Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Under the Sign of Saturn is shot through with this piety. The book includes two memorial essays, on Paul Goodman and on Roland Barthes. “Ah, Susan,” Barthes said at their last meeting. “Toujours fidèle.” She assented with a blush. “I was,” she told him: “I am.” Barthes’s own “deepest impulse was celebratory,” and so was hers. Much of what Susan Sontag came to represent to others was just what these models had represented to her: an ideal of high culture that held out the possibility of a better self.

  * * *

  As she entered her forties, Sontag had been haltingly moving away from her earlier Communist enthusiasms through contacts with exiles from Communist countries—and especially through one, Joseph Brodsky. In contrast to the men she wrote about in Under the Sign of Saturn—dedicated to Brodsky—he was neither dead nor even very old: he was, in fact, seven years younger than Susan. But there was no doubt that he was a great man, and the Soviet authorities, in their perverse way, had recognized him as such when he was only twenty-three.

  At that point, in 1963, he had published a handful of translations and a single poem in a children’s magazine.15 But in the wake of the apparent liberalization of 1962, which saw the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the government decided to send a message that, despite “de-Stalinization,” the system had not changed. With attacks ginned up in the time-honored Soviet way, the completely unknown Brodsky was used to deliver that message. First, with a single article. In it, Brodsky was accused of being “a pygmy, smugly climbing up Parnassus,” and one who moreover “doesn’t care how he crawls up Parnassus,” and who furthermore “cannot give up the idea of some Parnassus that he aims to climb by any and all dirty means,” and—if that was not bad enough—who wanted “to climb up Parnassus all on his own.” The articles were followed by a trial straight out of Kafka. “Parasite Brodsky on Trial,” read a placard at the entrance to the courtroom.16

  If the same script had not destroyed millions, it would have been a farce. But Brodsky was different, and the kangaroo court, successful in silently annihilating so many others, became an international embarrassment. Brodsky was also different because he survived: sentenced to five years of hard labor in the Russian Arctic, he served eighteen months. The unknown poet became a cause célèbre and was released after international protests. In a letter to the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Jean-Paul Sartre, sympathetic to Stalinism, regretted this “puzzling and regrettable aberration.”17

  And most of all, Brodsky was different because, unlike thousands of his comrades, who either lacked talent or never got the chance to develop it, he really did possess genius. It had been first confirmed by no one less than Anna Akhmatova, preeminent symbol of the suffering of Russian culture under Stalin. He was twenty-one when they met. “You have no idea what you’ve written!” she exclaimed, reading a poem of his.18

  Following his release in 1965, he remained in Russia for seven more years. At last, with no warning, he was put on a plane to Vienna, and he never returned to the country of his birth—which he loathed. “Home was Russian,” Susan wrote. “No longer Russia.” His experiences had given him a Parnassian idea of culture: as a weapon against vulgarity and tyranny. Underlying this idea was a duty to cultivate the universal tradition that he announced on the first day of class at the American universities where he taught.

  The list began with the Bhagavad Gita, the Gilgamesh Epic, the Old Testament, continued with roughly thirty works by ancient Greek and Roman writers, then moved on to Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Benvenuto Cellini, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard (but neither Kant nor Hegel!), Tocqueville, Custine, Ortega y Gasset, Henry Adams, Hannah Arendt, Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Young Törless, and Five Women, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, and finally wound up with a list of forty-four poets starting with Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Khlebnikov, and Zabolotsky.19

  Perhaps only Susan could have kept up. When they met—through Roger Straus, in January 1976, just after her mastectomy—she fell volubly in love. A number of acquaintances were skeptical about the erotic nature of their affair, but there is no question that she loved him: Brodsky and her mother were the two people she named in her last conscious moments.20

  Brodsky, after all, was the friend she dreamed of in Tucson and Sherman Oaks; the teacher she hoped to find in Philip Rieff: the companion she had sought all her life, an intellectual and artistic equal, and even a superior. She never found another friend as congenial, and it was in these terms that she mourned his premature death, at fifty-five: “I’m all alone,” she told a friend. “There’s nobody with whom I can share my ideas, my thoughts.”21 This was the love his biographer found in Brodsky’s own verse: “the dead end of carnality and the limitless space of Eros.”22

  * * *

  “He made a stunning impression,” Susan said. “He was so authoritative personally.”23 With his red hair and bright green eyes, he was very attractive to women, and much of his magnetism derived from the authority he claimed, unapologetically, as a great poet’s birthright. That status brought obligations, the first of which was a dedication to the very highest artistic standards, those his syllabus reflected: “One should write to please not one’s contemporaries but one’s predecessors,” he declared; Susan might have written the same, and in his idea of culture, she found her own.24 “Man’s greatest enemy is not Communism, not Socialism, not Capitalism,” Brodsky wrote, “but rather the vulgarity of the human heart, of human imagination.”25

