18.Ibid., 220, November 19, 1959.
19.Sontag Papers, August 24, 1987.
CHAPTER 6: THE BI’S PROGRESS
1.Sontag, Consciousness, 315, April 11, 1971.
2.Sontag, Reborn, 14, February 19, 1949.
3.Gene Hunter, “Susan Sontag, a Very Special Daughter,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 12, 1971.
4.David Bernstein, “Sontag’s U. of C.,” Chicago Magazine, June 2005.
5.Sontag Papers, June 18, 1948.
6.Hunter, “Susan Sontag, a Very Special Daughter.”
7.Author’s interview with Terri Zucker.
8.Sontag Papers, Notebook #11, May 28, 1948–May 29, 1948.
9.Sontag, Reborn, 8, September 2, 1948.
10.Sontag Papers, Notebook #11, May 28, 1948–May 29, 1948.
11.Sontag, Reborn, 5, August 19, 1948.
12.Ibid., 13, February 11, 1949.
13.Sontag Papers, Chicago.
14.Sontag to Judith Cohen, June 6, [1960], Sontag Papers.
15.Sontag Papers, December 30, 1986, Paris.
16.Sontag, Reborn, 14, February 19, 1949.
17.Ibid., 20, May 17, 1949.
18.Ibid., 15, April 6, 1949.
19.Author’s interview with Don Levine; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, preface by T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1937).
20.Barnes, Nightwood, 35.
21.Ibid., 90.
22.Ibid., 118.
23.Ibid., 95.
24.Ibid., 100.
25.Author’s interview with Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.
26.Sontag, Reborn, 18; Sontag Papers, written on the cover of the notebook dated 5/7/49–5/31/49.
27.Sontag, Reborn, 20, May 23, 1949.
28.Ibid., 36, June 6, 1949.
29.Ibid., 42, August 3, 1949.
30.Ibid., 33, May 31, 1949. This woman’s name was Irene Lyons.
31.Ibid., 34, May 30, 1949.
32.Ibid., 33, May 31, 1949.
33.Author’s interview with Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.
34.Author’s interview with Merrill Rodin.
35.Author’s interviews with Gene Marum and Merrill Rodin.
36.Sontag Papers.
37.Sontag, Reborn, 40, June 29, 1949.
CHAPTER 7: THE BENEVOLENT DICTATORSHIP
1.Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges (New York: Barron’s, 1986), 253.
2.Deva Woodly, “How UChicago Became a Hub for Black Intellectuals,” January 19, 2009, https://www.uchicago.edu/features/20090119_mlk/.
3.Author’s interview with Martie Edelheit.
4.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.
5.Molly McQuade, “A Gluttonous Reader: Susan Sontag,” in Sontag, Conversations with Susan Sontag, ed. Leland Poague (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 277.
6.“Robert Maynard Hutchings,” Office of the President, University of Chicago, https://president.uchicago.edu/directory/robert-maynard-hutchins.
7.Sontag, Reborn, 30–31, May 26, 1949.
8.Joel Snyder quoted in Bernstein, “Sontag’s U. of C.”
9.Author’s interview with Minda Rae Amiran.
10.Author’s interview with Sidney Sisk.
11.Author’s interview with Martie Edelheit.
12.Quoted in Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 29.
13.James Miller in Philoctetes Center, “Susan Sontag: Public Intellectual, Polymath, Provocatrice,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXJe3EcPo1g.
14.Author’s interview with Joyce Farber.
15.Robert Boyers in Philoctetes Center, “Susan Sontag: Public Intellectual, Polymath, Provocatrice.”
16.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.
17.Sontag, Conversations, 278.
18.Ibid., 275.
19.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 32.
20.Sontag Papers.
21.Author’s interview with Sidney Sisk.
22.Author’s interview with Joyce Farber.
23.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, October 29, 1950, Sontag Papers.
24.Author’s interview with Joyce Farber.
25.Sontag, Conversations, 274.
26.Author’s interview with Lucie Prinz.
27.Author’s interview with Martie Edelheit.
28.Sontag, Reborn, 67–68, early September 1950.
29.Ibid.
30.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, Chicago, [November?] 1950, Sontag Papers.
CHAPTER 8: MR. CASAUBON
1.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
2.Jonathan Imber, “Philip Rieff: A Personal Remembrance,” Society, November/December 2006, 74.
3.Author’s interview with Allen Glicksman.
4.Gerald Howard, “Reasons to Believe,” Bookforum, February/March 2007.
5.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
6.Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, Vol. 1: Sacred Order/Social Order (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 185–87.
7.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
8.Maxine Bernstein and Robert Boyers, “Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag,” in Sontag, Conversations, 75.
