Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Their excellence makes it all the more noteworthy that she never republished them.48 Except for the essay on Riefenstahl, all the essays in Under the Sign of Saturn were about men; and even if the feminist pieces do not quite fit alongside those essays, Sontag had plenty of opportunities to collect them in the later volumes that preserved far less worthy writings. Almost everything she wrote in a magazine eventually found its way into a book. But Sontag had a sense for which way the cultural winds were blowing; and by the end of the 1970s, as its earliest, most urgent goals were achieved, feminism had lost a certain momentum.

  In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill. In 1965, the Supreme Court legalized contraception, and in 1973 abortion. These victories, and a profound shift in the culture over the course of the 1960s, made feminism seem unstoppable. This was the tone of a meeting at Town Hall, in Midtown Manhattan, on April 30, 1971, during which Norman Mailer faced a panel including Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling, and—demurely, from the audience—Susan Sontag. The commemorative film Town Bloody Hall casts Mailer as the dragon of patriarchal reaction, slain by an army of women warriors. In a famous example, Cynthia Ozick seized on Mailer’s statement that “a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls” to ask a question she had long dreamed of posing. “Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?”49

  Despite his macho posturing, Mailer was an odd bogeyman. On the political substance, he hardly disagreed with any of the speakers. But the panel acknowledged no position to the right of Mailer’s, and the film reveals the intramural nature of so many leftist debates, including over communism and the Vietnam War. (This—not incidentally—was still raging.) It reveals, too, how speakers focused on the sins of Norman Mailer would be blindsided by Phyllis Schlafly, who galvanized opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment; Anita Bryant, who became synonymous with opposition to gay rights; Jerry Falwell, who brought enraged evangelicals into politics; or Ronald Reagan, who would be elected partly by that outrage.

  That night, at least, patriarchy was on the run. But the tide was already turning. It is astonishing to realize how quickly the bloom came off the rose of “second-wave feminism.” Carolyn Heilbrun wrote that a girl seeking to read about female lives other than those “of prime devotion to male destiny” would have “few or no exemplars” before 1970. But almost as soon as this work had begun—of recovering the female past, and particularly the female artistic past—overtly feminist writers began to be shunned. A prominent example was Adrienne Rich, a poet who had, throughout the sixties, written essays in no way inferior to Sontag’s; who had, like Sontag, appeared in the very first issue of The New York Review of Books; and who wrote a letter to the Review to protest a contention of “Fascinating Fascism”: that Riefenstahl’s revival could be attributed to a women’s movement seeking, too uncritically, to revive forgotten female artists.

  Without offering any evidence, Sontag had written that “part of the impetus behind Riefenstahl’s recent promotion to the status of a cultural monument surely owes to the fact that she is a woman” and that “feminists would feel a pang at having to sacrifice the one woman who made films that everybody acknowledges to be first-rate.”50 Rich, in her letter, pointed out that it was cinephiles, not feminists, who resurrected Riefenstahl, and that feminists had, in fact, protested the screenings.51 “One is not looking for a ‘line’ of propaganda or a ‘correct position,’” Rich wrote. “One is simply eager to see this woman’s [i.e., Sontag’s] mind working out of a deeper complexity, informed by emotional grounding; and this has not yet proven to be the case.”

  Sontag’s furious response suggested that Rich had touched a nerve. She accused Rich of resorting to “the infantile leftism of the 1960s” that verged into “sheer demagogy” from “that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind (‘intellectual exercise’) and emotion (‘felt reality’).” This way of thinking was “one of the roots of fascism.” Rich, an intellectual of the first rank, was subjected to the charge of illustrating “a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric: anti-intellectualism.”52 Sontag’s attack on Rich alienated many feminists, who would never consider her one of their own: a breach that may explain why Sontag’s own feminist writings were mothballed.

