Sontag
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maintain some perspective when a country known mainly for dance music, prostitutes, cigars, abortions, resort life and pornographic movies gets a little up-tight about sexual morals and, in one bad moment two years ago, rounds up several thousand homosexuals in Havana and sends them to a farm to rehabilitate themselves. (They have long since been sent home.)
The puritanical tone is not the only thing that raises eyebrows. It is odder still that rounding up members of a despised minority and dispatching them to distant prisons did not resonate with a woman whose life had been split in two by images of the Holocaust. Reinaldo Arenas, a gay dissident novelist tortured under Castro, spelled it out. The sixties, he wrote, were “precisely when all the new laws against homosexuals came into being, when the persecution started and concentration camps were opened, when the sexual act became taboo while the ‘new man’ was being proclaimed and masculinity exalted.”26 The creation of the “New Man” meant destroying the “old,” the “reactionary,” the “effeminate”—exactly as the Nazi dream of purity meant destroying the impure.
* * *
In January 1970, less than two months after Susan Taubes’s suicide, Sontag returned to Stockholm. There, she made the second of her Swedish films, Brother Carl. This project would bear the mark of Persona, in the form of a mute character; and of Carlotta del Pezzo, from whom Sontag was separated, and after whom the film was named. It would also draw from Jacob Taubes’s high-minded perversity and from Susan Taubes’s novel and character. In the film, Susan sought a dramatic form for the ideas she had been exploring throughout the previous decade. And she sought a way of digesting her personal losses: Florence Malraux met Susan at this time, and Susan asked her for help with the script. As they discussed it, Malraux saw how weighted down Susan was by the loss of Carlotta.27
The film was shot over the summer. Two women, Karen and Lena—the Susan Taubes character—visit Lena’s ex-husband, Martin, on an island. Martin was “a new version of the psychological fascist in Duet for Cannibals,” Susan wrote—which is to say, of Jacob Taubes. (Perhaps Susan Taubes’s description of their marriage in Divorcing made Sontag come to see him this way.)28 Sontag adds other characters, too, including Martin’s ward Carl, a dancer reminiscent of the mad Nijinsky, and Karen’s young daughter, Anna, who, because she is mute, is the only character who can communicate with Carl. Like the Hester/Diddy pair in Death Kit, this last pair allows Susan to translate, now in visual form, the ideas she had discussed in “The Aesthetics of Silence.”
* * *
The summer before the film was shot, when they were working on the script, Susan and Florence Malraux were walking through New York. Florence exclaimed over a Japanese platter in a shop window, only to have Susan denounce her frivolity: “Things like that weren’t serious.” The problem, for Florence, was that “Susan had no eye.”
This practical problem joined the philosophical problems dramatized in the film. Without words—and above all without an “eye”—Brother Carl shows the frustrations of the critical sensibility when attempting to venture into the visual arts, and becomes less a film to watch than a film to write an essay about. In 1974, Sontag did just that, noting that this film “takes a step beyond Duet for Cannibals: the spatial relations within the shots are subtler, the editing is more intelligent, the use of sound is more sophisticated, and the connections among the characters are more complex.” Furthermore, she found that “the dialogue in Brother Carl is much more consistently ‘de-naturalistic’ than that of Duet for Cannibals.”29
“It is the work of a cinephile,” said a new friend, the Argentine director Edgardo Cozarinsky.30 Yet though Brother Carl is weighed down by theory, it is nonetheless a marked improvement over Duet for Cannibals. The story is less willfully bizarre, the characters more like people whose motives one might hope to fathom. Both films are constructed around themes of sadomasochistic power—eating the other, controlling the other, refusing the other’s words—but in Brother Carl the characters strain to break out of these roles.
“Most of the critics said you have to feel something in order to understand,” said Peter Hald, the production manager, of Duet for Cannibals. “And nobody of them felt anything.”31 One does feel something in Brother Carl. The film makes the viewer curious to know what is really going on, to get closer: the same feeling the people in the story experience. All fail to find the necessary words—all but one.
