Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  How to be alone, how not to be alone—the perennial problem.

  I grieve, but dully. For it’s not just that I love and miss N., but that I am so disappointed in her and in myself.

  Perhaps the end of my life with N. is my last chance to be first-rate. (Intellectually, as an artist.) I’ve been wallowing in mediocrity and compromise—for that warmth, that warmth without which I thought I couldn’t live.16

  Four years later, she and Nicole were still enmeshed, and Susan was still trying to get away. Finally, Nicole herself put an end to it. Susan ran into Frederic Tuten in the street in Paris. “Nicole broke up with me,” she told him sadly. “When this kind of thing happens, you’re always sixteen years old.”17 If Susan needed “safe harbors” and “feudal relationships,” she constantly rebelled against the helplessness that made her seek them, and against the people eager to provide them. “I feel myself a prisoner of revulsion,” she wrote in 1981, “finding most everyone with whom I have contact ugly and shallow. And those feelings are, I feel at the same time, evidence of my failure: failure to love and to be loved by someone I can take pleasure in.”18 This was the limit of her will, and she knew it. She believed, David wrote, that “whatever she could will in her life she could probably accomplish as well (except in love: there she thought herself bereft of any gift and did not believe the will of any use at all).”19

  * * *

  “The perennial problem,” her incapacity to be alone, grew more acute. Years before, she had expressed this brutally to Stephen Koch: “She once was in a Chinese restaurant with me, and we were talking about solitude and living with people. She said: I refuse to live alone. I won’t live alone. Rather than live alone, I could live—and would live—with any person in this room chosen at random.”20

  Her house was packed. Lots of people—David; Nicole and Carlotta; assorted visitors and guests; Roger Deutsch; Don Levine; and then David’s girlfriend Sigrid Nunez, a young writer—spent longer or shorter periods in the house. Deutsch ended up spending more than two years on Riverside Drive, from 1975 to 1978, and noticed the perverse effects on both Susan and David of one apparent blessing: the money friends provided.

  Susan had always been supported, more or less directly, in her feudal relationship with Roger Straus. Fame and reputation had never translated into the kind of sales that would allow her to live without financial worries. Straus helped by publishing unprofitable books (the screenplays of Brother Carl and Duet for Cannibals, for example) and by paying her advances for books she never wrote: in 1973, she wrote him about “at least four books for the next two years”: a “China book,” a book of stories, a novel, and a collection of essays, none of which materialized. (A book of stories, I, etcetera, was published five years later.) He championed her abroad and sold her foreign rights; he often paid her bills. According to his secretary and “office wife” Peggy Miller, Susan was the author he loved the best; and following her illness, Roger added her to the company’s health insurance.21

  But she was not insured when she got sick, and Bob Silvers, along with Peggy and Roger, helped raise funds for her treatment. They were almost too successful. “Their everyday life was English muffins and a Chinese chicken dinner and then once or twice a week being asked to Roger Straus’s house for dinner or being given tickets to a concert,” Deutsch said. “The change in lifestyle was immediate and it was unbelievable. She started getting driven around in limos and taking private planes and going on vacations, paid for, and her whole lifestyle changed—completely, completely changed.”

  Susan kept careful track of the contributors. If people who were in a position to help did not punch their weight, she grumbled, even when they were not close friends. “If somebody like Jackie Onassis put in $2,000,” Deutsch remembered, “Susan would say, ‘That woman is so rich. Jackie Onassis. Who does she think she is?’”22

  * * *

  Susan’s fear of being alone, and the length and agony of her treatment, made it hard for David to come into an independent life. His Wanderjahre over, he had decided to go back to school. At Princeton, it was hard for him to integrate into campus life, and not only because of Susan’s illness: he was twenty-three, a sophomore who was older than most seniors; and his culture and experience gave him far more sophistication than most students of any age.

  So David lived mainly at Susan’s, attending classes only a few days a week. The people in his mother’s entourage—the sort of society she herself had dreamed of frequenting in Tucson or Sherman Oaks—formed a natural milieu for him; and if, in the view of a doting single mother, David had “a great mind,” that mind still lacked the training that Susan had undergone in thousands of nights at the library. “He had very few talents except for being brilliant and funny,” said Roger Deutsch. He got a D on a paper for Carl Schorske, for example, a historian of Vienna who was one of the grandees of Princeton. Schorske, the kind of eminence his mother would have dazzled at Chicago or Harvard, could tell that David had not put in the time: “He did that Carl Schorske thing in one night on amphetamines,” said Deutsch. Schorske ordered him to rewrite it.23

  David was “basically just devastated.” He would hardly have been the first college student to stay up all night and turn in a shoddy paper, but he was the son of a woman with tyrannical standards; and his reaction to even such a routine disappointment reflected a fear of falling short. “He felt like a failure,” said Sigrid Nunez. “He was very easily humiliated.”24 David was “sweet and not arrogant at all,” said Deutsch—in visible contrast to his mother, always tremendously alive to being patronized. But now, his friend was shocked to see him don a new persona. “This man is deliberately trying to turn himself into an asshole,” Deutsch realized. David agreed: “I’ve decided: No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

