Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Chapter 18

  Continent of Neurosis

  If Susan’s commitment to activism identified her with the opponents of the war, her private life gave her access to the people waging it. Through Jackie Kennedy, she met Robert Kennedy, attorney general in his brother’s administration and, for a time, the second most powerful man in the United States. More boyish—more bad-boyish—than his brother, he kept alive the hope that the light of the early sixties might be recaptured in a darkening age. In August 1964, after the president’s murder, he received an unprecedented twenty-two-minute ovation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. The reception made it seem that he, too, was destined for the White House. Though Vietnam was in part his brother’s creation, and though he himself was a principal author of the blockade against Cuba, he became a left-wing icon; and though he fathered eleven children, his lovers, on at least one occasion, included Susan Sontag.1

  In November of that year, his hated rival, President Johnson, was elected in the largest landslide in American history. Never a favorite of liberals, Johnson had allied himself with the cause dearest to the left by passing the Civil Rights Act in July. For a moment, his actions made him a hero to surpass even Roosevelt, whose New Deal Johnson emulated. His far-reaching social programs included Medicare, which provided health care to elderly Americans, and Medicaid, which offered the same to the poor. Other programs—in education, transportation, housing—would shape America into something like a social democracy, and were collectively known as the “Great Society.”

  The phrase belonged to a young staffer named Richard Goodwin, who had also been close to President Kennedy. “The ugliest person I’ve slept with was the best in bed,” Susan told Don Levine. In stark contrast to Kennedy or Johns, the pockmarked, chubby Goodwin was not attractive, but—like so many of Susan’s male lovers—he was a man of consequence, and one who offered a close-up view of the power she was ever more energetically opposing. “Come to the Statue of Liberty,” he would say. “There’s going to be a dedication ceremony. I’ll introduce you to the president.”2 Such invitations were hard to resist.

  And though Goodwin was married, this was not what created an unexpected complication. Before Irene, Susan had never had an orgasm at all; before Dick Goodwin, she had never had an orgasm with a man. “It’s not that he did anything any different from what other men do,” she told Koch. “It’s just that he was taught how to do it by a French prostitute.” She felt liberated by the possibilities in her body that Irene helped her discover. But she was flustered when they happened with Dick, and collapsed back on the pillow. “Oh, shit,” she remembered thinking. “Now I’m just like everybody else.”3

  * * *

  In 1967, she began an affair with Warren Beatty. He was thirty, and had just scored a great success with Bonnie and Clyde, which broke Hollywood taboos surrounding the depiction of sex and violence and became an emblematic film of the sixties. Susan liked to tell friends that she sometimes had to wait forty minutes for him to get ready: she would flip through magazines, bored stiff, as he primped in the bathroom.4 After one date, she told Don Levine that it was “very strange. All he could talk about was his sister. I haven’t the vaguest idea who his sister is.” Shirley MacLaine had been a major star for at least a decade.5

  But a man whose air of languor and decadence made him fascinatingly attractive to a whole generation was not especially attractive to Susan Sontag. Perhaps partly for this reason, he was fascinated by her, “obsessed in a way that I had never seen before,” said Stephen Koch. “I would be sitting there with Susan and the phone would start to ring. In those days there were no answering machines. And it would ring five hundred times. She would lock the phone in a closet and say, well, let’s just go on. And it would then ring for the next two or three hours.” Their affair was brief: she told her sister—to whom she never mentioned her relationships with women—that it lasted a month.6

  “Never for a moment,” said Levine, “did I get the feeling that she had any real interest in Dick Goodwin.” The same could be said for Beatty and the other men she dated in the years following her breakup with Irene. Exciting as it may have seemed to be courted by men like Kennedy, Goodwin, or Beatty, these men are rarely so much as mentioned in her journals. “The affairs were amusing to her,” said her son, “but I don’t think any of them engaged her in a deep way.” “Amusing” was surely the right word for her relationship to the world of celebrity: a fun but superficial escape from her intense work life. “She knew all these people,” David said, “Jackie whatever she was, Onassis Kennedy Bouvier, whatever: she would see them, and then it was back to the monastic cell.”7

  Increasingly “at home in the world,” as Alfred Chester had said, she came to idealize the monastic cell. She loved the access fame brought—to Hollywood, to the White House—but fame meant sharpening the split between the simulacrum, the metaphor, the mask, the persona, and the self found in silence. And so it was toward the cell that she gravitated. Austerity, seriousness, purity—values that had always attracted her—were the backbone of Styles of Radical Will, her second book of essays.

