* * *
A year before her visit to the Factory, Susan had not been a celebrity. She had been a young writer making a name for herself. She published her novel. She published her essays. But The Benefactor and reviews of Simone Weil were not the stuff of which celebrities were made. In the summer of 1964, she made her third visit to Europe. In Paris, she wrote “Notes on ‘Camp,’” published in the fall 1964 issue of Partisan Review.
Even before it appeared, it was divisive. William Phillips, one of the two editors of PR, loved it. The other, Philip Rahv, “had no use for her”11 and no use for the essay. As soon as it hit the newsstands, it unleashed a parallel reaction in society. Susan found herself in Time magazine, and The New York Times Magazine noted that “immediately both the intellectual and the not so intellectual world was suddenly abuzz about Camp.” To that, a Times reader, Mrs. Roberta Copeland of Philadelphia, sternly riposted that “if the concept of Camp is to be allowed to enter the mainstream of our cultural life, with the blessing, no less, of the New York Times, then I think our society is headed for a moral collapse unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”12
The Times article described camp as “anything that might be described as ‘mad,’ ‘crazy,’ or ‘funsville.’” What was so bad about funsville? Hilton Kramer, an art critic who knew Susan from Commentary, explained that she was making “the very idea of moral discrimination seem stale and distinctly un-chic,” collapsing fundamental distinctions. James Atlas wrote: “Works that were popular but serious, that occupied the middle ground . . . posed a threat to the sanctity of high culture.”13 This was Philip Rahv’s objection: “He saw her as an enemy of the high culture,” said Norman Podhoretz.
Sontag rarely bothered to contend with these objections, or to address the many misunderstandings her essay spawned. “Camp taste . . . still presupposes the older, higher standards of discrimination,” she pointed out later, in a rare reference to the essay. And it was these standards that stood “in contrast to the taste incarnated by, say, Andy Warhol, the franchiser and mass marketer of the dandyism of leveling.”14 To read Against Interpretation, Sontag’s first book of essays, where “Notes on ‘Camp’” was published in book form in 1966, is to ask: If this woman is an enemy of high culture, who could possibly be its friend? But Mrs. Roberta Copeland, one suspects, was not worried about the mass marketing of the dandyism of leveling.
Though short—sixteen pages, a little more than six thousand words—“Notes on ‘Camp’” is the product of years of reflection. A draft surfaces six years before its publication in Partisan Review, during her trip to Greece in 1958. Its title announced the theme that, as Mrs. Copeland surely suspected, was behind the one Sontag ultimately chose: “Notes on Homosexuality.”
Homosexuality and narcissism. Concern with clothes, with ageing, with beauty. Ricardo making H. and me go with him to the department store at Sevres Babylon [sic] to buy wrinkle-cream for his eyes. [He + H. speaking together in Spanish—she pretending to be the buyer, had to ask him, “Do you like this?” “Would you rather have that?”—thinking the salesgirl didn’t understand.] The faggot on Astir Beach who continually runs his hands through his grey-rinsed hair. Bruno’s blue silk cravat, his rings, his shame at balding.
Homosexuals are extraordinarily vain. Concern with being beautiful. Obsessed by idea of getting old. If you are ugly or old, you have no pay, no one wants you. (Ricardo said.) No one finds an old queen attractive. Not like lesbians who look for “character” more than “looks.”
Homosexuals and chic—faggots always to be found in the chic part of the bar, e.g. Zonar’s. Or in chic resorts, e.g. the Mediterranean islands (Capri, Ischia, Mykonos + Ydra + Poros).
Homosexuality has a more developed world than lesbianism. Phenomenon of “camp” taste. (Kitsch = sentimental, cheap). The super-snobbery of liking what is vulgar—more than “liking” it, being mad about it. Elliott Stein: digs opera, horror movies, artless pornography, odd newspaper stories and montages of newspaper headlines, holidaying in Lourdes—
Faggot taste in interior decoration (bars, Sandy + Mary’s apartment): stripes—black, white, red; painted plates, Indian rugs, modern furniture, blue + pink Picasso-type paintings (acrobats, sad youths), coasters for the glasses. . . .
