Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  * * *

  The idea of returning to finish her book was all the more poignant because by the time she went to South Africa she already knew—or at least strongly suspected—that she was sick. A couple of weeks before the trip, she went to Santa Fe for a speaking engagement. Michael Silverblatt was there to introduce and interview her. In the twelve years since they met, Sontag and Silverblatt had become passionate friends. “She was very tactile,” he said. “There was a great emotional need to be held and touched and felt.”25

  Silverblatt was one of the rare people she trusted to touch her. When he took her to an acupuncturist to help her quit smoking, Peter Perrone saw just how hard this was for her. He had been after her for years to try acupuncture to help her quit, and finally wore her down. The elderly Chinese therapist explained the process to Susan, saying that a patient should not so much as feel properly applied acupuncture needles. But she started writhing and screaming before he even touched her. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Go ahead, go ahead,” she answered. He tried again, and then again, with the same results. Exasperated, he finally told her it was no use. “Let’s go get dim sum,” she said to Peter.26

  In Santa Fe, Susan and Michael visited a massage center called Ten Thousand Waves. Susan claimed that she had never had a massage in all her life. Her mother was “a pig of pleasure,” she told him. “She wanted to be as unlike her mother as possible.” They booked a double room. Silverblatt knew it was a consequential moment, a level of intimacy she rarely attained. “I knew that she wanted to see if she could show me her mastectomy wounds, her scars,” he said. “It was something that she had enormous fear about, to be naked with people. Of course, I was extraordinarily moved and touched and frightened.”

  A more frightening sequel was to come. The pressure from the massage left black-and-blue marks on her body—and that, said Silverblatt, “was when she realized she had this very difficult kind of leukemia.”

  Chapter 43

  The Only Thing That’s Real

  On March 28, on his way back from a reporting trip in Palestine, David called from Heathrow. After listening to his stories about the West Bank, Susan said: “There may be something wrong.” She downplayed the danger, though she asked him to come with her to the doctor the next day. Back in New York, he went to her apartment. “She kept talking about the Middle East, and, unable to say anything that mattered, let alone touch her, I kept on telling stories about Yasser Arafat and his compound in Ramallah.” The tests left no doubt. Susan had myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood cancer. The doctor explained with brutal clarity what that meant. “So what you’re telling me is that in fact there is nothing to be done,” she said. “Nothing I can do.” The doctor did not answer. He suggested that, rather than pursue futile treatments, she take the time she still had—around six months—to live.1 On the drive back downtown, she stared out the window. “Wow,” she said. “Wow.”2

  * * *

  At first, Susan understood. “Three strikes and you’re out,” she told several friends.3 “I don’t feel lucky about this one,” she said to Peter Perrone. “This time, for the first time in my life, I don’t feel special,” she would say in particularly black moods.4 She had never been able to be alone, but now she needed someone with her around the clock. Her housekeeper, Sookhee Chinkhan, took to sleeping in the living room. One night, when she woke up screaming, Chinkhan prayed: “Please Lord, give Susan peace.”5

  “My mother came to being ill imbued with a profound sense of being the exception to every rule,” David wrote.6 Beyond the threat to her body, the loss of that sense of specialness, of self, added to the terror of the cancer. This was not grandiosity chafing against a monstrous dose of reality. To renounce her exceptionalism would mean renouncing the foundation of her identity, the fiction that had transformed Sue Rosenblatt into Susan Sontag. Giving it up would mean death, though clinging to it in the face of this diagnosis meant madness. Soon, David said, her choice became clear: “To say that we were all worried about her immediate mental state does not begin to describe the anxieties.”7

  “Lie to me,” Susan had imagined Mildred’s saying. Once Susan’s mind reasserted itself over her body, this was exactly what she demanded of those around her. David “gave the answers that I believed she wanted to hear.” He felt he had no choice. “Never for a moment, during the course of my mother’s illness, did I think she could have ‘heard’ that she was dying.”8

  This was the woman who “always liked to pretend my body isn’t there,” who had always been willing to subject her body to extreme ordeals. “They’re using chemical weapons on me. I have to cheer,” she wrote during her first cancer. Convinced that a steely mind was the key to survival, she would cheer again: a perverse last tribute to Freud.

  * * *

  She went back to work. A month after her diagnosis, another horrible event proved the ongoing relevance of her thought. Photograph emerged at the end of April that showed Americans torturing inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The revelation that George W. Bush had instituted torture did much to undermine support for a war he packaged as a liberation, and stirred Sontag to write one last time on the subject that had occupied her throughout her life. “Regarding the Torture of Others” appeared in The New York Times Magazine at the end of May.

  Her final published essay showed how a subject that might have seemed intellectual or abstract could break people’s bodies. Among the many things the separation of thing from metaphor could effect was a separation of crime from criminal. When the Abu Ghraib pictures surfaced, “the president was shocked and disgusted by the Photograph—as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict.”

