Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Thirty years before, Alfred Chester said she was “extraordinarily tactless.” She countered that she was “dumb, insensitive”—though she also recorded Irene’s disagreement: “She thinks I know what I’m doing, but that I’m cruel.” But her writings about “X” showed a self-awareness—a desire to understand her flaws and purge them—that faded. Fame shielded her from some of the consequences of this behavior. She never lacked for sycophants. And there were always people around—assistants, publishers, agents, friends—to clean up after her. Increasingly, when she spoke of uncertainties or vulnerabilities, these were always in the past, blamed on youth or inexperience; and if Annie was a hostage, so was Susan—of an irrational force that doomed her to act out, again and again, the same script, to fight, again and again, the same “little wars.” Despite the distance she placed between herself and Freud, her actions affirmed his central contention: the inequality of consciousness to unconsciousness.

  * * *

  In her later years, she constantly shed friends. But some of the same people who felt they had no choice but to step away loved her for the same reason they resented her. As a child is exempt from adult rules, so, too, was Susan.

  Her cluelessness about so many things, from brushing her teeth to paying her bills, was touching. Like Mildred, she did not ever quite know where the light switch was, and the disequilibrium between her talent for ideas and her incapacity for daily living was excruciating, for herself and for others. People saw her trouble better than she could and wanted to protect her. “To watch her, to be around her brains and her knowledge and to listen to her opinions, was always a delightful feast,” said Kasia Gorska, a young Polish student who worked first for Susan and then for Annie. “In a way she was like a child.”35

  Unfortunately, she hated the child others loved. Decades before, Harriet Sohmers saw Susan’s butch pose as a carapace protecting a vulnerable nature: “Everything that came later is a killing of that child that she was.” It was a necessary murder. The metaphoric self—“Susan Sontag”—helped the child—“Call her Sue”—survive, but the determination to be other than she was demanded a steep price. Those who tried to love or protect the child were often mauled by the metaphor. “Underneath all of this monstrous personality there’s this really frightened, sweet person,” said Karla Eoff. “When you could be with that person, it was really wonderful.”36

  Chapter 33

  The Collectible Woman

  Every writer—after a certain point, when one’s labors have resulted in a body of work—experiences himself or herself as both Dr. Frankenstein and the monster,” Sontag wrote in a short essay, “Singleness,” published in 1995. In it, she examined the division between the public writer and the private self. There was “Sontag,” she wrote, and there was “I”:

  In my “Sontag and I” game, the disavowals were real. Oppressed by as well as reluctantly proud of this lengthening mini-shelf of work signed by Susan Sontag, pained to distinguish myself (I was a seeker) from her (she had merely found), I flinched at everything written about her, the praise as much as the pans.1

  She had turned to Andrew Wylie for relief from the burden of “the Susan Sontag thing,” and in 1983 had written that “to have two selves is the definition of a pathetic fate.”2 Now, she claimed, she had avoided that fate by writing a book of which both “Sontag and I” could be proud, the book she was writing during the first years of her relationship with Annie Leibovitz.

  She had

  at last come to feel that the writer is me: not my double, or familiar, or shadow playmate, or creation. (It’s because I got to that point—it took almost thirty years—that I was finally able to write a book I really like: The Volcano Lover.)

  With The Volcano Lover, Sontag wrote the kind of book that Sue had dreamed of. In “Singleness,” she implies that the novel is the product of a harmonious resolution of the tension between the gnostic dualisms, between mind and body, “Sontag” and Sontag: between monster and Frankenstein.

  But as the book and Sontag’s reaction to it would show, she did not achieve unity by combining the two sides of her personality. She did so by choosing one over the other. Rather than venerating Thomas Mann or Walter Benjamin or Joseph Brodsky, she became them, leaving the modernist experiments of her earlier novels behind her. This was the very thing for which she had criticized Sartre: trying to make herself into “a 19th-century-style Great Writer.”

