Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  * * *

  Susan’s introduction to publishing and journalism was important, but another introduction marked her first months in the city. As Harriet had jealously foretold in Paris, Susan began an affair with Irene Fornés, Harriet’s ex. Irene was fast becoming a legend of Greenwich Village bohemia, “the queen of downtown,” and though she never became widely known outside theatrical circles, a whole generation of New York artists recalled her artistic brilliance, her ardent temper, and her sheer irrepressible sexiness.23 “A Latin firecracker,” said Robert Silvers, who would soon begin The New York Review of Books.24 Harriet spelled it out with characteristic explicitness: “Irene could make a rock come.”25

  Born in Cuba in 1930, she lived there until her father died. Then, because her mother, like Mildred, was obsessed with Hollywood—and obsessed, too, with the vision of America she saw in the movies—she, her sister, and her mother moved north in 1945. They first went to New Orleans, where they had relatives, and then headed to New York.

  Naturally I found life as a young girl in New York was much more exciting than it was in Cuba because in Cuba girls are not supposed to do this and they’re not supposed to do that and they were constantly being watched. And in the United States there was so much more freedom for young people. And I loved working. My first job was in a factory and I loved it! I just loved being a worker and I loved getting my salary at the end of the week. It was like magic when I cashed that check. When I went to the bank and I would cash that check into dollars I would hold it in my pocket and almost caress it! So from then on I think I immediately became an American.26

  New York was a new city for Susan. But the staff of Commentary was no different, in terms of interests or background, from the people she had known at Berkeley, Chicago, Cambridge, Oxford, or Paris. Irene, in contrast, was “absolutely uneducated,” said Stephen Koch. “But, in Susan’s opinion, a genius. She’d never had this experience before, of people whose intelligence was tremendously powerful, without education. Susan was overwhelmed by her intelligence.”27

  Irene was dyslexic and had a sixth-grade education. She started working in a textile factory and then began designing textiles herself, which led her to painting. After she met Harriet, at the end of 1953, she followed her back to Paris. There, she began to paint, and back in New York became involved in a ménage à trois with Norman Mailer and Adele Morales, the second of Mailer’s six wives. Adele was renowned for ordering her lingerie from Frederick’s of Hollywood and for being stabbed by her husband—and almost killed—in a brawl.28

  Bob Silvers remembered Irene as “a woman of almost electric intensity. You couldn’t visualize any calm thing with her.” She would say: “You know, Susan, sometimes the only way to deal with someone is a good beating.” This was her “advice, Latino advice,”29 and it did not remain in the realm of advice. She was “very vivacious and pretty in a zaftig, cuddly kind of way,” an acquaintance said of her. But that cuddliness was deceiving. “Some guy made a pass at her or something,” the man said, and the next thing he knew, the guy was “screaming and holding up a bloody hand tattooed with teethmarks”—Irene’s.

  She had never read anything—except the newspaper, Little Women, and Hedda Gabler.30 Susan, constantly “trying a little too hard,” was enthralled by Irene’s natural, unforced, effortless genius. “Irene was the real thing,” Koch said. “She was a real artist. Not a pretend one, and not a critic, and not a discussant, and not a graduate student making notes.”

  Susan was given to hectoring discourses, “long scholarly explanations of things one only needs the eyes and ears of someone like Irene to see.” But one thing that Susan could always see was talent, and she saw Irene’s. That talent had still not found its form, and not until she met Susan would she discover it. In turn, Irene’s eyes and ears would help Susan discover her own.

  * * *

  Susan’s first couple of months in New York were gloomy. She was not much interested in her job—

  Having a daily job, going to the office—to permit one to feel at ease, at home, in the world. For most people, to be (to exist) is to be somewhere. The job gives them permission to exist, it gives them a private life (by forcing them to give over most days to the public one). Only by fracturing their lives, by amputating most of their time, can they have a life at all.