9.Sontag to Judith Sontag, November 25, 1950, Sontag Papers.
10.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, December 2, 1950, Sontag Papers.
11.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 35.
12.Author’s interview with Minda Rae Amiran.
13.Sontag Papers.
14.Ibid.
15.Sontag Papers, July 27, [1958], Ydra.
16.Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 93.
17.Author’s interview with Joyce Farber.
18.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen; Sontag Papers.
19.Sontag, Reborn, 64, February 13, 1951.
20.Fictionalized memoir of her marriage, Sontag Papers.
21.Arthur J. Vidich, With a Critical Eye: An Intellectual and His Times, ed. and intro. Robert Jackall (Knoxville: Newfound Press, 2009).
22.James Miller in Philoctetes Center, “Susan Sontag: Public Intellectual, Polymath, Provocatrice.”
23.Author’s interview with Joyce Farber.
24.Unpublished memoir, Sontag Papers.
25.Author’s interview with Joyce Farber.
26.Michael D’Antonio, “Little David, Happy at Last,” Esquire, March 1990.
27.Sontag Papers, September 10, 1948.
28.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
29.Author’s interview with Allen Glicksman.
30.Author’s interview with Samuel Klausner.
31.Unpublished memoir, Sontag Papers.
32.Susan Rieff, “Decisions,” Sontag Papers.
33.Sontag Papers.
34.Sontag, In America, 24.
35.Sontag, Consciousness, 362, August 14, 1973; author’s interview with David Rieff.
36.Rieff, Swimming, 40–41.
37.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
38.Joan Acocella, “The Hunger Artist,” The New Yorker, March 6, 2000.
39.Heller, “The Life of a Head Girl.”
CHAPTER 9: THE MORALIST
1.Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 6.
2.Sontag to Judith Sontag, Sontag Papers. One ghostwritten manuscript survives in a private collection. Dating from 1951, it is an extensive examination of a thesis, “Jacob Burckhardt, Philosopher and Historian,” presented at Yale in 1941. The author was James Hastings Nichols, who was teaching at Chicago in Sontag’s time. On the backs of several pages, both typewritten and in Sontag’s handwriting, are drafts of letters from Philip Rieff, submitting the work as his own. It does not seem to have been published, perhaps because Sontag’s work so far exceeds what would have been necessary or expected of a book review. It is almost unbelievable that this could be the work of an eighteen-year-old girl—so learned, so conversant with Renaissan
ce history and philosophy, that it suggests that Sontag’s mind, even then, was fully fledged. It requires no effort whatsoever to imagine this author producing The Mind of the Moralist a few years later. Already we see the author of the essays that made her reputation.
3.Author’s interview with Minda Rae Amiran.
4.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, July 4, 1956, Sontag Papers.
5.Jacob Taubes to Sontag, October 22, 1958, Sontag Papers.
6.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
7.Jacob Taubes to Sontag, November 19, 1959, Sontag Papers.
8.Collection of David Rieff, dated “29th Sept. 98.”
9.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 46.
10.Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), viii.
11.Ibid., 38.
12.Ibid., 40.
13.Ibid., 67.
14.Ibid., 75.
15.Ibid., 145.
16.Ibid., 128.
17.Ibid., 134.
18.Ibid., 176.
19.Ibid., 148.
20.Ibid., 153.
21.Ibid., 174.
22.Ibid., 175.
23.Ibid., 182.
24.Ibid., 149.
25.Author’s interview with Sigrid Nunez.
26.Daniel Horowitz, Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 315.
27.Author’s interview with Samuel Klausner.
28.Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks.
29.Author’s interview with Allen Glicksman.
30.Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks, 126.
31.Author’s interview with Joyce Farber.
32.Rieff, Moralist, 155, 167.
33.Sontag, Consciousness, 47, November 17, 1964.
CHAPTER 10: THE HARVARD GNOSTICS
1.Author’s interview with Hardy Frank.
2.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, University of Connecticut press release, Sontag Papers.
3.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, “Tuesday” [Fall 1955], Sontag Papers.
4.Mackenzie, “Finding Fact from Fiction.”
5.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, Sontag Papers.
6.Author’s interview with Minda Rae Amiran.
7.Sontag, Essays of the 1960s & 70s, ed. David Rieff (New York: Library of America, 2013), 816.
8.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, Sontag Papers; Morton White, A Philosopher’s Story (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 147–48.
9.Sontag Papers. Around this time (1958), Sontag was already writing short memoirs, nominally fictionalized, about her marriage. It was a theme to which she often returned, in conversation and occasionally in her writing, for the rest of her life.
10.Author’s interview with Hardy Frank.
