Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Like much of campy gay terminology, “coming out” was an arch play on the language of women’s culture—in this case the expression used to refer to the ritual of a debutante’s being formally introduced to, or “coming out” into, the society of her cultural peers. . . . Gay people in the prewar years, then, did not speak of coming out of what we call the “gay closet” but rather of coming out into what they called “homosexual society” or the “gay world.”20

  Once it acquired a name, the phenomenon now known as “the closet” could be studied and understood. If homosexuals in the age of the black and women’s liberation movements were beginning to see that they, too, were an oppressed minority, they also understood that there were significant differences between the ways girls or members of minority communities grow up and the way gay children grow up.

  Girls—most of them—learn about being a woman from a mother. A black child can learn how to cope with racism from parents and community. But most gay children are born into heterosexual families, and into communities that often hold strongly antihomosexual attitudes. The incentive this creates to lie about who they are is so strong that those behaviors—reprehensible in other contexts—are a matter of survival.

  This is the context in which the young Susan could write that “being queer . . . increases my wish to hide.” When she was growing up, this skill was not limited to children. It remained vital for adults, too. Like her, many gay people married. Until the sixties, any attempt to socialize with other gay people brought terrifying risks. Discovery could mean, as it almost did for Susan, losing one’s children, and in any licensed profession, including medicine, law, or psychiatry, exposure meant that one’s license could be revoked on grounds of “moral turpitude.” The police frequently harassed homosexuals. Journalists entered gay bars and published the names and addresses of the people they found there; many committed suicide as a result.

  This pressure translated into low self-esteem and depression. “The theory of the day was if you really wanted to change, you could,” said Dr. Charles Silverstein, one of the first psychologists to treat gay people. “Therefore, if a person kept having homosexual fantasies, it had to be their own fault. They became a failure in life, a failure in the family, failure with spouses, failure to change. It just led to greater depression.” This sense of failure meant it was “impossible for some people to establish a love relationship,” Silverstein said. “There were such couples, but most of them lived in rural areas. I never found couples who had been together a long time in big cities, although I know that they existed.”21

  Even once the gay liberation movement began in earnest—following one of those police raids, on a bar called the Stonewall Inn in 1969—the closet was not a matter of being “in” or “out.” One could be open over the weekend but, come Monday morning, dissemble at the office. One might live freely in the city, only to revert to subterfuge when visiting a conservative hometown. And so “the closet” was never a place, nor something left behind once and for all. In places where homosexuals were not in physical danger, “coming out involves choices about how to handle moments of ordinary, daily conversation.”22 It is, another scholar has written, “a process that potentially never ends. . . . [Gay] people must decide on a daily basis whether to reveal and to whom they will reveal—an experience that may have no exact parallel for those with heterosexual identities.”23

  This was the world in which Sontag came of age. Despite the revolutionary change in the view of homosexuality, her behavior at the end of her life revealed that she had never been able to shed the attitudes that prevailed when she was young. Being openly gay no longer placed her in legal or social jeopardy. (If anything, honesty would have burnished her reputation as a fighter for radical causes.) But the habit persisted, with results that, in an age that no longer countenanced scientific condemnations of homosexuality, were increasingly understood by psychologists. “Hiding and passing as heterosexual becomes a lifelong moral hatred of the self,” wrote two researchers in 1993, “a maze of corruptions, petty lies, and half truths that spoil social relations in family and friendship.”24

  Hiding took another toll. Over the years, closeted people developed “difficulties in accurately assessing other people’s perceptions of [them], as well as recognizing [their] own strengths,” another gay psychiatrist found.25 This can explain why Susan could agonize over publicly revealing something everyone had known, at least in private, for forty years. Hiding made it hard for such people to feel “actual accomplishments as reflections of one’s own abilities”—since these, like themselves, could hardly be genuine. This made them exceptionally dependent on the opinions of others.

