Another evening, a limo brought her and her socialite friends to a famous nightclub. There was a crowd waiting to get in, but after one of her friends whispered to the bouncer, the group was immediately whisked inside.
Susan, impressed, asked: “What did you say?”
He answered: “I said we’re with Susan Sontag.”28
* * *
Susan was thirty-one when “Notes on ‘Camp’” was published. “Suddenly one day, Susan Sontag, highbrow critic, little-magazine essayist, philosophical novelist and college professor, became a midcult commodity,” Nora Ephron wrote in 1967.
The piece had been preceded by the essays she was publishing in the most prestigious magazines in New York, and by a novel that seemed to have been composed by some learned European. That the author of these complex works was a gorgeous young woman with a California accent was a source of constant comment; and when “Notes on ‘Camp’” appeared, with its risky whiff of verboten sex, the popular media began to pay attention, too.
“Blame it on Time Magazine,” Ephron wrote. “It spotted her ‘Notes on Camp’ when it was snug and safe in the Partisan Review, distilled and oversimplified the essay, and wrote about Camp and Miss Sontag as if the two were somehow symbiotic.”29 In early 1965, The New York Times Magazine devoted a long, heavily illustrated essay to “The Sir Isaac Newton of Camp.” As soon as “Notes on ‘Camp’” appeared, “both the intellectual and the not so intellectual world was suddenly abuzz about Camp,” and “the favorite parlor game of New York’s intellectual set this winter has been to label those things that are Camp and those that are not Camp.”30 The article quoted grave warnings about its connection to homosexuality.
“Basically, Camp is a form of regression, a rather sentimental and adolescent way of flying in the face of authority,” an anti-Camp New York psychiatrist told a friend recently. “In short, Camp is a way of running from life and its real responsibilities. Thus, in a sense, it’s not only extremely childish but also potentially dangerous to society—it’s sick and decadent.”
For Susan’s career, this publicity was valuable, up to a certain point. She became someone who could be filmed by Andy Warhol and go to dinner with Jackie Kennedy. She herself became a symbol of New York; and like the first sight of the Statue of Liberty in the immigrant memoir, the first glimpse of Sontag became a set piece in twentieth-century American literary life. Already in 1968, Larry McMurtry imagined the highest peak a provincial writer could attain: “If he ever gets to New York,” he wrote, “he may even meet Susan Sontag.”31 In 1968, Susan Sontag was only thirty-five.
In January 1966, when Against Interpretation was published, the Times reviewer Eliot Fremont-Smith could already call her “easily the most controversial critic writing in America today.” She had not, he said, “crept modestly and hesitantly onto the intellectual scene.” Rather, “she burst from nowhere amid something like a ticker tape parade—the ticker tape being her own very certain essays and reviews, and a quasi-surrealist philosophical novel called The Benefactor—and the ticker tape-throwers being her publisher (Roger Straus) and the somewhat brassy, assertive and valuable junior members of the Partisan Review-New York Review of Books cultural coterie. Suddenly, around 1963, Susan Sontag was there—instead of being announced, she had been proclaimed.”32
To Noël Burch, she said: “I have done everything I have to do to become famous.”33 She never spelled out what exactly that was; Stephen Koch, for one, was “haunted” by the question of why and how Susan became as famous as she did, and how she sustained that fame for decades, even through her most reader-unfriendly phases. At the beginning of her career, she was incongruous: a young woman who was intimidatingly learned; a writer from the hieratic fastness of Partisan Review who also engaged with the contemporary “low” culture the older generation abhorred, or claimed to. Yet her fame fascinated her friends because it was so unprecedented. She had no real lineage. And though many would fashion themselves in her image, her role would never be convincingly filled again: she created the mold, and then broke it.
