Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Her disappointment was as palpable as her superiority. “Her presence among those of us who met her at Oxford was unmistakably one of contained force,” said Spink. “Partly this had to do with her physical image: the dark prince. And prince because of the dominance.” Years later, once Susan’s diaries were published, Spink was astonished at the self-doubt they revealed. “We didn’t see the weaknesses,” she said. “In every way she held the advantage. We guessed that she knew much more than she cared to say.” The dark prince dressed entirely in black, and the first time Spink saw her stride across the ancient quadrangles in cowboy boots, she wondered where she could possibly be from: “South America? The Hindu Kush?”5

  The look was not entirely artless. “I never mentioned the cowboy boots,” said Bernard Donoughue, “and after a while she drew my attention to them. She got a bit impatient that I was not impressed.”

  * * *

  In painting as in architecture, in literature as in theology, twentieth-century artists and thinkers attempted to discover some core of ultimate meaning, if such a core existed: to find the most basic forms with which to rebuild a ruined world. But if Sontag was attracted to these ideas in other realms, including dance and painting, she was not excited by a philosophy that sought to discover formulas in language along the mathematical model.

  “I can remember asking my philosophy teacher what something meant,” Donoughue said, “and he said, ‘What do you mean by mean?’” Jonathan Miller, the actor and director who would become a friend of Susan’s, satirized this thinking in a sketch, “Oxbridge Philosophy,” with John Cleese:

  CLEESE: Yes, yes.

  MILLER: Tell me—are you using yes, here, in the affirmative sense?

  CLEESE: (carefully, after a thoughtful pause) Nooooo.6

  “Her interest in philosophy was bigger than that,” Donoughue said. She had written an important book on Freud; she had known ambitious thinkers, from Strauss to Gerth to Taubes to Marcuse. “Analytical philosophy was too cramped and academic a mode for her,” Spink said. At a time when she was trying to regain the vigor that propelled her this far, this reeked of Mr. Casaubon and of the men she found wimpy and sexless. “There is a type—the male virgin—lots of them in England,” she wrote in her diary.7 Sexism was pervasive but not palpable—“Nothing was palpable at Oxford,” said Donoughue—and the men, she found, managed to be “both anti-woman and not real men.”

  This explained her attraction to Donoughue. Though later created Baron Donoughue of Ashton for his service to three Labour prime ministers, he was that rare Oxford student from a working-class family. (“I was told there were four,” he said, carefully pointing out that the number was not an exaggeration.) At a lunch party, he spotted another talented outsider. “I was aware that she looked disengaged. We vaguely sort of came together and chatted. She was obviously a bit bored,” he said.

  I was immediately attracted to her. She was in some ways stunning looking. Wonderful structure in the face, lovely dark eyes, lovely hair. She was a bit tall and gangly, a bit elbow-y and so forth. Not the kind of lady I normally like. I like slim, small, cuddly ladies, and she wasn’t that.

  At Susan’s initiative, they began a relationship, which, if occasionally sexual, was primarily philosophical. They both considered themselves radicals, but the differences in their leftist views were instructive. Donoughue’s were those of the practical politician in the real world: “I was interested in boring things like getting homes for people, pensions for people, these kind of tedious things.”

  He had visited America:

  I went down to Kentucky to get involved in a coal strike where people got shot and I investigated the trial lawyer, who I found was a totally corrupt person. She wasn’t interested in any of that. She had these great left-wing intellectual ideas. It meant exploring your sexuality and your whole life and questioning all establishments and disliking all regimes and so forth.