  Published in 1969, it was mainly written in 1967 and included her two pieces about Vietnam, “What’s Happening in America” and “Trip to Hanoi.” The title is, in a way, misleading. If, in those years, “radical will” meant a positive means of forcing change, it is, in her use, quite something else. It was negative, a weapon against will, or, as in her essay on E. M. Cioran, “thinking against oneself.” The title meant not changing the world but overcoming it.

  Her heroic will had brought her far. But she had always been radically skeptical of it, writing in her journal in 1960:

  The idea of will has often come in to close the gap between what I say (I say what I don’t mean—or w/o thinking my feelings through) and what I feel.

  Thus, I willed my marriage.

  I willed custody of David.

  I willed Irene.

  Project: to destroy the will.8

  In these years of superficial fame and loveless affairs, she feared she was losing what little remained of a self she had never steadfastly possessed. When she said that being with Dick Goodwin made her “just like everybody else,” she meant that she was becoming less herself. The loss of self that heterosexuality implied was, like immersion in celebrity culture, another form of untruthfulness, of fraudulence. The idea terrified her, since she knew that holding on to herself—whatever that meant—was a matter of life and death.

  With D.G. a whole new continent of neurosis sailed into view. (Atlantis.) Who I am. I won’t let “them” take it away from me. I won’t be annihilated.9

  * * *

  “To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.”10 The words are quoted in Sontag’s essay “‘Thinking Against Oneself’: Reflections on Cioran.” Included in Styles of Radical Will, it is one of her best essays, precisely because the questions Cioran raises are so close to her own, and because her attitude toward his ideas, though never uncritical, revealed a way of thinking about her personal conundrum in the context of a greater crisis. Some called that crisis “history”; others, “modernity.” It was the problem that arose in a culture so highly developed that it seemed to have nowhere else to go, in which the arts and sciences had made such dramatic progress that they now provided answers to almost any question a person might pose. “The best of the intellectual and creative speculation carried on in the West over the past hundred and fifty years seems incontestably the most energetic, dense, subtle, sheerly interesting, and true in the entire lifetime of man,” Sontag wrote.11 This was the “one culture” that she had helped define as a new sensibility.

  Alas, this was not, or not necessarily, a consolation. Amid that artistic and intellectual splendor, the individual problem remained. “By now,” Susan wrote, “both the brightest and the gloomiest, the most foolish and the wisest, have been set down. But the need for individual spiritual counsel has never seemed more acute.”12 To live in this la
te phase, to possess this richness of knowledge, was to be trapped, to be aware that the old systems—she mentions Comte, Marx, and Freud—could not possibly account for the complexities this advanced culture had brought to light. (The older systems, including the religions, were hardly mentioned.) Increasing knowledge meant the progressive destruction of the consolations that once held out hope. There was no system, no overarching meaning, she wrote: “After Hegel’s effort, this quest for the eternal—once so glamorous and inevitable a gesture of consciousness—now stood exposed, as the root of philosophical thinking, in all its pathos and childishness.”13

  And so the figure of Cioran became emblematic of this unconsoled consciousness. He had created “a new kind of philosophizing: personal (even autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic. Its foremost exemplars: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. Cioran is the most distinguished figure in this tradition writing today.”14 It is not a coincidence that Susan Sontag would be the next figure in this lineage: she had always revered, and modeled herself after, her great predecessors, and in Cioran’s experience saw a mirror of her own. She noted in his writing a “strange dialectic” that was not so strange for her:

  On the one hand, the traditional Romantic and vitalist contempt for “intellectuality” and for the hypertrophy of the mind at the expense of the body and the feelings and of the capacity for action. On the other hand, an exaltation of the life of the mind at the expense of the body, feelings, and the capacity for action that could not be more radical and imperious.15

  Amid these paradoxes and impasses—and though he spent his life in something like the “monastic cell”—Cioran does not prescribe a renunciation of the life of the mind. It is this point that Sontag both admires and disputes. She alludes to “On the Puppet Theater,” an essay of Kleist’s that she often mentioned.

  However much we may long to repair the disorders in the natural harmony of man created by consciousness, this is not to be accomplished by a surrender of consciousness. There is no return, no going back to innocence. We have no choice but to go to the end of thought, there (perhaps), in total self-consciousness, to recover grace and innocence.16

  * * *

  Kleist’s position was congenial to Cioran’s. But its insistence that there was no escape from rational thought brooked no revolutionary foolishness. Susan acknowledged this with reluctance. “Politically, Cioran must be regarded as a conservative,” she wrote. “He regards the hope of radical revolution as something to be outgrown by the mature mind.” It is not clear how much Susan knew about Cioran’s development, since he suppressed his first books, written in Romanian before his establishment in France in 1937. They would not be revived until the fall of communism, but they reveal a youthful infatuation with radicalism that paralleled hers.

  Cioran had begun his political life as an extremist of the Right: a fascist. But the underlying process was the same, as one of his biographers has written, and had been common among twentieth-century intellectuals. It was not so different from the trajectory among Americans that Irving Howe had traced. The cycle “begins with intellectuals’ critique of modern society, coupled with utopian, totalitarian solutions. It ends with their revulsion at the excesses of revolution, war, and totalitarianism, and a retreat into the de-politicized realm of art and ideas.”17 A generation younger, Susan would become disillusioned along similar lines. Like her, Cioran was a great believer in self-transformation. And if he had any ideological beliefs, they were in the permanence of the high culture embodied by his rigorously classical French.

  As in their politics, so in their styles. Both desired to escape marginal origins with an appeal to universality. Both became aphorists who aspired to an eighteenth-century ideal of esprit. Both, when young, were manically ambitious. Both were insomniacs; and both produced works that were all the more profoundly autobiographical for being so highly masked. “All my books are more or less veiled confessions,” Cioran said, in a phrase that might have been Sontag’s. And, in an admission that describes perfectly her essays’ relevance to the biographer: “The only sincere confession is the one we make indirectly—speaking of others.”18

  Both, in their youth, would embrace radical politics. Coming from “a nation of nobodies,” Cioran dreamed of “a reformed nation that would suit his sense of himself.”19 Revolution, for him, was a dream of personal happiness; its failure, a failure of the same. After the Second World War, Cioran accepted the verdict of history, and the far more modest role it brought for him. “It may seem outrageous for Cioran to advocate, as he often does, resisting the vulgar temptation to be happy and of the ‘impasse of happiness,’” Susan wrote. But one who grew up “literally never daring to expect happiness” knew exactly what he meant.20

  * * *

  For one besieged by consciousness, there was another solution. If Susan bore many similarities to Cioran, she suggested at the end of the essay that her true ideal was John Cage. She calls Cioran’s work “a manual of spiritual good taste” that might help “to keep one’s life from being turned into an object, a thing.” Despite the condescension in the first phrase, the goal was hers: the opposite of Warhol’s goal to become a machine. But even this seemed inferior to Cage’s, whose thought she called “no less radical and spiritually ambitious than Cioran’s,” including because it “refuses to admit these themes.”21

  Cage was as indifferent to distinctions between good taste and bad as he was to the aphoristic style of eighteenth-century France. What he offered was an escape from the shipwreck of introspection, “a world in which it’s never preferable to do other than we are doing or be elsewhere than we are.”22 This idea, derived from Zen, involved no heroic renunciation, no lifelong project of self-conquest. “It is not irritating to be where one is,” he said. “It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.”23 That meant a possibility of a happiness that, for people like her or Cioran, was foreclosed. But the implication—self-acceptance—was not something Susan could envision. Instead, as for Cioran or Freud before him, knowledge would have to be its own end. “Relief, of course, is scarcely Cioran’s intention,” she wrote. “His aim is diagnosis.” Behind that comfortless “of course”: her old assumption of unhappiness.