Like Susan Taubes, Lena drowns herself. Afterward, Carl coaxes the first words from Anna: “He’s heavy,” she says, her only line in the film. The effort to make her speak costs Carl his life.
* * *
If the film bore the traces of Sontag’s personal and intellectual struggles, it also showed an evolution in her approach to the body in which her mind had always been a “restive tenant.” In her first film, Duet for Cannibals, the Jacob Taubes figure had repulsively wolfed down his food. Eva Kollisch had seen that this was a theme dear to Susan. In Sweden, Agneta Ekmanner saw that Susan “ate disgustingly.”
A note from 1970 suggests a motive.
I feel gratitude when I touch someone—as well as affection, etc. The person has allowed me proof that I have a body—and that there are bodies in the world.
Being a big eater = desire to affirm that I have a body. Identifying refusal of food with refusal of the body. Irritation with people who don’t eat—even anxiety (as initially with C.) and revulsion (as with Susan).32
When she was sixteen, she mentioned “my greatest unhappiness, the agonized dichotomy between the body and the mind.” For years, she had fled the body into the safety of the mind—and, beyond the conscious mind, into the subconscious dream. As she grew older, she determined to come back into her body, including by emphasizing her physicality with gestures such as outspoken eating.
And Brother Carl includes a sign that “the obsessive theme of fake death” Sontag had identified in her work was ripening from a child’s wish to an adult’s understanding. She was looking, as she wrote in the introduction to Brother Carl, for a miracle, something to rouse her from the depression one senses everywhere in her work from this time. In the surprising form of Lena’s corpse, that miracle was coming. Susan had earlier mocked the Christian belief that “every crucifixion must be topped by a resurrection.” But her work betrayed an uncanny faith in resurrection, the fake deaths listed in her journals. These only began to change with this film: “Carl tries to make Lena’s death into a fake death (i.e. tries to resurrect her) but fails,” she wrote.
As Lena’s suicide allowed Anna to speak, Carl’s failure offered Sontag an unexpected revival. Lena—which is to say Susan Taubes—would not be resurrected. Likewise, the theoretical, dreamlike vein of Sontag’s early work was played out, too. In the Vietnam War, the loss of Carlotta, and the death of Susan Taubes, reality had intruded too aggressively. But these intrusions, however painful, would give her future work an anchor it had hitherto lacked. The “unlovable soldier” would reveal herself a bit more, and the writer’s identity she had forged as a weapon against society, the metaphoric Susan Sontag, would broaden. The transition would not be smooth. But her next film would be littered with bodies.
Chapter 21
China, Women, Freaks
The slightest gestures of Nicole Stéphane assumed the terrifying power of those of Electra,” said Jean Cocteau, who cast her in Les enfants terribles. He had seen her in Le silence de la mer,1 made in 1949, in which Stéphane played a Frenchwoman forced to quarter a Nazi lieutenant. As the idealistic young German expounded about French culture and the glorious union of Germany and France, the young woman and her uncle looked on in polite blankness, never addressing a single word to their compulsory guest. Without language, “slightest gestures,” weaponized silence, were all the actress had.
The role of the steely résistante was one for which Stéphane was suited. Born Nicole-Mathilde-Stéphanie de Rothschild, a member of Europe’s greatest Jewish banking family, she and her sister Monique escaped France over the Pyr
enees in November 1942. They were clad in ski clothes and equipped with false papers giving a birthplace in a Norman village whose archives had been destroyed. Eighteen-year-old Nicole was so charming that two young Wehrmacht soldiers helped carry her luggage; but weather and Nazis were not the only obstacles: refugees were regularly robbed and murdered by the men they paid to smuggle them across the Spanish border. Jean-Pierre Melville—director of Les enfants terribles and Le silence de la mer—lost a brother this way. But their guide, “Frère Jacques,” saw them through to Catalonia, though their trials were not over: they were arrested upon arrival in Barcelona.2 Once they were finally released, they made their way to Lisbon and from there to London, where they joined the Forces féminines de la France libre. Nicole was a driver for the air force, and debarked in Normandy just after D-Day.