  “Transparency, invisibility, losing one’s voice, and being stuck behind walls or other barriers are some of the terms used to describe the subjective experience” of being in the closet. These, too, were metaphors. But “the closet” did mean secrecy, hiding, and shame. It meant losing one’s voice, and being unable to see.

  * * *

  Spending time with Susan was “like being in a cave with a dragon,” Acocella said.

  Susan was just very, very difficult, and she lied. She lied a lot. Although we were not friends, we were acquaintances and we were a part of the same social circle. She lied to me in a way that she shouldn’t have.

  Acocella’s profile, “The Hunger Artist,” was published on March 6, 2000, and is warm and admiring. She showered In America with far more praise than she thought it deserved, and said nothing of Susan’s behavior toward her. It is “the least candid profile I have ever written,” she said. “If I had told the truth about what it was like to be with Susan, the piece would have been very different.” Like a child who, seeing her outwardly monstrous mother’s struggles, refuses to expose her to public humiliation, Acocella was touched by Susan’s “immense neediness,” and was willing to cover up for her. Susan dismissed the essay as “extremely laudatory but vulgar.”26

  * * *

  Two months later, a less laudatory notice appeared in the New York Times. Ellen Lee, an eighty-one-year-old amateur historian in California, had discovered at least twelve passages in In America that seemed to have been plagiarized from works by and about Helena Modjeska, the actress who inspired the figure of Maryna Zalewska. Lee, a specialist on Modjeska, was astonished: “Why would a writer of Susan Sontag’s stature and prestige use sources without quotation marks and without documentation?”27

  Sontag deflected the controversy. “There’s a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions,” she told the Times reporter. “I distinguish between writers and sources,” she continued. “The sources themselves are working from sources and they are using quotations of actual words.” Though the amount of borrowed material only added up to around three pages, one would have to take an extremely liberal view in order to consider Sontag’s use of “sources” anything other than plagiarism. She was able to judge herself—and absolve herself—by the standards she had set for Maryna:

  “Most rules for behaving properly on a stage,” she told them, “also apply to real life.” (“Except,” she said, smiling blithely, cryptically, “when they don’t.”) One such rule is: Never acknowledge a mishap.28

  But plagiarism was a subject that interested Sontag. Her fiction is full of characters who alternate between fear of being discovered and tempting fate with reckless behavior. Hippolyte, in The Benefactor, tries to kill Frau Anders, apparently for no better reason than to get caught. In Death Kit, Diddy confesses to a murder that he did not commit. In her journal, she pondered the different kinds of plagiarism:

  Brecht to be dismissed as a plagiarist? In a conversation with Eckermann, Goethe suggested a robust response to any writer so accused: “What is there is mine, and whether I got it from a book or from life is of no consequence; the only point is, whether I have made a right use of it.” OK for Brecht, whose method of operation was collective. But what about D. M. Thomas? No, doesn’t exonerate him.2
9

  Merrill Rodin, who stole books with her in high school, suspected that her deceitfulness went beyond shoplifting. And later, Susan told Edmund White that he should stop citing references and “claim thoughts as your own.”30

  Ellen Lee was willing, albeit warily, to accept Sontag’s explanations: “Maybe the rules have changed and there are different rules for fiction now,” she said in the Times article. But she was shocked to read what Sontag said in the article. “I actually thought that they would be quite thrilled,” Sontag said. “Modjeska was quite forgotten. She was a great figure. I made her into a marvelous person. The real Modjeska was a horrible racist.” For Lee and the mainly Polish American women dedicated to preserving Modjeska’s memory, this was slander. Those same condescended-to “sources” revealed, after all, that Sontag’s accusation was untrue: Modjeska had, in fact, been a vigorous fighter against racism.31

  Susan was unchastened by the episode. The very last speech she ever gave, in Johannesburg in 2004, was full of lines lifted from the critic Laura Miller. “The irony is that it was in a lecture on morality and literature,” Miller said.32

  * * *

  “Though I can hardly complain of the treatment I have received from critics, I have never liked them,” Maryna says. “They always start out thinking you are going to fail.”33 But despite a tepid critical reception, In America was honored with the National Book Award. Some speculated that Acocella’s description of Sontag’s cancer and heavy-metal poisoning had moved the jury. Others, despite reservations, found it an appropriate prize for Sontag’s lifetime of achievement.