  He’d say something rude that would never have come out of his mouth before. I said to him, “You’re changing,” and he said: “Yes, and it’s a good thing. Don’t expect me to be who I was before.”25

  The world around Susan was nasty. She had always been attracted to exceptional people, but her friends agree that she was never bitchy or particularly interested in gossip. Sigrid pointed out that Susan was an elitist—interested in people of high achievement—rather than a snob—interested in people of high birth or income. Still, every night’s dinner provided an opportunity for new guests, along with Susan and David, to savage those who had sat at the same table the night before. “If they talked about another person, it was always in negative terms or gossip terms,” Deutsch said. “Who he’s fucking or he’s such a jerk or he’s really stupid. I never remembered a conversation that was ‘Oh, how’s Sally?’ and we’d talk about how nice Sally is.”26

  They began to engage in ritual displays of superiority. “Who should we be snubbing?” David was once overheard saying to Susan at a theater intermission.27 In the years following Susan’s cancer, jokes circulated about their attempt to constitute themselves as a two-person aristocracy. Paul Thek mocked “the establishment of the Sontag dynasty in Amer. Letters.” Nicole Stéphane called David “le monstre”; others called him “le dauphin.” “David got this snobbery from Susan without much to back it up,” said Susan’s friend Gary Indiana. “He had not accomplished anything impressive in life, but he thought he was part of an aristocracy.”28

  Part of being an aristocrat was inheriting things. Susan suggested, even before he finished college, that David be considered “the heir apparent” to The New York Review of Books, and take it over from Bob Silvers, whom he and Susan idolized.29 Later, Susan would express her desire to see David inherit FSG from Roger Straus. When he graduated from Princeton in 1978, the year after she finished her chemo and published Illness as Metaphor, Roger hired him as an editor at FSG. He had no prior editorial experience, but, as Peggy Miller put it, he was “mad” for the job, and he was also “smarter than everyone else.”30 His contacts in the literary world helped—he was on a first-name basis with many FSG authors, and his Spanish and French were an asset as wel
l.

  In a highly incestuous arrangement, Susan insisted that he become her editor. A troubled personal relationship became a troubled professional relationship. Even before he started at FSG, they were constantly fighting. David had not failed to observe that Susan tended to love people in inverse proportion to their love for her—“I always fell for the bullies—thinking, if they don’t find me so hot they must be great”—and would withdraw, refusing to speak to her in not-quite-secret disputes whose exact nature was veiled in mystery. Edmund White wrote: “Exactly what was going on between them wasn’t spelled out. Here again they seemed a bit like royalty—a dispute was registered throughout the court without anyone knowing the precise terms of estrangement.”31

  As she did with her lovers, “she could humiliate herself before David,” said Minda Rae Amiran. “Susan apologizing, begging forgiveness.”32 She would grovel her way back: “She would do things like make Nicole buy David very expensive French suits, three or four at a time,” said Don Levine.33 Another favorite bribe was the luxurious cowboy boots that he accumulated and to which, in 1981, he dedicated his first book. The general impression of David was, to borrow Philip Rieff’s self-description, of “a profoundly uncomfortable man.” He seemed to be undergoing a “deep fight within himself to control something,” said Robert Silvers. “I don’t want to know the inner life of David.”34

  * * *

  Neither did his mother. The more David tried to distance himself, the more avidly Susan seemed to worship him. Her worship was detrimental to both, and he became, like Carlotta, a screen for her projections. These took precedence over any rational maternal consideration of what might be best for him. She reproduced with creepy exactitude—the word “creepy” is hers—the way her mother had treated her when she was a girl. In 1967, she had already seen this problem coming.

  My own ageing: the fact that I look much younger than I am seems

  1) like an imitation of my mother—part of the slavish thralldom to her. She sets the standards

  2) like still keeping up the secret promise to protect her—that I would lie about her age, help her to look younger (What better way to establish that she’s younger than that I’m younger than I am?)

  3) like my mother’s curse. (I hate anything in me—especially physical things—that’s like her.) I felt my tumor and the possibility of a hysterectomy as her bequest, her legacy, her curse—part of the reason I was so depressed about that

  4) like betraying my mother—for I look younger when it doesn’t do her any good. Now she is getting old and looks it, but I’m not, I stay young—I increase the difference of age between us.

  5) like a trap she’s laid for me—so now people think David and I are sister and brother, and that pleases me immensely, turns me on. And then I remember her—and I boast of my age, dragging the number into conversation when it’s not really necessary, adding a year on to David’s age35

  In 1985, Edmund White wrote a novel, Caracole, which ended his friendship with David and Susan because two of its characters—a famous intellectual and her son—were so recognizable.

  More than once she’d assured him she knew what it was like to be stuck with a child in their nearly childless world of artists and intellectuals; after all she (with Mateo’s distant if affectionate assistance) had raised a child, Daniel, who was now thirty and looked so nearly as though he were her brother that her maternity would have been suspect had not their celebrated, even infamous past together been so well documented. Nevertheless Mathilda was delighted when naive or provincial people mistook Daniel for her brother or lover, and to increase the confusion she often referred to him coyly as “the darling.”