  These standards gave a way of living in the world, as Benjamin had lived in and through books. These standards tamed people, and were derived from literature: “For someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some ideal is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens.”26 Reading sensitized, humanized; and in place of the socialist “new man,” Brodsky proposed a Homo legens, “reading man.”27 Though not a fundamentally political writer, his aesthetics bore political consequences. He hated communism with an energy Susan had surely never encountered in such a powerful mind. Karen Kennerly, who would become friends with Susan in the 1980s, had a brief relationship with Brodsky shortly after he reached the United States, and was stunned by his politics on a long weekend they spent in Michigan:

  He was very difficult. He was very moody. He could hardly speak English. . . . Nixon was president and he sat in front of the television watching the news and the American flag and Nixon talking and he was clapping his hands. I thought, Get me out of here!28

  Susan Sontag surely had few friends who applauded the televised appearances of President Nixon. But Brodsky’s personal and artistic authority was such that he was difficult to ridicule. Part of his hold on Susan was that he was a bully: “very arrogant,” in the words of a friend of both, the Polish writer Jarosław Anders.29 “I didn’t like the way he treated her,” said Sigrid Nunez.30 “There was something in his character that I didn’t like,” said Susan. “I didn’t like how mean he was sometimes to people. He could be very cruel.” Yet she admired his public persona:

  I was always impressed by how he enjoyed impressing people, enjoyed knowing more than they did, enjoyed having higher standards than they had. . . . I think the bond between us, whatever emotional bond there was, as he told me early on, was that I was the one American he knew who had standards like his.31

  With these standards, with this attitude, he prepared her for the role she played in the last decades of her life: a voice of the liberal—no longer the radical—conscience. She had never fully absorbed the works of the anti-Communist writers she had read and, in many cases, known personally. Once, when she expressed skepticism about Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky interjected. “But Susan,” he said, “what he writes about the Soviet Union is true.” She was
amazed—as if she had not fully understood that the oppression, the gulag, was real, or had believed it to be an exaggeration, said Stephen Koch.

  It was compartmentalized into inexistence. I really do believe that. And then at a certain moment it came out of its compartment and she became an intelligent person again.32

  * * *

  Susan, too, could deliver smackdowns, and this endeared her to Brodsky. In November 1977, the month that On Photography was published, she was in Venice for the “Biennale on Dissent,” an event “entirely devoted to the problem of ‘dissent’ in the art and culture of those European countries currently defined as socialist.”33 Brodsky was there, too, and received a call from Susan. She had bumped into Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound’s longtime mistress, who invited her to visit. Susan dreaded going alone and asked Brodsky to join her. They walked in: “The grip of boredom was sudden but sure,” Brodsky wrote.34 Rudge began her litany of excuses for Pound’s wartime collaboration, including the broadcasts he made for the Italian Fascist government, before Susan interrupted:

  “But surely, Olga, you don’t think that the Americans got cross with Ezra over his broadcasts. Because if it were only his broadcasts, then Ezra would be just another Tokyo Rose.” Now, that was one of the greatest returns I had ever heard. I looked at Olga. It must be said that she took it like a mensch. Or, better yet, a pro. Or else she didn’t grasp what Susan had said, though I doubt it. “What was it, then?” she inquired. “It was Ezra’s anti-Semitism,” replied Susan.35

  Anti-Semitism was precisely the kind of “vulgarity of the human heart, of human imagination” that Susan and Brodsky believed was the enemy of man, and in the seventies, Susan took aim at that enemy. Like Brodsky, she believed that aesthetics was the mother of ethics, and that traffic with beauty would produce the ethically improved Homo legens. “The wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic,” Susan wrote toward the end of her life, “cannot be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness.”36

  This idea was put to the test by Leni Riefenstahl, whose films married aesthetic refinement to ethical repulsiveness. Like Pound’s, Céline’s, or Mishima’s, her works were long hailed as important even as she herself was considered to reside somewhere outside the civilized pale. After the war, she made stabs at respectability, and by the mid-seventies was beginning to succeed in reinventing herself as an apolitical artist who, she always claimed, was loyal to beauty alone. Even her Nazi films—Olympia, about the Berlin Olympics of 1936; and Triumph of the Will, her celebration of the Nuremberg rallies—were beginning to be presented, to cinephilic audiences, as masterpieces. This reinvention was in part made possible by the idea that her films’ beauty could be uncoupled from whatever “content” tedious groundlings purported to locate within them.

  If prettiness were all that mattered, Leni Riefenstahl’s was great art. Her Nazi films had been shown at the Telluride Film Festival in 1974, where Riefenstahl herself was a guest of honor, and in that same year, she published a book of Photograph of the Nuba people of Sudan. Even Sontag admitted it was “certainly the most ravishing book of Photograph published anywhere in recent years.”37 The strongest impetus toward Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation, Sontag wrote, was “the new, ampler fortunes of the idea of the beautiful.”38

  Riefenstahl’s work challenged those of Sontag’s writings that might be classed as “against interpretation.” In the sixties, she had briefly but notoriously defended Riefenstahl, writing, in “On Style,” that certain improving qualities—“disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, the awakening of the feelings”—might be stirred by a beautiful object, no matter how obnoxious:

  This is how we can, in good conscience, cherish works of art which, considered in terms of “content,” are morally objectionable to us. (The difficulty is of the same order as that involved in appreciating works of art, such as The Divine Comedy, whose premises are intellectually alien.) To call Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss.39

