Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Money was always a problem for Mildred and Nat, but their Hawaiian retirement had been otherwise pleasant. They managed to go on the occasional cruise, and they had their friends, including Mildred’s hairdresser Paul Brown and Nat’s nephew Jeff Kissel. Jeff came to Hawaii for college and, in his early years in Honolulu, saw the couple at least five days a week. They were active until the early eighties, when Mildred, in her seventies, was crippled by arthritis, forcing Nat into the caregiver role. It was only then that her drinking became more visible.

  “She was never in any way impaired by alcohol,” said Kissel. “She was never aggressive. She would just retreat to the bedroom. The evening would need to end after an hour and a half.” Brown agreed: “She wasn’t the kind of alcoholic that gets sloppy, or drunk, or stupid. Never.”2 But the retreat to the bedroom was one of the most painful memories of Susan’s childhood: the departure of the dependable presence a child needs to feel secure. “The queen of denial” always melted away when things got unpleasant; that is why Susan could say that her “profoundest experience is of indifference.”

  Mildred had her admirers, but her daughters were not among them. “From the reaction after my mother died,” said Judith, “her friends were totally bereft, and thought she was the most wonderful person who ever lived, and so beautiful.”

  She was really charming to just about everyone except us. She was like Susan in that she could put on a different face in different relationships. She pigeonholed us. I was the average, conventional daughter. She didn’t know shit about my life. Neither did Susan, really.3

  Mildred—who didn’t like details, who didn’t want to be disturbed—spent a lifetime cultivating appearances. She got her hair done every week, and displayed considerable stoicism when the end was nearing. “I noticed I had to help her out of a chair a couple of times,” said Paul Brown. “She’d put her hand on her back. I’d say: Oh, you’re having back pain? She said yes, she was having some pain.”

  But her back pain was not arthritic. Like so many others, she did not, when she learned she was sick, utter the name of cancer. “She never said the word,” Judith remembered. She expressed her love to Susan with a final gesture. She waited for her to arrive and then, with only days left to live, met her at the airport. With Susan settled into the Hyatt Regency in Waikiki, she said: “Now it’s time to go to the hospital.”

  “I think the reason Mother decided to go to the hospital and die was because we were both here,” said Judith. “Even when she was in the hospital—dying—her hands were so beautifully manicured.”

  * * *

  All week, the sisters slept, side by side, on the hospital floor. They had not been close since Susan skipped Judith’s wedding twenty years before. Now Susan rediscovered her sister, and for the rest of her life had a friend in the woman she once dismissed as a humdrum housewife. “I realize all Mother left me was you,” Judith told her.

  “She wept,” Susan added. “I wept.”4

  “What are you doing here?” Mildred said. “Why don’t you go back to the hotel?”

  These were her final words to Susan. “Oh, oh, oh . . . what am I going to do?” were her last words, “addressed to no one.” The sisters made the decision to take her off life support, and on December 1, 1986, aged eighty, Mildred died. She was cremated, her ashes scattered in the waters off Oahu.

  With her went the figure that defined Susan more than any other. So many of her relationships—to herself, to her son, to her lovers—had been shaped by Mildred. The ardent, almost romantic love that she had felt for Mildred as a girl gave way, as she aged, to resentment at the void Mildred had left—a hollowness Susan internalized. Passion sometimes matures into dispassion. But in Susan’s case it did not, and she could not pity a woman whose life was stunted first by her own mother’s early death, then by early widowhood, and then by drinking and the isolation it entailed. She became dependent, too, on her looks for a sense of value, and on the men those looks attracted.

  Shortly after Mildred’s death, Susan confided to her journal that she had “always felt guilty for leaving home/M. So she had the right to treat me so coldly, so ungenerously. (My phone call from Madison when I realized I was pregnant—etc. etc.)”5 Yet Susan often turned guilt against the person toward whom she felt it, and so it was with her mother. “I had no mother,” she would say a few years later.

