Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  “On Paul Goodman” is short, but it marks a distance from the difficulty of her films and novels, as well as from the radicalism of her political writings. In her Paris apartment, where she was trying to live for a year without books, Susan nonetheless discovered a copy of his New Reformation, published in 1970. In it, Goodman warned that the absence of clearly defined, achievable goals was causing once-inspiring liberationist movements to degenerate into anarchy. It was a message Susan could not yet entirely embrace, just as she could not entirely abandon Olympus for a more personable style. But a fusion would be given a push by an unexpected journey to the kingdom of her childhood imagination.

  * * *

  In February 1972, President Nixon paid his historic visit to China, the first by an American president since the Communist revolution. The geopolitical realignment brought the possibility that other Americans might visit a country generally closed to them since the 1930s, when Mildred packed her trainload of Chinese bric-a-brac and plunged into Manchuria. On July 20, two weeks before Paul Goodman’s death, Susan received an invitation. She would leave on August 25 for a three-week tour of China. On the very day the invitation arrived, she started jotting down ideas.

  She sketched a film project, something she could produce with Nicole, a story of an American couple in China whose daughter—unlike Susan—went there as a child. The project did not advance, and neither did “Notes Toward a Definition of Cultural Revolution,” for which she took extensive notes. There, she named “trip to China” as one of the “two root metaphors of my life.” (The other, “the desert,” likewise referred to her childhood, as well as to her mood at that time.)17 Another note listed “three themes I have been following all my life.” They were “China, Women, Freaks.”18

  The trip was canceled, rescheduled, and then canceled again, but her note-taking gave her the material for one of her best stories, “Project for a Trip to China,” which would appear in the April 1973 Atlantic. It had many of the outstanding features of her writing—her collagelike lists, her flair for marshaling quotes, her intimate voice, her humor—visible in her journals but mostly missing from her essays since “Notes on ‘Camp.’”

  She was conceived in China: “Conception, pre-conception,” she writes.

  What conception of this trip can I have in advance?

  A trip in search of political understanding?19

  As she described everything China meant to her, she emphasized that her China has nothing to do with real China. At school, “it seemed plausible that I’d made China up. . . . The important thing was to convince my classmates that China actually did exist.” She listed possibilities for the book on China, but concluded: “Perhaps I will write the book about my trip to China before I go.”

  In her journal, she explained that

  I wrote a story that started “I am going to China” precisely because I then thought I wasn’t. I decided to let the four-year old have her say, since the thirty-nine-year-old wasn’t going to get to find out about Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. (Of course, when, in January, I did get to go—it was the 39-year-old who went; the 4-year-old, to my surprise, didn’t even deign to come along. Was it because she’d gotten the load off her chest? No—probably she would never have come—because the real China has nothing, never had anything, to do with her China.)20

  This was a crucial insight. The inability to perceive the difference between fantasy and reality was a weakness of her earlier travel writing. This was the tension in “Trip to Hanoi”—between the reality of Vietnam and the Vietnam she knew from images: between Vietnam and its metaphors. It turned out that the China in her head was far more interesting than the China she actually saw when the rescheduled trip finally took place in January 1973, as she turned forty. There, she reverted to her old role of the earnest student, jotting down the less-than-riveting lectures of the guides—

  We have only a few state-run tractor factories, as in Shanghai, Peking, + Tientsin, Baulong

  More than 95% of all our counties have their own factories to make + repair their own machines21

  —but these factories are mere distant cousins of the “lathes and pneumatic drills and welding machines” that captured her heart in North Vietnam. She was souring on her fellow travelers, noting their “condescending remarks” with a skepticism that never surfaced in Cuba or North Vietnam:

  “Oh, isn’t that beautiful!” (of some calamitously poor village)

  Capa, at Peking Opera: “The audience is better than the opera. Look how drab they are. It’s fantastic!”

  Of Forbidden City and Great Goose Pagoda: “Look. That’s monumental.”