  The job, like marriage, a crude solution which works. Most people would be lost without it. But there are people on a certain level of sensibility for whom Job, like Marriage, can’t work at all—people who wither when their lives are fractured, put in splints.31

  —and she was still mourning the almost-end of her relationship with Harriet, which, as so often over the previous year, had not yet quite ended. When Harriet returned to the United States after almost a decade abroad, she moved in with Susan on West End Avenue.

  “How I looked toward her coming to New York, just to seeing her, to seeing her smile, to going to bed with her once and waking beside her,” Susan wrote with a lovingness that would not be reciprocated.32 She threw a welcome-home party, at which Harriet got “insanely drunk,” slipped while dancing, fell on her face, broke her nose, and ended the evening in the emergency room at St. Luke’s.33

  It was an inauspicious beginning, and at that party Susan met Irene. It is hard not to see this as karmic comeuppance for Harriet’s treatment.

  Her vision of me makes me despise myself. And I’m terrified that it is partly because she finds me uninteresting, depressing, naive, sexually dull that I continue to be in love with her. No one has ever regarded me in this way, no one whom I’ve liked and responded to—but I love her + somehow loving her, respecting her has dragged out of me a numb assent to her opinion of me.34

  Harriet headed to Miami at the end of February, and Susan began seeing Irene—at first, it seems, to talk over their common ex. “Astonishing that my account of H. + me should make her say, I could be saying that. She loved H., + H. killed it by needing to be jealous, to be in doubt as to Irene’s love; and loved her most when Irene stopped loving her.”

  Also astonishing: “Irene not fictional.”35

  The next week, Susan went to bed with Jacob Taubes (“unexpectedly good + sensitive sexually”), feeling no apparent guilt about sleeping with her best friend’s husband but sounding almost relieved that the experience gave her the “feeling of being totally queer.”36

  And then her friendship with Irene became something else. If Harriet made her feel her “sexual dullness,” Irene introduced her to the orgasm, a revolution in her life that opened the possibility for the new, better self she hoped to discover when she resolved to get a divorce:

  It is two months now since that September night, when I was preparing the Euthyphro for Friday’s nine o’clock class. The repercussions, the shock waves are only now beginning to fan out, to radiate through my whole character and conception of myself.

  I feel for the first time the living possibility of being a writer. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego. For me to write I must find my ego. The only kind of writer I could be is one who exposes himself. (That is why the Freud book doesn’t count.) To write is to spend oneself, to gamble oneself. But up to now I have not even liked the sound of my own name. To write, I must love the sound of my own name. The writer is in love with himself, he fucks himself, and makes his books out of that meeting and that violence. It must be a rape, a violation, a spending and yielding and using up. Up to now, I have not had even the courage to understand myself, much less because I dared . . . I knew that if I tore anything off, used anything up, it could not be replenished; and, stripped from the maimed, incomplete, pre-orgiastic self, this limb of me would be as dead as the trunk from which it was carved.

  I was hoarding myself. But I was not a self yet, I had no signature. I was only the hope of a self.37

  After endless demoralization at the hands of Philip and Harriet, Irene was a radically new experience. Susan was reborn as she had been at Berkeley, and em
erged less puny, less of a weakling, readier for her new life; and by the time Harriet got back from Florida, passion had fermented into contempt.

  Susan would go out at night, supposedly spending all night in Times Square, “watching a million movies,” Harriet said, “but she’d come back reeking of Mitsouko, which was a Guerlain perfume that I loved and I had always given Irene. I never picked up on it.”

  Finally, Irene called.

  “Susan wants you to leave,” she said. “Pack up.”

  Harriet left, and never slept with another woman.38

  * * *

  Susan understood how essential her alliance with Irene Fornés would prove. She had outgrown the academic world. The teenager who jittered in the presence of Thomas Mann had become a woman who could take note of Jean-Paul Sartre’s bad taste and tell Sir Isaiah Berlin he was a bit careless of the detail. She was still a champion student, but she had indeed been hoarding herself. “I have always been violently, naively ambitious,” she wrote in the journal entry cited on the previous page. Such ambition could not have been satisfied by an academic career. And the radical novelty that Susan Sontag came to represent could not have emerged from academia. Her work displayed a scholar with perfect classical training turning to an avant-garde culture too fresh to have attracted much serious criticism. Irene Fornés catalyzed the persona soon to be known as Susan Sontag.

