Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.2

  These paragraphs were more incendiary than anything she had ever published. The words may have been just—even, as time would show, prophetic. And the opening sentence—“To this appalled, sad American, and New Yorker, America has never seemed farther from an acknowledgment of reality than it’s been in the face of last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality”—was cut, an edit that she felt distorted her intentions.

  With or without that sentence, the tone struck many as wrong, even before it was published. The first reactions were shocked. She had planned to read from In America at a previously scheduled event at the American Academy in Berlin, but a hundred people wanted to hear her speak about the inescapable subject of the day. She accordingly read a text that lacked, as she herself admitted beforehand, “any specially high level as far as the writing is concerned, is moralistic, may go too far, and is exaggerated.”

  A German journalist who heard her was astounded. “The criticism is devastating, polemical, and aimed at America. No paper has printed this kind of belligerent rage. Only the next weeks will say whether it will appear in The New Yorker.”3 At the end of her reading, she looked up. The audience was sitting in dumbfounded silence.

  The piece violated her own principle, articulated four years before, about Sarajevo: “You have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there.” The images CNN was pouring into her hotel room were no substitute for being in New York, and the negative reactions demonstrated her old adage. No matter how sensational, Photograph are a poor substitute for reality.

  At home, where many remembered her political interventions in seasons past, the right wing pounced. “What do Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Susan Sontag have in common?” one piece in The New Republic opened. “Susan Sontag should not be permitted to speak in honorable intellectual circles ever again,” said a spokesman for the Reaganite Heritage Foundation.4 A columnist for the New York Post said: “I wanted to walk barefoot on broken glass across the Brooklyn Bridge, up to that despicable woman’s apartment, grab her by the neck, drag her down to ground zero and force her to say that to the firefighters.”5

  * * *

  Fiercer was the friendly fire. David Rieff was indignant. “I’ve come rather to dislike the piece I dashed off for the New Yorker,” she wrote, trying to appease him, a week after it was published. “Even while writing it, I thought it primitive. Now I think it’s more seriously defective. I was right to denounce the retro smarminess and bluster of American rhetoric. But I should also have said something about terrorism—what you have emphasized in your several letters to me. . . .” He kept at her. “I continue to mull over the issues you raise. Was my piece hateful? I prefer to think it wasn’t very smart. I’m beginning to think that the main thing driving people—which I see includes me—to take positions you hate and despise is rage against Bush: that America should be led by this team.”6

  David would not let it go. She grew annoyed by his insistence, but defended herself.

  Once again about my piece. It was written last Thursday. I was in Berlin. It was about the rhetoric I heard on CNN. Sharon asked me to write something, and I agreed. You speak of “the view Sharon was pressing on me.” Please. . . . My mistakes are mine.7

  “Never acknowledge a mishap,” she wrote in In America. Except with David, she hardly ever did. Now, with him, she kept backtracking, trying to regain the approval of the only person who could berate her: the words “my mistakes” were rare in her interactions with anyone else.

  But as to the substance of the critique, she was not in the least a fool. The campaign against her was directed toward anyone who questioned the reigning jingoism. On September 26, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, warned people to “watch what they say, watch what they do.” The comedian Bill Maher was condemned for saying something Sontag also said: that the terrorists were not cowards. “Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly,” he said. Following these comments, his advertisers made themselves scarce, and at the end of the season his show was canceled.

  Glenn Greenwald, one of the most unyielding critics of the Bush administration, believed that the time to react was before emotional reactions hardened into orthodoxy. It was important to say that “the reason we should stop droning people and killing everybody is so that we don’t keep getting attacked by people who want to take revenge on us. So if you’re Sontag and you see all these people using 9/11 to justify all the militarism and demand greater militarism and imperial domination, that’s the time that you push back.”

  Sontag was right to point out the connection between American actions and terrorism, Greenwald believed.

  Most Americans had this idea that America was just minding its own business in the world and out of the blue, for no discernible reason, these fucking extreme religious fanatics decided to attack us, right? Just because they’re hateful and fucked up and crazy. And I think if you’re someone like Susan Sontag, who had spent decades saying the United States is the source of extreme violence and aggression in the world, it makes total sense to make that connection.8

  Another president might have proven Sontag wrong. That president was not George W. Bush, who soon plunged America into the greatest foreign policy catastrophe since Vietnam. But if her analysis was proven right, David and others who criticized her had a point. Behind her analysis was the lack of empathy that wrecked her relationships and trivialized many of her political observations. Brenda Shaughnessy was thunderstruck.