The attractiveness of homosexuality for me—the element of parody, of masquerade, the melange of wit and bathos.
Members of a secret society, with succursales—bars—in most cities. The game of recognition. Is he one or isn’t he? (H. and I call it bird-watching.) Main clues are visual gestures and dress. The unmistakable ass-wiggling, soft-footed walk of the faggot. . . .
Two forerunners—extreme types of female emancipation: the courtesan and the lesbian.
Serious possibility of improvising and breaking away from set conventions of the erotic relationship—male and female, dominator and dominated—if both people are of the same sex. This possibility exists, promisingly. But most homosexual couples only parody the heterosexual coupling. . . .
Homosexuality a criticism of society—a form of internal expatriation. Protest against bourgeois expectations. . . .
Homosexual speech: (1) high-pitched, heavily accented voice, flapping hands and other between-the-wars mannerisms of English upper class women. “Dahling, whenever did you get back from Istanbul.” . . .
Colonel Veloutis—in his sixties, silver hair, pink skin, plump, soft mouth, faggoty army shirt with phallus cufflinks. Talks of ancient Greece.15
Behind the stereotyping, there is admiration for lives constructed outside the “bourgeois expectations” against which she herself was in revolt. This was homosexuality as resistance to the conventional relationship Susan was ready to escape, a few weeks before she returned to California to tell Philip their marriage was over. It was the sexiness of a secret society like the one she had frequented in Los Angeles, whose denizens were as thrilled by avant-garde films as by illicit hookups. And, as the “faggots . . . in the chic part of the bar” suggested, it was homosexuality as—to use a Warholian word—glamour.
This glamour depended on codes only known to its initiates. And it was those codes that Susan Sontag, with her keen understanding of “the difference between the outside and the inside,” revealed in “Notes on ‘Camp.’” She was well aware this was treason. “To talk about Camp,” she wrote, “is therefore to betray it.”
* * *
“Notes on ‘Camp’” was effective at the time, and remains effective now, for the feeling it gives: of insiderness. Like so many of Sontag’s best writings, it is a list, a guided tour. She patiently explains why Cocteau is camp but not Gide; Strauss but not Wagner. Caravaggio and “much of Mozart” are grouped, in her ranking, with Jayne Mansfield and Bette Davis. John Ruskin effortlessly sidles up alongside Mae West. Sontag’s ability to make apparent previously invisible connections is what makes this essay—along with its prankishness, its mischief, and its humor—a work of critical genius.
It is a calculated blurring of boundaries, typified by camp’s fondness for the epicene: “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine,” Sontag declares. “What is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” The camp sensibility undermined hierarchies. She attributes to Oscar Wilde, to whom the essay is dedicated, “an important element of the Camp sensibility—the equivalence of all objects.” This meant an attack on critical authority: in their own house organ, an attack on the Family. Hilton Kramer felt this did nothing less than open the floodgates to the “spiritual bankruptcy of the post-modern era.” He thundered that Sontag “severed the link between high culture and high seriousness that had been a fundamental tenet of the modernist ethos. It released high culture from its obligation to be entirely serious, to insist on difficult standards, to sustain an attitude of unassailable rectitude. . . .”16
He never forgave her.
But hidden in “Notes on ‘Camp’”—not, it must be said, well hidden—is a still more aggressive contention. Camp, as Sontag posited
it, was not about leveling: au contraire. It meant the establishment of a new hierarchy. The true “aristocrats of taste,” she proclaimed, were homosexuals. Their “aestheticism and irony,” alongside “Jewish moral seriousness,” made up the avant-garde of the modern sensibility. More than a coded assertion of equality, this was a bald statement of homosexual superiority.
The idea that gay people were inferior to straight people was as generally unquestioned as the idea that women were inferior to men, or blacks to whites. And it was this that made “Notes on ‘Camp’” as threatening as black nationalism was to white supremacy or the birth control pill—approved in 1960—to male supremacy. To see gay people taking charge of aesthetics meant they would be in charge of the ways they would be seen, another of the “revolutions of feelings and seeing.”
