In 1947, twenty-seven-year-old Irving Howe—younger than Rahv or Phillips, older than Podhoretz or Sontag—traced the positions of the Family in a rough chronology:
Their attraction to radical politics in the early thirties; their subsequent break from Stalinism and turn to Trotskyism; their retreat from Marxism in the late thirties; and finally their flight from politics in general . . . [in] turns to religion, absolute moralism, psychoanalysis and existential philosophy as substitutes for politics.14
After the war, political activism, though certainly present in the pages of Partisan Review, was mostly channeled into aesthetic debates that made criticism the most elevated intellectual endeavor of the day. That urgency kept Partisan Review’s standards so high that when Mark Greif, a critic young enough to be Sontag’s grandson, read through the first decades of the magazine, he was stunned that it was “impossibly good. It was better than I expected or could have imagined, maybe the best American journal of the century, or ever.”15
* * *
By the time Sontag reached New York, many of these debates, particularly those around communism, had played themselves out. Like the debates around psychoanalysis and existentialism, they would linger, explicitly and implicitly, for decades; but like Rahv and Phillips and Trilling and Arendt and McCarthy and Macdonald, they were aging. In the Family genealogy Podhoretz traced in 1967, another generation—Howe’s, Philip Roth’s, Norman Mailer’s—had already risen, and a third was making its appearance in the form of two prodigies. The firstborn son, at least according to Podhoretz, was Podhoretz himself. The firstborn daughter, he wrote, was Susan Sontag.
But though she was Jewish, Sontag did not share the older Family members’ fraught relationship to America. She expressed little love for the heartland—but talented people who flee boring provinces for capitals rarely do. She was not the only New Yorker, Jewish or otherwise, who took a dim view of the philistinism they believed to reign in those provinces, nor the only American who ranked highbrow Europe above lowbrow America. When she occasionally expressed her disdain for America, she did so in the same terms that Americans always had; and when those terms changed during the Vietnam War, she, like so many other Americans, would change with them.
Nor was her relationship to Jewishness particularly troubled. After her first visit to Israel, she said: “I couldn’t live there. But I’m glad it exists, so I could have somewhere to be buried.”16 Of Judaism, the religion, she took little notice, though in her early years she wrote quite a lot about Jewish identity: “Are the Jews played out?” she wondered in 1957. “I am proud of being Jewish. Of what?”17 The Nazi horrors marked her as they did every other Jew. But being Jewish was, as much as anything, a way of belonging: she noted that “in New York (Greenwich Village) there’s a shared comedy of being Jewish.”18 Podhoretz wrote that the second generation of the Family, including Saul Bellow, marked itself off from the first by its desire
to lay a serious claim to their identity as Americans and to their right to play a more than marginal role in the literary culture of the country. Both the claim and the right were a decade later to be taken so entirely for granted that one is in danger of forgetting how tenuous they seemed to all concerned even as late as the year 1953—how widespread, still, and not least among Jews, was the association of Jewishness with vulgarity and lack of cultivation.19
The worldly, sophisticated Sontag would become the preeminent symbol of the third generation. She would not need to lay claim to anything—except, as Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Henry James to T. S. Eliot always had, to Europe. She would share with the Jews an ideal of seriousness, “haunted,” in Podhoretz’s words, “by what was perhaps the most ferociously tyrannical tradition of scholarship the world has ever seen”—the Talmudic—and by a suffocating feeling that “they must either be Marx or Freud or not be anything at all between the covers of a book.”20 And she shared the earlier generation’s profound sense of alienation. Like Paul, who hoped Christ would abolish the distinction between Greek and Jew, master and slave, male and female, she, too, would despise categories, seeking a universal culture that would abolish them—but not because she was Jewish. Because she was gay.