  When Susan returned to New York, she recounted her mother’s death to Lucinda Childs. “My mother didn’t try to kiss me or hug me or anything like that.” Lucinda disputed this telling.

  “Don’t you understand? She waited for you. She did this unbelievable physical feat to meet you. This is a woman on her deathbed who actually physically went to the airport.” . . . She showed so much in her way—but not in the way that Susan wanted. She didn’t die until Susan got there, which was sort of a miracle.6

  A dream Susan once confided to a friend may illuminate the nature of Mildred’s grip on her, the damage she did to her, and the enduring sense of being haunted by a ghost whose features she would, at times, discern in the women she loved. While in Hawaii, she fell asleep on the couch, “feeling a closeness with another human presence—and looked up and it was her mother, leaning over, about to strangle her.”7 Nobody haunted her like Mildred.

  * * *

  With her mother gone, Susan began writing more personally, more accessibly, mixing revelation and obfuscation as she had in “The Way We Live Now.” This was a kind of resumption of her movement, a decade before, toward a more personal manner. The best example was her Thomas Mann story, “Pilgrimage,” which appeared at the end of 1987.

  She had sketched this piece for decades, but only published it after Mildred’s death. It portrayed her family as intellectually primitive, mentioning her “morose, bony” mother and her feeling that living with Mildred and Nat amounted to “slumming in her own life.” This surely would have wounded her mother—as it wounded her stepfather. “He was one of the most honest people I’ve ever met,” said her cousin Jeff Kissel.

  He lived in the belief that Mildred and Susan actually had a close relationship. They were in touch frequently by phone. I think that it came as a real shock that Susan decided to say what she said publicly. The fact that she was critical of her mother, he was really hurt by that. A couple of years after Mildred died, I was talking to him and I said, “Have you heard from Susan lately?” He just looked at me and said, “I have no relationship with Susan anymore.” Literally that was the last time he mentioned her.8

  If Mildred’s death freed Susan to write more personally, it also further eroded the tact and empathy that had been diluted by her struggle with cancer more than a decade before. The “tall lonely walker” of her journals—the keenly self-aware persona that accurately diagnosed her shortcomings and harshly castigated her missteps—threatened to walk away for good. As she had trouble seeing Lucinda or Mildred other than as extensions of her, she could only see her son in those same terms. He was thirty-five, and his attempts to assert his own identity, to erect and enforce boundaries between them, wounded her. On March 25, 1987, her mother’s eighty-first birthday, “her first non-birthday,” she wrote:

  For decades, being D.’s mother made my identity bigger—I was an adult, I was strong, I was good, and I was loved

  entirely positive . . .

  now it’s negative:

  I feel stripped of my identity when I’m with him.

  Not a writer—

  Just his mother

  And his rival

  And I’m not loved9

  Her friend’s observation, in 1975, that “I don’t describe him, I describe my relationship with him” was valid as ever. Then, however, she had written: “What a dreadful burden for him.” Now she expressed no such sympathy. In her relationship with her son, as with her mother and girlfriends, she was never appreciated, “not loved.”

  Yet she was. “I loved Susan,” said Leon Wieseltier, speaking for many others. “But I didn’t like her.” She gre
w more and more insulting toward the people who did love her, and as a result her isolation often astonished people who knew her only as a famous public figure. Many formerly close friends abandoned her. “It was like Marilyn Monroe, who couldn’t get a date on a Saturday night,” Wieseltier said. “She had absolutely no understanding of herself.”10 And so she suffered genuinely from the cruelty and indifference she perceived in others. But she could not perceive her effect on those she hurt in turn, and friends and acquaintances were constantly befuddled by her behavior, which they would still be analyzing years after her death.

  Jeff Seroy, head of publicity at FSG, once mentioned her to his psychiatrist, only to hear the shrink burst out laughing. Seroy asked what was so funny. The doctor answered: “You can’t imagine how many people have sat on that couch over the years and talked about Susan Sontag.”11

  * * *

  But if she could drive other people crazy, no one struggled more than she to keep up with the “great person” Jamaica Kincaid identified, that shadow-self that her striving had created. Her reputation as the smartest person in the room, the person who set the pace, gave her a responsibility to know everything, said Wieseltier, who saw what that reputation cost her.