After the war, life resumed in the Rothschild palaces. Nicole and Monique grew up at the Château de la Muette, whose backyard was the Bois de Boulogne. It had been built by her grandfather, the Baron Henri, an amateur playwright who created the Théâtre Pigalle for his mistress and financed the research of Pierre and Marie Curie. His son Baron James, Nicole’s father, inherited his father’s interest in women: his wife, the former Claude Dupont, the granddaughter of the Jewish engineer Paul Worms de Romilly, had the reputation of being the most beautiful woman in France. The couple lived in opposite wings of the house, their life together as carefully planned as their dinners. Nicole grew up literally without ever using a key: someone would open any door she might wish to enter.3
* * *
As a member of the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, Susan had been attending Cannes for several years. In 1971, she was there to show Brother Carl, but did not take much joy in the occasion. She was still miserable about the film’s namesake, Carlotta, who had dumped her around six months before. “Solitude is endless,” she wrote at the end of April. “A whole new world. The desert.”4
Two weeks later, Nicole Stéphane walked into a meeting in a hotel room in Cannes. Nicole had not been able to follow up her early successes in Les enfants terribles and Le silence de la mer because she had been disabled by a car accident that forced her to learn to speak and walk again. She had to find a new career, and decided to produce films: “one of the two women producers in France.”5 (There were few anywhere.) In 1969, she produced a picture based on Marguerite Duras’s Détruire, dit-elle; her great dream was to film À la recherche du temps perdu, to which she had acquired the rights in 1962. It was this effort that brought her to Cannes. There, she and a friend, the Italian radiologist Mimma Quarti, had come to speak to an actress about the project.6
In the hotel room, they found a visibly despondent Susan Sontag. When the meeting was over, Nicole turned to Mimma and said: “We must save that woman.”7 This missionary impulse was typical of Nicole. She and Susan soon became lovers, but if Carlotta was Susan’s mother, Nicole—unlike Carlotta or Mildred—was genuinely maternal. She immediately surrounded Susan with a solicitude she had never before enjoyed. Nicole bathed, fed, clothed, and housed her, investing her considerable energies in saving Susan: her career, first, and then her life.
Their affair was not passionate in the way that Susan’s affairs with Irene and Carlotta had been. That, in any case, was not Nicole’s style. “For me, it lasts about one or two weeks,” she said. “Then I want us to be friends and sisters forever but no more sex.”8 This was similar to Susan’s own pattern, in which the coup de foudre quickly became something else. Similar, too, was her conception of relationships as power. At first, Nicole was boldly dominant. She was ten years older, and she swept down on Susan, later explaining her technique: “Take her out, give her a couple of drinks, and pounce!” In words that recall Susan’s appraisal of the Swedes, she said: “Susan is someone who needs to be raped.”9
Yet the passivity Susan displayed with Nicole was different from her total submission to Carlotta. Nicole found Susan on the ground. Having resolved to pick her up, she went at it with industry. Susan moved to Paris, temporarily, where she had been spending time, on and off, for years. Part of her desire to escape had to do with culture, but much of it had to do with Vietnam: “I don’t want to live in the United States,” she told an Italian reporter in 1973. “Staying in America means going crazy, being finished off, disappearing, disintegrating somehow. And if you’re abroad, you understand what that country is, and how much harder it gets to go back and live there.”10 But she was never away from New York for more than a few months.
Perhaps afraid the relationship was moving too fast, Susan rented her own apartment in the rue Bonaparte, above the Café Bonaparte, the very same apartment where Sartre had produced Les temps modernes. She did not spend a single night there. Nicole immediately whisked her across the Seine—to 31, rue de la Faisanderie. She shared this house with Mimma, who occupied the ground floor. Nicole had the rest, arranged around a garden. She created an office for Susan on the top floor.