  And so it was with language: “There was also the avoidance of the word ‘torture,’” which Bush skirted with legalese. Metaphor meant so many things; and among its sinister powers was its ability to disguise evil by dressing it in other names. Thousands of years ago, Confucius wrote that the abuse of metaphor led to the destruction of society, because tyranny began with language. The warning could never be repeated enough. In every generation, it needed to be relearned, often at hideous cost.

  Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are “detainees”; “prisoners,” a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless “global war on terrorism”—into which both the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon decree—inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.

  Into these mangled meanings entered the predatory weapon, the camera. The Abu Ghraib pictures were made by people who saw nothing wrong with what they were doing and recorded torture exactly as they recorded everything else. Torture was simply another occasion for photography.

  Andy Warhol’s ideal of filming real events in real time—life isn’t edited, why should its record be edited?—has become a norm. . . . Here I am—waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school.

  The camera made all events equal. “The distinction between photograph and reality—as between spin and policy—can easily evaporate.” And, as Warhol had predicted, it had made people equal to their images: “The Photograph are us,” she wrote.

  Was this distinction overstated? There would be no “ecology of images,” no way to check their proliferation. And so the identity of object and image had to be made a positive weapon. Because they retained a power that words had lost, pictures needed to be wielded against other pictures, as artists since Goya had endeavored to do.

  The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in which we live. . . . Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, a
nd so much easier to forget.9

  * * *

  On May 25, two days after this essay was published, Roger Straus, the most enduring parental figure in Susan’s life, died at eighty-seven. Their relationship had lasted forty-two years. “I never thought I would die the same year that Roger did,” Susan told Karla Eoff.10

  In Illness as Metaphor, she had denounced the practice of lying to patients. “All this lying to and by cancer patients is a measure of how much harder it has become in advanced industrial societies to come to terms with death,” she wrote then. “Yet the modern denial of death does not explain the extent of the lying.”11 Her experience would suggest another explanation: the sufferer wanted to be lied to—insisted on it. But the lying deprived her of an opportunity to come to terms with what was happening to her. Sharon DeLano saw that if she was sometimes far more optimistic than she had reason to be, that was because her doctors frequently gave her false encouragement. “She was not allowed the chance to reconcile herself with death.” DeLano believed that she would have made other choices if the options had been more soberly explained to her, as the doctor who gave her the initial diagnosis had attempted to do. But his banishment resulted in a gruesome “treatment” that was almost certainly bound to fail. Echoing many of those who accompanied Sontag’s last months, DeLano said: “Torture is not too strong a word.”12

  Thirty years before, as she was preparing for her first cancer surgery, Susan had written that

  We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably . . .13

  The body knew. But the mind needed to be brought to that knowledge. With talk of “miracle drugs” constantly dangled before her, she held out hope far longer than she had any rational reason to. But she had beaten cancer twice. The first victory maimed her, and the second poisoned her: the third was the result of the chemotherapy she had received for her uterine sarcoma.14 Still, that therapy had bought her six more years. Encouraged by her new doctors, she was determined to do whatever it took to buy herself a bit more time.

  And so, as she was writing “Regarding the Torture of Others,” she was undergoing torture herself, in a desperate bid to prove the initial diagnosis wrong. Her battle plan had two prongs. First, a determination to outwit the disease through careful study. “Above all,” David wrote, “information needed to be collected.”15 Second, the willingness to undergo suffering.

  * * *

  She elected a bone-marrow transplant. Most cancer treatments aim to produce remission: to buy some time. A successful bone-marrow transplant effects a total cure. Stem cells are injected into the vein, and these—beautifully, mysteriously—fight their way into the marrow. There, if all goes well, they establish themselves and begin to make new blood. The patient’s cancerous blood is banished, replaced by a new blood system, borrowed from the donor.

  It is no small thing to destroy a person’s entire blood system. For all its theoretical elegance, the transplant presented so many obstacles that her doctors in New York did not want to risk it. For a person of her age and with her medical history, its chances of success were slight. It was shockingly expensive; Annie paid.16 And it entailed grotesque suffering. Nevertheless, there was a chance it could work. She found a matching donor: one in three patients never do. And she found a hospital in Seattle willing to offer the therapy, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at the University of Washington. Before she went, she began conditioning chemotherapy at Sloan Kettering. Then, on June 9, Annie arranged for her to be flown to Seattle in a private plane.

  Annie also arranged a whole system of caretakers to ensure that Susan would not need to be alone. With them, the first days of summer in Seattle were not unpleasant, considering the circumstances. With Sharon DeLano, she visited the new public library, designed by Rem Koolhaas. With Peter Perrone, she saw Spider-Man 2. With Peter, Annie set up two apartments at a Residence Inn: one to house Susan as she awaited her operation, and the other to house visiting friends and relatives.