* * *
In 1962, four years after her divorce, Sontag’s gayness endangered her again. When she and Philip separated, they agreed that David would spend summers with his father. By then, Philip had moved to Philadelphia to take a position in the Sociology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. But when David returned to New York on September 15, 1961, he was, his mother claimed, “a mass of neuroses,” including those induced by “enforced attendance with his father at graduate meetings and sociology classes.”21
She spoke these words in response to a custody suit. The suit demonstrated that Philip’s bitterness had not relented, as Jacob Taubes predicted in 1958. At the end of 1959, she wrote in her journal: “I have an enemy—Philip.”22 In 1961, he admitted to stalking her in New York. In a piece in the Daily News entitled “Prof: Gotta Be Sneak to See My Son,” he said he had only obtained “fleeting glances” of his son by “lying in wait outside the school the boy attends, or near the apartment house at 350 West End Ave. where Mrs. Rieff lives.”23
The name “Mrs. Rieff” is a clue to who was behind the appearance of these articles. Absent a concerted campaign to elicit sympathy, it is hard to imagine why the press would have taken an interest in a routine squabble between two unknown academics. But Philip was eager to play the martyr. Described as the “author of several solemn tomes” (at this point, only one, The Mind of the Moralist, had appeared), and emphasizing his “international reputation in the highest levels of academic ivy,” one article casts Philip as the true victim, even going so far as to insinuate that Susan’s real problem was godlessness. “This woman teaches religion at Columbia University,” his lawyer intoned, “but not to the boy.”
Claiming to be acting in the interest of a child, Philip stalked and sued that child’s mother. He dragged her through the newspapers, which published at least one picture of David, with Susan standing beside him, composed and elegant. But she was devastated by the proceedings, which dragged on for months. Philip came close to succeeding, particularly after Susan refused to send David to him for Christmas,24 and particularly when Philip brought the heaviest charge against her, one not reported in the paper: that her relationship with Irene Fornés made her an unfit mother. Homosexuality, as in The Price of Salt, was enough to cost many parents custody. But when the case came to trial on February 14, 1962—Valentine’s Day—Philip’s harassment worked against him, as it had in the original divorce in California. Not only did he not get custody: his visitation rights were cut back.
Susan and Philip never spoke again. The poet Richard Howard remembered how often she spoke of the divorce and custody battle, and particularly of the traumatizing smear campaign in the press. Thirty years later, when David was going to lunch with his father, Susan asked where they would be eating and asked David to arrange a table by the window. She walked by and stole a glimpse of Philip; she was shocked at how he had aged. When she sold her archive to UCLA, she wrote her agent to request that some materials be withheld. “There are a few items—such as my correspondence with my ex-husband—which to protect his reputation, if that’s the right word, I don’t want anyone to look at as long as he is alive. (I don’t know why I feel obliged to be protective of the bastard, but I do.)”25
Though he remarried, Philip always loved Susan. On a trip to Boston in the company of a Philadelphia rabbi, Philip “insisted that he drive round and round and round where their home used to be, when he and Sontag were married.”26
* * *
In 1962, Susan met a man who, though a Jew and a New Yorker, was as far from the Family—immigrants or their children, socialists or their offshoots—as could be conceived. Roger Straus’s family belonged to “Our Crowd,” the great capitalist magnates of Jewish New York. If Lopate and Podhoretz were impressed that Sontag took taxis, one c
an imagine how intimidating they must have found Straus, scion of two of the richest families in the United States. His mother, Gladys Guggenheim, belonged to the mining dynasty; his father’s family had owned Macy’s department store; his wife, Dorothea Liebmann, was the heiress to a brewing fortune.
The marriage of old Jewish money to avant-garde art was consummated in the construction of the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright’s upside-down ziggurat on Fifth Avenue. Founded by Roger’s great-uncle Solomon, it opened only three years before Susan met Roger, its radical architecture offering an impudent contrast to the staid pile of the Metropolitan Museum down the street. From the Europeanizing Met to the American Guggenheim, a momentous historical shift was given plastic form; but the Guggenheim was not merely an American assertion of independence from European tutelage. (With varying degrees of conviction, Americans had been asserting that for centuries.) It did not assert equality or distance but superiority and authority—a shift that, not coincidentally, assigned the city of New York a new status as the cultural capital of the world.