  When 9/11 happened she said the most amazing thing that I still can’t get out of my head. She said, “The restaurant workers! The restaurant workers! I don’t care about the bankers. I don’t care about the CEOs. I don’t care about the finance guys. The restaurant workers.” I was like, “Wait, you don’t care about the other people?” It seemed like such a weird political thing to say about 9/11.9

  * * *

  On 9/11, Annie Leibovitz, eight months pregnant, was at her doctor’s office, listening to her baby’s heartbeat. “When I got back to my apartment and looked out the window, the towers were gone,” she said. “There was just smoke. I could not believe that I was not grabbing my camera and running down to the site, but I had to think about the baby.”10 A few days later, Susan returned to New York and they went down to the site now known as Ground Zero, Annie masking her advanced pregnancy with an oversized coat.

  To express her solidarity with the city where she had lived “ten stupendous years,” the Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela came at the end of September. Just before Annie’s birthday, on October 2, Susan invited her to Annie’s country house in Rhinebeck. “Annie had gathered friends, colleagues, and assistants to honor life and invite them to believe in a world still worth bringing children into,” Valenzuela said. Wearing a cap with the logo of the New York Fire Department, Susan offered to read a story, “Rip van Winkle,” set near Rhinebeck. “It was a magical reading that evening, and later Susan invited me to the small house where she lived on Annie’s estate. There, looking out at a pond, she spoke to me of her happiness, of how good she felt about the baby’s arrival. ‘I’ll be like her grandmother,’ she told me.”11 Susan cut Sarah Cameron Leibovitz’s umbilical cord on October 16, 2001. “When they wheeled Sarah into my hospital room and left me alone with her, I was scared out of my mind,” Annie said.12

  Susan was, too. It did not take long for her fears
of abandonment to surface. Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and Annie’s titular boss at Condé Nast, came to the party to welcome Sarah, and arrived in the same elevator as Susan. Michael Silverblatt said that Annie greeted Wintour a bit too enthusiastically.

  Susan said, “What am I, chopped liver?” I couldn’t believe that Susan was using that kind of Barbra Streisand line. But she wanted to be at Annie’s side and not neglected or shunted aside, certainly not for Anna Wintour. Now, you don’t ignore Anna Wintour, but I think Susan immediately thought, Well, you don’t ignore me, either. She was experiencing it as a scene in an opera where the lover welcomes the prince regent and ignores the sordid object of affection.13

  “I think she wanted me to herself,” Leibovitz wryly said.

  * * *

  In early 2002, Annie left London Terrace. She bought two adjacent town houses in the West Village, and began remodeling them as a home for her family. “For reasons I don’t entirely fathom,” Susan wrote Luisa Valenzuela in May, “Annie has really no place for me in her new life, or rather all she has to offer is the possibility of visiting her in her apartment now and then, at which there are invariably many others there.” The resentment at the others competing for Annie’s attention was palpable; but Susan remained stoical: “I tell myself I shouldn’t want to be close to the rather brutal, imperial person she has become.”14

  In 1962, Susan wrote: “The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross).”15 This was her experience, and it was no different now: she had always suffered in love. “I am going through hell,” she wrote a friend.

  Ever hopeful, or gullible, or masochistic, I get flushed out, enter into a conversation (on the phone) and within a minute I’m listening to a vulgar, vicious, truly stupid, screaming denunciation; and then she hangs up on me. It would be funny if it weren’t so painful. In a word, I’ve been fired, although that’s not the way Annie sees it. (The only relationships Annie understands are those with employees and relatives.)16

  The next month, Susan wrote Peter Perrone about Jane, “nanny from hell,” a British woman with whom Susan erroneously believed that Annie was having an affair.

  As for Annie, well, she’s gone . . . psychologically, humanly, whatever. Her only thought is to get Jane back. . . . In the meantime, Jane is spending her summer with the Niarchos family on their island in Greece—Annie’s never heard of Niarchos—and will return in September. The move is scheduled for November. And then? Then Jane will take care of Annie and nose her around and make her feel secure.

  Still, Annie made another gesture: “I’ve been told I could have a floor in one of the houses if I want to move there.”17

  * * *

  Annie’s spending had always inspired awe, and some in her entourage believed that her approach to money reflected a more general refusal of reality. Her assistant Christian Witkin saw it on her shoots: “She was clueless,” he said. “And she had all these ludicrous demands of us while we were—say—up to our knees in water in the Atlantic. She wanted to have lights in the water, but we weren’t going to risk our lives. She didn’t seem to have much common sense.”18

  But cluelessness had its uses. Like Susan, she disregarded rules as a way to flex her muscles. “She was an intimidating woman,” said Witkin. “She would make a fool of you. She had no clue what it took to get the lighting right, but psychologically she was very clever. Mean clever.” And like Susan, she could surprise with showy generosity. “Suddenly she was the nicest person in the world” at an opening. “Or at the employee Christmas dinners. She’d hand people Rolexes and gifts, and you’d love her. It’s like an on-off switch.”

