Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  “Our era” does not prefer images to real things out of perversity but partly in response to the ways in which the notion of what is real has been progressively complicated and weakened, one of the early ways being the criticism of reality as a façade which arose among the enlightened middle classes in the last century.31

  —and another thing in Maoist China:

  The Chinese don’t want Photograph to mean very much or to be very interesting. They do not want to see the world from an unusual angle, to discover new subjects. Photograph are supposed to display what has already been described. . . . For the Chinese authorities, there are only clichés—which they consider not to be clichés but “correct” views.32

  By emphasizing how erratic these values are, and how strongly susceptible they are to culture and history, Sontag has moved far from her interest in camp, “which blocks out content,” and just as far from the views at the other extreme, which could be summed up as “against interpretation.” No longer is content warring with interpretation, or metaphor with substance. Instead, they are enmeshed in ways that could be described as tragedy versus drama. Or—to put it in the personal terms in which both Sontag’s and Leibovitz’s books were received—as a relationship.

  * * *

  The relationship between photography and reality is as fraught as the relationship between any two people. As in any relationship, Sontag’s own attitude toward photography was never constant. Her apprehension of the difficulties of looking and seeing had deepened since her early writings and, in coming years, would deepen further still. In no area would her understanding grow as richly complicated as in the question of looking at bodies, especially bodies in pain. She had been fascinated by Peter Hujar’s pictures of dead bodies. She herself had photographed blackened corpses in Israel. To apply the same readings to these pictures that she applied to pictures of suffering, and that others applied to the pictures of her own body, would mean asking whether those people, too, had consented to allowing their bodies to be used to make a point, whether morbid (“Me today, you tomorrow”) or moral (the human cost of war).

  Leibovitz’s pictures of the dead and wounded of Sarajevo, interspersed with pictures of rock stars and family outings, were taken at Sontag’s direct insistence. “Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention,” she had written in On Photography. But by the time she brought Leibovitz to Bosnia, nearly twenty years later, she no longer believed that; no longer dismissed war photography as a combination of “voyeurism and danger”; no longer said that pictures of war were “the unbearable replay of a now familiar atrocity exhibition” deadening the senses of a jaded bourgeoisie.33 In Bosnia she saw that photography could be an act of love and self-sacrifice, a direct political intervention, a jolt, not an anesthetic.

  At the same time—just as it is perfectly possible to love and hate the same person—it could also be obscene.

  Chapter 23

  Quite Unseduced

  In 1971, David Rieff was nineteen, finishing his first year at Amherst College. He had negotiated a difficult passage through adolescence between warring parents. Susan, often an absent and neglectful parent, herself acknowledged the observation of many close friends. She was too possessive, and saw David as an extension of herself. “I identify myself too much with him, him too much with myself,”1 she wrote the year he left for college. This boundaryless relationship had gone on for a long time, since even before his birth. Philip, she wrote, had

  persuaded me of his idea of love—that one can possess another person, that I could be an extension of his personality and he of mine, as David would be of us both. Love that incorporates, that devours the other person, that cuts the tendons of the will.2

  She criticized—even mocked—this possessive, cannibalistic “idea of love,” but was unable to check her own neediness and fear of abandonment. She was more explicit on this subject, and less self-critical, in a letter to her sister, Judith, when David was still a toddler, writing that she had no intention of releasing “the divine little tyrant.”

  I have already pledged him not to marry until he is forty and then to take an apartment in the same building with his parents, like a good Jewish son. I want none of this new-fangled emancipation from mamma that the psychiatrists are preaching to the heathens.3

  In her journals, she was unsparing with herself—but the focus was always on herself. That, surely, is what a journal is for; but even the women who caused her agony appear as players in her personal drama rather than as personalities in their own right. And in the hundred volumes of these journals, one person is notable for his absence: her only child.

  Her friends worried about her treatment of him. Susan had often left him to go to Europe, especially when she was involved with Carlotta and Nicole. Once Rose McNulty left, when David was quite young, she often confided him to the care of Roger Straus and Peggy Miller, who would check in on him in loco parentis. As he entered adolescence, Susan gave him unusual—and, to more conventionally minded people, alarming—freedom.

  Susan left David to raise himself, though she liked to take credit for having created “a brilliant, funny, perfect gentleman,” said Roger Deutsch. Deutsch was a “normal guy from Wisconsin” who became David’s friend around this time and ended up spending more than two years, from 1975 to 1978, in the Riverside Drive apartment. He saw how Susan had groomed him as a companion. “He had to be something that she could show off in public as her creation,” said Deutsch.4

  Susan was only nineteen when he was born, forty when he came of age. They were so close in age that their relationship evolved into a kind of companionship, and as he grew older, they came to resemble a couple more than a parent and child. “She was not a mother, and he was not a son,” said Yoram Kaniuk, who met them in Israel in 1973.5

  Their relationship often struck friends as odd. “She obviously did not love him in a motherly sense,” said Deutsch. “She loved him in the sense of having created this character.” Susan’s constantly reiterated themes of his gorgeousness and brilliance seemed like something more than a mother’s natural pride. In a letter from 1978, Paul Thek said what many others thought, but were unsure how to enunciate. “Your emotional situation regarding the establishment of the Sontag dynasty in Amer. Letters (with poor Davids cooperation) seemed desperate, ludicrous, even GREEDY.”6

