Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  * * *

  Susan found her son’s addiction “unforgivable,” said Boyers. “She could tell it was ruinous to him personally and professionally and that there was no possible way to forgive it.” To speak of forgiveness is to speak of sin; Susan saw addiction in the same moralistic terms that most people did. But in this area as in so many others, she displayed an inability to conjugate “always tell the truth” with “I don’t want to know.” To condemn drug use meant telling the truth—about others. “People needed to be told,” Sigrid Nunez imagined her insisting. “But she told them unkindly, and often when there were others present.”35 And she often took refuge in dogmatism when hiding something from herself.

  One astonishing case is an essay dating from the decline in David’s health, her relationship with Lucinda, and her break with the Left. It was the kind of piece she specialized in, a career-spanning evaluation of a major European writer: this time, of Jean-Paul Sartre. Through several drafts, “Sartre’s Abdication” presents perhaps the most thinly camouflaged of all her self-portraits, and one of which she seems unaware. It was, indeed, a work of autofiction: using Sartre as a stand-in for Sontag, and condemning him savagely for many of her own self-diagnosed faults. Her reading of Sartre has all the ingredients of a novel: the story of an outstanding mind who forfeited greatness because he failed to be honest personally. It was a failure and “a tragedy—for the misuse and devolution of his mind, one of the most fertile, lavishly gifted of the century, was brought about not by an intellectual but a flaw of character; a deficiency of the culture of private life even more than of political culture.”

  The failure was twofold. First, he had embraced a public role. Her insights on the pitfalls facing the public intellectual are brilliant. “No good writer speaks as well as he can write. (To write means to revise.)” Sartre chitchatted his way through thousands of interviews, accepting “an invitation to self-vulgarization, to the adulteration of one’s ideas, and the leveling of ideas into opinions,” she insisted. The interview form was a leveling one, “an ideal arm of the triumphant anti-elitist notion of literature.”

  This notion accorded with Sartre’s communism. He was given to utterances that sounded suspiciously like Susan in Hanoi: “In a socialist society such as we envisage it there will no longer be any intellectuals,” for example. He saw “vanguard literary works . . . as a luxury of bourgeois society. (Hence, the infamous judgment that in the Third World one could not read Robbe-Grillet.)” It was hard enough to read Robbe-Grillet in the First World, she admitted—but that, of course, was not what Sartre meant. His choice of party over nuance or truth, she wrote, resulted from a tendency to overgeneralize the aesthetic or metaphoric view of the world. “When it came to politics, Sartre treated it, too, as a moral fiction.” She described “Sartre’s basic strategy” as “the conflating of the real and the imaginary.” The result was a career “shot through with philistinism—in the familiar guise of moralism.”

  There is much justice in the ideal life span Canetti sketched, which she quoted in “Mind as Passion.”

  Fifty years to be a child and a pupil; fifty years to get to know the world and see all that exists in it; one hundred years to work for the benefit of all; and then, when he has achieved all human experience, another hundred years to live in wisdom, to rule, to teach, and to set an example. Oh, how valuable life would be if it lasted three hundred years.36

  She turned fifty as she was writing this essay. She had been a child and a pupil. She had needed time to outgrow political errors; and if she was right that Sartre’s had been reprehensible, she was in a better position than almost anyone to explain why he had made them. Instead, the finger points obstinately away from herself—at a man, she wrote, “always struggling against the experience of sluggishness, mental senescence; obsessed by the stupidity of the ‘others.’”37

  * * *

  The thrust of “Sartre’s Abdication” concerns how, exactly, Sartre had blown his mind.

  Perhaps the most inclusive pact with the devil, because it proceeds from a further stepping up of his ambition as a writer, as well as the most devastating, because it yoked physical ruin to mental, was the pact with speed.

  This disaster caused Sartre’s health to collapse, and fluency to degenerate into logorrhea. “Saint Genet,” his long study of Jean Genet, “is not merely logorrheic but has the characteristic over-explicitness of writing done on speed,” she wrote. Her description of Sartre’s drug use, and the style that resulted from it, bears only the most cursory textual or medical reference. The unsupported assertions that had undermined much of her political writing, from Vietnam to Sweden to Leni Riefenstahl, proliferate, and a reader familiar with her own history will find it studded with elaborately disguised confessions:

  The speed was a response to the pre-existing character of Sartre’s work, to the ambition and anxiety behind the work. Feelings of omnipotence, the attraction to schemes of total understanding, to the idea of totality itself—these were magnified by speed. . . . With speed came anxiety as well as euphoria.

  His Faustian ambition, “which it never occurred to him to criticize,”

  far surpassed in grandiosity (and hubris) the dream harbored from childhood, so relentlessly scorned (with such rhetorical overkill as out-of-date, bourgeois, idealistic, neurotic) in the last decades, of becoming a 19th-century-style Great Writer.