  She had this terrible sense of inadequacy, and it was not easy being her. The level of nervousness was just spectacular. I thought it was amazing that she could breathe. What if you felt that you yourself were not enough and you had this insane fame always preceding you? What if deep down you feared that you might be empty?12

  Around the time of Mildred’s death, she redoubled her efforts to present an admirable facade. In 1964, she had confessed this tendency to her journal, and revealed how far back in childhood it was rooted.

  I valued professional competence + force, think (since age four?) that that was, at least, more attainable than being lovable “just as a person.”13

  One who despairs of being loved will drive off, or deprecate, those who try to love her, and this increasingly became the story of Sontag’s relationships. A moment of intense closeness would quickly burn out. Her former friends were legion. “I began to notice that almost everyone I ran into had once been a close friend of Susan’s,” said Wieseltier. “Everybody started as fascinating and a secret sharer and there were only the two of you. But with a lot of people it wasn’t just that Susan gave up on them: they gave up on Susan, too.”

  Susan—human—drove people away. But the symbolic Sontag was tremendously attractive. She was so recognizable as a public intellectual that Woody Allen could include her as a commentator in his fake documentary Zelig, which came out in 1983. He filmed Susan on a Venetian canal, offering profound commentary on Leonard Zelig, the “human chameleon” who miraculously turned up everywhere and could morph into anything: a celebrity with no stable identity, a mirror upon whom anything could be projected.

  In that film, Susan could view her position as the face of American intellectuals with irony. But that position was ratified on June 3, 1987, when she was elected president of the PEN American Center. Her ascent symbolized a makeover of the venerable organization. PEN was one of the earliest international human rights organizations, founded in 1921 along the same principles as the League of Nations. A large part of its work had always been to help writers targeted by oppressive regimes, but because it was international and thus, like the United Nations, dependent on harmony among its members, it could not always be effective. In Communist countries, where writers like Brodsky were targeted and “official writers” were apparatchiks, its reach was limited. But it had often proven invaluable: its intervention had saved the lives of Arthur Koestler, for example, when he was imprisoned in Fascist Spain, and of the Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, sentenced to death in Nigeria. Until the mid-eighties, the PEN American Center “was a fairly small, not particularly prosperous” group, according to the feminist writer Meredith Tax. Its transformation began under a new president, Norman Mailer, elected in 1984. Much of the literary world loved to hate Mailer’s bluster and machismo, but he could, and did, raise the profile of PEN as few writers could. “Mailer came in,” said Tax, “and all of a sudden it was like Rockefeller Center.”14

  * * *

  He showcased this transformation in an International PEN Congress hosted in New York in January 1986. The “Mailer Congress” made a dazzling impression on an Indian writer who would himself soon need the organization’s advocacy. Salman Rushdie was “more than a little awestruck” by the roster. “Brodsky, Grass, Oz, Soyinka, Vargas Llosa, Bellow, Carver, Doctorow, Morrison, Said, Styron, Updike, Vonnegut, Barthelme, and Mailer himself” were there, and when a photographer put Rushdie into a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, he found himself squeezing in alongside Czesław Miłosz and Susan Sontag.15

  Mailer, a publicist of genius, could create an event that placed literature at the center of politics and culture: the place it occupied in certain European countries, the place that—to Sontag’s regret—it never occupied in the United States. “The PEN congress was on the front page of the Times every single day,” said Meredith Tax. “That doesn’t happen with literary events in New York.” Rushdie wrote: “In those days in New York literature felt important, and the arguments between the writers were widely reported and seemed still to matter outside the narrow confines of the world of books.”16