  For Susan, radicalism meant possibilities for personal freedom and self-creation. But when she hinted at her attraction to women, she only did so obliquely. “She would talk about how you’ve got to grow out of this society where it assumes you’re all one thing,” he said. “Where it assumes a woman has to marry a man, has to be stuck in a marriage with a man. She wanted to explore other things. She was telling me what she wanted to do.”8

  * * *

  At first, she wrote Philip aerograms every evening. “During the day I’d be composing my letter to him in my head,” she wrote. “I was always talking to him in my head. I was, you see, so used to him. I felt safe. I didn’t feel like a separate person.”9 But she spoke dismissively of him to Bernard, whose masculinity contrasted dramatically with Philip’s. A notorious hypochondriac10 (“neurasthenic”11 was Susan’s word), Philip had promised to come to Oxford, but changed his mind because the journey made him nervous. This looked pathetic to someone engaged in a brave self-creation.

  But—as with her politics—positive self-creation could sometimes shade into solipsism. She had left her son behind, and “talked as if she missed him,” Bernard said. “She clearly felt she was paying the price. I felt she wasn’t adequately aware of any price the son might perhaps be paying.” To Judy Spink, her involvement with her son also seemed odd, particularly when Susan made a pass at her: “She showed me this photograph of David Rieff as a little tiny boy and I could not square that with her making sexual advances to a woman. The moment I saw that photograph, it was: No! You don’t do that.”

  Perhaps, absent such intense focus on the self, she could not have made the heavy decisions that faced her. Donoughue noted she was humorless and excessively earnest. But she was being forced, as she had not been since the painful decision to go to Berkeley, to decide what she was going to do with her life. Chicago gave her a “right way.” So did marriage, graduate school, and motherhood. Now she was being granted her freedom—at the price of all the obscurity and uncertainty of an independent life.

  She would later call the 1950s a lost decade. But the strength her Oxford friends found so overwhelming was the product of a decade’s evolution, from the “weakling” at Berkeley to the dark prince her fellow students met at Oxford. Her apprenticeship was over, and she was ready to be an adult. The legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart described her interactions with another Oxford eminence, Sir Isaiah Berlin:

  Among his most formidable critics is Miss Susan Sontag. She is right in thinking that he is a bit careless of the detail, but she is wrong if she thinks there were not shafts of great insight and illumination. She has, I think, enjoyed her term here though she professes to think very little of everybody except [the philosopher J. L.] Austin, whose sense data lectures have sent her into raptures.12

  To Bernard, she talked about “boring Oxford, the failings of intellectuals. I felt, from my dealings with some of them, she wasn’t wrong.” Still, like Hart, he thought that was only part of the story. “I loved Oxford. Though she was right, in every way, about its failings, she didn’t see its good side.” At another, earlier point, she would have. But it was not the right place for her now. She needed something radical. She needed something warm. In December, at the end of Michaelmas term, she left for France, and did not return.

  * * *

  In 1957—with New York still shaking off the vestiges of provincialism and London the bedraggled capital of a disintegrating empire—Paris reigned as the most sophisticated city in the world. The prestige of its language was then equal, probably indeed superior, to that of English; and for ambitious people from the tens of thousands of Tucsons scattered across the globe, its name meant art and architecture, science and philosophy, fashion and fame, sex and perfume, in a way no modern city has rivaled. Susan went to Paris to find those things, but especially to find a previous version of herself, the potentially happy woman reborn in Berkeley and then quickly shoehorned into an impossible marriage.

  Susan went specifically to find Harriet Sohmers, the personification of that early liberation. She had not seen her in
almost a decade; Harriet had been living in Paris since early 1950. They had kept up sporadically, and even when writing to tell Harriet of her marriage, she said that she loved her (“It is a transcendent fact”).13 In July 1951, during her first trip to Europe, she wrote: “I am in Paris. Meet me at Notre Dame.” She added, detective-novel style: “I cannot see you with my husband’s knowledge,” which led Harriet to suppose that Philip knew about their past relationship.14 In 1954, Harriet returned to New York, where her mother had been stricken by cancer. Just before her mother died, in December,

  she opened her tormented eyes to me, and, wanting to comfort her, I said, “Mom, you know the Israeli guy I told you about? I might marry him.” “No, you won’t,” she whispered. “Why not, Mom?” I asked, surprised. “Because, because,” she struggled to bring it out, “because you like women better,” and her eyes closed on a deep, strangled sigh.15

  This dramatic deathbed utterance turned out to be untrue: Harriet was predominantly heterosexual. But a year before her mother died, she had met a Cuban American named María Irene Fornés, one of the most consequential figures in her life, and—soon enough—in Susan’s. Their stormy liaison (“I love you, Irene. How well you fill my need for pain!”16) lurched and sputtered, on and off, for years, as Harriet simultaneously juggled a relationship, also tempestuous, also on-and-off, with a Swedish painter named Sven Blomberg.