  Through Irene, she became a part of New York’s artistic bohemia: a world that she would not have encountered with Philip. The sense of discovery that permeated her early essays offered her readers the same excitements. She would dedicate one book to Irene; she would dedicate two to another essential figure, the painter Paul Thek. Like Irene, he was completely without education; like her, he was dazzlingly attractive: “He literally lit up a room when he walked in,” said Stephen Koch. “Very blond. Very good looking. Intensely sexual. She was thrilled by the idea of someone who was both gay and as hot as Paul was.”

  But more than that, Koch said, she was thrilled “to meet these people who didn’t need Leo Strauss to validate their thinking, who would never have heard of Leo Strauss, who would have had no concept at all of why we were even discussing him: that was really overwhelming to her.” A phrase Thek cast off in conversation would, through Susan, become a motto of the emerging culture—a motto, too, for the new self she hoped to create.

  Many had complained that her cerebral way of talking about art was a bore; and one day, when she was holding forth, Paul ran out of patience: “Susan, stop, stop. I’m against interpretation. We don’t look at art when we interpret it. That’s not the way to look at art.” The first book she dedicated to Thek was Against Interpretation. “That’s one of the things that Paul Thek and Irene brought to her,” said Koch. “That you could be a dazzling artist and know practically nothing.”39

  * * *

  “Mad people = people who stand alone + burn,” she wrote a few years later. “I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.”40

  Despite the thrill of her sexual and intellectual discoveries, Susan could not stand alone. She was a mother. David was stuck in an undesirable position, or rather two: between his mother and her new life on the one hand, and between his parents on the other. He spent the summer in California with his father, who was far from resigned to the divorce. David wrote him “the sweetest and most insightful letters out of his troubled soul,” Philip said decades later, “pleading to be left out of the middle of the conflict.”41 Susan had to remind herself, in a list compiled around the time of David’s seventh birthday, to keep him out of it.

  Be consistent.

  Don’t speak about him to others (e.g., tell funny things) in his presence. (Don’t make him self-conscious.)

  Don’t praise him for something I wouldn’t always accept as good.

  Don’t reprimand him harshly for something he’s been allowed to do.

  Daily routine: eating, homework, bath, teeth, room, story, bed.

  Don’t allow him to monopolize me when I am with other people.

  Always speak well of his pop. (No faces, sighs, impatience, etc.)

  Do not discourage childish fantasies.

  Make him aware that there is a grown-up world that’s none of his business.

  Don’t assume that what I don’t like to do (bath, hairwash) he won’t like either.42

  Philip later admitted that Susan “never denounced me as I denounced her to him, and that was my blunder—and a shortcoming of character. He found my hostility to Susan, which was a form of bitterness, very hard to take.”43

  Life as a single mother was hard. Just before she met Irene, she mentioned “the unspeakable loneliness of this new life with David.”44 Yet loneliness did not equal lovelessness. Once Harriet left for Miami, she noted that “I began to grow more detached when I saw that she disliked David (predictably). I don’t doubt his worth + charm as a person as I do my own.”45

  For David, these were difficult years. Susan once wrote that “I wasn’t ever really a child!” David could make the same complaint. Once Irene entered the picture and introduced Susan to the downtown scene, David was either brought along or left at home. “It was because she couldn’t afford a sitter,” David remembered.