  “It is not a procedure for which anyone can be prepared,” wrote her friend Jerome Groopman, the physician and writer.17

  It is a treatment of last resort. Even when all goes well, it represents an experience beyond our ordinary imaginings—the ordeal of chemotherapy taken to a near-lethal extreme.18

  In July, Susan was isolated in a radiation chamber and brought as close to death as is clinically sustainable. On August 21, she received the transplant. It was not clear whether the cells would root; and throughout the days of doubt, from time to time, Annie took pictures. If words can be inadequate to describe the pain of others, Photograph showed the torment. Susan’s skin turned black. Her face swelled beyond recognition. For all the controversy these Photograph created when they were published, the most remarkable thing about them may be that they did not show this instantly identifiable woman in any identifiable form. Susan Sontag was no longer herself.

  * * *

  Peter was relieved by Paolo Dilonardo, who was relieved by Karla, who stayed from the end of August until early October, when Sharon came. Though her father was dying in Florida, Annie came whenever she could. Judith came in from Hawaii.

  Those who came faced arduous work. Throughout September, Karla began circulating a daily e-mail to a few of the people entrusted with Susan’s care. They discuss the monitoring of Susan’s blood counts, as the doctors waited to see if the transplant had worked. They show the frantic concern of Nicole Stéphane, in Paris, trying to get Dr. Israël to pull off another miracle. In a moment of despair, Susan called Nicole, herself elderly and ill, and said: “I’m not going to make it this time.”19 They show the efforts of Anne Jump, Susan’s assistant. And they show the team Annie had assembled and paid to arrange practical matters from her office in New York, and her efforts to give Susan emotional support, too: “Annie was overachieving, giving Susan all of her attention (which was loving and sweet) but something that Annie couldn’t possibly keep up at that level if she was here all the time.”20

  They show the efforts made to distract Susan: “Annie had put Parsifal on (5 hours, oy) and so Susan was completely engrossed.”21 And they show how difficult the most basic activities had become. It took her hours to eat a simple meal, and her inability to control her bodily functions created a horror. She was incontinent, but often too dazed to realize that she had soiled herself, Karla wrote: “You can barely hear her when she talks, she won’t talk on the phone, her hands shake, she doesn’t look at you when you talk to her (or only rarely).”

  As they were striving to keep Susan alive long enough to give the transplant a chance, Susan had one overwhelming wish: to see David. He had not one but two dying parents: Philip Rieff was sick in Philadelphia, and David himself had to undergo a minor operation in New York. But many felt his presence was grudging. “It was hard to get David out there,” said Annie.22 He had not been since Karla arrived in August, and had promised to come on his birthday, September 28. As the hours passed and he had still not arrived, Susan began to panic. “Can you call David? Can we find David? David’s not here. I hope nothing’s happened to him. Where’s David? Where’s David? Where’s David?”

  Around five, Karla finally got him on the phone. “I’m not coming,” he said. Karla reminded him that it was the last time she would be alive for his birthday. “It means more to her than anything.” But he was in New York, and declined to call; it was left to Karla to break the news. “She freaked out. She was like, ‘Oh my God, is he sick? Is he in the hospital?’”

  To get her mind off David, Karla brought some sushi, since she hated the hospital food, and suggested they talk about his birth. “I certainly couldn’t get her to talk about dying, but I could celebrate David’s birthday with her. I could give her that.” That night, she wrote David.

  We turned off the lights and watched the moon rise, and I asked Susan to tell me the story of your birth.

  S
he said that at four o’clock in the morning, the day before you were born, she was in bed next to Philip and realized that she was lying in a puddle of water. Philip asked what they should do, and she said, “I guess we should call a taxi.” She was in a maternity ward at the hospital, so she could hear other women in labor. “The strange thing is that they didn’t call out for their husbands, they called out for their mothers.”

  Every few hours she would ask for painkillers, and they would say, “Soon, but you have to push some more first.” It was a long period of labor, difficult, but when it was over she had a ten-pound boy. “I always knew it would be David. I never even thought I’d have a girl.”

  You looked like an Inuit baby. You had a Mongolian spot at the base of your spine, and a tiny tail. Your hair was black and fuzzy and came all the way down to your eyebrows.

  I don’t think Susan has ever done anything that made her happier than having you. She’s always said that you were the love of her life. You must realize how proud of you she is, but multiply that by a thousand.23

  * * *

  Friends sent the kinds of weighty foreign films that Susan had enjoyed all her life, but to their surprise she was not interested. “It was not Dreyer or Bergman but Cary Grant and Fred Astaire,” said Sharon. “The American musical.” They watched Kiss Me, Kate; Singin’ in the Rain; It Happened One Night; The Philadelphia Story; Some Like It Hot; To Have and Have Not.24 “We really liked Funny Face, for instance,” Sharon said. “We thought how great that holds up.” When Susan was watching a movie, she would not be interrupted. Once, a doctor tried to interrupt, and Susan waved him away. “You’ve got to go and come back when this is over.” The doctor insisted, but Susan told him to come back later: she was watching Aida. “She wouldn’t let him talk because she was watching an opera,” Karla said.