Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Their unorthodox sexual arrangements proved disastrous for all involved. But the very unconventionality of the marriage gave Susan Taubes an anchor, an identity, a relationship whose nature expressed the radical thought to which she was necessarily attracted. She had “a special interest in the topic of estrangement,” said Christina Pareigis, a scholar of her life, “feeling estranged from any kind of belonging. Belonging to a nation, belonging even to a language. Belonging to other people, to a group, to a religion.”17

  * * *

  Years later, Susan Sontag remembered their first meeting: “You’re still the twenty-three-year-old who started an absurdly pedantic conversation with me on the steps of Widener Library.”18 Unlike the pedantry that suffused many conversations at Harvard, Susan Taubes’s conversation was fertile. Many topics that appear in Sontag’s later work originated in conversations with the Taubeses.

  Susan Taubes’s dissertation, “The Absent God: On the Religious Use of Tyranny,” was a study of Simone Weil, who offered another answer to the demonic twentieth century. By rejecting Judaism in favor of mystical Christianity; by starving herself to death, aged thirty-four, as an act of compassion, Weil was a Romantic heroine who offered both Susans an exemplar of female courage, a woman who had given her suffering a meaning that transcended the merely personal.

  Susan Taubes’s dissertation on Weil was advised by Paul Tillich, the German exile theologian whose studies of Christian symbolism sought to discover a role for religious thought in the wake of catastrophe. Tillich approached the question from the Protestant perspective, but his questions were not substantially different from those that Jewish thinkers posed in a world in ruins. Indeed, the notion of philosophy among the ruins (of a culture, of a life) would become central to Sontag’s writing. Illustrated by Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, E. M. Cioran, and others, “the sense of standing in the ruins of thought and on the verge of the ruins of history and man himself” was, Susan wrote in her later essay on Cioran, the theme par excellence of the twentieth century.19

  In this shattered world, there was new interest in heterodoxies. In Susan’s circle of exiles, the ancient heresy of gnosticism offered a compelling alternative. A few months after the end of the Second World War, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a farmer happened upon a series of papyrus manuscripts. Wary of jinns, his mother burned a few. But when Coptologists examined them, this fourth-century library came to rank with the Dead Sea Scrolls—discovered in Palestine the next year—as among the most valuable archaeological finds in history. Texts whose outlines were known only through the negative arguments of Christian polemicists revealed astounding evidence of the gnostic heresies.

  The timing was providential. The gnostics were the product of a time analogous to the postwar period. The Hellenistic world became the first cosmopolitan society known to history. Peoples mixed freely—and so, at least around the edges of society, did their gods. Gnosticism compounded “oriental mythologies, astrological doctrines, Iranian theology, elements of Jewish tradition, whether Biblical, rabbinical, or occult, Christian salvation-eschatology, Platonic terms and concepts.”20 This shaded into an antinomianism, disdain for all convention, including sexual: a theoretical source of the libertinism the Taubeses practiced.

  * * *

  “The Creator of the World is evil and the World is bad,” one ancient polemic put it.21 Gnosticism, a religion that lost, was also a religion of losers, of exiles who transfigured suffering into faith. The modern gnostics were exiles, too, and their experience explained a dualism opposing “God and the world, spirit and matter, soul and body, light and darkness, good and evil, life and death—and consequently an extreme polarization of existence affecting not only man but reality as a whole.”22

  The world was divided; so was the mind. The greatest modern exponent of gnosticism, Antonin Artaud, proposed “a theater that Savonarola or Cromwell might well have approved of,” an impossible idea of the theater that was more ambitious even than Wagner’s. Sontag was fascinated enough by Artaud to spend eight years collecting his work in an almost seven-hundred-page anthology. He posited “an exact and delicate concordance between the mind’s ‘animal’ impulses and the highest operation of the intellect,” Sontag wrote, “a swift, wholly unified consciousness.”23 This was the concordance that Freud had despaired of bringing about, especially for educated women; but Artaud’s theater would do nothing less than “to heal the split between language and flesh.”24