  This was the role she was born to play. And she played it without ambivalence, inhabiting the dreamworld of celebrity and money, of high culture and “opera.” If grandiosity and posturing were held against normal people, they were not held against a great diva, from whom they were expected, and whose colorful legend they enhanced. Susan Sontag’s last two novels were about actresses.

  * * *

  At the center of The Volcano Lover is a famous triangle: of Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador at Naples; Lord Nelson, hero of the age; and the most alluring woman in Europe, Emma Hamilton—wife to the former, mistress to the latter.

  The story upon which it was based had already been made into a movie, That Hamilton Woman, starring Vivien Leigh. It appeared in 1941, before Sue moved to Tucson. Whether she saw it then or later, the foul-mouthed courtesan intrigued her. “What did this concealed woman have that these great men loved her?” she wondered in 1960.3 In the eighties, in London, she found a series of prints. “Erupting Vesuvius, somnolent Vesuvius, close-ups and cross sections of volcanic rock—she bought five prints, five more the next day, and then another seven,” a journalist wrote.4

  The city of Vesuvius was the city of Carlotta. And like Carlotta, her protagonist was a tabula rasa, a beautiful blank. Unlike Carlotta, who made no effort to be more than surface, Emma works eagerly to adapt to the fantasies of others. In this sense, she is more Annie than Carlotta, keen to be shaped, molded, carved, “taking his impress as clay does a sculptor’s thumb.” And though he loved her, Sir William—whom Susan calls the Cavaliere—sees Emma as Susan saw Annie: “Her perfections and his happiness did not mean he did not want to improve her.” The Cavaliere notes Emma’s grammatical slips as Susan noted Annie’s: “Oh lordy how vulgar they was,” she says. As a result, “the Cavaliere’s mansion was stocked with tutors from morning to night.”5

  “He tells me I am a grate work of art,” she writes.6 Emma’s sumptuous beauty—“A truly great beauty always has beauty enough for two”7—demands a means of display. “The Cavaliere had first asked her to pose inside a tall velvet-lined box open on one side, then within a huge gilt frame.” As Annie’s models posed, so does Emma, and adapts to any gaze: Emma’s poses—“Attitudes”—were gazed upon by the whole Neapolitan court. “I could not help it if I had an actress’s talent.” Emma shrugged. “If I liked to please . . . It is really very easy to please. It is no different from learning.”8

  As a work of art, Emma is susceptible to collection. She eagerly endeavors to be acquired by a series of powerful men until finally snagged by one of the supreme collectors of the day. Sontag understands that, for one eager to rise, being turned into an object has its uses. And the mentality of collector and collected, hunter and hunted, allows Sontag’s talent for aphorism to flourish:

  A collection is always more than necessary.

  Every collector is potentially (if not actually) a thief.

  You can’t have everything. . . . Actually, you can have quite a lot.9

  The collector par excellence, the aging Cavaliere, is a melancholic for whom beauty and art are medicine. “His is the hyperactivity of the heroic depressive,” Sontag writes, about herself as much as about him. “He ferried himself past one vortex of melancholy after another by means of an astonishing spread of enthusiasms.”10 These enthusiasms make him an admirer: “Even more than wanting to be admired, he liked admiring.” And what he wants to collect—besides Emma, besides his stunning antiquities—is his great obsession, the volcano: “The Cavaliere had discovered in himself a taste for the mildly plutonian.�
�11

  * * *

  “Nothing can match the elation of the chronically melancholy when joy arrives.”12 Emma’s arrival brings joy to great men, but great women take a dimmer view. The first is Madame Vigée Le Brun, painter to the deposed queen of France. She has sought refuge in Naples, and sizes Emma up with a glance:

  Never, in all the portraits made of her, was she depicted so patently as a courtesan. Unpleasant depiction by one independent woman surviving out in the great world by her wits and talents, of another woman at the same perilous game. But impudent as the portrait was, it was a success. The artist knew her patrons. She must have wagered that the Cavaliere (infatuated) and the young woman (innocently vain) would not see the portrait as others might see it, would see only one more tribute to her all-conquering beauty.

