Sontag
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But this is interspersed with complaints that seem almost touristy. Swedes, like every northern people, drink. Sweden is cold. The winters are long, and the darkness depressing. “The Swedes simply do find it hard to accept generosity and to extend it,” she writes, forgetting the $180,000 she has just received to make a film. And “being with people feels like work for them.” Perhaps all this is true, but these assertions are offered as just that, assertions, without much evidence. As in her essay on North Vietnam, we never learn what the Swedes themselves think. Would they have been surprised to hear that they have “a relatively weak drive toward differentiation as individuals,” for example?48 What did they think of her statement that “the ruling class of this country is genuinely benevolent and filled with good intentions”?49 We never learn—any more than we hear whether “the Swedes want to be raped.”50
But “Letter from Sweden” is less about its purported subject than it is about its author, and the last few sentences suggest a solution to her dilemma.
Sweden has enjoyed a great reform, not a radical change. Humane and ingenious as these reforms are, they don’t strike at the root of the situation of the Swedes as human beings. They have not awakened the Swedes from their centuries’ old chronic state of depression, they have not liberated new energy, they have not—and cannot—create a New Man. To do that Sweden needs a revolution.51
This is the disappointed hope behind the slogans. The reforms she described were less important than the hopes Sweden created inside herself. Her journey to Sweden, in this context, seems like travel as escape-from-consciousness: a fresh start, somewhere else. In the terminology of alcoholism, this is known as a “geographical cure,” an attempt to escape addiction by seeking a fresh start, a change of scenery. An outraged American could go abroad. A blocked writer could become a filmmaker. A depressed woman could become a “New Man.” It was this elusive creature that she had glimpsed in Hanoi: “Through these ordeals, ‘a new man’ is being formed.”52
She was not done trying to find him: to find romance. The piece concludes with the ultimate sixties slogan: “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!”53
Chapter 20
Four Hundred Lesbians
There were four hundred lesbians in Europe, Susan used to joke.1 For this group—heiresses and socialites, writers and academics, actresses and designers—lesbianism amounted to an aristocracy within an aristocracy. This was the sapphic equivalent of what, in England, Isaiah Berlin called the Homintern, and what was known in France as l’homo-people. In Paris and London, Cannes and Capri, these women holidayed, fell in love, and broke hearts in the same exclusive circles.
For them, homosexuality in no way meant a renunciation of class privilege, as it often had in works like Nightwood. “They lived in a lovely palace,” one member said of another. “But you certainly couldn’t call them rich.”2 This was the family of Anna Carlotta del Pezzo, Duchess of Caianello. When they met in 1969, Susan was desperate for romance, and Carlotta was romantic in the older sense of the word: straight out of a novel. Susan had not been in love since she met Irene a decade before. “I don’t think Susan ever loved anyone the way she loved Carlotta,” David would later say.3
They were opposites in every way. Susan was a middle-class American consumed with becoming. Carlotta was a Neapolitan aristocrat whose only concern was being. “It’s almost offensive to ask those people: What do you think, what are you going to do,” said the poet Patrizia Cavalli. Carlotta was notably indolent even by the standards of her milieu. “Her friends, women her age, women she went to school with: they all did something,” said the painter Marilù Eustachio. “She was the only one who did absolutely nothing.”
“Carlotta might not even get out of bed,” Cavalli explained. “It was impossible to make any plans with her.”4 In 1970, their friend Giovannella Zannoni explained this to Susan: “She gets at times very vague about time and its meaning and seems totally uncapable of understanding that other people may take dates and appointments as something precise.”5 Cavalli added: “I don’t think she ever read a book in her life.” And she only ever made two things in her life, said Don Levine: “her fat dark brown paper joints, which she rolled every morning, and her very spicy pasta sauce for breakfast.”6
Carlotta was the opposite of “radical will”—the opposite of Susan—but her refusal of activity created problems of its own. Once, when Eustachio reproached her for her languor, Carlotta bristled: “So you think it’s easy, doing nothing?”