But friends saw her ambiguous relationship to fame. It gave her the recognition that she had always craved, but it was dangerous for someone who was “perennially looking for [her] bearings in the opinions of others.” Some of her early brushes with fame were comic. Soon after she began getting recognized in public, she and Don Levine were in a grocery store in the Village, and a besotted fan rushed up to say that Susan was one of her two favorite novelists. Susan was flattered; Don cringed, hoping she would not ask the question he knew was on the tip of her tongue. “Really? Who’s the other?” The woman eagerly answered: “Ayn Rand.”34
Stephen often asked her about how she had done it. “It’s very simple,” she told him. “You find some limb, and you go out on it.” Yet friends found that Susan was not immediately changed. “She didn’t mind looking ugly,” said Don. “She had this natural appeal that was unworked at, no makeup, no expensive clothes.” Neither did she seem to savor attention. “I hate these things,” she told Stephen at one glitzy party. “I just park myself near the food table and wonder when I should leave.” She tried to protect the private self from the swirl of new obligations that came along with the increasingly powerful public self. A little sign by her phone reminded her: “NO.”35
Surely—as when she grew annoyed that Bernard Donoughue had not noticed her cowboy boots—she worked at seeming unworked at more than she admitted. Yet so many people strive to make an impression, and those who knew her agreed that she had that mysterious inborn property that did not depend on how many parties she went to, or what she looked like, or how she dressed. “She had star quality,” said David, “and she knew it.” But she did not go as far as she could have. “She could have been more famous if she wanted to be. There were lots of publicity-seeking offers, in that first period when she burst on the scene: television things, and she never tried to write a Hollywood script, a whole bunch of things she could have done at that moment.”36
* * *
She seized many of the opportunities her new position opened. She was magnificently, dazzlingly productive. She had always pushed her limits. “She would be studying and reading and she would read twenty-four hours nonstop,” said Martie Edelheit, her friend from Chicago. “She’d be walking around absolutely blurry-eyed.”37 Ever since her teens, when she read Martin Eden and started trying to wake up at two in the morning, she endeavored to sleep less in order to achieve more. Now, as she was basking in the success that had eluded Martin Eden, she discovered amphetamines—speed—which seemed to eliminate the need for sleep entirely. The drug was the Factory favorite, its zenith coming in late 1965 and early 1966, precisely as Susan herself was becoming prominent. Ondine, one of the Warhol Superstars, described the time.
Oh, it was splendid. Everything was gold, everything. Every color was gold. It was just fabulous, it was complete freedom. Any time I went to the Factory it was the right time. Any time I went home, it was right. Everybody was together, it was the end of an era. That was the end of the amphetamine scene, it was the last time amphetamine really was good. And we used it. We really played it.38
Susan’s drug dealers included W. H. Auden. She would go to his house on St. Marks Place and marvel at his ugly feet: “Often he was barefoot,” she told an assistant, laughing, “and he had these horrible feet with corns and just . . . really gross feet.”39 But Sontag’s amphetamine use was not stylish. “The one thing speed never was for us was cool,” Don Levine said. “It was a work thing.” For hours on end and for days on end, she and Don would work. “The only thing Susan would get up for was to pee or to empty the ashtray, or get her next coffee.”40
Speed let Susan do what she had always done, but far more: “Susan liked to do as many things in one day as she possibly could,” said her friend Gary Indiana, who, though a speed user himself, nonetheless marveled at her energy. “If she could go to Chinatown for lunch and then go to Bleecker Street Cinema to see a matinee and then
go to Public Theater in Chelsea and then go to Times Square to see a double feature of kung fu movies, she would do it.”41
“Writing is very hard,” said the writer Sigrid Nunez, who lived with David and Susan for a while in the seventies. “And particularly that kind of writing. And it makes it so much easier to take the speed. She would take it, and then, in a much less painful way, she would get there. The only reason she did it was because it made it easier, that’s all.” She later told Camille Paglia that to finish her essays she simply stayed awake for two weeks.42
Weeks without sleep; cartons of Marlboros; bottles of Dexedrine, washed down by rivers of coffee: this may have seemed normal for a person who liked to “pretend my body isn’t there.” But as surely as a real person hides behind the image of a person, the physical body, however firmly denied, asserts itself eventually.