If Warhol and Sontag triumphed, the old hierarchies would crumble. To study the subsequent history of the culture wars is to see how fiercely, and for how long, those hierarchies would be defended.
* * *
When “Notes on ‘Camp’” appeared, gay people were assumed to be sick, deranged, and perverted. On May 19, 1964, only months before “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the New York Times ran a piece entitled “Homosexuals Proud of Deviancy,” in which phrases like “sexual deviants” and “sex inverts” were used as interchangeable synonyms for “homosexuals.” (The deviants, the report announced, were increasingly militant, and “seem to have taken to writing autobiographies.”)17 In 1969, Donn Teal—writing, as he then had to, under a pseudonym—published a pioneering bit of criticism entitled “Why Can’t ‘We’ Live Happily Ever After, Too?”
Much like the American Negro of 20 to 30 years ago who saw himself on stage and screen—and read about himself in novels—as Ole Black Joe or Prissy or Shoe Shine Boy, the American homosexual has a complaint: He does not believe his life must end in tragedy and would like to see a change in his image.18
This change was coming. The feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun remembered her shock at learning that Gertrude Stein was a lesbian.19 “Even Allen Ginsberg’s sexuality was not discussed,” said Stephen Koch, who himself was bisexual. “And not known by most people who knew anything about Allen Ginsberg. Even though he wrote about it.”20
To see that sexuality, so obvious in retrospect, required a “revolution of seeing.” That revolution was coming, thanks in large part to the inverts the Times piece cited. “There was a new element of freedom,” said Koch. “There was a new level of permission in the air for which the crowning achievement was ‘Notes on “Camp.”’”
* * *
That permission had not quite won the day. On April 13, 1964, in The Nation, Susan published a short review of a new experimental film called Flaming Creatures. Despite its duration (forty-three minutes) and budget (three hundred dollars), the film, by a gay artist named Jack Smith, excited the censors. The racist South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond weighed in, and so did a Catholic antipornography outfit called Citizens for Decent Literature. But the climate was no longer quite as deferential, and Smith, only a couple of months older than Susan, was the kind of downtown personality now emerging into broader awareness.
Her review opened with an impatient brushing-off of the more tiresome objections:
The only thing to be regretted about the close-ups of limp penises and bouncing breasts, the shots of masturbation and oral sexuality, in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures is that they make it hard simply to talk about this remarkable film; one has to defend it.21
She did defend it, and not only with appeals to the “poetry of transvestism” or the “poetic cinema of shock.” In June, she was summoned to court to defend Jonas Mekas, the critic who had been accused on charges of “showing an obscene film.” The film was Flaming Creatures, which Mekas had shown at the New Bowery Theater in New York. Sontag was the only expert witness allowed to testify at any length, the Village Voice reported, because the lawyers on both sides were intrigued by her definitions of pornography. “That which aroused sexual interest,” she offered, uncontroversially, stressing intent and context. Then, pressed to give examples, she answered in a way that hearkened back to her discovery, as an adolescent, of the pictures of the Nazi camps, and that looked forward to so much of her later work: “She referred to posters outside Times Square movie theaters that advertise war movies with sadistic atrocity pictures.” This definition appeared to clash with her previous description of pornography as something that aroused sexual interest, but her definitions had no impact. Mekas was convicted, along with the projectionist and a woman taking donations. (A fourth defendant, the ticket-taker, was let off.)22
In her essay, Susan wrote that “there are some elements of life—above all, sexual pleasure—about which it isn’t necessary to have a position.” That was not quite true. Certain sexual pleasures, above all those she would suggest with the word “camp,” inspired certain people to call the cops. Sontag herself harbored doubts about homosexuality, both attracted to and repulsed by the “camp” view. In her essay, she had praised Flaming Creatures as “a triumphant example of an aesthetic vision of the world.” The aesthetic vision—world as representation, world as metaphor, world as camp—was one about which she had decidedly mixed feelings.
* * *
In later years, this ambivalence would be extended to “Notes on ‘Camp’” itself. The writer Terry Castle recalled an incident at a dinner at Stanford in 1995, when another guest remarked that he admired “Notes on ‘Camp.’”