  Artaud thought “about the unthinkable—about how body is mind and how mind is also a body.”25 This thinking came

  from metaphysical anxiety and acute psychological distress—the sense of being abandoned, of being an alien, of being possessed by demonic powers which prey on the human spirit in a cosmos vacated by the divine. The cosmos itself is a battlefield, and each human life exhibits the conflict between the repressive, persecuting forces from without and the feverish afflicted individual spirit seeking redemption. . . . Founded on an exacerbation of dualisms (body-mind, matter-spirit, evil-good, dark-light), Gnosticism promises the abolition of all dualisms.26

  * * *

  In the sixties, a syncretism arose as radical as the one gnosticism created. Freudianism and Marxism and Christianity and Buddhism and existentialism were thrown together, often by Jewish writers. It was sometimes hard to distinguish between syncretism and pastiche, sometimes easy to ridicule that intermixture’s more demotic manifestations. But there was more than faddishness in the attempt to braid such diverse strands together. Modern art did not create “the shock of the new.” It tried, imperfectly, to reflect it.

  One such attempt happened in Philip and Susan’s own house, where one of the most renowned of the Hitler exiles, Herbert Marcuse, took refuge after his first wife died. Marcuse was teaching at Harvard and working on books that, like those of Adorno and Benjamin, would become central to the critical debates of the sixties. Marcuse stayed for a year in a household where intellectual debate mixed with the life of a young family. “I guess David heard us talking about Hegel,” Susan remembered, “because when he came down for breakfast he just sort of marched around the table saying, ‘Hegel, bagel. Hegel, bagel.’” He was three.27

  The book Marcuse was finishing, Eros and Civilization, published in 1955, was a typically syncretistic product of the age. It combined Freud and Marx with a brand of optimism suited to postwar America. In a dehumanizing and repressive industrial civilization, Marcuse wrote, Eros was a potentially liberating force that opened “the possibility of an erotic civilization—that is, one which does not live on the repression of the sexual in the Eros.” The phrase is Jacob Taubes’s, who had derived a similar possibility from the gnostics. The context was a class at Columbia University, six years after the publication of Marcuse’s book, that Sontag and Taubes taught together.

  “Freud never conceived of the possibility of an unrepressed society,” she said, according to a record of the class.

  Miss Sontag then pointed out that there is no hope seen for real happiness or contentment in Freud’s doctrine (except in work and science). Rather, Freud seems to be trying to help us minimize the agony of life. Happiness is possible in intellectual endeavors, but it could be argued that this too is merely sublimated happiness. There is no real sexual happiness, because the motivation of our sexual life is incestuous. Thus, sex is never contented, being never directly gratified.28

  Sontag gets Freud wrong in a way so revealing that it might be called a Freudian slip. As she surely knew—it is a famous precept of Freud’s—he had not said “work and science” but “work” and “love,” in that order. Why would she forget love—or locate it within sex, and then doom it to incestuous discontent?

  The notion that happiness is possible in intellectual but not sexual endeavors reveals Sontag’s experience as surely as hopes for an antirepressive society mirror Taubes’s and Marcuse’s. Popularized, their ideas, more than hers, would shape the sexual revolutions known as “the sixties.”
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br />   Marcuse’s thought, as well as Sontag’s, would evolve in different, radical directions, and nowhere more than in views of sex and revolution. In the fifties, when many “sixties” ideas were still the embryonic property of elite intellectual circles, Marcuse himself was already taking a skeptical view of Susan’s preference for the abstract over the concrete. “She can make a theory out of a potato peel,” he later told a friend.29

  * * *

  In so many ways, Susan’s decision to flee her marriage seems a foregone conclusion. Her writings on marriage are notably bleak. The thing itself was bad, she wrote in 1956,

  an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies. Quarrels eventually become pointless, unless one is always prepared to act on them—that is, to end the marriage. So, after the first year, one stops “making up” after quarrels—one just relapses into angry silence, which passes into ordinary silence, and then one resumes again.30