Chapter 16
Where You Leave Off and the Camera Begins
When, after her death, extracts from Sontag’s diaries were published, many who knew her were surprised by the often-remorseless self-awareness they revealed. “I’ve always identified with the Lady Bitch Who Destroys Herself,” she wrote, for example, in 1960.1 “I’m not a good person,” she emphasized in 1961. “Say this 20 times a day. Sorry, that’s the way it is.” A few days later, she added: “Better yet. Say, ‘Who the hell are you?’”2 She did not think she was bad, she wrote in 1965. Rather, she was “incomplete. It’s not what I am that’s wrong, it’s that I’m not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave, etc.).”3 She noted other people’s criticisms of her, but, citing “X,” protested that she was not deliberately unkind: “Rather, it’s that I’m dumb, insensitive.”
For a person who suffered from “X,” this was the real danger of fame. She needed other people to see herself, and without them reverted to the self Irene identified: Mildred’s daughter. “I hate to be alone because when alone I feel about ten years old,” she wrote in 1963, shortly before “Notes on ‘Camp.’” “When I’m with another person, I borrow adult status + self-confidence.” After twenty-four hours alone on a trip to Puerto Rico, she was confronted with “the ‘real me,’ the lifeless one. The one I flee, partly, in being with other people. The slug. The one that sleeps and when awake is continually hungry. The one that doesn’t like to bathe or swim and can’t dance. The one that goes to the movies. The one that bites her nails.”
This was not Sontag.
This was not even Susan.
“Call her Sue,” she concludes.4
“It’s hard to tell where you leave off and the camera begins.” She would quote this line, from a 1976 Minolta ad, in On Photography. “When you are the camera and the camera is you.” It was a distinction that was hard to draw: “real me” vs. self-for-others, the others whose eyes lent life to “the lifeless one.” But fame seemed to offer a solution to her besetting loneliness. A constant influx of people kept “the slug” at bay. Amphetamines warded off “the one that sleeps.”
* * *
The sheer numbers of new people that entered her life at this time kept her occupied. They included students from her days at Columbia, where she taught until 1964, people like Koch and Levine. They included the literary circles around Farrar, Straus, Partisan Review, and The New York Review. And they included older artists attracted to her charisma: Warhol, briefly, but also Joseph Cornell, whose relation to fame offered a poignant counterpoint to Warhol’s.
Cornell sent her a range of paraphernalia in the last years of his life, little objects that seem to have crept out of his dreamlike world. There is a card printed with a quote from John Donne, Victorian Photograph, a yellow feather, a sheet reading “Dear Susan” that incorporated a leaf into her first initial, old letters in an elegant Greek hand, and a book he published in 1933: Monsieur Phot, short for photographie. There are kind notes with playful names, “Suzanne Dimanche” and “Miss Henriette Sontag” and “David Sontag.” Sometimes he signed them “Jackie Derequeleine”; sometimes, even, “Hippolyte.”
It was The Benefactor that brought him into Susan’s life. She suggested that he would have identified with her protagonist, who “lives entirely in his head and in his dreams.” But Cornell was captivated by the picture of the author more than by the text. “He was fascinated by photography,” she said, “but what was important in photography was people. He was fascinated by stars, he was fascinated by the romance of the performer.” He noticed “that my last name is the same as the last name of a very famous 19th century performing artist, a soprano, who was one of the great divas of the first half of the 19th century along with Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot, and her name was Henriette Sontag. . . . She was a great diva and there are some wonderful images of her, and so he made a connection between me and this famous soprano.”5
Warhol shared these fascinations; his library was full of books about divas. But the contrast is otherwise complete. Warhol’s art refused depth, aggressively affirming the surface, “tawdry and brilliant, unmistakable, instantly grasped.”6 Cornell’s was all suggestion. His characteristic form was a quiet little box; his characteristic surface a glass, transparent but nevertheless blocking entry to the objects arranged behind it. Behind the glass were compositions as oblique as baroque still-lifes: “against interpretation” not because, as in Warhol’s art, there was nothing one needed to understand, but because, in Cornell’s, there was nothing one could.