  There were two major controversies. The first was Mailer’s invitation of George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state. This elicited protests: from writers who were critical of American policies toward apartheid or Nicaragua; from those who recalled that the State Department had denied visas to writers deemed subversive, including Farley Mowat and Gabriel García Márquez. Sontag and E. L. Doctorow led the movement and handed Mailer a letter as Shultz was getting up to speak. Mailer showed it to Shultz, but refused to read it aloud. When Grace Paley protested, he said: “I didn’t bring the Secretary of State here to be pussywhipped by you.”17 The protesters would have surely been more receptive to his subsequent explanation: since PEN aimed to reduce the oppression of writers, “the more clout we have with the State Department, the more effective we are.”18

  But Mailer specialized in zingers, sometimes jokingly, sometimes resorting to misogynistic rhetoric. This—not to mention having stabbed his wife—undermined his position in the other dispute. That concerned the underrepresentation of women, a mere sixteen out of the 120 invitees. “He announced it as the best writers in the world,” said Tax. “After sitting there for the first day, it became painfully clear that the best writers in the world were white men.” Karen Kennerly, the executive director of PEN, disputed this characterization. “Susan and Donald Barthelme and I were the ones who decided who should be invited,” she said, and many prominent women they invited—Joan Didion, Eudora Welty, Doris Lessing, Mary McCarthy—were unable to attend.19

  Rather than acknowledging or trying to address the problem, Mailer added fuel to the fire, telling a reporter that “there are not that many women, like Susan Sontag, who are intellectuals first, poets and novelists second.” This further enraged the protesters. It did not, however, enrage Susan. To Nadine Gordimer, she said that “literature is not an equal-opportunity employer.”20 This was repeated as an assertion of meritocracy. It was, in fact, the opposite. Tax remembered that “she didn’t say—which would have been the perfectly obvious thing for anyone to say—‘Oh, come on, Norman. There are lots of women intellectuals, it’s just so-and-so is busy and so-and-so is dead.’ She took it as her due.”21

  Her quip assumed some equal playing field, and hinted that women were demanding inclusion based on their sex rather than on their achievement. As Sontag surely knew, the feminist critique was that the playing field was not equal, and that any woman who arrived at the position she had was not only exceptionally talented but—more to the point—exceptionally lucky. In feminist terminology, she was an “exceptional woman”: like the one black or Jewish family allowed in an otherwise all-white neighborhood. Waiving the rules for an odd exception
did not undermine those rules; a show of flexibility only strengthened them.

  Ironically, it was Mailer himself who came closest to identifying the problem: “There are countries in the world where there are no good woman writers.” Phrased, as ever, in the most provocative form, this line earned hisses. But what he meant, he explained, was that “women had been exploited and kept down in those countries.” Lack of access—to education, birth control, economic opportunity—meant that any woman who overcame these structures would always be exceptional.

  * * *

  After this fiasco, PEN America needed a woman president. Mailer’s term ended in June 1986, and the choice fell on the novelist Hortense Calisher. Calisher immediately clashed with Kennerly, who ran the day-to-day operations, and resigned after a year, when Susan found a way to allow all parties to preserve their dignity. The American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she had been elected in 1979, was looking for a new president, and she suggested that they might choose Calisher, and then suggested to Kennerly that she herself could step in as president of PEN, a position that she had often been invited to occupy in the past. “God bless Susan,” said Kennerly, for finding such an elegant solution. “How can you not love her forever and ever for that?”22

  The presidency was largely symbolic. Meetings would be attended; Washington visited; letters drafted, signed, dispatched to newspapers. Yet the role of constitutional monarch fit Susan perfectly. She made an important start at the next International PEN Congress, which opened in Seoul on August 28, 1988, a little more than two weeks after Paul Thek’s death. American PEN and its allies—Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and West Germany—protested the selection of South Korea, which, though it had been steadily democratizing, still had writers in prison. But when they lost the battle, Kennerly went, and for two weeks before the congress laid the groundwork for their protest. This was to be a simple cocktail party in honor of the dissident writers, and it was to be in sharp contrast to the “quiet diplomacy” other countries sought, “a moderate nonconfrontational approach.”23