  Despite his wide interests, David was not an ambitious scholar. His high school friends “were regular guys,” Deutsch said. “They were not intellectually interesting, and they were boys, who did boy things.” He dropped out of Amherst after a year, then moved to Paris, and then, the next year, went to Cuernavaca, Mexico. There, he studied at the “deschool” of the Austrian priest Ivan Illich, whose Center for Intercultural Documentation was “a free club for the search of surprise,” Illich wrote, “a place where people go who want to have help in redefining their questions rather than completing the answers they have gotten.”7 During his time in Mexico, David learned Spanish, and then went back to New York, where he spent almost two years as a taxi driver. “I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing,” he said.8

  It is impossible to imagine Susan dropping out of college and becoming a cabdriver—and that was probably the point. David’s rebellions took him places she could not follow, and he even announced that he wanted to join the marines. “That was a real challenge for her to outflank,” said Stephen Koch.9 But many young people try to escape overbearing parents, and the search for new ways of living under the guidance of charismatic gurus was typical of many members of his generation. Still, Susan did insist that he finish his education. He enrolled at Princeton in the fall of 1975, a decision that inadvertently sparked a grave crisis. Princeton required a physical, and David “was getting incredibly adolescent about the whole thing,” he said. He refused to schedule an appointment, eventually telling Susan to make it for him. “Then she thought, ‘Well, as long as he’s getting one, I haven’t had one in a long time. I might as well get one, too.’”10

 
; * * *

  The result was a shock. Sontag, at forty-two, had a tumor in her left breast: a metastasized cancer, stage 4. She went to the Cleveland Clinic, where the oncologist she consulted proposed a “milder” mastectomy. When she returned to New York for a second opinion, a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital proposed a radical operation, and with that word her mind was made up: “Real commitment for her,” David wrote, “was always radical.”11 But the meaning of the word was different in medicine than in politics; in oncology, it meant an extremely invasive surgery that turned out not to offer better results over the long term than more localized interventions.12

  She alternated between optimism and despair. On one occasion, Roger Deutsch drove with her to Sloan Kettering. “We both got out of the car, and she took my hand in both of her hands, which she had never done before, and she looked me in the eye.” She said, “Roger, I am dying.” Whatever optimism she mustered was fueled, in part, by medical dishonesty. “It was standard practice for doctors to lie to cancer patients,” David wrote. Though her doctor did not expect her to live, he did not communicate this message; David later wondered whether, if she had known how slim her chances were, “she would have had the strength of will to go forward with treatment.”13 She knew that she had only a 10 percent chance of being alive in two years. “Somebody’s got to be that ten percent,” she reasoned, trying to coax herself into pressing on.14

  Before the surgery, Stephen Koch talked to her about the work of the seventeenth-century Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying. “She was very struck by it. She took it in—as I recall—silently.”15 And in the hospital she composed her short preface to Peter Hujar’s book Portraits in Life and Death: “In previous periods, people have made a discipline of studying dying,” she wrote. “But the body already knows. It’s as if the body is already familiar with death.”16

  On October 28, 1975, her left breast was “erased,” she said, by a skilled surgeon, who left no scar. Or no visible scar. Her “place in her own body—never secure—had been irretrievably wrecked” by the surgery, David said, and she came to think of herself as “maimed.”17 It was the word she had used before—“maimed, incomplete, pre-orgiastic”—to describe the conundrum she identified as a teenager. Then, she described her unhappiness as rooted in “the agonized dichotomy between the body and the mind.” She had made strides toward overcoming that dichotomy, but romantic catastrophes forced her, time and again, to retreat into the relative serenity of her mind.

  So it was now. But the prognosis was not good, and the surgery was only the beginning. The tumor was the most accessible manifestation of a cancer that saturated her body. Four additional operations followed, to remove other lesions; and then thirty long months of chemotherapeutic bombardment. “I feel like the Vietnam War,” she said. “They’re using chemical weapons on me. I have to cheer.”18

  * * *

  Shortly before her diagnosis, she had already been depressed. “I must change my life,” she wrote. She was forcing herself to be cheerful. But she feared that, like Diane Arbus and Alfred Chester, she was being pulled under. She had been preserved only by “a system of safe harbors, of feudal relationships, to ward off terror—to resist, to survive.” But this was no longer enough.

  I’ve constructed a life in which I can’t be profoundly distressed or upset by anyone—except by D., of course. Nobody (except him) can “get” to me, get into my guts, topple me over the precipice. Everybody is certified “safe.” The jewel and centerpiece of this system: Nicole.

  I’m safe, yes, but I’m getting even weaker. I have more and more difficulty being alone, even for a few hours.—My panic on Saturdays this winter in Paris, when N. leaves at 11 in the morning for the hunt and doesn’t come back until after midnight. My inability to leave the rue de la Faisanderie and go around Paris alone. I just stay there, these Saturdays, unable to work, unable to move. . . .