  James Miller, a professor at the New School, recalled that David was sick, and there was some question about whether he could come. This made Susan nervous, and her nervousness about both David and the prize revealed a side of Susan he had never seen.

  Nobody—but nobody—expected Susan Sontag to win a National Book Award for that novel. . . . David had materialized at the eleventh hour and Susan—she was still in tears. In tears. And completely unguarded and overwhelmed. . . . The insecurity was at such a great level that when a kind of recognition like this came she was completely disarmed. She needed it insatiably, and then when the moment arrived, it was stunning—and the fact that David had shown up at the last moment: it was very unexpected and moving.34

  She called Brenda Shaughnessy, a young poet she had recently befriended. “It was the softest I have ever heard her talk on the phone,” said Shaughnessy. “It wasn’t the typical bark.” Susan invited her to join the party at the Russian Samovar, the Midtown bar where she had often hung out with Brodsky. Roger Straus was there, and all her friends. Whatever doubts her entourage may have harbored about In America, they were thrilled.

  Roger said something so great to her: “You know what really matters about this, Susan? You know why this is so great? Because it means that In America will last forever. It will be immortal. It will always, always exist because of this.” That’s what she wanted to hear. That’s what she wanted to happen. We all knew that was her greatest dream. There were opera singers at the piano. They were singing songs for her. It was just an incredible triumph. I was so lucky to be there. It was so beautiful.35

  Chapter 40

  It’s What a Writer Is

  In her last years, Susan had a series of friendships that took a remarkably similar pattern. These friends were younger, sometimes much younger. They were usually gay or bisexual. They were usually from boring provincial backgrounds, like Susan, and like her were highly talented, usually as writers or visual artists. And they were often unsure about how to use their talents—until the dea ex machina swept into their lives.

  She would shower them with elaborate praise that was irresistibly flattering, and desperately necessary. She would dispense wonderful advice that they would never forget. She would encourage their work and praise them, often in front of very famous people, as “gorgeous” or “brilliant.” She would offer personal confessions that put them on a first-name basis with the great. They would eat foods they had never eaten and see plays they had never seen. They would read books they had never heard of, and dine with people they had. They might be invited to some exotic destination they could never have afforded to visit by themselves. During this honeymoon, they would see themselves becoming the person they had dreamed of being in their no-name hometown. For all of this, they would be—the phrase recurs—“eternally grateful.”

  But then the recriminations began. At first, the mentor delighted in recommending books. Now she professed herself frankly demoralized by her friend’s dreadful ignorance. The younger person would scurry to prove herself, improve herself; but what started as encouragement would devolve into bullying. In many cases, Susan would begin ignoring or snubbing her protégée at the very opera or ballet to which she had brought her. These new friends would be shocked by Susan’s treatment of the woman who, it became obvious, was paying all the bills—a woman who fit into this category as well as anyone. The self-esteem that came from being fulsomely praised by Sontag was a devastating thing to lose, and if these people had a problem with drugs or alcohol, this often worsened. But they could not quickly loose themselves from Susan’s spell. Those who had glimpsed sweet, girly, nervous Sue would feel the need to help Susan, to guide her back to that charismatic person they were—the phrase recurs—“in love with.” For many, she would remain, even long after her death, the most important relationship, the most dominant influence, in their lives.