  Marriage to Philip—“an emotional totalitarian”31—was destroying and suffocating her:

  The sense of not being free has never left me these six years. The dream of a few weeks ago: a horse came up behind me as I was going down a short flight of stairs—into a swimming pool, it seemed—and placed its two front legs on me, one over each shoulder. I screamed and tried to free myself from the weight, then awoke. An objective correlative for my darker moods.32

  But the marriage’s doom is inevitable only in retrospect. Plenty of people stay in unsatisfying marriages, particularly when children, money, and careers are involved. Susan would display a talent, in later years, for sticking it out in relationships long after anyone watching from the outside would have fled. She was unhappy, but the contemptuous tone she adopted toward Philip only appeared after he subjected her to public humiliation. It is revealing that when the break came, it was not on her initiative but on his. He did not realize the consequences of his decision until long after taking it.

  “He doesn’t know,” a friend said at the time, “he’s cutting his own throat.”33

  * * *

  She would write about this decision over and over in her memoirs. Friends recalled that for the rest of her life it was a favorite topic of conversation. The pretext was academic. With Paul Tillich’s support, she applied to the American Association of University Women to study “the metaphysical presuppositions of ethics” at St. Anne’s, one of the women’s colleges at Oxford.34 It was a logical next step in her education—logical, too, in ways of which she was not quite aware.

  In one version of her unpublished memoirs, she wrote: “The plan was, as usual, joint. [Philip] was to come, too, but at the last moment he had a better offer for the year”—from Stanford. In another version, the idea was hers. She wanted to “travel—really travel—in Europe.”

  “But sweetheart, we’ve talked about this before. Next year, when the book is finished, we’ll both apply for teaching positions abroad. It’s all settled.”

  “But I can’t wait!” she cried. “It’s always next year, and next year, and nothing ever happens. And we sit in this rat hole on our asses growing eminent and middle-aged and paunchy—”

  She stopped, aware that it was no “we” she meant, and that this attack was entirely unprovoked.

  She had been a feverish and gentle and weepy girl when she married Martin; now she was a shrewish, weak, tearless woman, full of premature bitterness. . . .35

  The decision to leave America was not a decision to leave Philip, at least not immediately. In June 1958, after she had been in Europe for a year, she wrote Morton White at Harvard to discuss her thesis; in July, she proposed to the American Association of University Women that she “continue working on the manuscript during the summer, and to return to the Harvard Dept. of Philosophy this coming year.”36 Part of her still wanted to come back to her husband, or thought she ought to: she had a five-year-old child, after all. And even if the original idea had not been Philip’s, she could not have gone away for a year without his tacit encouragement.

  In one of her unsparing memoirs of this time, she noted her “fastidiousness in personal relationships that was not always clear of cowardice” and constant movement “from entanglement to escape and back to involvement again.” She described “a bearable life” as “a balancing act—in which one didn’t lose the benefits of being entangled or get lost in the loneliness of escape.”37

  She surely did not intend to reproduce her mother’s pattern. (Few people ever do.) And she did not do so out of a lack of love: David was the most important and enduring relationship of her life. “She always adored David,” said Minda Rae Amiran. “She was constantly rushing home to see him. He was in no way a neglected child, even though she was spending every afternoon reworking this manuscript, and doing her own schoolwork and so forth. He continued to be the center of her life.”38

  She tried to give him the childhood she wished she had had, and when he was a toddler she was already leading him through a University of Chicago–like great-books curriculum. One of his first books was Candide, and she read Gulliver’s Travels with him, “but nothing specifically engineered for children,” a friend said. “She had no tolerance for it.”39 In early 1957, her diaries record the following scenes:

  Yesterday David announced, as he was being prepared for bed, “You know what I see when I shut my eyes? Whenever I shut my eyes I see Jesus on the cross.” It’s time for Homer, I think. The best way to divert these morbid individualized religious fancies is to overwhelm them by the impersonal Homeric bloodbath. Paganize his tender spirit. . . .