  * * *

  Rich, who never turned from feminism, was banished along with it. In the thirty-seven years that remained of her life, she would publish only a single further essay in the New York Review. It appeared six months after her letter about Sontag: it was presumably already in the works. Her reputation in that world would be severely restricted by the word she never disavowed: never simply a writer, she was always, inevitably, a feminist writer, a “woman writer.” In activism, in psychology, in universities, in the project of reclaiming of the female artistic legacy through biographies and criticism, feminism would go from strength to strength. But among the Family, it became more than unfashionable: it became liable to attract critical violence.

  Sontag, too, was determined not to be held back by a description that she found limiting. In her aspiration to universality, her example was Hannah Arendt, who would make her contribution to the cause of women by achieving equality—and, indeed, superiority—through talent alone.53 But there was something else. Sue, age eleven, made her “great decision” to be popular: “I understood the difference between the outside and the inside.” That instinct never soothed what David called her “profound, and in the end inconsolable, sense of being always the outsider.” Rich had another label attached to her: besides being known as a woman writer and a feminist writer, she was also a lesbian writer. Sontag was well aware that to be known as a lesbian would mean walling herself into a ghetto.

  “There was nothing to gain by coming out,” said the gay writer Edmund White.54 This did not mean keeping one’s relationships secret, though many people did. Jill Johnston—who, at the Town Hall meeting, proclaimed that “all women are lesbians except those who don’t know it yet”—only came out publicly in 1971, the year of the meeting. “In our world of the 60s,” Johnston said, speaking of only a few years before, “Susan was the only other lesbian I knew of.”55 It is an astonishing statement: Johnston was gay, an art critic for the Village Voice, and thus a denizen of what were presumably the most progressive corners of New York. In the post-Stonewall era, the stigma surrounding homosexuality had lessened, but not by much. “Everyone” in the New York literary world might know about a prominent person’s sexuality, said White, “but at that time ‘everyone’ equaled maybe four hundred people.” With great courage, Rich, by coming out publicly, bought herself a ticket to Siberia—or at least away from the patriarchal world of New York culture.

  In the pre-Internet age, said White, “you didn’t know someone was gay unless you had met someone and they had confided in you personally. Ninety-nine percent of people in the outer circle didn’t know” about Susan—and, as Johnston’s testimony shows, lots of people knew about Susan. The only way the outer circle could have known was if Susan—like Rich—began publishing explicitly gay works, or if, when invited to speak, she used phrases like “As a lesbian . . .”

  “People would have been really shocked,” said White, “and her readership would have been reduced by two-thirds.” Susan’s growing cultural power, the power of her admiration, depended on being unquestionably established as a universal arbiter. To be known as a feminist, much less as a lesbian, would have pushed her to the margins.

  * * *

  “Fascinating Fascism” was fun. Few object to seeing a Nazi propagandist debunked, and in this sense Riefenstahl was an easy target. And if the suggestion that feminists were responsible for her revival attracted Rich’s attention, few seemed to notice another aspect of the essay, far more troubling.

  The essay was divided into two “exhibits.” Riefenstahl’s Nuba Photograph were the first. The second, a cheap paperback called SS Regalia, was unconnected to Riefenstahl except inasmuc
h as it concerned Nazism. Its appeal, Sontag wrote, “is not scholarly but sexual”56—because it shows Photograph of uniforms rather than uniforms themselves. Despite what she calls “the banality of most of the Photograph,” this distinction mattered, she wrote, because Photograph of uniforms “are erotic materials and Photograph of erotic materials are the units of a particularly powerful and widespread sexual fantasy.”57

  It is unclear why she classifies this book as erotica, since she confesses that it contains no sexual references. “Precisely the innocuousness of practically all of the Photograph testifies to the power of the image: one is handling the breviary of a sexual fantasy.” As when she suggests that feminism is responsible for the revival of Riefenstahl, she does not offer any evidence for this statement: never quite says whose fantasy this is, or why this book is different from any of the countless volumes of militaria published about the Second World War.

