Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  The New York Review of Books, a club often mocked as The New York Review of Each Other’s Books, would become the preeminent institution of the third—and last—generation of the Family. Last, because people would never joke, as they did of the aging Partisan Review, that it had special typewriters with words like “alienation” stamped on individual keys.40 Like the Guggenheim Museum and Farrar, Straus, The New York Review was firmly integrated into an American culture whose cruelty and vulgarity it criticized, and whose ambitions and prestige it symbolized. Together with Farrar, Straus, the Review would become the foundation upon which Susan Sontag built her career.

  * * *

  When The Benefactor was published in October 1963, it bore a dedication to María Irene Fornés. Already in Cuba, in 1960, and indeed before, their relationship had adopted the pattern that marked her relationships with Philip and Harriet; the pattern would remain remarkably similar throughout her life. Within months, passion dissolved into sniping and jealousy.

  Susan’s attraction to Irene was physical. But it was also a tropism to someone unlike herself. “Till now,” she wrote in 1959, “I have felt that the only persons I could know in depth, or really love, were duplicates or versions of my own wretched self. (My intellectual and sexual feelings have always been incestuous.) Now I know and love someone who is not like me—e.g., not a Jew, not a New York-type intellectual—without any failure of intimacy. I am always conscious of I.’s foreignness, of the absence of a shared background—and I experience this as a great release.”41

  She expressed this to Irene, who resented the “Latin firecracker” stereotype. She summed up how Susan saw her as “Latin, foreign, good taste, sexual experience, uneducated intelligence.” In her diary, Susan tweaked her: “(—this is not correct, since according to the dictionary, education is development of character and mental powers as well as systematic instruction).”42 The resort to the dictionary was a perfect illustration of their differences, a gap that grew with their increasingly wild fights. Their neighbor Sam Menashe, the poet who proposed marriage to Susan, was shocked by the screeching from the apartment.

  Irene pinpointed the sources of Susan’s insecurity. “I. says I am ruled by a family image of myself: being my mother’s daughter,”43 Susan wrote. She noted a passive-aggressive mechanism in herself, and knew that she had, indeed, turned Irene into Mildred:

  My “masochism”—caricatured in the exchange of letters with Irene this summer—reflects not the desire to suffer, but the hope of appeasing anger and making a dent in indifference that I suffer (and am “good,” i.e. harmless.) . . . If Mommy sees she’s really hurt me, she’ll stop hitting me. But Irene isn’t my mommy.44

  At the same time, Irene was “the great turning point.” She reflected Susan’s anxieties. She also offered a chance to escape them. “She introduced me to an idea deeply foreign to me—how incredible it seems now!—that of seeing myself. I thought my mind was only to see outside myself! Because I didn’t exist in the sense that others and everything else did.”45

  She despaired when she read Irene’s diaries, as she had Harriet’s. Her despair came not from invading Irene’s privacy but from what the act revealed about her own wretchedness. It was “the glimpse of myself reading the notes that disturbed me, perennially looking for my bearings in the opinions of others.”46

  * * *

  As Susan struggled with “X,” Irene had been sexually abused by a relative, a trauma that left inevitable psychic consequences. She was, a cousin said, “all joy or all rage.” The relationship was bound to explode,47 but the partnership—between Susan’s willed intellect and Irene’s natural genius—was a breakthrough for both. Irene had flitted around Europe, pretending to be a painter, living first in Paris and then in a Spanish village: “I thought I was Gauguin,” she said. “The people of the village thought I was crazy.”48

  Not until she met Susan did she discover her true vocation, and helped Susan discover hers. The breakthrough came in the spring of 1961, when they were sitting at a restaurant. Susan was teaching at Columbia and fretting about her inability to write. “How silly,” Irene said. “If you want to write, why not just sit down and write?” As they were talking, a friend appeared and invited them to a party. Susan accepted; Irene ordered her home to write. When they got there, Irene said she would write something, too, “just to show you how easy it is.”

  She had never written a word, but opened a cookbook and wrote a story by using the first word of every sentence. It was a technique she would later refine, and the creativity it unleashed would make her “the queen of Off-Broadway,” who won more Obie Awards than any other playwright.49 At first, said the great friend of her last years, Michelle Memran, she was “experimental, because she had no idea what she was doing.” This spontaneity would be conveyed to her students, whom she taught to unblock their imaginations with the same techniques she herself had begun with.

  “Close your eyes,” Fornés instructs. “Visualize two people in conflict.” After a minute’s silence, she picks up a paperback she’d found in the street that morning, skims through several pages, finds a sentence at random. “Use this sentence,” she says: “‘It’s all just as you left it.’” Everyone begins to write, including Fornés—she’s written almost every word of her last half-dozen plays in the workshop. After half an hour, she speaks again. “Now it’s a week later,” she says, and reads another random sentence from the paperback: “I haven’t the faintest idea what you want me to do.”50

  Susan Taubes joined Sontag and Fornés every Saturday. As Irene was writing Tango Palace and Susan Sontag was writing The Benefactor, Susan Taubes was writing a novel about a woman separating from a charismatic, sexually insatiable man who bore more than a passing resemblance to her husband. If The Benefactor errs by presenting its characters as too ethereal, Divorcing—which is far more absorbing—is almost too wrenchingly grounded in the world of real people, real emotions, and real history. This is ironic, because Divorcing is the story of a refugee who, torn from one world, can never find another.