Nostrils flaring, Sontag instantly fixes him with a basilisk stare. How can he say such a dumb thing? She has no interest in discussing that essay and never will. He should never have brought it up. He is behind the times, intellectually dead. Hasn’t he ever read any of her other works? Doesn’t he keep up? As she slips down a dark tunnel of rage—one to become all-too-familiar to us over the next two weeks—the rest of us watch, horrified and transfixed. Now the offending interlocutor is a person of no little eminence himself—the inventor, in fact, of the birth-control pill. He is clearly not used to having women tell him to shut up and be ashamed of himself.23
It was a reaction that many ham-handed individuals would receive over the years, and its melodrama, redolent of Joan Crawford, would eventually thrust Sontag herself into the first rank of camp divas. But like the overwrought reaction that greeted the original publication of the essay, Sontag’s histrionics suggested a more profound conflict.
In the second paragraph, she had written: “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly frustrated by it.”24 In the version published in Against Interpretation, as if to increase her distance, she made this more emphatic: “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.” If “Camp” is substituted with “homosexuality,” as in the title of the piece, the conflict becomes obvious. “Too obvious,” in Castle’s words, “about her own erotic orientation: the gay ‘coding’ and the in-jokes too blatant for comfort.” She was conflicted about the piece because it was about homosexuality: because it was about her.
Still, as long as it remained an in-joke—read by the Family and a handful of culturally ambitious hinterlanders—it was harmless. Once it wandered off the reservation, it became dangerous for another reason. If Sontag could be said to have a life project, it was to escape the feeling of fakeness she had identified in herself as a teenager. She wanted to become an authentic person, more physical, less cerebral. She wanted “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” And camp was “to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” It was “the farthest extension, in its sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” This was the metaphor that Andy Warhol pushed to its logical conclusion. Fearing the human, he embraced dehumanization.
“I want to be plastic,” he said.25
And: “I’d like to be a machine.”
Susan did not.
A decade later, in On Photography, Sontag would describe how people become images, how the individual is subsumed into the representation of the individu
al, and how the image and the representation—the metaphor—come to be preferred over the thing or the person they represent. She wrote of “how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between the photograph and a life, to choose the photograph.” It was this process that “Notes on ‘Camp,’” for all its playful tone, examined, finding a modern name for a phenomenon Plato had described. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” What better illustration of camp than the gap between Susan Sontag and “Susan Sontag”?
* * *
In February 1965, only months after “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan was spotted at Elaine’s. This was a celebrity hangout on the Upper East Side, famous for its mediocre food, insulting prices, and ineffable glamour, whose proprietress, Elaine Kaufman, seated patrons according to her own ideas of their cultural importance. The few tourists or gawkers who made it past the maître d’ were banished to a back room known as Siberia; the round tables near the door were reserved for initiates. This was the evening that she was seen dining with Leonard Bernstein, Richard Avedon, William Styron, Sybil Burton, and Jacqueline Kennedy.
Through a Chicago friend, Mike Nichols, the comedian and director, Susan had gotten to know the murdered president’s beautiful young widow. Bookish, Francophile, and less than four years older than Susan, Jacqueline Kennedy—herself a favorite Warhol subject—would invite Nichols and Susan to her apartment and weep over her lost husband.26 Susan was awed by Mrs. Kennedy’s palatial surroundings. (She had thirteen living rooms, Susan told a friend: “You better not forget your cigarettes.”) She was fascinated by the glimpses of the person behind the famous face and thought it was hilarious, she told another friend, that “Jackie kept saying ‘fuck’ all the time.”27
It took Susan a while to learn the ways of this new world. One evening, not long after she published “Notes on ‘Camp,’” she was invited to the New York apartment of Marella Agnelli, a Neapolitan princess whose husband was the chairman of Fiat. The doorman directed them to the fifteenth floor. But as they were walking to the elevator, Susan realized he had forgotten the apartment number. She turned back to the doorman and said: “Excuse me, fifteen what?” Her companions burst out laughing, and one asked: “You think the Fiat heiress lives in 15G?”
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