Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  She knew this—“she felt like she was stealing David’s thunder,” she confided to her sister—but proved, as so often, unable to make something emotionally useful out of something she might have known intellectually.30 Even seven years after the end of the siege, when she was preparing her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, she wrote her friend Paolo Dilonardo:

  David does mind, very much, my doing this book. For him, it’s a continuation of the betrayal of “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” which he asked me, in 1993, not to write, after I had promised it to the NYRB. Last night at Honmura An: “Couldn’t you leave me this one corner of the world as my subject?” That is, war. When I said, but it’s a sequel to On Photography, he replied, it’s about history, and about war, and you know nothing about history. You got all that from me, etc. You’re poaching on my territory.

  I’m heartsick. But there’s nothing I can do now.31

  * * *

  Nothing I can do: the phrase remits to the same questions about the usefulness of art that Sarajevo posed. What was the point? “Art was there to make you a more sensitive and a more humane human being,” said her Bosnian friend Senada Kreso. “Art can make you cry, it can make you happy, it can make you sad, but not help.”32 Art, by itself, could not summon the armies Sarajevo demanded. But as many of Susan’s relationships—with herself, with others—showed, it could not even always make a human more humane.

  “How should one live?” she asked her diary at the height of the siege. “The great question of 19th century Russian literature . . . I live under the aegis of 19th century Russian literature.”33 Sontag had always turned to literature, to art, to help her answer this question. Art offered a model of solidarity. But to aestheticize is to distort, she argued throughout her life. And her own life illustrates this thesis as eloquently as anything in her writing. Does metaphor deepen one’s relation to reality—or, to the contrary, pervert and pollute it? Put another way: Can Dostoevsky help you get along with your son?

  This was what she argued in 2002, describing “the role of literature itself” as a means “to extend our sympathies; to educate the heart and mind; to create inwardness; to secure and deepen the awareness (with all its consequences) that other people, people different from us, really do exist.”34 Yet to learn about her life in its last years is to see that such awareness cannot be secured through art. Absent native empathy, no amount of metaphor can help, and no amount of literary knowledge—who had more than she?—can substitute for an ability to see others. Years after she confided that she was “not very sharp about other people, about what they are thinking and feeling,” after she said “I’m sure I have it in me to be empathetic and intuitive,” she had still not learned empathy.

  If stories about Susan, in these years, told of obliviousness, they also, increasingly, told of cruelty. She could not bear even the most delicate intervention, and she evaded intimacy when friends tried to evoke it, as her assistant Karla Eoff did one day, when she was helping Susan pack for a trip. They were playing around as they had done in earlier days, and Karla, hoping to spark a serious conversation, said: “Susan, it’s so nice to have you back with me.” Susan answered:

  “I’m only going away for a couple of days.” I said, “That’s not what I’m talking about. Some part of you has gone away, and I see the real Susan—not often enough, and I am really, really missing it. It’s just painful to be around the other Susan.” She said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” and got up and took off.35

  “She didn’t have regular friends” in the mid-nineties, said Miranda Spieler. “She was pretty isolated.”36 On January 27, 1996, a volume of the Loeb Greek Anthology open on his desk, Brodsky had died in New York. It was a hard loss. “I am all alone,” Susan told Marilù Eustachio. “I don’t have anyone to talk to, anyone with whom I can exchange my ideas, my thoughts.”37 Brodsky was one of the few people she admitted as a superior. Now he was gone.

  * * *

  In On Photography, she had written of “how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph.”38 Now, she, too, chose the Warholized personality, the opposite of what she had seen as the goal of Cioran’s work, “to keep one’s life from being turned into an object, a thing.” Increasingly, she interacted with similarly aestheticized others. Leon Wieseltier was astonished, one evening, to hear that she had just been hanging out with Debbie Harry, the lead singer of Blondie. “She entered this universe where you knew Mick Jagger but you didn’t know the Stones. It’s A-List land. Everyone is great friends, and nobody knows anybody.”39

  There, if one was famous enough, the rules that bound the layman no longer applied. But in exchange for that freedom, one had to choose the photograph—the image—over the life; and this, the young Sontag had written in The Benefactor, was a kind of death.

  He is gone: aged, transfixed by the great stare of the public eye, frozen. Now he is utterly famous. Everyone laughs at his mockery, he can offend no one. His acts have been transformed into postures.40

  Sontag’s next book, which she began in 1994, was about a woman who occupied the public eye without pain or ambivalence, “utterly famous.”