  “In pornographic literature, films, and gadgetry throughout the world . . . the SS has become a referent of sexual adventurism.”58 Perhaps, but there was no shortage of real pornography available just up the street, in the bookshops of Times Square, that might have furnished better examples than this anonymous, unimportant, nonexplicit work. As we wonder who is producing this phenomenon, and who might be enjoying it, we get the answer. “It is among male homosexuals that the eroticizing of Nazism is most visible.” (Visible where?) “S-m, not swinging, is the big sexual secret of the last few years.”59 (How did she learn about it?) “How could a regime which persecuted homosexuals become a gay turn-on?”60 (It is a good question; it goes unanswered.) But the gay men turned on by Nazis, repeatedly mentioned, disappointingly fail to materialize.

  In Sontag’s strongest writings, example is piled upon example, quote upon quote, making it difficult for the reader to reach any conclusion other than hers. Her feminist writings, like her writings on photography, show, in mesmerizing detail, how apparently anonymous operations (camera, image, metaphor) distort and change, liberate and imprison. But “Fascinating Fascism” reveals a weakness of Sontag’s writings about two subjects, sex and politics, whenever they appeared outside the pages of books. Both could be aestheticized, but were not aesthetic. Sexual play, after all, was hardly a secret. Pornography was widely available and did not need to resort to the kind of coding Sontag discovered in SS Regalia. Fantasies of domination and submission had not emerged “in the last few years,” and they were neither gay nor straight. But even if they had been exclusively gay, there would still be a considerable distance between wearing leather at a Greenwich Village bar and getting off on images of Nazi brutality. (It is hard to know how else to interpret her repeated comparison of SS Regalia to “pornographic magazines.”)61 For one who conceived “all relationships as between a master and a slave,” projecting her own conceptions onto others—unquoted, unseen—was a way of deflecting those anxieties.

  “Fascinating Fascism” is an essay written by a person who derived her knowledge of sexuality from books—from a deranged genius like Mishima, or from a deranged mediocrity like the author of The Solar Anus:

  As the social contract seems tame in comparison to war, so fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice, and therefore unexciting. The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy.62

  Bataille’s assertion stands unchallenged. No wonder Rich’s suggestion that the essay lacked “emotional grounding” struck a nerve. The allegory that was the only pleasure a melancholic permits himself could, after all, so easily shade into deflection, distancing: into the passive voice. Inauthenticity was the price Sontag paid for maintaining her cultural centrality; and the center of that culture was about to shift.

  Chapter 25

  Who Does She Think She Is?

  Susan’s illness had many unintended consequences. One was to create a hairstyle that ranked alongside Elvis Presley’s greasy pompadour and Andy Warhol’s platinum fright wig as that rare coiffure that could, all by itself, identify the face over which it presided. It was simple: a single white streak rising from her forehead like a skunk’s stripe, setting off the black hair around it. It eventually became so identifiable that Saturday Night Live had a Sontag wig in its wardrobe department—a comic synecdoche for the New York intellectual.1

  Like many great ideas, its origins were simple. On August 20, 1966, Susan’s sister, Judith, married Morrie Cohen in San Mateo, California. Susan was in Europe and did not attend, a slight that would estrange the sisters for twenty years. Not long after the wedding, Judith and Morrie moved to Honolulu, where Judith worked for a department store and where, in 1970, they were joined by Mildred and Nat: the elder Sontags had earlier moved to Northern California when Judith did, and now they followed them to Hawaii. (Judith and Morrie later fled them again and moved to Maui, where Nat and Mildred did not follow.)

  Susan first visited Honolulu in 1973, following her trip to China. In “Project for a Trip to China,” she mentioned that “after three years I am exhausted by the nonexistent literature of unwritten letters and unmade telephone calls that passes between me and M.”2 The alternating enmity and closeness between Susan and Mildred set the pattern for many of her relationships, even if the enmity was mostly in Susan’s head. But her visits to her family were always difficult. “She dreaded every minute,” said a friend. “She couldn’t wait to leave.”3 When Susan got sick, she did not tell her family, who only learned when a cousin happened to see her cancer written about in the Hollywood Reporter.4