  People will tell these stories about David sleeping on the pile of coats. Listen, I don’t think it was the greatest thing she ever did, to be honest. If I had my childhood to live all over again and I could tell her what not to do, that would probably be very high on my list, dragging me along to all that stuff. But when I think back, she didn’t have any money, and she wasn’t willing not to go, and obviously, until I was a certain age, she could never leave me, so she chose the option she chose.46

  Susan’s boundless energy, which David called “her single most distinguishing characteristic,” kept her whirling from party to gallery to reading to dinner to film to play. After she put David to bed, she would go out with friends, attending movies and performances and coming back around dawn, before David woke up.

  He began to strike Susan’s friends as isolated, and to display a vivid interest in weapons. His only fond memory of Nat Sontag was that he allowed him to hold his gun,47 and the only positive memory he allowed of his father to an interviewer was of “outings to target ranges.”48 In 1960, the poet Sam Menashe proposed marriage to Susan, and David was relieved when she declined because Menashe had once suggested David should throw all his toy guns into the Hudson, Susan wrote Mildred. “Ever since, David has been very cold to poor Sam!”49 A couple of years later, when David was about ten, a new friend, Don Eric Levine, came to the West End apartment for the first time. David was playing with metal soldiers; Susan handed Levine the manuscript of a piece she was working on, “Notes on ‘Camp.’”50

  Chapter 13

  The Comedy of Roles

  Susan met Irene only a few months before the emergence of an art form that would become typical of the new decade. In October 1959, the first “happening,” Allan Kaprow’s Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, took place in New York. Partly a protest against “the museum conception of art,” happenings were ephemeral and thus noncommercial. (“One cannot buy a Happening,” Susan wrote.) They were a quick, disorienting series of “radical juxtapositions” designed “to tease and abuse the audience.” They were not quite theater and not quite painting but used elements of both to create a new immersive experience: held in cheap spaces, employing found objects, including the castoff debris of urban life, they were a downtown, downmarket Gesamtkunstwerk.

  They were also the kind of events that fascinated Irene Fornés. With the death of Jackson Pollock in 1956, abstract expressionism, which had defined his generation of American artists, seemed to have run its course. Happenings were created by artists Susan’s age—Kaprow was only six years older. They were the expression of an emerging avant-garde, Sontag wrote in 1962, and “one logical development of the New York school of the fifties.”

  The gigantic size of many of the canvases painted in Ne
w York in the last decade, designed to overwhelm and envelop the spectator, plus the increasing use of materials other than paint to adhere to, and later expand from, the canvas, indicated the latent intention of this type of painting to project itself into a three-dimensional form.

  These events drew inspiration from abstract expressionism, as well as from surrealism and the theatrical writings of Artaud. But the notion of an art that would envelop the spectator and create an alternative reality had a source even better known to Sontag: Sigmund Freud. “The Freudian technique of interpretation,” she wrote in her essay on happenings, “shows itself to be based on the same logic of coherence behind contradiction to which we are accustomed in modern art.” And what was modern art? “The meaning of modern art is its discovery beneath the logic of everyday life of the alogic of dreams.”1

  * * *

  The refusal of reality—setting the dream on a pedestal to lord over the waking world—would become as much a hallmark of the new decade as it would of Sontag’s work. “The world is, ultimately, an aesthetic phenomenon,” she would write in one of her most complex essays, “On Style.” This idea had a complicated genealogy. In the sixties, it would find expressions ranging from the erudite to the vernacular, as with the vogues for LSD (first championed by literary and scientific figures, including the English writer Aldous Huxley and the Harvard professor Timothy Leary) and for the hyperstylized not-quite-art favored in certain homosexual circles.

  “The meaning of modern art” that she identified derived from Freud, who placed dreams at the center of many psychoanalytic theories. But the tension between reality and dream, between object and metaphor, had been a favorite of philosophical discourse since Plato; and if it appealed to Sontag intellectually, its interest to her was above all emotional.

  There was the private self: the self when nobody else was around. There was the sexual self. There was the social self: self as representation, metaphor, mask. And there was yet another self: an alter ego who had haunted her all her life, the person she thought she ought to be. “That person who has been watching me as long as I can remember is looking now,” she wrote at just fourteen.2