  Her fascination with the possibility of returning to an authentic self through art is the theme of the first essay in Styles of Radical Will, “The Aesthetics of Silence.” The essay shows all the strengths, and also the weaknesses, of the aphoristic style. She aimed to put a new idea in every sentence, she later said. The result is a dazzling range of ideas, far too many for a reader to absorb: here and elsewhere in the book, the density daunts in a way Against Interpretation did not. Perhaps it could not have been otherwise. The difficulty of the ideas she contended with in the essay mirrored the difficulty of the ideas she was contending with in her own life, including in her creative life.

  These were the difficulties of making art in her time. The peculiarity of modern art—literature, painting, dance, music—was that it had become a “site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness.” This Sontag calls “art”—as opposed to art. And “art,” as in Cioran’s notion of “thinking against oneself,” is a way of surpassing the self. “Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the realization—the transcendence—he desires,” she writes. “Therefore, art comes to be considered something to be overthrown.”24

  Many elected silence. Rimbaud headed for Abyssinia; Wittgenstein became a schoolteacher; Duchamp devoted himself to chess. This “art,” mastered only to be subsequently discarded, was a redirection of older renunciations, mystical in origin: art as a journey to the monastic cell. “Through it, the artist becomes purified—of himself and, eventually, of his art. The artist (if not art itself) is still engaged in a progress toward ‘the good.’”25

  That could be accomplished by getting rid of “the bad”: metaphor. “Language,” she insisted, “is the most impure, the most contaminated, the most exhausted of all
the materials out of which art is made.” In a late historical period like the one Cioran described and Sontag inhabited, meanings, like plaque in the arteries, clotted up words. Language was experienced “not merely as something shared but as something corrupted, weighed down by historical accumulation.” Yet this accumulation had still not offered enough words for a world in the shadow of Hiroshima and Auschwitz. “We lack words, and we have too many of them,” she wrote.

  The way out of this conundrum was the simple refusal of language that Sontag identified as a hallmark of modern art. “The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence.” The empty canvases of Rauschenberg and Rothko, the silent music of John Cage, were attempts to incorporate into art values that had previously been the province of religion.26 But a refusal of language was impossible for a writer. Like Kleist and Cioran, Sontag was not a mystic. She understood the world through the tool many modern artists had renounced: the exhausted and impure vessel of language.

  * * *

  What the aesthetics of silence might look like—sound like—was the theme of another great work from the age of Vietnam. Released in 1966, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona captured perhaps better than any other film the suffocating dilemmas of modern consciousness. It shows two women, Elisabet, an actress, and Alma, her nurse. Elisabet has fallen completely mute, but her doctors cannot say why. She first stirs to life when the television shows a Vietnamese monk burning himself alive; later, she will carefully study the famous picture of a terrified boy arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto.

  What words could be appropriate in the face of these images of modern cruelty? Silence is a legitimate response. But Bergman reveals Elisabet’s as another form of cruelty. Her refusal of language is a refusal of the connections that might have made her plight—whatever that plight actually is—less punishing. She punishes Alma; she punishes her husband and child. And Bergman, through her, punishes his viewers. The silence of Persona is not the prankish silence of Andy Warhol’s films. Almost nobody watched all of Empire—his single shot, eight hours long, of the Empire State Building—and it is hard to imagine that Warhol thought anyone would. In contrast, Bergman’s silence is an ordeal. The film “bears an almost defiling charge of personal agony,” Sontag wrote in Styles of Radical Will.27