  Rather touching that people who enjoy liberty—Americans—can’t imagine a total dictatorship, a militarized society. They can’t recognize the signs. Of a soldier with fixed bayonet at the gate of our hotel in Sian . . . “He’s the doorman.” I demur, wearily. Chou explains that “there is a guard because this is a government building . . .” Oh, of course.22

  These remarks often touch on aesthetic matters, and though she never wrote about China—she once planned a book about strictly supervised tours of Communist countries—she herself had not entirely shaken her old habits. She praised the absence of cars, which was “wonderful, ecologically. I was told that only about one per cent of the population could afford cars, and therefore there are none.” But when asked whether cars would be desirable if everyone could have one, she exclaimed: “Oh yes!”23

  “There are people interested in radical changes in society, in some way in the line of the Marxist tradition. I am with them,” she said. “China was an experience that shook me: it makes you reexamine everything, including yourself.” She does not say how, though.24 The closure of China’s schools and universities, the sacking of its libraries and museums, the desecration of its temples and monasteries, the murder of hundreds of thousands of people—the Cultural Revolution—is passed over in silence. As in Vietnam, when she might not have known about the Americans being tortured right down the street, the frame was everything. It was not always easy to see; and in an age of “guided tours” and strictly controlled news coverage, she may not have known the extent of the disaster.

  * * *

  After China, she paid a second visit to North Vietnam. There had been talk of a Vietnamese publication of “Trip to Hanoi,” for which she wrote a brief preface, but the book did not materialize. Perhaps the overture—her confession that she found Vietnam incomprehensible and longed for her own more complex society—raised a censorial eyebrow.

  At the airport in Hanoi, she got her period, an event for which she was utterly unprepared. When she told the story a few years later, she astonished her assistant, Karla Eoff, with this illustration of how surprised she was by this most predictable of events. She told Karla: “I couldn’t believe it.” Was she early? “Oh, no,” Susan cheerfully answered. “It was time. I just couldn’t believe I started it in the airport.” Karla was amazed:

  Your period doesn’t sort of creep on you every once in a while. You know this is coming. You are in North Vietnam, and you don’t have a Kotex or a Tampax or whatever they had at that time? . . . It underscores a lot of this not living in reality, just not knowing basic survival things.25

  She arrived back in Paris completely filthy, and Nicole bathed her with disinfectants.26 Her difficulties with hygiene were nothing new: in high school, she had pretended to take a shower at the end of gym period.27 And in her lists of exhortations to self-improvement she often had to remind herself to bathe: “Shower every other night,” she wrote in 1957.28 Five years later, the habit had still not taken: “Bathe every day (already big progress here in last 6 mos.)”29

  All her life, her inattention to basic personal care—not brushing her teeth or bathing, not knowing that she was going to get her period or that childbirth was painful—baffled her friends: even as far back as Tucson, her sister was embarrassed by her lack of hygiene.30 Such stories suggest more than carelessness—how many people, after al
l, need to exhort themselves to bathe?—offering example after example of an essential theme in Sontag’s own writings. This, as she wrote about Artaud, was “the unthinkable—about how body is mind and how mind is also a body.” It was not a question of intelligence. These stories illustrate, in a strangely literal way, how even the most highly developed mind could find itself alienated from the body that circumscribes it. For Sontag, it would be no easy thing to unite the beastly body to the intellectual realm, the realm of language, metaphor, and art.

  * * *

  In October 1973, a few months after she returned to Paris from China, she was back in the United States. There, a brief encounter with a young academic would show just how many expectations were being heaped upon her. Camille Paglia had been obsessed with Sontag since she happened upon Against Interpretation, “among a dozen books that defined the cultural moment and seemed to herald a dawning age of revolutionary achievement.”31 In a culture that lacked models of intellectual women, Sontag became for Paglia something like what Madame Curie had become for Sontag: “I had fixed on Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy as the only available female role models in the literary life,” she wrote. “With Against Interpretation, Sontag revived and modernized the woman of letters.”32

