Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  * * *

  “Annette is a scary person,” said Noël Burch. “All her life she’s frightened people away.” One of these, eventually, was Susan, and her intelligence became destructive. As for her failure to live up to her early promise: “It was sadomasochism that did it,” said Stephen Koch. Burch himself was a confessed “viragophile,” interested in women who practiced martial arts: “What he wants is girls in black leather to come out and rip his velvet suit off him and kick him in the balls.”28

  The interest in sadomasochism was widespread in Susan’s new circle. She was not the only one who thought of love as between a master and a slave. Another new friend, Elliott Stein, was a gay sadomasochist, “famous for his whip collection.”29 Harriet Sohmers had translated the Marquis de Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue in 1953 for the avant-garde publisher and occasional pornographer Maurice Girodias. He also published many of Sade’s descendants in twentieth-century French literature, including writers like Georges Bataille and Anne Desclos, who, as “Pauline Réage,” wrote The Story of O. Sontag would examine their work at length in “The Pornographic Imagination.”

  The connection between sex and pain was so natural for her—“All relationships are essentially masochistic,” she told Burch30—that she could never imagine the loving partnership of equals that Freud had posited. Her “profoundest experience,” of her mother’s giving and then withdrawing her love, was perpetually renewed. Harriet dribbled out her affection by the scant thimbleful, which Susan gratefully slurped down: “I suppose, with my sore heart + unused body, it doesn’t take much to make me happy.”31 A couple of weeks later, she described the “total collapse” of their relationship and “blindly walking through a forest of pain.”32 But like “the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed” in Nightwood, the relationship dragged on. In April, they spent two weeks in Spain and Morocco. In June, Susan noted that “living with Harriet means to live through an all-out assault on my personality—my sensibility, my intelligence, everything but my looks which instead of being criticized are resented.”33

  Harriet hardly disagreed. “My jealousy reflex is being activated big time,” she wrote in January, “with everyone wanting her, men and women. Although I don’t really care for her, I envy her success.”34 Her jealousy even led to violence, when she punched Susan in the face at a party. Allen Ginsberg—whose Howl, one of the monuments of the Beat Generation, had been published in 1956—asked Harriet why she treated Susan so badly, since Susan, after all, was younger and better looking. Harriet answered that that was exactly the reason.35

  Harriet also admitted that she was relying on Susan financially. Susan was hardly rich, but she had her scholarship, and an unwitting Philip was sending money, too. In addition to their trip to Spain and Morocco, they also traveled to Greece and Germany. Susan’s shyness and insecurity, her willingness to be the submissive partner, are obvious in her diaries: “It’s true—what Harriet charges—I’m not very sharp about other people, about what they are thinking and feeling, though I’m sure I have it in me to be empathetic and intuitive,” she wrote in June.

  Like an “eye,” empathy and intuition are hard to learn, as she would show when the tables were turned. Susan could be cruel. She wrote Bernard Donoughue that spring that she was in Paris, and when he was next over, he looked her up. “We chatted a bit,” he remembered. “I think she gave me some coffee or something. And then I realized there was somebody in the bed, a very attractive, live young lady. I felt she was probably hoping to shock me a bit.”

  It was not her interest in women, which he already suspected, that shocked him. It was the brutality with which he was dispatched. He found it “an unnecessarily aggressive statement that she was rejecting me”—and never saw or heard from her again.

  The contrast would recur between her imperious treatment of men—who loved or admired her, but in whom she was never especially interested sexually—and her groveling treatment of women. “She could have done it more graciously and subtly,” Lord Donoughue said. “A French lady would have.”36

  * * *

  In Germany, she and Harriet hitched a ride to Dachau. “What feelings I had seeing ‘Dachau, 7 km’ as we sped along the Autobahn toward Munich in the Dutch anti-Semite’s car!” she wrote.37 This was her first physical encounter with the Nazi camps whose existence she had discovered as a girl in Santa Monica, the shock that led to her reflections in On Photography. She alludes to the feelings, but never wrote about the visit.

  Her time in Paris coincided with one of the turning points of French history: in May, as a result of the ongoing disaster in Algeria, civil war loomed. The American embassy considered evacuating its citizens as France fell under martial law: Corsica was conquered by dissident elements from the French Algerian army, and only an emergency government under General de Gaulle prevented a coup d’état.38 Yet there is not a word about this in Susan’s journals. “I came to Paris in 1957 and I saw nothing,” she said ten years later. “I stayed closed off in a milieu that was in itself a milieu of foreigners. But I felt the city.”39

  She was so weighed down by heavy choices that she could spare little attention for even the most dramatic events; later, when she became a public figure called upon to pronounce on world affairs, her difficulty in seeing political matters became clear. Now, she was trying to determine the shape of her life. She had already rejected many possibilities, even if she still clung to them, as to her marriage or her academic career. Surrounded by brilliant ratés, she saw that becoming a writer—a real writer, a successful writer, no longer a promising young person but one with the stamina and focus to create an enduring career—was a matter of urgency. “Why is writing important?” she asked a few weeks after she arrived.

  Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that too? With a little ego-building—such as the fait accompli this journal provides—I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said.

  My “I” is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity.40

  In later life, Sontag exuded such bulletproof certainty that few sensed the weakness behind the pose. Read with that invulnerable image in mind, the above passage lends itself to misunderstandings: her beauty, and her sex, encouraged the idea that her reputation was a triumph of image-making over substance. But Harriet called her a “weakling,” and she called herself “puny.” Unprotected by family, money, or profession, subject to abuse from those she tried to love, she took shelter behind an alternative self. Through writing, she said, “I create myself.”41 And it was to this other self that she appealed now: “Give me strength, tall lonely walker of my journals!”42

  “To have two selves is the definition of a pathetic fate,” she later wrote.43 But the success of the performance would be such that, when extracts from those journals were published, even longtime friends were shocked by the lacerating insecurities they exposed. In an amphitheater in the southern Peloponnesus, with Harriet, she saw a performance of Medea that stayed with her ever after, her son wrote.

  The experience moved her profoundly because as Medea is about to kill her children, a number of people in the audience started yelling, “No, don’t do it, Medea!” “These people had no sense of seeing a work of art,” she told me many times. “It was all real.”44

  Chapter 12

  The Price of Salt

  In 1986, Susan published a story called “The Letter Scene.” Among other such scenes described in the story—Tatyana writing Eugene Onegin; a Japanese man writing his wife from a doomed airplane—she included one of her own: her arrival at San Francisco airport, where she handed a letter to Philip.

  She seems to have stayed in Europe through the summer of 1958 precisely to avoid this confrontation. From Athens, she mysteriously told her mother that there was a “personal reason for extending my stay—that it’s not just the desire to see an
other beautiful country.” Perhaps she was, yet again, trying to patch things up with Harriet, since she had already told Mildred what she intended to do. “When I arrive in California—around Sept. 1st, I assume still!—I want to talk to Philip immediately. By immediately I mean that—the day I see him. But then what? It seems absurd, exposing David and myself to too much rage and hysteria, for me to live in the same house with him while I try to divorce him.”1

  Though he later claimed to have been utterly unprepared for the letter scene, Philip suspected that something was going on. By July, when he was already living in California—he had taken an assistant professorship at Berkeley—he was writing “letters filled with hate and despair and self-righteousness. He speaks of my crime, my folly, my stupidity, my self-indulgence.”2 David said: “If he—and I do not know whether he did or he didn’t—imagined that when she came back to California, that it would all be okay, he was indulging himself in very wishful thinking.”3 Yet that was the story Philip put out in a letter to Susan’s Chicago friend Joyce Farber: “What a tough, ruthless character Susan turned out to be, harboring her little secret for half a year in Europe, then springing it on the happy, wonderful day of her return to adoring husband and son.”4

  The letter she gave him on that day is, however, exceptionally kind. She describes the dissatisfactions of marriage in general terms that assign no blame to him. She describes, instead, “germinating under the old dead tissue,” a “new self—creative and alive—but that self needs a new life to be born.”

  I don’t want to be married, at least not on the terms I (and you) have understood marriage. I hate the exclusiveness, the possessiveness of marriage—each couple stewing in its own privacy, guarding its interests against the world . . . Perhaps if I (I mean, we) had understood marriage differently from the start . . . Perhaps if I (we) weren’t so romantic, so in love with the idea of love. Adultery, civilized arrangements, marriages of convenience or of comradeship—these happen, and work, all the time. But they’re not for you and me, are they? Timid, easily bruised, sentimental as we are . . .

  She returns again and again to the idea of a self struggling to be born. “I feel a vocation flowering within me,” she writes; “I want to be free. I’m prepared to pay the price—in terms of my own unhappiness—for being free. Alas, I must make you suffer, too.”5

  * * *

  It was the sort of letter that invited a civilized arrangement. Susan noted “the beauty and temptation of the house in Berkeley” where Philip was living with David and Rosie. She was still attached to the warmth of California. Her family, for better and worse, was nearby. There was David to consider. In a wildly optimistic miscalculation, and in spite of what she had written to her mother, she had decided to stay with Philip in Berkeley while the separation was being worked out. But relations soon devolved into Woody Allen–like scenes of feuding Jewish intellectuals: at one point, fisticuffs ensued over who would keep the back issues of Partisan Review.6

  The last straw came one evening when Rosie prepared her “signature” dish, fried chicken. Philip accused Rosie of trying to poison him, becoming “absolutely hysterical” and “making wild threats,” David remembered. Susan called the cops, who escorted her, Rosie, and David across the bay to San Mateo, where Nat and Mildred were now living. In later years, when Susan told the story, she would always note that she remembered to take the poisoned chicken at the last minute. They ate it in the back of the police car: “I mean, we hadn’t had a chance to eat,” Susan would say when people laughed, “and David was hungry. So of course I thought to bring it.”7