* * *
Carlotta’s early life was half feudal, half jet set, lived in a world, David Rieff said, “one would now call Eurotrash.” Tall and lean, partial to belted fur coats with shoulder pads, or to minks thrown over the T-shirts she wore without a bra, she modeled, hung out with Visconti, was an extra for Pasolini: inhabited a world, Levine said, “of people who don’t think: ‘Instead of being at this party on Capri, I should be writing a play.’”7
She and Susan would seem to have been almost comically mésalliées—and they were. But Carlotta was beautiful, and Susan was susceptible to beauty. “To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrong,” Nietzsche said. It was a phrase Susan liked to quote,8 but if Susan experienced Carlotta wrong, she was not the only one. “When I met her,” said Eustachio, “it was difficult not to sense the fascination of Carlotta.” Cavalli agreed: “Fascination incarnated.” Many fell for her charm. She was androgynous—“like a boy,” said Cavalli—and had lovers of both sexes. Once, in New York, Levine took her to see a movie starring Kirk Douglas. “He was very good in bed,” she confided in a low voice. Her female lovers included many of the four hundred lesbians: Colette de Jouvenel, daughter of the great Colette; the Italian movie star Mariella Lotti.
She was also a toxicomaniac. The gorgeous lesbian duchess with a taste for smack was a legend. Her charm, and the impression she gave of not being on first-name terms with reality, let her get away with things others would not have dared attempt. But her drug use eventually brought legal problems. Sometimes she wiggled out of it (“My next phone call will be to the Minister of Justice”), but sometimes her connections proved less helpful. Once, she spent a month in an Italian jail, and Susan wrote every day. Carlotta got along famously with the hookers with whom she shared a cell, but the court ordered her to rehab, and she headed to a clinic in Switzerland.9
* * *
Beautiful, stoned, and unavailable, Carlotta resembled Mildred—and Susan knew it. In 1975, she described her “taste for custodial relationships. Propensity first developed in relation to my mother. (Weak, unhappy, confused, charming women.) Another argument against resuming any sort of connection with C.”10
In 1958, during her breakup with Harriet, Susan noted a lesson. “Not to surrender one’s heart where it’s not wanted.”11 Carlotta made her forget that lesson, and her surrender was humiliating. “Carlotta was cruel—very cruel—to Susan,” said Cavalli, bringing out Susan’s “endless masochism.” Stephen Koch agreed. “She was masochistic to an unbearable degree. She would crawl on the floor, almost literally.” Florence Malraux said: “Susan was at Carlotta’s feet.” And Don Levine said: “Susan literally sat at the feet of only two people. If she came into a room and saw either of these two people she’d sit right here on the floor: Hannah Arendt and Carlotta.”
“I’m looking for my dignity. Don’t laugh,” Susan wrote in 1971. “I’m very intolerant and very indulgent (of others). Toward myself, the intolerance predominates. I like myself, but I don’t love myself. I’m indulgent—to an extreme—of those I love.”12 The lengths to which she was prepared to go shocked her friends. Carlotta was stingy; Susan was generous. Carlotta was demanding; Susan kowtowed. Levine once asked what she would do if Carlotta insisted she cut off contact with David. “She didn’t say what an absurd question or out of the question or anything like that. She said, I would wait until she was getting her hair done and I would call him from a phone.”
They had met in the summer of
1969, through Giovannella Zannoni, a Neapolitan producer; but by the fall of 1970, a little more than a year after it began, the relationship ended. Like many of Susan’s disappointed loves, including with her mother, this one would linger in other guises, but when it was over, Susan fled to Amherst, where Levine taught. She was more depressed than he had ever seen her, and he tried to distract her with walks, conversation, and music. Nothing worked.
I say let’s go into town. It’s autumn, and at one point we walk under this tree, the fabulous maple trees, this tree is just in flames, and we’re under it so it’s all around us, like an umbrella. She’s talking about Carlotta, and I say, “Susan, stop!” She stops, and I said: “Look at the leaves.” And Susan was not someone who cursed, and she says: “Fuck the leaves.”