  Susan Taubes did, indeed, seem lost. Whenever Don Levine went to her apartment, he would first clean out a refrigerator full of rotting food. Literally unable to cross the street, she was eventually diagnosed with an eye condition that explained a bit of her strangeness. But fragility was only part of the story. She was “more than a bit of a monstre sacré,” Don said. When he reproached her for her treatment of her children, she shrugged: “My childhood was awful. Why should theirs be any better?”51 Like Irene, like Harriet, she defied convention, and gave Sontag permission to do things she might not otherwise have dared to.

  * * *

  By the time The Benefactor came out, with its dedication to Irene, she and Susan were no longer a couple. But Irene would remember Susan even when she remembered almost nothing else. At the end of her life, when her mind had been destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease, she suddenly told Michelle Memran, who was making a documentary about her life, about a “bookworm, which ordinarily is, like, not very attractive, but she was very attractive, and the idea that this very beautiful woman was a bookworm where Sartre—Sartre—would come to a café and be looking for where Susan was to sit at her table. Sartre!”

  In her still-heavy Spanish accent, Irene asked:

  If I said because she was the love of my life, would you get any more information? She was the person I loved the most profound. Right now my eyes begin to tear. And this is now a hundred and fifty-five years later. So do you want to still ask why sooner or later I start talking about Susan? And why is someone the love of your life? That is a mystery. That’s magic cannot be explained. And it’s as real as this table, and you cannot say it’s because of this, you cannot analyze it. Because it is. . . . When you fall in love with a person it is not logical. What I think if I’m actually being, if I have a lot of freedom or trust in the person, I would say I think it has to do with something in a person’s system that is almost like chemical, that has a need, like you go
to the doctor, you feel weak, and the doctor takes a blood test, they analyze it, and so they figure out that you need vitamin C or vitamin B, and also drink as much milk as you can, and it has to do with a balance of certain chemicals in the system, and certain, because people would say, why were you so completely, through the years, even after we broke up, in love with her? And I would say, you know why was I in love with her? Because I was!52

  Chapter 15

  Funsville

  The Benefactor was published in the fall of 1963. Reviews were respectful, though several expressed surprise that the novel was the work of an American author. “If I did not know that the book was written by a native New Yorker and issued by a publisher in that city, I would assume without question that its author came from somewhere—anywhere—between Calais and Warsaw,” wrote the critic for The New Republic.1 Time’s critic agreed: the book was “written in what would be identifiable as English prose if it did not sound so much like a blurred translation from some other language.”2 Hannah Arendt, herself born between Calais and Warsaw, wrote Roger Straus who had sent it to her for a blurb: “It is extraordinarily good. My sincere congratulations: you may have discovered there a major writer.”3

  Only a few weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The decade had started hopefully, with the transfer of authority from the oldest president in history, Dwight Eisenhower, to the youngest, John Kennedy. Many Americans imagined that the new decade Kennedy’s election inaugurated would allow the nation to savor the fruits of victory amid unparalleled power and prosperity—and that the world, under benevolent American leadership, would bask in a Pax Americana. Things did not work out that way, to say the least; and the rise of the new generation was marked by traumas. Kennedy’s murder was one. Kennedy’s creation, Vietnam, was another. The decade would be remembered for a series of revolts: at home, for a previously unthinkable wave of assassinations; for the assertiveness of blacks, women, and homosexuals; for the determination of young people to remake a society that, at the height of its wealth and influence, they rejected as greedy, bigoted, and repressive. Abroad, revolts were under way in nations determined to overcome imperialism, American, Soviet, and otherwise; but in The Benefactor, Hippolyte identifies a more profound change, the change that underlay all the others.

  I believe that the revolutions of my time have been changes not of government or of the personnel of public institutions, but revolutions of feelings and seeing.4

  To study the cultural revolutions of the sixties is to realize to what extent its “revolutions of feelings and seeing” had to do with fear of miscegenation. The racist term was “mongrelization.” It expressed the fear that sexual intercourse between blacks and whites—widespread in private, taboo in public—would create a degenerate mulatto race. This was not a fringe opinion. Blacks and whites would not be allowed to marry in all fifty states until 1967.

  And in fact all the sixties revolts strove to break down boundaries. Some of these—between women and men, blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles, straights and gays—had such a long history that they seem to require little explanation, though this is deceptive: in the last half century, the connotations of all those terms have changed, often beyond recognition. And American society was riven by other taboos that, though almost entirely forgotten now, make it hard to understand how a person as intimidatingly erudite, as polymathically allusive, as Susan Sontag could have been attacked as a mongrelizer, a leveling popularizer whose prominence was a sign of decadence.