The Guggenheims and the Strauses had been in America since before the Civil War, two generations before the pogroms in Russia in 1881 that marked the beginning of mass Jewish immigration. Straus’s grandfather had been United States minister to the Sublime Porte, as well as the first Jewish cabinet secretary. His caste, which included families like the Morgenthaus, Warburgs, Sachses, and Lehmans, were akin to the court Jews of Europe, and their money largely insulated them from the indignities of anti-Semitism with which poorer, more recent Jewish arrivals had to contend.
They identified strongly with the country that made their affluence possible, an identification that Straus’s career reflected: in World War II, he worked in public relations for the navy; and once he started the firm that became Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he allowed the CIA to use his literary scouts in Europe to sniff out Communists: a black phone in his office reportedly provided a direct line to Washington. (Once wartime patriotism gave way to Cold War jingoism, the phone was repurposed for calls to his mistresses.)27
Such a telephone would not have appeared on a desk at Partisan Review. But the Family would never have created an institution like FSG. If the Guggenheim Museum was proudly American, that did not mean its galleries housed a chauvinistic national collection. Alongside its American works were Modiglianis and Picassos and Kirchners and Klees, gathered in pursuit of the cosmopolitan ideal whose monuments, from the Statue of Liberty to the new United Nations, filled New York. It was a city that saw itself as the Mother of Exiles, an American ideal of diversity that later became commonplace. But particularly during World War II, with most of Europe under Nazi occupation, it was not shared by everyone, inside or outside the United States. It was an ideal that Farrar, Straus—and Susan Sontag—would embody.
Of the twenty-three Nobel Prize winners the house has published, none were born and died as Americans. (T. S. Eliot renounced his citizenship; Joseph Brodsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer were naturalized.) Eventually, FSG published an impressive range of international writers: Europeans like Hermann Hesse and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eugenio Montale and Elias Canetti; Latin Americans including Pablo Neruda and Mario Vargas Llosa; Africans including Wole Soyinka and Nadine Gordimer. Together with the Americans FSG published, the house embodied the ambition of the postwar republic of letters.
Through FSG, many great international writers reached America. From it, the great Americans irradiated. None embraced the pluralistic model as enthusiastically as Susan Sontag, who would become the most important of Straus’s scouts. “Susan is the real editor in chief of FSG,” Robert Giroux was heard to grumble.28 She helped dozens of writers, often with little fanfare, make their way into English. Roger’s loyalty to her was unquestioned, as was hers to him. “You’re the only person in the world,” she told Straus, “who can call me ‘baby’ and get away with it.”29
* * *
It was the same word Nat Sontag used to address Susan’s motherless mother. As Nat proved to be an ideal parent to Mildred, Roger became the same for fatherless Susan. Though he was sixteen years older than Susan, they died within months of each other in 2004. Those who knew them felt the timing was a blessing. “That was a mitzvah that he died before her,” said Peggy Miller, Roger’s longtime secretary and lover.30
Roger made Susan’s career possible. He published every one of her books. He kept her alive, professionally, financially, and sometimes physically. She was fully aware that she would not have had the life she had if he had not taken her under his protection when he did. In the literary world, their relationship was a source of fascination: of envy for writers who longed for a protector as powerful and loyal; of gossip for everyone who speculated about what the relationship entailed. It was, briefly, sexual: “They used to go out for ‘margarita lunches,’” an assistant said. “That was her word. It must have reminded her of California or something. They had sex on several occasions, in hotels. She had no problems telling me that.”31 But this short-lived tryst in no way explains their lifelong bond.
In May 1962, Susan signed a contract with Farrar, Straus for The Benefactor. It stipulated payment of five hundred dollars, one hundred paid in advance. It wasn’t much, but money was not the point. Roger, for the rest of her life, would be more than a publisher. He would be a friend who would deliver the stability, the confidence in her work, that she required to write.