  Today, David is Ajax the Lesser + I am Ajax the Greater. Together we’re “invincible,” a new word he’s learned. His last words as I kissed him goodnight + left the room tonight: “See you later, Ajax the Greater.” Then, peals of laughter. . . .

  “My son, aged four, on first reading Homer.”40

  * * *

  When Susan departed, David, along with Rosie and Philip, left for Berkeley. She recorded her last day in Cambridge, September 3, 1957, with nearly minute-by-minute detail, unique in her journals. This care suggests that she knew how weighty the moment was:

  It was now 1:00. I shut the padlock on the kitchen closet, shut my suitcases, used the toilet, then called a Harvard cab which came in three minutes with a pleasant old man driving it. It was now 1:15. I directed him down Mass. Ave. (1) to stop in front of the Widener entrance so I could return a book ([John] Gay’s Plays—Abbey edition, with the music); then (2) to the post office, where I mailed the rest of the packages, including one of old clothes to Chicago; then (3) to the Bradley offices on Brattle St., where I left a copy of the lease + the keys to the house with perspiring, disorganized Mr. Elliot; then (4) to Back Bay Station. It was just 2:00 when the cab got there, + the train was due in 5 minutes, + there were no porters anywhere in sight. The driver offered to carry my bags (this is against the rules) when I became slightly frantic—carried them into the station, where there were still no porters, + then down the stairs to the train which was just pulling in. For all this and the cab fare ($2.15) I gave him $4.00—he tipped his hat + wished me a good trip, the conductor put the bags aboard the train, + I was off.

  Often, in her life, motivations that seemed obvious to others remained veiled to her; and she seems not to have admitted, even to herself, that she was leaving her marriage. “You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud,” David said, “to say if you leave that kind of marriage and a very young kid it’s because somewhere you want to escape. But I would bet dollars against dimes she didn’t know she was doing that consciously at the time.”41

  She sailed from New York on September 5. Jacob Taubes had been waiting for her at the boat for an hour. “I was really touched,” she wrote, “for who can afford not to be moved by the gestures of affection. I kissed him + boarded—he continued to wave until the boat was out of sight.”42

  Part II

  Photogra
ph from AP Photos.

  Chapter 11

  What Do You Mean by Mean?

  She felt a savage desire to come to Europe,” Susan wrote in one of her unpublished autobiographical stories, “and all the myths of Europe echoed in her mind. Corrupt Europe, tired Europe, amoral Europe.”1 This was the Europe that had beguiled her when she first read Thomas Mann; the counterpart, intellectual and amorous, to her monastic life with Philip.

  “Romantic by temperament,” she had dreamed of “vagabondage in Europe and love-affairs and fame.” Marriage forced her to lower her sights, to be practical, and to compromise by choosing “a career of her own but which was in the same world” as Philip’s.2 This was not simply a safe choice: in the 1950s, an academic woman was still a pioneer. Still, it seemed that the university, at least intellectually, was as congenial a milieu as someone of her interests was likely to find. But her romantic temperament resisted. Lacking alternatives, she hesitated to leave the only society she had known since she went to Berkeley at fifteen. She would remain inside it even when she went abroad.

  Everything about Oxford—its medieval architecture, its venerable name, its intellectual romance—spoke to Susan’s aspirations. But Oxford was chilly and dank.3 Ancient Britain, which Americans had always seen as superior, was threadbare, still recovering from the war; and Susan was disappointed. “It’s hard to explain in retrospect,” said an acquaintance, Judith Spink, “how Americans came from a wealthier, happier, luckier world.” She had “wanted to get away from America,” said a friend from that time, Bernard Donoughue, but now she “was really rather hankering for California.” Most of the conversation was about “how cold she was and why didn’t the English central heating systems work.”4 Spink said she complained about the cold a lot: “I remember that because she wore pajamas under her clothes.”