Warhol collected celebrities; Cornell, their images. These bore only the vaguest relation to the people themselves: Photograph were hieratic objects, showing people impossible to know or possess. He was, Susan said, a “classic example of the reclusive bachelor artist.” He had
the artist’s temperament to an exquisite degree but he also has the temperament of the collector which is often not the same as the artist’s temperament, in fact very often the collector is precisely someone who can’t—who’s fascinated by the beautiful but cannot create it, must collect it, but whose creative possibilities either don’t exist or remain latent.
Susan later wrote that Thomas Mann was the first person she had met “whose appearance I had already formed a strong idea of through Photograph.” This is how Cornell’s relationship with her began. “The images of people that fascinated him most of course were images of women, famous women, glamorous women,” Susan said. “Some of the imagery comes from advertising and comes from popular magazines.” This was exactly the case with Warhol, but Cornell’s approach to these mythic women was very different. The picture of Susan on the back of The Benefactor became a collage, entitled “The Ellipsian.” He had it delivered to her house, and others followed. “I did not answer his first communications,” she said. “I just received them I think in the spirit in which they were written, that they were part of his relationship to the world and they didn’t really require an answer.” As they piled up, she grew alarmed by the value of the gifts.
At last, she wrote to say that she considered them loans, to be returned whenever he might need them; and in the ensuing correspondence he repeatedly invited her to visit. Unsure of his intentions, she hesitated, and when she eventually accepted, she brought David as protection from unwelcome advances. She need not have worried. “He was extremely beautiful,” she remembered. “A sort of transparent face and wonderful bones and incredible eyes. . . . You didn’t feel his sexuality, you felt his delicacy and his refinement and the sweetness and he was magical.” They sat in the kitchen; he put on a Jacques Brel record: “He said well tell me what the words mean, and I said oh I’m sure you know French, he said no no but it doesn’t matter, I get the feeling. I know what it is.”
He continued to send her letters and gifts, but they never met again.
* * *
Ratified by Warhol, rarified by Cornell—and photographed by a long list of the leading photographers of the day—Susan was also starting to be portrayed in fiction. The first recorded instance of Sontag-as-character came in an unfinished novel by Alfred Chester, The F
oot. There, she appeared as “Mary Monday,” and there were two Mary Mondays, Chester presciently observed: “the person and her image of herself.”7
Chester’s rise and fall made him a character out of a nineteenth-century French novel. Five years older than Susan, born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants, he was strikingly ugly: a childhood illness had left him entirely hairless, and the wig he wore to disguise his deformity succeeded only in calling attention to this condition. It was a totem, his British editor Diana Athill wrote, for his freakishness, his shattered life. “When the wig was first put on his head, he wrote, it was as though his skull had been split with an axe.”8
But he was, as Gore Vidal said of him, “Genet with a brain.” Despite his appearance, that brain made him indelibly attractive.9 “What he wrote was too strange to attract a large readership,” Athill wrote. “But he remains the most remarkable person I met through publishing.”10 After several years in Europe, Chester returned to New York. There, for a few years, he enjoyed a Balzacian rise; there, through Irene, he met Susan, and became one of her closest friends. He encouraged her and shared his contacts when she first arrived in New York, and she, in turn, defended him when his book of stories, Behold Goliath, was trashed in The New York Times Book Review.
The reviewer, Saul Maloff, attacked Chester for mixing dream and nightmare in his fiction—a favorite mode of Sontag’s—and also attacked Chester for the way he wrote about homosexuality. “What vagueness! What banality! What impudence!” Sontag thundered in a letter to the editor—adding, for good measure, that the reviewer was “pathetic” and “beneath contempt.”11
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