  Amphetamines, he said,

  are all right for philosophy, where they “induce facility,” though not for literature, because to work on a novel one must be “absolutely normal.” Wrong. . . . To use amphetamines was, essentially, to give up on literature; set the seal on his abandonment of literature.38

  * * *

  “I’ve been working about sixteen hours a day, seven days a week,” Susan wrote Roger Straus from Paris in 1973. “I wish to hell I could write faster. I might seem to write fast, or at least faster than some writers, but it isn’t true. I just stay longer hours at the typewriter than anyone else.”39 She was a person of extraordinary energy. “She would stay up so long,” said Sigrid Nunez. “The little lamp was on for so many hours that it burnt the shade.”40

  But much of that energy was provided by speed. Its first commercial production occurred in 1933, the year of Susan’s birth, and it would be decades before the effects of amphetamine were fully understood. It was given to pilots in World War II to keep them awake on long bombing runs; and after the war, pop stars started using speed to stay perky for show after show after show; it was then pushed to the American housewife as a weight-loss tool, the guise in which it entered the mainstream. Around the same time, writers discovered it, too. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road were composed on speed. In both, a jumpy euphoria alternated with histrionics and depression: the amphetamine style.

  It was this personality that Sontag began to develop in the sixties. She would use amphetamines, often heavily, for at least a quarter of a century.41 They helped her concentrate. But if all they had done was deprive her of sleep, that would have been enough: every torturer knows that keeping a prisoner from sleeping is the best way to drive her mad. Amphetamines did more than that, though. Speed worsened the personality disorders grouped together in “Cluster B.” These fall short of physically dangerous psychosis, but nonetheless make life extremely unpleasant for both patients and those around them. Symptoms include fears of abandonment and feelings of inconsolable loneliness, which trigger frantic neediness; antisocial behaviors such as rudeness (it is hard for such people to feel empathy) and volatility: mood swings that doom relationships. Cluster B sufferers tend toward drama and—to compensate their sense of low self-worth—are prone toward attention-seeking and grandiosity. Their desperate need to be admired leads them to issue cruel judgments of others.

  When Susan started taking speed, the effects of amphetamine use, like those of parental alcoholism, were only dimly understood. But the upshot of both was that, as Virginia Woolf wrote, the police went off duty. Added t
o the consequences of her cancer treatment and her string of failed relationships, she would have increasing difficulty keeping herself in line. Even people who loved her most—especially people who loved her most—were dumbfounded. If, in her early years, she could be insensitive and self-involved—even, as she had noted, “extraordinarily tactless”—her treatment of others would reach such proportions that outré stories about Susan Sontag eventually became part of American literary folklore.

  This behavior was chalked up to the eccentricities of a legendary diva. But to hear too many of these stories is to realize that something darker was at play. For those who have studied amphetamine use, this behavior was typical of Cluster B. The B, therapists grimly joke, stands for “bastard.”

  * * *

  When she asked for his help in editing the Sartre essay, Gary Indiana was shocked. “She’d been attracted to the subject. She was a speed freak, obviously,” he said. For years, he had bought speed for her. Other people raised an eyebrow, too. As she was describing Sartre’s addiction, David sardonically commented to Helen Graves: “Meanwhile she’s got these caches of the stuff all over the apartment.”

  Gary was baffled by the attitude, and by the writing itself: the manuscript is repetitive, insistent, impossible to follow. “She had generated bales and bales, and she got very angry with me about this because reading through it I realized that Susan wrote in a way that no one I’ve ever known wrote or writes.”

  Bob Silvers, who she hoped would publish it, found it “odd.” In a letter, he said that her excessive use of superlatives (“extraordinary,” “stupendous,” “dazzling”) without concrete examples undermined her case, and objected to the unfootnoted assertion that Sartre had been addicted to speed:

  It will come as a surprise to many. A central question seems at first passed over and then touched on in passing: how we know about this, and how much we know about it. . . . Are his talks with de Beauvoir the only source we have? When did he first disclose it and in what way? As it is, you very strongly broach the thesis of his pact with amphetamines on page 4 and it is not until page 7 that we learn that de Beauvoir talked to him about it reproachfully in 1974. You say on page 5 that his early work acquired the traits of the amphetamine style. Did he acknowledge that this was the time that he began to take speed? Did he say that Saint Genet was written while taking it (p. 6)? These questions naturally arise because the reader has no idea of the status of the connection being made: the reader will not know if it is something you knew from him personally; if it is a speculation based on rumor and on a diagnostic reading of the work; or if it is something declared by Sartre himself.42

  Silvers never published the essay. To read it in draft form is to see something sadder than confused writing or undocumented assertions. It is to see a loss of self-awareness, which is to say: a loss of self. “I won’t let ‘them’ take it away from me,” she once vowed. “I won’t be annihilated.”

  As a philosophical matter, giving “no idea of the status of the connection being made” between an artist and her subject reverses the traditional objection to metaphor, which is that it distorts the very thing it attempts to portray. Such distortion may be an inevitable consequence of language. But to deploy Sartre as a metaphor for Sontag without acknowledging that he is, in fact, a metaphor—is strange. This is the acknowledgment that separates fiction from lying. It was also a refusal of the revolution of feminism and the gay rights movement, whose truths would soon be demonstrated by the catastrophe of AIDS.