  T. S. Eliot had called criticism, the policing of cultural boundaries, “the correction of taste.” This task was so central to the second generation of the Family, writers like Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and Randall Jarrell, that their writing shaped something called the “Age of Criticism.” Many of the greatest American writers—the most influential, most learned, most admired writers—were critics, and saw themselves as forming a prophylactic shield against the pollution tainting everything they held dear. The culture they defended was the culture that despised and rejected anything too easy, too popular, too in thrall to money and image and success.

  For the Partisan Review crowd in the 1950s, the quintessence of middlebrowism was the Book of the Month Club and Life magazine. For serious painters, the enemy was commercial art, with its reek of advertising. For serious theater and music, the enemy was Broadway. For the avant-garde cinema, it was everything the word “Hollywood” connoted. Cinema itself was dubious: debates about whether film could be considered an art mirrored a similar debate about photography. The idea that someone could write on science fiction films, or happenings, or a homosexual style known as “camp,” and still wish to be taken seriously as an intellectual, was unsettling. The elders saw their carefully drawn distinctions being carted off to the rubbish heap.

  * * *

  In 1964, Susan Sontag got in a rickety elevator on East Forty-Seventh Street and emerged into a fourth-floor loft, rented for one hundred dollars a year. Decorated in silver foil and known as the Factory, it was a guerrilla outpost, and its presiding genius was Andy Warhol.

  In 1957, Warhol won the Art Directors Club Medal, “the citation noting particularly his shoe advertisements.”5 A few years later, he was the most notorious artist in America. This confirmed the worst fears of the critical gatekeepers. He was their opposite in every way. They were mostly Jewish; he, and most of his entourage, were Catholic. They liked to talk; he was famously silent. They sought depth; he lingered on the surface. They worshipped learning; he dandyishly held aloof. (One of the best-read visual artists of his generation kept his reading a “closely held secret.”) They professed to loathe commercial values and culture, while he had nothing against money, and reveled in tabloid celebrity. “All is pretty,” he blandly affirmed, soaring on amphetamines, chewing on his endless sticks of gum.6

  He was, in a phrase, against interpretation. And though this inevitably made him one of the most interpreted artists of modern times, his dedication to surfaces was not an affectation. It was a strategy for survival, and one Susan instinctively would have understood. She warned against having two selves, but she also realized that through writing she could create a new self, a metaphorical self, that could protect the “weakling” within. Warhol had reached a similar insight. If Andrew Warhola was introverted, pallid, stammering, exceedingly phobic, and—not coincidentally—homosexual, Andy Warhol was a famous person: a persona.

  His presence turned a party into a scene. His gaze turned a soup can into a masterpiece, and a street hustler or a strung-out heiress into an icon. The names of his Warhol Superstars—Penny Arcade, Candy Darling, Ultra Violet, Rotten Rita—testify to Warhol’s view of self-transformation as drag, people and objects transformed “into the image, par excellence, of a subterranean world of beautiful people and geniuses and poseurs, the obsessed and the bored, come at last into their glamorous own.”7

  He had made himself into one of his own objects, Stephen Koch wrote: “tawdry and brilliant, unmistakable, instantly grasped, but with a resonance that kept flickering at the edges of attention, his image seeming to build meanings that then fell away like static in fantasy that seems to come and go at once.” He did the same for others. He made “Screen Tests” of hundreds of people, famous but mostly not, who got off the freight elevator and entered the silver hall. “That was Warhol’s gift,” Koch wrote. “He made everybody in his world watched. And what is being watched has a meaning, even if it’s only the meaning of being watched.”8

  * * *

  By the time she turned up at the Factory, “Warhol already had it on good authority that Sontag didn’t care much for his paintings and distrusted his sincerity.” Warhol had no interest in her critical opinions, and would never have let on if he did. He was interested in a “good look—shoulder-length, straight dark hair and big eyes, and she wore very tailored things.”9 As Warhol spoke encouraging banalities in his fey voice, she did seven four-minute Screen Tests.

  “Oh, wow,” he sai
d, as Susan slouched, legs spread wide, in a chair.

  Hidden behind sunglasses, she struck a butch pose.

  “Smile,” he said. “Say cheese.”

  The longer she was watched, the more restless she grew. She shifts in the chair; the playful joking peters out. As the camera whizzes away, we see this woman, with all her boldness and beauty and affectation, being turned into a superstar, which is to say: a commodity, devoid of life. This objectification was Warhol’s way of aestheticizing death, with which he was obsessed, and from this obsession he drew a shocking conclusion. By objectifying its imagery (Mrs. Kennedy in her widow’s veil) and its creepiest modern instruments (the electric chair), he could aestheticize even the most immitigable human fears.

  This was the attraction of stardom. He wanted to transform his own jittery self into the figure of the modern celebrity, “to remove himself from the dangerous, anxiety-ridden world of human action and interaction, to wrap himself in the serene fullness of the functionless aesthetic sphere,” wrote Koch, a prominent critic of Warhol.

  Desiring the glamorous peace of existing only in the eye of the beholder, he tries to become a celebrity, a star, making no bones at all about his preference for objecthood over being human. “Machines have less problems,” he once told an interviewer. “I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?”10