  Just when Harriet had broken up with both Irene and Sven, Susan, looking for a new life, stepped into the combustible mix. She was desperate for love: desperate for a woman’s love. In January, when a “dumpy, over-dressed blonde” hit on her, she was thrilled, she confessed: “I wasn’t attracted to her, but it was so good to be home, as it were—to have women, instead of men, interested in me.”17 Harriet had been her first great love, and it was to Harriet she looked for help in making a new life.

  But the love was not reciprocal. “I’m not sure that I want to see her,” Harriet confessed in her journal even before Susan arrived. And once she got there, Harriet wrote: “What a beauty she is! But I dislike so much about her . . . the way she sings, girlish and off key, the way she dances, rhythmless and fake sexy . . . Poor kid! I don’t really think I’m attracted to her at all, but then, she says she loves me, and I need to hear that right now!”18

  Disappointed by others, each sought something their new lover could not offer. Susan wanted the passion of a decade earlier; Harriet wanted Irene. “Susan’s vulnerability and insecurity displease me,” Harriet wrote. “She seems so naïve. Is she honest? I can’t really believe she means what she says.” As if to prove she was not, in fact, honest, Susan read Harriet’s journals, “that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying that she really doesn’t like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated.”19

  Susan wondered whether she was supposed to be peeping at Harriet’s diary. “Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes?” Her firm answer: “No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people.”

  This reasoning was typical of Susan’s resort to intellectual excuses to justify the emotional reactions of which she was ashamed. But if she sinned against Harriet, Harriet sinned against her, too, finding her own excuses for allowing the affair to sputter on long after she ought to have broken it off. The relationship, she knew long before Susan realized it, was doomed; and the main feeling that results from reading both Harriet’s and Susan’s journals from this time is dread.

  * * *

  Susan’s personal turmoil was so intense that she wrote very little about France. She hardly spoke French; she had left Philip and David; she had left Harvard and Oxford. It was clear within days that Harriet was no replacement for Philip, and that she was leaving the career into which she had invested nearly a decade without any viable alternative. Letting go of marriage and career might offer a quick liberation, but it could also mean poverty and failure. Only days after arriving, she mentioned

  the ratés, the failed intellectuals (writers, artists, would-be Ph.D.’s). People like Sam Wolfenstein, with his limp, his briefcase, his empty days, his addiction to the films, his penny-pinching and scavengering, his arid family nest from which he flees—terrify me.20

  The city was filled with such ratés. They clustered on the Left Bank, between the Sorbonne and the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Many of the people Susan met during her few months there would become profoundly important in her life; others would turn into precisely the kind of failures she most feared becoming.

  Among these new friends was Annette Michelson, a decade older than Susan. In 1958, Michelson had been living in Paris for several years and working as the art critic of the International Herald Tribune. She frequented the most advanced artistic circles in France. Her partner, Bernard Frechtman, was the American translator of Jean Genet, and Michelson knew Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whose Must We Burn de Sade? she had translated in 1953. This crowd gathered at the Café de Flore and offered a combination of worldly glamour and intellectual rigor that stood in sharp contrast with the musty chilliness of Oxford. It, and they, would serve Susan as a template for her own life: “I realize,” she wrote a few years later, “how important Sartre has been to me. He is the model—that abundance, that lucidity, that knowingness. And the bad taste.”21