* * *
Carlotta was named for her Swedish grandmother, the feminist writer Anne Charlotte Leffler. And Carlotta’s effect on Susan recalled other Swedish women whose very blankness offered an ideal screen for other people’s projections. Blankness was what gave Elisabet power in Bergman’s Persona; blankness was Greta Garbo’s secret, too.
Susan had long been fascinated by Garbo, whose lesbianism—an open secret—was a source of pride for many gay women. In 1958, she listed learning “to subscribe to the Garbo cult” as an important part of her sexual and worldly education.13 And in 1965, when she saw a play called The Private Potato Patch of Greta Garbo, she gave an idea of her power:
I wanted to be Garbo. (I studied her; I wanted to assimilate her, learn her gestures, feel as she felt)—then, toward the end, I started to want her, to think of her sexually, to want to possess her. Longing succeeded admiration—as the end of my seeing her drew near. The sequence of my homosexuality?14
In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” she referred to her twice, both times in terms of her blankness: to “the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo,” and then claimed that “Garbo’s incompetence (at least, lack of depth) as an actress enhances her beauty. She’s always herself.”15 This—“always herself”—was Carlotta’s greatest attraction for Susan. Whatever her failings, Carlotta never aspired to be other than she was.
“Make your face a mask,” a director once told Garbo. “Think and feel nothing.”16 Like Garbo, Carlotta was a Warholian ideal, all surface, no depth. Susan was a house divided; Carlotta was all body, no brain: “She was only an image, you understand?” said Eustachio. “She was absolutely not interested in substance.” For Susan, Carlotta became a way of surrendering the will.
* * *
Another possibility for escaping consciousness appeared on the afternoon of November 6, 1969, when a woman took a train from Manhattan to East Hampton and got in a cab headed for the beach. “There’s nobody here,” the driver said when they reached their destination. “I realize that,” the woman answered. A couple of hours later, a body washed ashore at the end of Ocean Avenue.17
The woman was Susan Taubes. Four days earlier, her novel Divorcing had been savaged in the Times. Hugh Kenner, the critic, allowed that the book contained “mild rewards once you fight down the rising gorge that’s coupled to your Sontag-detector.” But it was otherwise no more than the annoying work of a “lady novelist”: “a quick-change artist with the clothes of other writers” who began “her performance with a stylish vertigo à la ‘Death Kit.’”18
Sontag and Stephen Koch went to Suffolk County to identify the body. They were met by a doctor, who led them into a sterile room with a large viewing window, entirely covered by a brown plastic curtain. A man pushed a button, and the curtain slowly rose.
Beyond the glass, Susan Taubes’s body lay on a gurney, with her very long hair spread expansively around her head. There was no bloating or disfigurement of her face. Apart from her head, the rest of her body was covered with a large paper covering, stamped in large letters, SUFFOLK COUNTY NEW YORK.
“Is this your friend Susan Taubes?”
“Yes,” Susan said. “Yes, it certainly is.”
The man lowered the curtain. There was a table in the same room, where there were legal documents laid out for Susan to sign. Her hand was trembling so much she could not manage the pen. Then she recovered herself and signed. We were led out.
Walking back to the car, Susan said, “So, she finally did it—that stupid woman.”19
* * *
The Taubeses had long been separated, though they only divorced in 1967. Jacob returned to Europe, where he would remain for the rest of his life. As recounted in Divorcing, the marriage had been a high-concept disaster, an attempt to reformulate relations in ways that ranged from the monstrous—Jacob made his wife crawl up to their roof on the Upper West Side and howl at the full moon—to the philosophical.