  Sontag, still young herself, was already a symbol for a whole generation of emerging female intellectuals. They were coming into a society with vastly more opportunities than their mothers had had, but without the role models they needed. Many of them looked to Susan Sontag; Paglia, fourteen years younger, was one of these. In April, Paglia drove from Bennington, where she was teaching, to Dartmouth, where Sontag was speaking. She invited her to Bennington, and Susan accepted, agreeing to half her usual fee. But this gesture could never have lived up to the expectations. At the end of September, Paglia was already nervously preening, as she wrote to the president of Bennington:

  Naturally, I am tearing my hair out in my desire to set the right tone for myself. My new formal blue Forties/Mao jacket? Or my more casual slate-blue blousey turn-of-the-Fifties smock? Possibly my gamine French-boy’s pullover? Alas, the burden of Chic!33

  And then Susan turned up, Paglia reported, “puffy, groggy, and disoriented.” She was an hour late to an auditorium “tangibly simmering with hostility.” A drunk Paglia introduced her (“Bacchus knows what I said”) and then Susan began reading a “bleak and boring” story, disappointing an audience that had hoped to hear her on contemporary culture and politics. Afterward, they adjourned to a dinner at the house of Bernard Malamud, “Bennington’s semi-resident star (and general pain in the ass),” who proceeded to say something rude to Susan “with his usual intolerable air of pious paternalism.” Susan turned to Camille: “He invites me to his house to insult me!” Susan and Camille beat a retreat, at which point “‘Sontag,’ cool, detached, austere, and lofty,” gave way to “‘Susan,’ warm, gossipy, and distinctly Jewish in speech and manner.”34

  Susan was late, tired, and boring, as she sometimes was when she spoke in public. Yet by Paglia’s own admission, Susan was kind to her: taking a much lower fee, speaking to her privately and at length. “But our minds did not connect,” she wrote. “Something was missing.” There was a disconnect between Susan and Sontag.

  Finally, [Susan] asked, half irritated, half amused, “What is it you want from me?” I stammered, “Just to talk to you.” But that was wrong. I wanted to say, “I’m your successor, dammit, and you don’t have the wit to realize it!” It was All About Eve, and Sontag was Margo Channing stalked by the new girl.35

  After comparing herself to the upstart in All About Eve, Paglia did not go on to wonder whether Sontag wanted to be stalked, or whether she—barely forty—was already scanning the horizon for a successor. In the next two decades, Sontag would ripen into a much larger presence in Paglia’s mind.

  * * *

  The day after Susan left Bennington, October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year. Despite repeated warnings, including from the Jordanian king, who secretly flew to Tel Aviv to alert the Israeli prime minister, the Israelis were not prepared. As Egyptians poured across the Suez Canal and Syrians flooded into the Golan Heights, many Israelis and their friends feared for the country’s very existence.

  One was Nicole Stéphane. From funding the first settlement in Palestine to securing the Balfour Declaration to building the Knesset in Jerusalem, her family had been instrumental in helping to create the State of Israel. In 1948, during the War of Independence, she had been a war correspondent. In 1957, she had been on a kibbutz, Ein Gev, on the Sea of Galilee: easy walking distance from the former Syrian border. These deep ties made her panic, and she called Susan.

  “I can’t bear being in France,” she said. “The television reporting here is too terrible.” Susan told her to come to New York, where “everybody is for Israel,” and she did.36 With Susan and David in tow, she almost instantly took off again, bound for Israel. “On a credit card,”37 they made a film, Promised Lands, that would stand as the best Susan ever made. Even today, after all the shifts the Arab-Israeli conflict has undergone, the film remains an indispensable guide to that conflict. It brought Susan’s analytical mind to a highly emotional situation and showed the conflict’s hideous toll on individual lives while avoiding clichés and propaganda.