  * * *

  Brenda Shaughnessy was one such friend. In 1999, FSG published her first poetry collection, Interior with Sudden Joy. The book came to Susan’s attention, and the twenty-nine-year-old was alerted to her interest by Richard Howard, her teacher at Columbia. He told her to call Sontag: “She didn’t call people. She had a mutual friend call.” Susan was excited to meet the woman behind the book. “She really expected me to talk in this incredibly rarified erotic-poetry kind of way. I totally did not. I have a Valley Girl accent. I grew up in Southern California. She was visibly disappointed.”1

  But Susan was sweet. She peppered Brenda with questions about poetry. She encouraged her writing and took her to bookstores, where she berated her for not being better read. At first, this was inspiring. “It’s hard to explain her magnetism and her sexual charm and just how dazzling she was in person,” Brenda said. “She never seemed old to me.” Like so many others, Brenda fell for Susan. “I loved hearing her talk. I loved the way she laughed.”

  And as she got to know her, she saw Susan’s vulnerabilities. “She would say things like, ‘I don’t drink because my mom was a drunk,’” Brenda remembered. “She’d have a margarita in her hand.” Brenda found this moving.

  I started noticing how if the conversation ever turned to something she didn’t know anything about she would quickly steer it back to something she knew about. I started understanding that she would do that repeatedly. She’s got this understanding of herself that she’s got to know everything. That has got to be huge pressure; that’s got to be so scary.2

  Like so many others, Shaughnessy saw her isolation. “I eventually got put in this heavy rotation where I was on call to take her to doctor’s appointments. I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m so lucky. This amazing person is hanging out with me.’ It didn’t really cross my mind that—why would someone who is so amazing want to hang out with me five times a week? Why is she so available?”

  Susan’s loneliness had aggravated as she got older.3 In the early sixties, in Paris, she wrote that “I still don’t know how to be alone—even sitting in a café for an hour.”4 Solitude turned her into a child: “I hate to be alone because when alone I feel about ten years old,” she wrote in 1963, around the same time that she told Stephen Koch that she would rather live with any person plucked at random from a Chinese restaurant than live alone. “How to be alone, how not to be alone—the perennial problem,” she noted in 1977 in her journal.

  “To write, as Kafka said, you can never be alone enough
,” she had written in “Singleness” in 1995.5 At the same time, “she was afraid of silence,” said Jamaica Kincaid. “And I have always thought that the kind of thinking she admired comes out of silence.” She wrote with people: she sat next to Don Levine, chomping on amphetamines, gulping down coffee, puffing on Marlboros. She carried on writing with the younger writer Ted Mooney in the room, too, which amazed him. “Come to my room,” she would tell Michael Silverblatt. “Bring a book. I’m going to be writing. We can babble.” This need for constant attendance suffocated people, and as Susan’s praise turned to abuse, Shaughnessy started to wonder whether Susan merely wanted a lady-in-waiting. “Why was she calling this person who’s thirty years younger than she is—and then berating that person?”

  * * *

  Susan’s need for praise, like her need for company, sometimes led to compromises that her most steadfast friends deplored. In May 2000, a few months before Susan won the National Book Award for In America, she traveled to Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. Even then, when there was more hope than there later would be for a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this honor was controversial. Several prominent writers urged her to refuse it. One of Susan’s closest friends, Nadine Gordimer, the South African Nobel laureate, wrote her an insistent letter.

  I write to you instead of calling because I feel that my dismay and distress will confuse me, on the phone, and I want to be clear in what I have to convey to you. My dear and much-loved friend, the writer whom I hold among a five-finger handcount as one of the best living—I am convinced beyond question that you should not allow yourself to be the recipient of the Jerusalem Prize this year.6

  Gordimer—Jewish like Susan—had been offered the prize and had turned it down. She did not, she said, “wish to travel from one apartheid society to another.” And she had seen how effective the boycott of South Africa had been in forcing the apartheid regime to stand down. Israel had been a prime ally of that regime, and its apartheid in Palestine was clear to anyone who wanted to see, including Israelis themselves.