  In February, through Annette, she met Sartre at the home of the philosopher Jean Wahl in the rue Le Peletier. She described every detail of the apartment—the North African furniture, his ten-thousand-book library, and Wahl’s beautiful Tunisian wife, thirty years younger than he.22 This world was so far removed from anything either Susan or Annette had grown up with that to be accepted within it demanded certain adaptations—though Annette, most agreed, went too far. (In the mouth of a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, a flawless British accent seemed a bit much.) But those who knew her in Paris agreed that she was unquestionably brilliant, and Susan found her fascinating. “Susan was, at first, very much the enthusiastic admirer,” said Stephen Koch, who later became close to both. “Susan was as impressed with Annette as Annette was with her.”23

  Annette’s interests came as a revelation to Susan, with her highly traditional education, part of which, in America, meant a decided national prejudice. If Germany had collapsed, the prestige of Germanic culture had not. Places like the University of Chicago and Harvard were still in the thrall of the lineage running from Freud and Marx through to contemporary thinkers including Mann and Adorno and Marcuse and Strauss. They were “wholly uninterested in postwar continental culture,” Koch said, which basically meant the culture of France.

  But the culture of France was not so easily dismissed. Economically, France was far less ruined than Britain. Its writers were far less interested in Casaubon hairsplitting than in the urgent human questions derived from the Nazi occupation and from France’s own Enlightenment heritage. France was where many of the greatest modernist books—by Henry Miller, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov—were published—in English—when banned in the English-speaking countries. French philosophers and writers, including Genet, Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, were among the most influential in the world, and Susan would write about them all; French filmmakers, including Godard, Resnais, and Bresson, furnished another rich subject. None were taken fully seriously in Anglo-American academe.

  Annette Michelson took them seriously. “Annette had a great deal of admiration for Susan,” said the filmmaker Noël Burch, who was carrying on a clandestine affair with Michelson even as she was officially connected to Frechtman. “Susan had even more admiration for Annette.”24 Annette also had something Susan lacked, and knew she lacked. Annette had an eye. “She was much more sensitive to art in general than Susan,” said Stephen Koch. “She had a genuine critical eye. I was very impressed, as I never was impressed with Susan, by her sensitivity to the arts, which was really remarkable. I began to see
what it means to take a hypersensitivity to art and turn it into language.”

  The suggestion that Susan was insensitive to art, surprising as it may seem, was widely echoed.25 In Los Angeles, Merrill Rodin had noted her great capacity to be moved by music. But—perhaps as a result of her equally great insecurity—she had developed a tendency to bury emotional reactions under a blizzard of pedantry. “Susan drives me mad,” Harriet wrote in April 1958, “with her long scholarly explanations of things one only needs the eyes and ears of someone like Irene [Fornés] to see. At the Prado, she discoursed at length on Bosch and just now, explained that women are the backbone of the Church. I find these textbook dissertations of hers unbearable!”26

  Susan had grown up “trying both to see and not to see,” and seeing, for her, would always be an effort. Something in her even seemed to resist looking at all. “She would forbid David to look out of the window from buses or trains when they were traveling,” said one of David’s later girlfriends, Joanna Robertson. “She used to say that he needed to hear all about a place in terms of facts and history in order to understand it, but that looking out of the window would tell him nothing. She never looked out of the window on journeys like that—I remember her, always talking about the places we were in or were headed towards, but never curious to simply look out to see them.” David told Joanna about an early visit to London, when he was a boy. He was staring out the window, trying to take in this completely new country; Susan ordered him not to look. Toward the end of Susan’s life, when the three were in a train together, they saw her staring resolutely ahead. “I remember David and I winking at each other—an inside joke about her utter refusal to just look out there and take in what she saw. The world as is, in the raw, happening now. No connection.”27 But precisely because seeing did not come naturally, she was forced to reflect on it as someone to whom it came without effort did not. The effort is palpable in her often-belabored early prose, which took those reactions and tried to put them into words. And Sontag, not Michelson, became the great critic of her generation. “Name a book that Annette Michelson has written,” Stephen Koch said. “There are none.”