  It is a physical, visceral film. The camera lingers over textures: of the desert, of city streets, of the matériel with which the war—still raging during the filming—was conducted. The soundtrack constantly rumbles, as if someone is switching stations on a radio, skipping from Jewish funeral prayers to French pop songs to Italian arias and giving a good idea of the unlikely brew that came together to make modern Israel. But one sound remains in the mind. This is the sound, in the last few minutes of the film, of a doctor in a psychiatric hospital “treating” a sobbing, drugged veteran by re-creating the sounds of the war—clanging, whistling, shouting, shooting—that had driven him to the hospital in the first place. As the man buries his head in his pillow, crawls under the bed, whimpers, and begs, the horrible scene—orders shouted, sirens raging, furniture banging—goes on and on, an unendurable ten minutes: Jewish history embodied in a single faceless patient.

  Like Nicole and Susan, Promised Lands is highly sympathetic to Jewish aspirations. “Why should I be anti-Israel?” Susan asked a reporter in Jerusalem. “I would find it very, very difficult to take a position against this country. I’m proud to be a Jew, I identify very much with other Jews, and by temperament I’m predisposed to Israel.”38 At the same time, it is also a portrait of the State of Israel as a mental hospital, haunted by pogroms and gas chambers, so perverted by its own suffering that it became unable to regard the pain of others.

  The spokesman for this view is the novelist Yoram Kaniuk, who speaks throughout most of the film, tracking Zionism from “Tolstoy and the song and dance and the early beautiful socialist ideas” to the current stalemate. Until the 1967 war, he says, Israel had been a scrappy society whose main concern was survival and whose highest values were equality and solidarity. But victory brought money—“People started building villas”—and the moral degeneration abetted by imperial fantasies: Israel “became very unconcerned about other people’s suffering, other people’s plights.”

  At this point, Susan takes stock of this society’s paraphernalia, shifting from pictures of Bedouins herding sheep to sleek supermarkets and sleazy nightclubs. In an interview, she bemoaned the developments that had made Israel a modern materialistic society without making it modern in a positive, liberating way: “I didn’t expect this conventionalism, this consumerism, and especially not the attitude that exists here toward women,” she told the Jerusalem Post. Asked whether feminism might be considered a “fringe import from America,” she retorted: “Considering all the things you have imported from America, this might have been one of the better ones.” And asked whether it was “unusual for two women to be in charge of making a film,” she answered:
“Isn’t it unusual for two women to be in charge of anything?”39

  But feminism was not Israel’s biggest challenge. (A woman, Golda Meir, was, in fact, prime minister.) The problem was that the Zionist dream, Kaniuk said, had caused the Jews to wander, totally unprepared, into a tragedy.

  The Jews know drama. They don’t know tragedy. Tragedy is when right is opposed to another right. And here is two rights. The Palestinians have full rights to Palestine. And the Jews have full rights to Palestine. Don’t ask me why. But they have. There is no solution to a tragedy, and this is a tragic situation here.40

  The film expresses this ambivalence, and as a result was far more nuanced than Susan’s earlier political writings. Too often, they had been all drama, no tragedy. And the bodies that appeared in the film were not the dreamlike wraiths of Death Kit and The Benefactor but the charred faces and blackened legs of real people, rotting in the desert sun. As she put it in her journal, this is when “Death starts getting real.”41

  Chapter 22

  The Very Nature of Thinking

  On October 18, 1973, five days before the ceasefire that brought an end to the Yom Kippur War, when Susan and Nicole were still camped out in the Sinai, an essay appeared in The New York Review of Books. Entitled simply “Photography,” it announced one of the “revolutions of feelings and seeing” that Hippolyte called “the revolutions of my time.”

  One revolution was in Sontag’s own work, of which it inaugurated the mature phase. Another was in the history of criticism and modern art. When On Photography—six essays, of which “Photography” was the first—appeared four years later, it almost immediately became that rare book of criticism that itself generated a whole school of criticism. It was not a perfect book, as Sontag herself later agreed. But it was a great book, its greatness residing not in its perfection but in its fecundity: its ability to provoke other thinkers, and to spur them to formulate new ideas of their own. It was the beginning of a conversation, not the end; and if we may never know whether it is possible to write about photography without reference to Susan Sontag, that is because hardly anyone has bothered to try.