  By his own later admission, Philip was out of his mind. “He had a really, really rough time,” David said. “He was, as they would say in the nineteenth century, maddened by it.” Looking back at his father’s life, David said that, despite Philip’s long subsequent marriage, “he was a wolf, a mate-for-life kind of person. I think he truly loved her.”8 For Susan, it was a return to the family she had left a decade before. She took a little apartment near San Mateo and spent time with relatives she had not seen for almost a decade. She got reacquainted with Judith, who had recently graduated from Berkeley and was now working in the Bay Area. “She was so miserable, and I wanted to relax her,” Judith said. “I taught her how to smoke. That’s the worst thing I ever did.”9

  Unaware of Susan’s interest in women, Judith loaned her a famous lesbian novel, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. In 1958, this was one of the rare works of gay fiction that did not demand some dreadful catastrophe as the price for homosexuality. For many lesbians, the novel’s sympathetic portrayal was a welcome revelation. But it also portrayed an aspect of their lives that caused Susan to note that she had read it “at very much the wrong, vulnerable, moment.”10 One of the women, Carol, is involved in a custody dispute with her husband, who hires a private investigator to discover evidence of her homosexuality. In an age when such evidence was often used in court to take gay people’s children away, this was scary, and The Price of Salt can only be considered to have a “happy ending” in comparison to other contemporary writings about homosexuals.

  Though Carol and her girlfriend stay together, she loses the custody battle; Susan could not have read without a shiver how her daughter is taken from her.11 Her relationship to David, who was only six, was already frayed by her long absence. He had to adjust to his mother; she had to be a mother to a child she had not seen in a year.

  In Paris, she had written that

  I hardly ever dream of David, and don’t think of him much. He has made few inroads on my fantasy life. When I am with him, I adore him completely and without ambivalence. When I go away, as long as I know he’s well taken-care-of, he dwindles very quickly. Of all the people I have loved, he’s least of all a mental object of love, most intensely real.12

  This statement has often been translated into an expression of maternal indifference. (As one friend put it, “When Susan was there, she was there.”)13 But for a person who tended to love images—“mental objects”—rather than “intensely real” things, to speak of David’s physical reality was an overwhelming statement of his importance to her.

  But Philip was not about to let him go. “You know that Philip will not settle in peace,” Jacob Taubes wrote in November, as he was urging her not to abandon all rights to Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, which was about to be published. “Calvin must see those who oppose him as enemies of the light and truth.”

  Beware! Even in Rieff vs. Rieff there are degrees of persecution. And you must be ready for the worst. Do you have good i.e. ruthless legal advice? And you, do not play “gentle” in a life and death struggle. It is meaningful to be gentle and forbearing when the other lives in the same universe of experience.

  You did not ask for this way. It is humiliating and degrading, but Philip is at your neck. I am bound by confidence, but you must be on guard. Every generous gesture will be twisted around.14

  In just such a “gentle and forbearing” way, Susan did not fight him over the book, which she regretted ever after; and though she accepted child support she proudly refused alimony. Meanwhile, Philip terrorized Susan—though David emphasized that “he SAID violent things and made violent threats but DID nothing violent”15—to the point that Nat, who had grown fiercely protective of Susan, poured sugar into Philip’s gas tank. The tactic, straight out of a detective novel, was intended to disable his engine and prevent him from harassing Susan and David.16 The bickering would drag on for years. But Susan was safe for now. “Yeah, your husband’s crazy,” the family court judge said. “You get the kid.”17

  * * *

  On the day Fidel Castro arrived in Havana, January 1, 1959, Susan arrived in New York. She moved to 350 West End Avenue, between Seventy-Sixth and Seventy-Seventh Streets, less than ten blocks from the building on Eighty-Sixth Street where she spent her first months of life. It was a floor-through, fifth-floor walk-up; David got the only real bedroom, overlooking the avenue, and the living room doubled
as Susan’s bedroom.

  By the time she reached New York, her origins in the city were a vague memory. She had lived in seven other states, besides her stints in England and France: “I’m not even a New Yorker,” she later said, emphasizing her connection to the American provinces that people were often astounded to discover had produced her.18 In one sense she was right; in another, of course, her desire to escape her origins and remake herself was the most New York thing about her. It was a city of refugees, and this “great athlete of ambition” found herself in a place where she had plenty of company.19

  When Sontag arrived, the city was struggling against decline. In 1950, the city’s population began to decrease as many headed for the greener, and whiter, acres of suburbia. Through the musical West Side Story, which premiered in 1957, the Upper West Side became known for its ethnic tensions and its slums—though West End Avenue was always populated by professionals: psychoanalysts, for example, and professors at Columbia.

  Thanks to Jacob Taubes, she found a job at Commentary magazine. “That you are a woman is a difficulty but not an insurmountable difficulty,” he had told her in October.20 Elliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary who would die only a few months later, said that “the difference between us and Partisan Review is that we admit we’re Jewish.”21 It was published by the American Jewish Committee, and according to Cohen’s successor, Norman Podhoretz, it was “one of the two magazines that you”—young people who aspired to join the intelligentsia—“wanted to write for, the other one being Partisan Review.”22 Like Podhoretz and Sontag themselves, both magazines would soon find themselves at the center of the cultural and political battles of the sixties.