“In the sexual revolution of the sixties,” said their son Ethan, “where there was a lot of sleeping around, there wasn’t a whole philosophy behind it, which he did have: to liberate people, like redemption through sin.” Jacob helped Marcuse publish Eros and Civilization, but in real life—in his own life—liberating erotic energy proved far more difficult. He was bipolar: “He couldn’t control himself,” his son said. “He was constantly flying off the handle. Every little thing was a catastrophe. Crumbs on the floor, catastrophe. Bad manners, catastrophe.”20
Susan Taubes spent time in Europe, too, sending their children, Tania and Ethan, to various boarding schools, and occasionally working at Columbia. For her, sexual antinomianism, however necessary historically or justifiable intellectually, was a different matter emotionally. “I think my mother was a heartbroken romantic,” said Ethan. “This is the love of her life, and this guy is basically sleeping with everybody.” She had other lovers after separating from Jacob, and shortly before her death, she spent three months in Budapest, where she had an ill-fated affair with the novelist György Konrád.
Sontag blamed Konrád for the suicide, which Ethan found “a little over the top.” Others blamed the scathing Times review. But already in high school people had exhorted her to smile. She had long been despondent and had attempted suicide before. Like Susan Sontag, she was often unable to see: literally, because she was nearly blind and could hardly cross the street without help; and metaphorically, because she was unable to see the effects of her actions on others—on the children she left behind, and on her parents. “It was just grim,” said Ethan Taubes. “The parents were both alive, so it was really sad to see two people in their seventies weeping. Susan [Sontag] was devastated.”
Struggling to fend off depression, afraid of failure, Sontag was terrified by her friend’s death. “I don’t want to fail,” she wrote in 1975. “I want to be one of the survivors. I don’t want to be Susan Taubes. (Or Alfred. Or Diane Arbus.)”21 In 1971, Alfred Chester died in Israel, completely insane. Five days later, in New York, Diane Arbus killed herself. Sontag’s harsh reaction to Arbus’s work would give birth to On Photography. But the intensity of her reaction to Arbus surely betokened identification—a fear that she herself was a freak; that she, too, would eventually succumb.
* * *
Shortly before she met Carlotta, while Susan Taubes was still alive, Sontag wrote the last of her sixties political pieces, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution.” Sweden needed a revolution; Cuba was the future.
In December 1968, she flew with David and Bob Silvers to Mexico City: Cuba was under an American embargo, and direct flights were out of the question. Like Hanoi, Cuba was on the international revolutionary itinerary, and the group traveled in an atmosphere of intrigue: “We were all photographed by the CIA as we got on the plane,” Silvers said. In Havana, Susan was whisked off to a dramatic midnight meeting with “Redbeard,” Manuel Piñeiro Losada. A former Columbia business student, Redbeard was now head of Cuban intelligence.22
A decade before, Bernard Donoughue said that politics, for Susan, meant “questioning all establishments and disliking all regimes.” Now, she wrote that for the New Left, “the starting point is the view that ps
ychic redemption and political redemption are one and the same thing.”23 But as at Oxford, it was aesthetics, rather than the “tedious things” of practical politics (“homes for people, pensions for people”) that interested her.
Like Sweden and Vietnam—like Carlotta—Cuba was a projection of her own desire to be reinvented. “It is still common, as it has been throughout the ten years of the revolution, for people to go without sleep,” she wrote. “It seems sometimes as if the whole country is high on some benevolent kind of speed.” Sleeplessly, hyperactively, Cubans were creating the “New Man” of which Susan dreamed. This dream rarely elicited her finest prose. Its knotty patterns and jargon-laden phrasing show her effort to appropriate a language that was not quite her own:
As Che stated in his famous “Man and Socialism in Cuba” and Fidel has reiterated many times, the Cuban leadership measures the revolution’s success first of all by its progress in creating a new consciousness, and only secondly by the development of the country’s economic productivity upon which the securing of its political viability depends.
A year before, in a preface to a book about Cuban poster art—which is to say, about revolutionary aesthetics—she praised its heroes: “Ever since my three month visit to Cuba in the summer of 1960, the Cuban revolution has been dear to me, and Che, along with Fidel, have been heroes and cherished models.”24 Her descriptions were fuzzy, unsubstantiated. The United States was a “too white, death-ridden culture.” Cubans had “become less erotic since the revolution.” And she claimed that “almost all” Cubans “were illiterate when the revolution came to power.” (In fact, in 1960, almost 80 percent could read.25) Death-ridden Americans ought to