  Among the large number of roles and personae that she deemed herself suited to play, there was a special pleasure in portraying women whose destiny was so unlike her own happy one, such as Ariadne and Medea, princesses who sacrificed all—past, family, social position—for a foreign lover and then were betrayed. She saw them not as victims but as persons who were inordinately expressive: persons affecting and heroic in the intensity of their feeling, in the recklessness and wholeheartedness with which they gave themselves to a single emotion.

  She elaborated her Attitudes, improved the stagecraft and the dramaturgy.13

  Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, a revolutionary writer who emerges as the real heroine of the book, sees Emma as “not merely exuberant and vulgar, but cunning, cruel, bloodthirsty.” Her judgment might be said to reflect another female character’s, one who, after an appearance at the beginning, pops up in the very last paragraph:

  I [Eleonora] would lie to myself about how complicated it is to be a woman. Thus do all women, including the author of this book. But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.14

  * * *

  The glories of power—the delights of wealth and acquisition, of conquests military and sexual—are lavishly described by a person who knows their joys are real. Yet the book’s true heroine has refused them, and it was this refusal that Sontag saw as the mark of the truly noble. “I did know about power,” Eleonora says. “I did see how this world was ruled, but I did not accept it.”

  In her essay on Canetti, Sontag wrote that

  the teacher at his boarding school to whom he now “bows” won his fealty by being brutal during a class visit to a slaughterhouse. Forced by him to confront a particularly gruesome sight, Canetti learned that the murder of animals was something “I wasn’t meant to get over.”

  She quoted his observation that “the loudest passage in Kafka’s work tells of this guilt with respect to the animals.”15 And when Sontag denounces the vanity and cruelty of Emma, Nelson, the Cavaliere, and the world over which they preside, she does so most effectively when showing that world’s cruelty toward enslaved animals. The court celebrations feature an artificial mountain laden with food, including living food, delivered to the mercies of the brutalized citizenry, who are unleashed with knives in hand:

  One’s nose [was assaulted] by the smell of blood and the excrement of the terrified animals; one’s ears, by the cries of the animals being slaughtered and the screams of people falling or being pushed from some part of the mountain.16

  The cruelty is not always this spectacular. The Cavaliere has a monkey, Jack, housed with the rest of the collection, “tied up, made comfortable.” The Cavaliere behaves toward Jack as Susan did toward anyone who loved her more than vice versa. “He wanted a mock protégé, a jester,” she writes, “and poor Jack loved him abjectly enough to oblige.” And so “he began adding a tiny bit of teasing to his treatment of the monkey, a little bit of cruelty, a touch of deprivation.”17 No courts will punish these crimes. But their savagery is visited on those who commit them; the “despicable” trio receives their merited comeuppance.

  * * *

  “Damn them all” are the last words of The Volcano Lover. They are not, however, Sontag’s last word. Her protagonists are genuinely despicable. They are also genuinely lovable. They push against internal limits, as she did. They push against external limits—those imposed by politics and society, love and passion—as she did. And in that struggle, they, like her, reveal themselves as monsters and heroes both.

  In The Volcano Lover, she resisted the temptation to choose sides, or to choose them conclusively. This was the pitfall that reduced many of her political writings to propaganda. Instead, she patiently dissected the conflicting motives inside every person—the little wars—to make a book that united the rigor of her best essays to the ambivalence of her best stories. This was the difference between having no firmly held opinions and acknowledging the complexities and conflicts that animate people’s lives—the view that distinguishes the novelist from the pamphleteer.

  She brought this view to that most difficult of questions, metaphor. She hated saying “the road is straight as a string.” Now, the “profound part of me that feels that ‘the road is straight’ is all you need to say and all you should say” ceded, seismically, to this:

  Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mud slide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreck, like an explosion, like a lid blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.18

  But—the very nature of thinking was still but—this did not mean an unambiguous embrace of metaphor: of changing one thing, through an aesthetic operation, into another. Much of the novel shows people pushing against the limits of this aesthetic view, one that, no matter how earnestly cultivated, is unable to compete with the more brutish realities of nature: including one’s own nature.