  Eventually, when Susan was better, she flew to Hawaii. There, she met Paul Brown, the hairstylist who had become close to Nat and Mildred. In the tropical sun, “I was afraid she was going to burn to a crisp because she was like a piece of paper, so white,” said Brown. Mildred enlisted him in her perennial campaign to groom her daughter—“get Susan to dress better, wear makeup.” A picture from the makeover survives: Susan in full makeup, wearing what looks to be a négligée. She had not lost her hair to the chemotherapy, but it had gone white. Paul cut it and dyed all but one swatch an inky black.5

  * * *

  “Standard accounts of epidemics,” Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, “are mainly of the devastating effect of disease upon character.”6 Pain can wreck even a saint. “It’s like any one of the great emergencies that bring out the best and worst in people,” she said, speaking of her cancer.7 In health, wrote Virginia Woolf, “our intelligence domineers over our senses. . . . In health, a ‘genial pretence must be kept up’; in illness that make-believe ceases.” Illness, Woolf wrote, is when “the police [are] off duty.”8

  And so it was with Susan. Her police—her superego, her self-awareness—went off duty. Friends remarked that she was even more than usually insensitive to others, more prone to fabrication. Even when they were teenagers, Merrill thought she was dishonest. “Is she honest?” Harriet asked. Eva thought “there was something very wrong with Susan.” Susan saw herself as “struggling to be honest, just, honorable.” Don’s description of the “blind area in Susan”—“she was not smart or intuitive emotionally”—was echoed by Irene, Alfred, and, not least, Susan herself, who concurred that she was not “very sharp about other people, about what they are thinking and feeling.”

  This awareness was rarely displayed in public. In “Trip to Hanoi,” she mentioned her “empathic talents.” That essay was an unusual instance of the first person that she had shunned, at least outside her journals, and she was, as she said, uneasy with its demands. When she channeled her psychological perception into portraits of others, as in her essays on Benjamin or Canetti, it was often acute. She had always had a tendency toward dishonesty and grandiosity—but she knew this, and reproached herself for it. Now, dismissing other people became an essential part of her self-image.

  She had not accepted the advice of her doctors in New York; she had found a solution of her own. By going to Paris, she had not only taken charge of her therapy. She had actively ignored her New Y
ork doctors, and in her retelling, she came to believe that ignoring others was the key to survival. “Not listening to anyone and only trusting herself and having that save her life” became the center of her story, said Miranda Spieler, her assistant from 1994 to 1996. “It made her feel that her future and her safety were tied to listening to herself. Her stubbornness—some of the refusal to yield in relation to other people—all refers back to this moment where being willful and stubborn saved her life.”9

  Yet Sontag was not unique, as the cancer historian Siddhartha Mukherjee observed. “The patient withdraws into herself, becomes aggressive, has no time for people—is fighting all alone.”10

  * * *

  Susan, however, was not fighting all alone. Her relationship with Nicole had been strained before her illness; but cancer papered over their problems and brought friends rushing to her side. The French Brigade, as one friend called them, appeared: “three or four of the most exquisite women,” he said. “Fantasy: beautiful, civilized, sophisticated, rich women.”11 These included Carlotta, whom Nicole “loathed,”12 and whom she blamed for Susan’s sickness. The loathing was partly attributable to jealousy, since Susan’s love for Nicole never matched her mad passion for Carlotta. The rivals kept up appearances for the patient’s sake, but, said Roger Deutsch, “everything was at an operatic pitch in [Susan’s] house.”13

  Nicole had been instrumental in bringing Susan to Paris for the treatment that saved her life. And during Susan’s treatment, Nicole was a mother figure, in more ways than one. Though she stopped drinking in the late 1970s, she was a “florid alcoholic,”14 and even as she mothered Susan—fed her, bathed her, made sure she took her medicine—she also re-created the hostile dependency that, as in Susan’s previous relations, allowed neither happy marriage nor clean break. When Susan was still in chemotherapy, they began the same agonizing process that marked her breakups with Harriet, Irene, and Carlotta. Now, though, there was an extra layer of desperation, since Susan feared that her very life depended on Nicole. In 1981, she mentioned “the old dependence felt since 1975, that I will get sick again if Nicole is not in my life.”15