  D. reminds me that the safe harbor isn’t going to be so safe for much longer. (N.’s bankruptcy, the inevitability of selling the rue de la Faisanderie.) Then it will be even harder to change anything—My 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., whom I found so pathetic, deteriorated in Rome this March.19

  In this dark passage, it is easy to read a presentiment of the illness that, unbeknownst to her, was already infesting her body. Yet in sickness or in health, contentment—much less happiness—had never come naturally. She had grown up “literally never daring to expect happiness,” and her relationship with Nicole was fading as quickly as all her other relationships did.

  But when she fell sick, Nicole offered her shelter, physical and emotional. Healthy, Susan may have distrusted that cocoon; sick, she was in no position to decline. Her illness brought another blessing. She felt that David “had come back to her,” said Minda Rae Amiran, “and that they were very close in that period. She was very happy about that.”20 Despite everything, these returns made her remember her brush with the abyss in a positive light.

  The only time in my life I knew I was loved—felt it, accepted it, welcomed it, humbly, gratefully—was in 1975–76—the first year I was sick, when I and everyone else thought I was going to die. And I was euphoric. Ted [Mooney] said I was filled with grace.21

  Two decades later, she told a friend who had also suffered from cancer that “that was the first time in my life that I thought about how wonderful life is.”22

  * * *

  After Susan’s initial surgery in New York, Nicole located a Parisian oncologist, Lucien Israël, who recommended a course of immunotherapy then unavailable in the United States.23 She would later credit Dr. Israël with having saved her, and credit herself for having chosen his ruthless treatment.

  Like so many Americans who are self-employed, she had no health insurance when she fell sick, and no money to pay for the treatments she required. The cost was $150,000, which would be nearly seven hundred thousand dollars today. It was a colossal sum for a writer whose books sold modestly and who had no private income.

  Yet unlike so many Americans, she was lucky to have a network of affluent friends. Under the leadership of Bob Silvers, who sent out a fund-raising letter, they rallied to her side. Contributors included Martin Peretz, the owner of The New Republic, and the Houston collector Dominique de Menil. They also included fellow writers and artists, including Carlos Fuentes, Arthur Miller, and Jasper Johns.

  Nicole made sure Susan had everything she needed, and despite her own financial difficulties made sure, for example, that Susan could fly back to New York on the Concorde: the long flights were too exhausting. And when she was fully recovered, her survival was greeted, in the cultural milieu, as a miracle. Stephen Donadio, a young intellectual, remembered as “one of the most important occasions of my life” the first public speech Sontag gave after her recovery, in Bobst Library at New York University.

  When they saw Sontag approach the podium many people thought that it was as if they were seeing someone who’d come back from the dead. There was almost an audible gasp from the audience. But she did not appear frail or in the least hesitant, and she spoke on the subject of illness with a remarkable directness, and with the evident authority of experience. The sustained intensity of her presentation was something that I have very rarely witnessed, and the effect of what she had to say was electrifying. I can still remember her observing in a tone of absolute certainty that each of us is a citizen of two kingdoms—the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of those afflicted with illness—and that we are fated to spend time in each. During the time that she spoke, there was not the slightest sound in the audience.24

  * * *

  In 1978, she published a short essay, Illness as Metaphor, that examined how cancer was talked about—or, just as often, not talked about. In it, she made no reference to her own experience. This reticence placed the book at an emotion
al remove but also lent it, as so often in her work, an extra polemical charge. She had been struck by cancer in a world in which that was something to be ashamed of—something one most likely deserved—as she later wrote:

  Cancer is regarded as a disease to which the psychically defeated, the inexpressive, the repressed—especially those who have repressed anger or sexual feelings—are particularly prone, as tuberculosis was regarded throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (indeed, until it was discovered how to cure it) as a disease apt to strike the hypersensitive, the talented, the passionate.

  In 1989, with the benefit of more perspective, Sontag reflected on her earlier essay. She described how her fury at the stigma surrounding cancer added to her fear of the disease itself: “What particularly enraged me—and distracted me from my own terror and despair at my doctors’ gloomy prognosis—was seeing how much the very reputation of this illness added to the suffering of those who have it.”25 This reputation did what metaphors do: turned a thing into something it was not. In the case of cancer, a moralizing mythology turned a chemical or physiological condition into an occasion for judging those who suffered from it.

  These judgments meant patients were often “shunned by relatives and friends and are the objects of practices of decontamination by members of their household,” she wrote. “Getting cancer can be a scandal that jeopardizes one’s love life, one’s chance of promotion, even one’s job.”26 Patients were often not told what was wrong with them—because cancer suggested moral and psychological weakness. It was “a disease of insufficient passion, afflicting those who are sexually repressed, inhibited, unspontaneous, incapable of expressing anger.” Sex—“What is called a liberated sexual life is believed by some people today to stave off cancer”—was as important as anger: “There are cancerophobes like Norman Mailer, who recently explained that had he not stabbed his wife (and acted out ‘a murderous nest of feeling’) he would have gotten cancer and ‘been dead in a few years himself.’”27