  The Cavaliere thought of himself as—no, was—an envoy of decorum and reason. (Isn’t that what the study of ancient art teaches us?) Besides a most profitable investment and the exercise of his collecting lust, there was a moral in these stones, these shards, these dimmed objects of marble and silver and glass: models of perfection and harmony. The antiquity that was uncouth, alert to the demonic, was largely hidden from these early patrons of antiquity. What he overlooked in antiquity, what he was not prepared to see, he cherished in the volcano: the uncouth holes and hollows, dark grottoes, clefts and precipices and cataracts, pits within pits, rocks under rocks—the rubbish and the violence, the danger, the imperfection.19

  In The Volcano Lover, we see the sad demise of Brodsky’s Homo legens. Uncouth holes lurk beneath the most polished surfaces. Art is not only futile as a means of teaching goodness or morality: it is a product of the same demonic forces that underlie the eruptions of passion and politics.

  The aesthetic or metaphoric view is not only beautifying. It is also remorseless—and to no one more than a beautiful woman. Emma’s beauty rocketed her from scummy origins and placed her among the great; but the loss of self is the price of ascent: “She does not know who she is anymore,” Sontag writes, “but she knows herself to be ascending.”20 The tension between persona and person becomes untenable when reality resurges, and avenges itself upon the dream.

  “Without my beauty, my shield, everyone could mock me,” Emma says.21 She descends into alcoholism. The beauty is damned by the drunk old tart; the no-longer-collectible woman is discarded. Perhaps, for her cruelties, she deserves to be discarded. But it is not for these that she is condemned:

  For nothing was she judged more harshly than her failure at what is deemed a woman’s greatest, most feminine accomplishment: the maintenance and proper care of a no longer youthful body.22

  * * *

  The Volcano Lover was a huge success. Susan had never before had a bestseller. Now she did—and in the genre, fiction, in which she had always dreamed of excelling. “I think I’m a slow developer,” she sa
id. “I ask myself this all the time—why did it take me so long?” She decided that it was because she “didn’t have access to this kind of expressiveness, of inner freedom. . . . One blushes to use such well-worn phrases as ‘maturity,’ but I think it is. . . . I think I will do, now, my best work.”23

  With the exception of the eighty-something pages of AIDS and Its Metaphors, The Volcano Lover was the first book she had published since Under the Sign of Saturn, twelve years before. She had changed in those years, and so had the broader culture. The novel garnered admiring reviews and widespread media attention, and Susan reveled in her success. She was elated when friends expressed their pleasure in the book. To several, she gave a version of the same reply: “Good, now read it again” or “It’s even better the second time.” Terry Castle saw her childlike pleasure:

  A waiter came up and said, “I know you’re famous, but who are you?” And she was delighted by the question, first of all. She said: “Well, I am Susan Sontag. I’m a writer, and my most recent book was a novel you may have heard of, called The Volcano Lover.” Then she said, “Here, I’ll write it on a napkin.” So she wrote her name, like she was signing somebody’s high school yearbook, with The Volcano Lover written on the napkin, too.24

  Zoë Heller saw it, too, when a newsagent recognized Susan. She beamed, and spent several minutes talking to him:

  She tells me she has been “moved in a very feminine and almost maternal way” by the encounter. “I just think of him standing there selling papers,” she says, “and probably it’s not the thing he wanted to do most in the world. If he knows who I am, that means he reads and he probably went to college and then . . . Well, this is my over-empathetic sensibility at work. I just feel he’s probably not doing what he wants to and he is struggling for self-esteem.”

  In spite of this warm reaction, Sontag claims that she would much rather go unnoticed in public. “People find this hard to believe,” she says, “but despite all the attention that has been paid to my person, I’m not at all interested in being famous.”25