  Chapter 28

  The Word Won’t Go Away

  The disease that succeeded tuberculosis and cancer as the most feared scourge of the modern age began to appear in the United States at the end of 1980, two years after the publication of Illness as Metaphor. Sontag could not have conceived of a better illustration of her theses about the deadly workings of metaphor. Neither could the feminist and gay thinkers of the sixties and seventies have imagined how soon their assertion of the relation of the physical body to the apparent abstractions of politics would be clad, in the eighties, with flesh—as often as not, their own.

  AIDS pushed questions of language to the forefront of politics. The disease bumped up against a host of linguistic difficulties. Writers groped for military metaphors to describe the apparently unstoppable “invasion.” Some of these difficulties were the same Sontag had earlier adumbrated with reference to tuberculosis and cancer. Others were new. The first and most intractable was that to speak of AIDS was to speak of sex—gay sex. The need to speak clearly—without religious sanctimony or political posturing, without blaming victims or feeding panic—was a matter of life and death.

  Sontag was far from the only person—far from the only gay person—who struggled to find an appropriate language. To read the literature from the gay movement in the eighties is to discover phrases that sound far more dated than the language of the civil rights movement or feminism from twenty years earlier. Even the most radical African American and feminist activists stood in a venerable tradition. In the age of AIDS, gay activists had to invent a grammar to allow them to speak about their lives. AIDS sparked a revolution, and so would the language discovered by the activism it unleashed. But it would be a revolution that Sontag would largely sit out: unable to speak certain words.

  * * *

  Rumors of a “gay cancer” started spreading at the beginning of the eighties. The first notice in the New York Times came on July 3, 1981: RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS. The cancer, “rapidly fatal,” was called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Little was known of its cause, which is partly why the linguistic confusion that characterized the disease’s career appeared in that first article. But that article, and that language, also relied heavily on stereotypes about gay men. It suggested a link to promiscuity that would be durable: the victims were “homosexual men who have had multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners, as many as 10 sexual encounters each night up to four times a week.”

  The phrase made the disease seem restricted to sexual athletes, which it was not: a single encounter could mean infection. The sentence suggested that anyone with a more prosaic sex life was safe; also immune, a doctor affirmed, were women and heterosexuals. Male homosexuality—rather than certain behaviors—was a pathogen: “There was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion. ‘The best evidence against contagion,’ Dr. Curran said, ‘is that no cases have been reported to date outside the homosexual community or in women.’”1 This was an embarrassingly unscientific statement: homosexuals are not physiologically different from heterosexuals.

  If the words in a single article, published long before the epidemic was understood, had not been repeated and amplified in the following years, they would not be worth parsing now. But that language contributed to the shame surrounding the disease and complicated the attempt to understand it. The truth was that nobody, at first, knew what was causing these strange cancers. Joseph Sonnabend, a doctor in the heart of the gay community of Greenwich Village, only a few blocks from Susan’s house, had an idea. He had been a laboratory microbiologist before going into private practice, where his experience led him toward sexually transmitted diseases. “There were almost no specialists in sexually transmitted diseases,” he said. “As a field, it was not regarded as respectable. Doctors would giggle at words like ‘gonorrhea.’ They couldn’t utter the words ‘anal intercourse.’”2

  Cancer patients had been thwarted by medical prudery—in the early 1950s, the New York Times refused an advertisement for a group supporting breast cancer patients with the explanation that “The Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages.”3 And gay men, even before AIDS, had trouble being taken seriously by doctors. “There was squeamishness about homosexuality,” said Dr. Sonnabend. “The things I used to hear from colleagues were just so horrible. They made jokes about gay men, absolutely.” Yet researchers faced a difficulty as the epidemic spread. To describe this as a “gay disease” meant letting it be trivi
alized as a problem for a marginal population toward which there was significant hostility. It became important to find words to disassociate the disease from homosexuality. Almost a year after the New York Times first mentioned it, a name was proposed. No longer GRID—gay-related immune deficiency—the disease became AIDS: acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

  This terminology brought problems of its own. AIDS was, at least at first, a gay disease, and Sonnabend, like many others, suspected it was sexually transmitted. “What became apparent to me was that people who were getting this disease weren’t just anywhere. They were placed in geographical locations where the prevalence of microorganisms was very high,” venues for gay sex in New York, San Francisco, and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles. But to emphasize that would feed a stereotype and invite the opprobrium of the right wing, which had mounted populist attacks on homosexuals in the seventies and was now, in the eighties, in power in Washington. “You don’t want to point out that substantial numbers of gay men were having multiple anonymous sexual exchanges,” Sonnabend saw. “You don’t want to say anything like that because that’s somehow judgmental.”

  And so activists went out of their way to universalize the language of AIDS. “They would go to great lengths to say this is not a gay disease. It’s everybody’s disease,” Sonnabend said. In 1983, Sonnabend helped found the American Foundation for AIDS Research. “Without my knowledge, they were putting out press releases that nobody’s safe from AIDS, everybody’s going to get it. They did it for fund-raising purposes.” This was understandable but deceptive: some groups were indeed at much higher risk. But if it was not everyone’s disease, it soon would be. In 1983, worldwide only a few hundred people had died. The toll eventually reached nearly forty million: one of the greatest pandemics in history.