished those present with his profound and comprehensive knowledge—until he was informed that no such person existed; he’d been invented for the purposes of this discussion. That put an end to Taubes’s hopes of a career at Harvard.11
“He was an awful, gnomish little man,” said Amiran of the victim. Many were repelled by the squat, chinless Taubes—but not everyone. Some of the most interesting women of the day succumbed. His admirers, besides Susan Sontag, included the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann; the scholar Margherita von Brentano, scion of an illustrious German family; and his first wife, Susan Taubes. She and her husband formed a couple of the first importance in Sontag’s life.
* * *
Born in Vienna in 1923, Jacob Taubes survived the Nazis thanks to his father’s providential appointment, when Jacob was thirteen, as Grand Rabbi of Zürich. He was himself ordained as a rabbi and published Abendländische Eschatologie (Western Eschatology), his dissertation and only published book, in 1947. In that year, for any European Jew, an interest in the end of the world was natural. Natural, too, was an awareness, for anyone who straddled the worlds of secular and religious learning, that the old observant Judaism had been rendered absurd by the Holocaust. The philosophically minded had to discover a new way to live.
Soon after, he left Switzerland for New York, where he taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary and, in 1949, married the twenty-one-year-old Susan Feldmann. Her given name, Judit Zsuzsánna, combined Susan and Judith Sontag’s names. “Susan: same name as me, ma sosie [my double], also unassimilable,”12 she wrote many years later. “Unassimilable” was the word she reserved for people, including her father and Antonin Artaud, who were impossible to know or understand.
; Like her husband, Susan Taubes was of distinguished Jewish lineage. Her grandfather was the Grand Rabbi of Budapest; her father, Sándor Feldmann, swapped Judaism for Freudianism and became one of the leading Hungarian disseminators of psychoanalysis, close to Sándor Ferenczi and the fabled circle around Freud. For Sontag, such proximity to the fountainhead was glamorous in the extreme. For Susan Taubes, raised according to psychoanalytical principles, it was something less. In her autobiographical novel, the father “explained to her the Electra complex: she was really in love with him and wanted to marry him and there was no point in denying it; that was part of her Electra complex to deny it.”13
She and her father fled ahead of the Nazis and reached the United States in 1939, when she was eleven; her mother joined them later. They lived in the Pittsburgh slums for three years, while her father, whose foreign degree was invalid in the United States, studied to pass the American medical boards. She finished high school in Rochester, New York. In her yearbook, the answer to “What People Usually Say to Her” was “Smile, Susan, SMILE!”14 It was a sharp contrast to Sontag’s worry that she came across as too perky and Californian. Unlike Sontag, she would never have to exhort herself “to smile less, talk less.”15
Torn from Europe but estranged from America, alienated from the Judaism of her grandparents but unconvinced by the Freudianism of her father, she found a similarly uprooted figure in Jacob Taubes, who called her Susan Anima, Susan Soul. Their distaste for convention was not, as for someone from middle-class America like Susan Sontag, an aesthetic choice. It was an inescapable destiny imposed by history. They entered marriage on unconventional terms, in which sexuality would be unrestricted:
If Ezra’s [i.e., Jacob’s] practices did not appeal to her that was a matter of personal taste; to judge him by society’s rules, as a principle she refused. She hadn’t asked for a bourgeois marriage; and if ever the depressing thought took hold of her that she was trapped in a bourgeois marriage, [Jacob’s] behavior assured her that she was not.16
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