* * *
When Roger’s Mercedes pulled up to the office each morning, Tom Wolfe wrote, the drug deals and assaults on Union Square came to “a momentary but deferential halt.”32 In those days, Union Square was nasty, and so were FSG’s offices. They were appropriate to a publishing house that was never, or only rarely, profitable: “He loved walking on the thin edge of nothing,” Dorothea Straus said of her husband.33 But if the offices were shabby, the Strauses’ Upper East Side town house was decidedly not. Its Our-Crowd glamour gave FSG an air of solidity that Roger used to bolster his business’s reputation, and parties at their house struck many guests, particularly new arrivals, as from another, Proustian, age. “We will dress” or “We will not dress,” Dorothea would say when she called to issue an invitation. This dazzled many younger people, like Susan’s friend Fred Tuten: “I was just a kid from the Bronx,” he said. “I had no idea what it meant—none.”
(“Dressing” meant ball gowns and jewels and tuxedos; “not dressing,” suits and skirts.)
At the house, a guest would be greeted by the eccentrically outfitted Dorothea, whose dresses were made by a Russian émigrée couturière who styled herself “Countess Jora.” (Her son said: “I think my mother saw an Aubrey Beardsley drawing when she was young and never recovered from the experience.”34) Roger, who rarely remembered people’s names, would offer a drink—“Whaddaya like, pal?”—and then bring newcomers around to meet the other guests. “Edmund Wilson was there, and Susan Sontag was there, and Malamud was there, and Lillian Hellman was there,” Tuten remembered. “It was the most interesting level of literary culture.”
Their son, Roger III, called them Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, masterful performers—“Roger was an external person, not an internal person,” said Jonathan Galassi, his successor as publisher of FSG—and after the performance, the set was struck. The house without a party was like “an airport runway waiting for the plane to come in,” their son said. “The main function wasn’t being performed; the landing field was there but it was waiting for the plane.”35
Straus exuded the kind of politician’s warmth that made everyone feel welcome and important—but only up to a point, especially with men. “He was incredibly effective, but he was not someone that you would sit and have a heart-to-heart with,” said Galassi.36 For Straus as for his publishing house, the point was to bring people together; and his parties brought Susan into contact with people she had idolized since childhood. She was not, however, daunted by her new surroundings, and cast aside rules that did not suit her, including the postprandial separ
ating of the sexes. One evening, Susan, hearing the suggestion that she go upstairs and join the ladies, simply kept talking. “And that was that,” said Dorothea Straus. “Susan broke the tradition, and we never split up after dinner again.”37
* * *
It was there that she met William Phillips, coeditor of Partisan Review, and asked him how one wrote for his magazine.
“You ask,” he said.
“I’m asking,” she answered.38
And in the summer of 1962, only a few weeks after she signed her contract with Farrar, Straus, her first piece appeared, a review of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave. It focused on familiar preoccupations: the dream (“the purest form of the post-classical novel is the nightmare”); the gulf between body and mind (“the novel has been preempted by the agony of disembodied emotional and intellectual struggles”); and an interesting but unexplained definition of the principal subject of modern fiction: “the failure of appetite and passionate feeling.”39 What is new about the essay, never reprinted, is its context. It marked the arrival of Susan Sontag into the Family flagship, and announced her membership in the Farrar, Straus circle: The Slave had been published by Roger, and its cotranslator, Cecil Hemley, had been an enthusiastic reader of The Benefactor, and would be Sontag’s first editor.
In February 1963, another institution, The New York Review of Books, was born. A printers’ union strike had forced a stop to the publication of the New York Times and the city’s other newspapers. Inspired by an essay Elizabeth Hardwick had published in Harper’s in 1959, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” a small group, including Hardwick herself, took advantage of the work stoppage to begin a review of their own. The group included Robert Silvers, another product of Hutchins’s University of Chicago who had edited Hardwick’s essay at Harper’s. Silvers and Hardwick were joined by a young married couple of prominent editors, Jason and Barbara Epstein. The inaugural issue included Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Adrienne Rich, Alfred Kazin, Robert Penn Warren, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and—with a short essay on Simone Weil—Susan Sontag.
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