  This paragraph became a notorious symbol of sixties leveling, Dante uttered in the same breath as Leni Riefenstahl. An anthology of her interviews mentioned “the frequency with which Sontag is asked to recapitulate her thoughts on the formal ‘beauty’ of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-era filmmaking.”40 To one interviewer, she explained that the paragraph “is correct—as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far.”41

  But if her interest in Riefenstahl reflects the thorny relationship between ethics and aesthetics, it also reflects an almost sexual desire to be ravished, exalted, overwhelmed by art. This was what Riefenstahl’s films provided: art that was a means of escaping the melancholy of selfhood. “You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie,” she wrote of her obsessive filmgoing.42 Happenings followed “Artaud’s prescription for a spectacle which . . . ‘will physically envelop the spectator.’” The description could serve for Riefenstahl’s filming of the Nuremberg rallies, too: the individual swept away by the tsunami of an orgiastic Gesamtkunstwerk.

  * * *

  The power of Susan Sontag’s enthusiasm was such that she became the world’s most authoritative blurber. Her admiration for a book or a film—a dance, a painting—could usher an artist out of respectable obscurity and place him or her in the company of the great: discussed, exhibited, translated, celebrated. “When Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize, Susan’s was the only essay about him in English,” said Edmund White, whose early work she likewise advocated. “She was the first one I knew to mention W. G. Sebald, Danilo Kiš, and Roberto Bolaño—all considered major literary figures now.”43 The same could be said for dozens of others.

  In the last decades of her life, it became hard to remember that she had once been considered a leveler. She came to symbolize high culture and the rigorous standards that upheld it. But she almost never did so publicly by chastising works that fell short. “That’s why I’m not a critic,” she said, distancing herself from the label by which she was best known. “I really do think an important job of the critic is to savage this, to say this is garbage, this is terrible, this is pernicious. Although it is a lot of fun to do, the essay that was written most quickly was, of course, the Leni Riefenstahl because it’s much easier to write when you feel angry, self-righteous and you know you are right.”44

  She distrusted that kind of writing, but her resorting to it reflected that much had changed in the decade between her brief defense of Riefenstahl, in 1965, and her publication, in 1975, of “Fascinating Fascism.” The leveling of which an earlier generation of New York Intellectuals had warned—often using Sontag as an example—had shaken old standards. Part of this was a result of feminist and African American demands to expand the canon. In the sixties, that grip loosened, and for many younger intellectuals, Sontag herself stood for a broadened, modernized sensibility.

  But it was one thing to open up to Virginia Woolf, and quite another to open up to Leni Riefenstahl. In “Fascinating Fascism,” she wrote that “art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous, in a way they were not then.”45 The Nuba book was “full of disquieting lies,” particularly regarding the artist’s biography. “It takes a certain originality to describe the Nazi era as ‘Germany’s blighted and momentous 1930s,’” she wrote, and ridiculed the self-mythologizing in Riefenstahl’s pre-Nazi films:

  The role Riefenstahl devised for herself is that of a primitive creature who has a unique relation to a destructive power: only Junta, the rag-clad outcast girl of the village, is able to reach the mysterious blue light radiating from the peak of Mount Cristallo, while other young villagers, lured by the light, try to climb the mountain and fall to their deaths.46

  By tallying up the “inaccurate
or invented” facts that Riefenstahl used to whitewash her past, Sontag leaves very little of her reputation standing—savaging, too, the critics who had let Riefenstahl travel so far down the road to respectability. By wielding biography to discredit a creator’s art, Sontag was delivering an implicit rebuke to her hero, Roland Barthes, celebrated in the same book—Under the Sign of Saturn—in which the Riefenstahl essay appeared. His idea of “the death of the author,” taken from an essay of 1967, popularized the idea that there was no connection, or at least none that mattered, between an artist and her work. In the circumstances Sontag documented, this sophistry crumbled.

  Riefenstahl would sing the same vissi d’arte aria until she died, in 2003, at 101. But she understood very well that the author was not quite dead, that her history most certainly did matter to the way in which her films were seen, and that Sontag had landed a blow from which her reputation would not recover. Despite periodic attempts to revive it, they never really took, and she would forever be known as Hitler’s filmmaker. The actor Kurt Krueger said: “I do not recall Leni to have been hateful towards anyone, even Hitler, except Susan Sontag.”47

  * * *

  The excitement of seeing Susan take down Riefenstahl can blind the reader to certain problems in “Fascinating Fascism.” The first has to do with feminism. In 1972, she published a long and eloquent piece, “The Double Standard of Aging.” In 1973, she published another long essay, “The Third World of Women.” In 1975, she published two shorter pieces, “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?” and “Beauty: How Will It Change Next?” These are among the best essays Sontag ever wrote, not least because they explicitly show connections between the image-world of “beauty” and the real world of actual human lives. By describing how ruthlessly women were judged for their failure to resemble representations of women, her essays on beauty and aging take their place alongside her very best writing, offering illustration after illustration of the theses of On Photography.