  “Daniel,” White also wrote, “liked to say Mathilda had less insight into herself than anyone else he knew.”36 But even where Susan did display that insight—privately, and in flashes—she had trouble translating it into action. This had often been the case, but in the years of her illness, the situation worsened. Her diaries—that repository of her authentic self—dried up, became less and less astute.

  Her comments about David are notable for their absence, but her few remarks reveal moments of understanding that her presence, and her increasing neediness, was oppressive. “I must think about David,” she reminded herself in 1971. A friend

  said (rightly) that I don’t describe him, I describe my relationship with him (us)—when she asked me to describe him, I felt blocked—embarrassed—as if she were inviting me to describe the best part of myself. That’s the key to the problem: I identify myself too much with him, him too much with myself. What a burden for him.37

  And in 1975, shortly before she got cancer, she wrote:

  D. told me he’s noticed my anxiety this spring—each time he leaves the house for a few hours, to go to the library at Columbia, to spend an afternoon with Roger or Gary, etc. What a dreadful burden for him!38

  In 1977, she left the Riverside apartment and moved downtown, to an apartment at 207 East Seventeenth Street. From that point on, Susan and David would not share a home, but that did not mean David, now twenty-five, would be free to go: he ended up next door. An appalled Paul Thek wrote:

  In that weekend of The Move you changed your image in my mind; a change from an image of a generous very human, tender person to an image of a manipulative harridan frightened out of her own mind that her son (at long last) wanted his own life, and it seemed you became willing to use all manner of very unpleasant maneuvers to force people into the positions required, with little respect or understanding of their own private needs.39

  She gave proof of this when David broke up with Sigrid, who had lived in the apartment on Riverside Drive for more than a year. David was “madly, madly in love, and dangerously in love,” said Roger Deutsch. Later, Deutsch was astonished that their breakup went unmentioned in Susan’s journals. If she could justly write that she “was (felt) profoundly neglected, ignored, unperceived as a child,” David could say the same. He began showing signs of depression: “He would go to sleep and then he would actually sleep for maybe thirty-six hours,” Sigrid remembered.40 For Deutsch, Susan’s narcissism explained why David changed: “He’s the nice guy, and he’s got this mother who clearly does not love him for himself.” Instead, she cared about him in relation to her. “Did he go out to dinner with her or not? That’s all she cared about. It’s about being a reflection of her. And he deals with it by humiliating other people, because then he’s not humiliated.”41 One of the people he would humiliate would be Susan herself, whenever he got the chance. “He would know what would hurt her,” said Nunez, “and he would do it.”

  Chapter 26

  The Slave of Seriousness

  In public, the postcancer Sontag was invulnerable. From the end of the 1970s, she held court alongside other grandees (Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Donald Barthelme) at the New York Institute for the Humanities, whose members gathered to hear visiting speakers and discuss their own work. Sontag, with the white streak in her hair, was one of the Institute eminences, and visitors often marveled at the combative wit and intelligence on display. “At one point Susan took great offense at something I had said and turned on me in full force,” said the Australian writer Dennis Altman, “a majestic if rather terrifying experience.”1 This was the Sontag, majestic and terrifying, whose raised eyebrow made and broke careers, who penned essays like “Fascinating Fascism,” who knew everyone and everything.

  But another Sontag was writing fiction whose main principle might be called narrative uncertainty. The uncertainty she introduced into her early novels and films was befuddling. Her insistence that nothing could be known—of her characters, of the events that befell them—made those works impossible to engage emotionally. The reader resented being thwarted by theoretical gimmickry, and only the devout, one suspects, read or watched to the end.

  Uncertainty was a frustrating principle around which to organize a story. But when shifted from the narrative to the narrator, it approached truth by the same means previousl
y used to mask it. The actual woman behind the increasingly formidable Sontag persona was profoundly uncertain. When this Sontag—not the one who fell back on rude assertion or artsy “Marienbad” theorizing—allowed uncertainty to seep into her writings, those writings invariably gained in resonance and authority. The results resembled the lists that litter her journals, or the collages of the surrealists, or the boxes of Joseph Cornell: fragments, in their shattered—which is to say their authentic—form. Life is lived in a cloud of unknowing; experience, memory, and dreams are never more than shards.

  The book she published in 1978, I, etcetera, collected eight such stories, all of which had been written before her illness: from a time when she could still allow herself uncertainty. Dedicated to her mother, to whom she remained intermittently close, it opened, quite literally, with Sue. Written when she thought she was not going to China, “Project for a Trip to China” gathered what she knew of her father: snippets of memories, clumps of sentences, ample blank space. This kaleidoscopic approach, facts and aphorisms heaped up without attempting to force them to any totalizing revelation, was a feature of her best essays. These did not attempt, as in the Riefenstahl essay, to assert or to damn. Instead, they expressed a desire to revive the dead (her father); to “think about the unthinkable” (Artaud); to define the indefinable (camp). These writings do not shut off discussion. They leave it open, stimulate it; and stimulating discussion is the function—the achievement—of the great critic.

  * * *