* * *
Susan would not quickly recover from the trials of the late sixties. At the beginning of 1973, a few days before her fortieth birthday, she noted in her diary
the terrible, numbing loss of self-confidence I’ve experienced in the last three years: the attacks on Death Kit, feeling myself a fraud politically, the disastrous reception of Brother Carl—and, of course, the maelstrom of C.11
Reviews of Death Kit had, in fact, been mostly bad. The Times critic Eliot Fremont-Smith expressed particular disdain, in terms guaranteed to wound: “An old saw has it that the critical and creative imaginations are in some sly way antithetical, that their sensibilities are mutually subversive, that one cannot successfully do the job to the other,” he wrote. Then, as other critics would throughout her career, he wondered how “a critic of Susan Sontag’s refined sensibilities can write fiction that is both tedious and demonstrably insensitive to the craft of fiction.”12
The reception of Brother Carl was better than that of Duet for Cannibals, though that was not saying much. The Swedish reviews reflected a general mystification, and some of the American reviews would have hardly bolstered her self-confidence: “Susan Sontag will probably never find her way into artistic significance,” she read in the Harvard Crimson. “Not many people will read her books, and not many will watch her movies. But she has her function nonetheless. She is thinking all the time and she rides the crest of every new fashion; she is worth keeping an eye on. When the cultural wind shifts, she rustles in the breeze.”13
By taking her up and giving her a new home, Nicole helped her stem her growing sense of futility: a feeling always present, and one that would never entirely disappear. Only weeks after their meeting, the two women embarked on a project that allowed Susan to find a new direction for herself, as writer and filmmaker. Nicole had acquired the rights to Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, L’invitée, published in 1943. It was the story of a ménage à trois that included Beauvoir, Sartre, and a young protégée. The story would appeal to Susan for its unorthodox domestic arrangements, for its connection to the Paris intellectual world, for the possibility of directing a more mainstream feature after the failure of her Swedish ventures—and for its inclusion of a character that bore a striking resemblance to Carlotta. In June 1971, they were already working on a treatment with her old friend Noël Burch, a Californian long rooted in Paris. But then, apparently on Nicole’s advice, Susan unexpectedly dropped the project: the abrupt and unapologetic abandonment meant the end of her once-close friendship with Burch.14
Despite Nicole’s grand name and connections, the life she offered Susan was austere: “the monastic cell.” Susan’s description of her apartment on the rue de la Faisanderie made it sound like the aesthetics of silence translated into interior design. In “small bare quarters,” which “undoubtedly answers to some need to strip down, to close off for a while, to make a new start with as little as possible to fall back on,” she wrote for months on end: “many blessed days and nights when I have no desire to leav
e the typewriter except to sleep.”15
The occasion for these words was the death, in August 1972, of Paul Goodman. A radical bisexual polymath largely forgotten today, Goodman was one of the greatest influences on Susan’s life, and on the New Left. His book Growing Up Absurd, published in 1960, listed many grievances that, until then, had been felt but not articulated. Goodman described the hopelessness behind the facade of American prosperity: how young people were trivialized, demoralized, and desexualized—shoved, after a bad education, into meaningless work, condemned to lives far more depressing than those a better society might have offered.
“For twenty years he has been to me quite simply the most important American writer,” Susan wrote. “He was our Sartre, our Cocteau.”16 Her memorial essay was without precedent in her work. She had memorialized other people fictionally, but in this essay she takes a very different tone from the critical stance of her literary essays and political tracts. The tone, in fact, is that of the Susan friends recall—the enthusiast, the admirer. It is also the self-critical tone of her journals, which are saturated with a self-awareness that did not always find expression in her published work or public presentation. She recalls her nervousness in Goodman’s company, her sense that he didn’t really like her, and how she, in turn, told people she didn’t really like him: “How pathetic and merely formal that dislike was I always knew.” She sympathized with his ambition: “There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things”—a resentment she herself was already feeling. And she sympathized with his sense of not being properly recognized while warning of a “media stardom” that had “little to do with actual influence and doesn’t tell one anything about how much a writer is being read.”