  Chapter 37

  The Callas Way

  In America opens with a flash of memoir. In Tucson and Los Angeles, Sue discovers the wobbly stirrings of vocation: “Steadfastness and caring more than the others about what was important would take me wherever I wanted to go.” She recalls her marriage to Philip Rieff: “I married Mr. Casaubon after knowing him for ten days.”1 And she describes her first encounter with a diva:

  I remember the first time I ever saw a diva up close: it was more than thirty years ago, I was new in New York and seriously poor and a rich suitor took me to lunch at Lutèce, where, shortly after the first delicacies had materialized on my plate, my attention was galvanized by the (come to think of it) familiar-looking woman with high cheekbones, raven-black hair, and full, red-painted mouth eating at the next table with an elderly man to whom she said loudly: “Mr. Bing. [Pause.] Either we do things the Callas way or we do not do them at all.”2

  She could not have foreseen how many people would later tell of their first sightings of Susan Sontag in similarly starstruck tones. And it is the figure of the diva that connects In America to her earlier fiction. This character dramatized the contrast between the person and the aestheticized person, between reality and dream: Sontag’s great theme. The diva is the dream of others. They fantasize about her, long to possess her, idealize her beauty, worship her genius, envy her wealth and fame. She is the product of a collective will—a product, like literary or political fictions, with a reality of its own.

  From the time Susan was a child and started calling her mother “Darling,” she had been obsessed with this dream-figure. “I wanted to be Garbo,” she wrote in 1965, explicitly connecting this desire to her homosexuality. In a later journal, beneath the word “DIVA,” she wrote “Detest . . . adore” and then offered the following list.

  I detest paying visits, writing letters, signing Photograph. I adore having people come to see me, and I detest going to see them. I adore receiving letters, reading them, commenting on them, but I detest writing them. I adore giving advice and I detest receiving it, and I never follow at once any wise advice that is given me.3

  Her writings were peopled with divas: Garbo, Callas, Bernhardt, Medea, Lady Hamilton—and, now, Helena Modjeska, the Polish actress who, in In America, became Maryna Zalewska. Sontag descended from two generations of movie “fans-fatales,” as she described her mother. And her childhood in the shadow of Hollywood had taught her, like the masses of the unfamous, to use the movies as an escape—not simply from a tedious, workaday life, but from consciousness itself. What she craved from art was annihilation, la petite mort: “It is this longing to have one’s normal consciousness ravished by the singer’s art that is preserved in an irrepressible phenomenon usually dismissed as an oddi
ty or aberration of the opera world: diva worship.”4

  This was a darker idea of the diva. Stardom was not the same as happiness. Instead, for one who had renounced happiness, it was perhaps the best one could hope for.

  Maryna sat down and looked into the mirror. Surely she was weeping because she was so happy—unless a happy life is impossible, and the highest a human being can attain is a heroic life. Happiness comes in many forms; to have lived for art is a privilege, a blessing.5

  “I identify entirely with those words,”6 she assented, when an interviewer asked whether this was a self-portrait. She had grown up without the expectation of happiness; and her friend Michael Silverblatt agreed: “For Susan, happiness was a trivial subject. I don’t think she would have been interested in happiness. That was not Susan.”7 A kind of contentment, instead, was generated through the most intense forms of art: the theater of Artaud, the operas of Wagner.

  She was a tragedian. She wanted absolute passion. The heightened quality, that’s Susan. Maybe sometimes a monster, and many of my friends told me that they would never be anywhere with Susan, ever again, not to even think of it, not to ask them. She really was very, very rough on people. I have no illusions about that. I am saying that for Susan, it was always an occasion—first for a bravura scene, and then for an aria.8

  * * *

  “I do have this fantasy of tearing everything up and starting all over again under a pseudonym which no one would know was Susan Sontag,” she told an interviewer in 1978. “But I just want to say that my notion is very much that of going further and further, of new beginning, and of not going back to origins.”9

  With In America she would find a way to go further—into her preferred identity as a novelist—while at the same time going back to origins. The novel was based on the true story of Poland’s greatest actress, who, in 1876, at the height of her fame, uprooted a troupe of friends and traveled halfway around the world in order to create a utopian colony in Anaheim, California. To no one’s astonishment, the colony did not flourish; but Modjeska did, returning triumphantly to the stage and acquiring all the signs of gaudy American success. These included her own train, complete with “a large watercolor painting of your pet pug adorning a panel of the parlor of your private car.”10

  For so many reasons, the story was irresistible to Sontag. There was the theme of starting over, this time in a dreamlike utopia. (In the sixties, alongside her writing on Vietnam and Cuba, she worked for a time on a novel, Joseph Dover, about the founding of a utopian colony.) And there was the theme, as in her memoir on Thomas Mann, of European sophisticates stranded in materialistic California.

  It requires little imagination to hear Sontag’s voice in Maryna’s. “We’re always talking about ourselves when we talk of anything else,”11 she avows in the novel, and her reflections on what motivates a person to become famous, and what fame demands of the famous person, are the best part of the book. “It was partly so as not to feel like a child, ever, that she had become an actress,” she writes.12 As an actress, Maryna was also freed from the restraints imposed on women: “A woman could not say much,” she wrote. “A diva could say too much. As a diva, with a diva’s permissions, she could have tantrums, she could ask for the impossible, she could lie.”13

  In America, a diva’s permissions were granted more generously than in Europe.