  She knew these lavish outlays impressed, and was even more careless with other people’s money. According to Susan’s assistant Oliver Strand, when Sarah was born and Annie had to be in Europe for a shoot, she would take the Concorde, and then pay for her nanny and daughter to come back on the Concorde: “Then, of course, change the tickets.”

  Just for the kid to come on the plane might be, on the low end, ten thousand dollars. On the high end, thirty-five or forty thousand dollars. This would happen a few times a year.19

  But there were limits even for Annie, whose financial situation had been weakened by a combination of extravagance and bad financial advice. On October 11, 2002, Dan Kellum was busy setting up Sarah Leibovitz’s first birthday party. This would include “a petting zoo and performances by hipster kiddie singer Dan Zanes and country singer Rosanne Cash, who was being flown in to sing Sarah’s favorite lullaby.” As he was preparing the festivities, Kellum received a panicked call. The two nineteenth-century town houses had a sub-basement that was only five feet tall; Annie decided to dig past the foundations to create a full floor. During the excavation, the wall she shared with the house next door groaned, and sank several inches. “The wall separated from the floors, leaving a gaping hole,” New York magazine reported. Much of the damage was covered by insurance, but the neighbors’ home was condemned. They sued, and, under a settlement reached in 2003, she purchased their home for $1.87 million.20 The two-house complex became even grander when the third house was added, with its attendant restoration and remodeling costs.

  To help with Annie’s deteriorating finances, Susan took out a second mortgage on her apartment—which Annie had mostly paid for—and loaned her the money: around three hundred thousand dollars, according to Susan’s accountant.21

  * * *

  In January 2002, UCLA announced the acquisition of Sontag’s archive. “I am delighted that my archive is going to UCLA, thereby renewing an old connection with Southern California,” she said.22 The sale also included her library, estimated at twenty thousand books. The price, $1.1 million, was enough to allow Sontag to help set David up in a large floor-through apartment in Tribeca. But the delight she expressed in the press release was not quite the way she felt privately, and the sight of her papers being prepared for shipment overwhelmed her. “Psychologically that’s a very difficult thing to do, and she did it to help David get that apartment,” said Sharon DeLano.23 “She was really upset,” said Karen Mulligan, who worked in Annie’s studio and helped prepare the archive. “She didn’t want to do it.”24

  Once she had bought the apartment, “she spent a tremendous amount of her money,” said Minda Rae Amiran, “and money is nothing compared to time, outfitting it. He made sure she bought the kind of handle he wanted on the door.” Susan struck Oliver Strand as unusually determined to please David: “That’s the only time when she’d be not rational and a little aggressive and a little huffy and puffy.” She was intimidated by him. “She called him a bully, many times,” said Annie Leibovitz. Once, before Sarah’s birth, she turned to Annie after David walked out. “Just wait till you have children,” she said.25

  Chapter 42

  Can’t Understand, Can’t Imagine

  In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. It would be some time before the full breadth of this folly became universally clear, at which point far more people would claim to have been against the invasion than had been at the time. Many prominent liberals voted for the Senate resolution authorizing the invasion; in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s support was a principal reason she lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, who had opposed the war.

  By then, such opposition required little courage. But if anything proved the prescience of Sontag’s warnings against the language of overheated patriotism, it was the run-up to the war, when bad metaphors showered, like missiles, upon the frightened populace. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, making her fraudulent case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In England, a “dodgy dossier” showing that Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons was, in the words of a British official, “sexed up.” Iraq had no connection to the September 11 attacks, and so a connection had to be pitched—as a consumer item. Ask
ed why the administration waited until September 2002 to press its case, Bush’s chief of staff candidly admitted: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”1

  This language sustained the frenzy September 11 unleashed. George W. Bush, who dodged service in Vietnam, was marketed as martial, macho, the only barrier between America and Armageddon. His opponents were jeered as members of the “Blame America First Club.” This phrase was slapped onto figures as various as the country band the Dixie Chicks, the government of France, and Susan Sontag. A rhetorical low was attained with the resolution to change the wording of the menus in the House of Representatives cafeteria from “French fries” to “freedom fries.” If, two days after the fall of the World Trade Center, it seemed inappropriate for Sontag to denounce the climate of chauvinism, her opposition would seem farsighted after hundreds of thousands of people—by some estimates more than a million—were killed in the Iraqi inferno.

  * * *

  A month before the invasion, Sontag published her final reflection on the ways of seeing and denouncing war. Regarding the Pain of Others appeared in February 2003, a month after her seventieth birthday and a month before the invasion of Iraq.