  In America, you were expected to exhibit the confusions of inner vehemence, to express opinions no one need take seriously, and have eccentric foibles and extravagant needs, which exhibited the force of your will, the spread of your self-regard—all excellent things.14

  And America was itself founded on a requirement of the acting profession: to keep moving, to the next city, the next costume, the next role. An actor could discard a former existence like last night’s costume: “To change one’s life: it’s as easy as taking off a glove.”15 Not even a new life was enough: “It wasn’t a new life M. wanted, it was a new self.”16 This self was there for the making:

  Giving interviews entailed rewriting the past, starting with her age (she lopped off six years), her antecedents (the secondary-school Latin teacher became a professor at the Jagiellonian University), her beginnings as an actor (Heinrich became the director of an important private theatre in Warsaw where she made her debut at seventeen), her reasons for coming to America (to visit the Centennial Exposition) and then to California (to restore her health). By the end of the week Maryna had begun to believe some of the stories herself.17

  The illusion of intimacy was the permission America gave the diva: “You go somewhere, you please people, and then you never have to see them again.”18 Emotions were useful when they could be performed, and even Maryna’s famed lack of fakeness is fake: “There was nothing natural about this naturalness, which was concocted for each role out of a thousand tiny judgments and decisions.”19 Eventually, “it became harder—does this always happen to great actors?—to remember the difference between what she said and what she thought”20—between being and pretending to be.

  * * *

  “I believe I can give a faultless imitation of the emotions that may elude me in real life,” says Maryna. And Susan often gave the impression of offering, in place of true feelings, a faultless imitation, as Gary Indiana said:

  She worked up to her exaltations with an eye to impress those around her with a depth of feeling that seemed a bit dramatized and artificial. It took formidable willfulness for her to cry at the end of Vigo’s L’ Atalante, I thought, when she had already seen it thirty times. . . . Susan heaved from one enthusiasm to the next, a storm-tossed vessel calling in at every Port of Epiphany.21

  “I am myself an actress,” Sontag told a Polish journalist in 1998, “a closet actress. I always wanted to write a novel about an actress. I understand what acting is all about.”22 And on the evidence of this novel, she also understood that a danger of faking emotions is that one ends up confusing performance for reality. Sontag was almost ideally equipped to analyze these themes; yet in order to plumb them, she needed a sense of irony, of distance, that she had so far failed to attain, and her infatuation with Maryna undermined a book that might otherwise have been a masterpiece.

  An actor doesn’t need to have an essence. Perhaps it would be a hindrance for an actor to have an essence. An actor needs only a mask.23

  Sontag had earlier written of the longing for a doppelgänger, a body double, a literal or metaphoric clone; she had offered “Being-as-Playing-a-Role” as a definition of camp: “the farthest extension, in its sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” But here, the effects of life as performance pass largely unexamined, and she describes Maryna in ways that, for one acquainted with her life, become uncomfortable. “I too am not a good mother (how could I be? I am an actress),” Maryna sighs. “Actresses make willful mothers,” she later reiterates, “smothering and neglectful.”24 There is no examination of what this might mean for the child, and Sontag grants a similar leniency to Maryna’s treatment of her lovers, who are reduced to foils for her ambition: “I loved him with that part of me that wanted to be someone, someone who would do great things in the world.”25

  Love, in this book, is something received from frenzied fans, a state of constant throbbing excitement, “passion,” the “quasi-amorous approval of innumerable, never to be known or barely known, others.”

  The à deux thing isn’t, can never be that important to me. I understand that now. Déformation professionelle, if you will.26

  Once she achieves stardom, the diva floats, in her private train, from place to fabulous place, delighting crowd after adoring crowd, heaping up laurels and lovers. The greater her success, the more fantastic Sontag’s descriptions become. Fantastic, as in “fantasy.”

  * * *

  The woman she created—both Maryna and “Susan Sontag”—could combine Joan Crawford’s outrageousness with Greta Garbo’s blankness. She could compare herself to Joan of Arc, and be famous for being famous, and live in A-List land,
and do things the Callas way. The only requirement was that she be “not a woman, but a ‘woman.’”

  In Sontag’s best writings, she chastens her own enthusiasms. She is “strongly drawn to Camp, and just as strongly offended by it.” Her relationship to the aestheticized woman in In America was an embrace of the “larger than life”; yet to the astonishment of her friends, she refused to admit that the category of the diva, which had fascinated her since childhood, applied to her. “She would get very angry” when Silverblatt suggested it. “She hated the categorization, of being ‘the diva.’ She just couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t accept it.”27 The self-analytical Sontag—the one dedicated to self-improvement, the one who wrote that “I’ve always identified with the Lady Bitch Who Destroys Herself”—had vanished.

  After decades of censoring her desires, repressing them, she was, in a sense, liberated. Silverblatt saw her larger-than-life persona as a key to her enduring appeal to ambitious women.

  Susan had decided to be that kind of woman—the woman who gets what she wants. We never use these words anymore, but we called such women “hellcats.” We don’t even call them femmes fatales anymore. All of that diction for the woman strong enough to go after what she believed was hers. The role of Regina in Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes is the role of the little sister strong enough to take over her brothers and murder her husband in order to gain control of the family fortune. She sometimes had to play a villainess—and when I say villainess, [I mean] an old-fashioned movie villainess. That was one of her facets. She didn’t care what you wanted or expected her to be. That was a self-conscious, morose, self-absorbed person who thought first about consequences. For Susan, consequences be damned.28