11.Hans Jonas, Memoirs: The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2008), 168.
12.Sontag, Consciousness, 336, July 21, 1972.
13.Susan Taubes, Divorcing (New York: Random House, 1969), 225.
14.Christina Pareigis, “Susan Taubes—Bilder aus dem Archiv,” Aus Berliner Archiven (Beiträge zum Berliner Wissenschaftsjahr, 2010), 22.
15.Sontag, Reborn, 288, September 14–September 15, 1961.
16.Taubes, Divorcing, 56.
17.Author’s interview with Christina Pareigis.
18.“Debriefing,” in Sontag, I, etcetera, 52.
19.“‘Thinking Against Oneself’: Reflections on Cioran,” in Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 75.
20.Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 31.
21.Ibid., 38.
22.Ibid., 31.
23.Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), xxxiii, xxiii.
24.Ibid., xxxv.
25.Ibid., xxv.
26.Ibid., xlv–xlvi.
27.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 38.
28.“Report—7th Meeting,” minutes of a class taught at Columbia University by Jacob Taubes and Sontag, March 7, 1961, Sontag Papers.
29.Author’s interview with Michael Krüger.
30.Sontag, Reborn, 83, September 4, 1956.
31.Ibid., 140, March 27, 1957.
32.Ibid., 98–99, March 3, 1957.
33.Ibid., 180–81, January 6, 1958. The friend was Annette Michelson.
34.Kaplan, Dreaming in French, 92.
35.Sontag, Reborn, 170, early 1958.
36.White, A Philosopher’s Story, 148; Sontag Papers, July 1, 1958.
37.Sontag Papers.
38.Author’s interview with Minda Rae Amiran.
39.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.
40.Sontag, Reborn, 103, 133, 135, January 14, 1957; January 19, 1957; February 18, 1957.
41.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
42.Sontag, Reborn, 152, September 5, 1957.
CHAPTER 11: WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY MEAN?
1.Unpublished fictionalized memoir, Sontag Papers.
2.Sontag Papers.
3.Author’s interview with Judith Spink Grossman.
4.Author’s interview with Bernard Donoughue.
5.Judith Grossman, Her Own Terms (New York: Soho Press, 1988), 217.
6.Jonathan Miller and John Cleese, “Oxbridge Philosophy,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUvf3fOmTTk.
7.Sontag, Reborn, 193, February 25, 1958.
8.Author’s interview with Bernard Donoughue.
9.Sontag, “The Letter Scene,” The New Yorker, August 18, 1986.
10.“Late in Rieff’s life, his son, David, once said to me that his father was a hypochondriac his entire life, but now he was actually ill,” wrote Jonathan Imber, a former student of Rieff’s. Imber, “Philip Rieff: A Personal Remembrance.”
11.Author’s interview with Joyce Farber.
12.H. L. A. Hart to Morton White, December 18, 1957, quoted in White, A Philosopher’s Story, 149.
13.Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, Abroad: An Expatriate’s Diaries: 1950–1959 (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), 26, February 21, 1951.
14.Ibid., 32, July 15, 1951.
15.Ibid., 121–22, December 2, 1954.
16.Ibid., 129–30, May 1, 1955.
17.Sontag, Reborn, 183, January 2, 1958.
18.Zwerling, Abroad, 264–65, December 7–22, 1957.
19.Sontag, Reborn, 167, December 31, 1957.
20.Ibid., 165, December 29, 1957.
21.Sontag, Consciousness, 133, December 10, 1965.
22.Schreiber, Geist, 61.
23.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
24.Author’s interview with Noël Burch.
25.Ted Mooney, a writer who, for a period in the eighties, was friendly with both Susan and David, remembered that she was “visually unable to see painting.” They visited a Mondrian retrospective: “She appreciated it but she didn’t see it. I remember trying to teach her how not to make a judgment or have a verbally couched thought for five minutes in front of a painting . . . it was impossible. She didn’t see the point of it. She didn’t believe it was possible or desirable. I found it very frustrating because I know she checked off some things in her mind about perspective and the course of abstraction without really seeing it once.” Leon Wieseltier, who had become close to Susan around 1976, tells a similar story. “Susan would go to the opera every night, but if you asked me was Susan genuinely musical, I would have to say no. It was programmatic. She couldn’t dance. She never tapped her feet to the rhythm.” Florence Malraux had said that Susan had no eye; Stephen Koch said that “she wasn’t a good reader, in the sense that she would get how a style works. I remember one thing that is almost insulting to bring up. She was known for promoting the works of Jean Genet. And I had been in a discussion with her about metaphor. And she says she doesn’t see metaphor, she sees two things. And I said,
oh now come on, you must, and gave her certain examples of metaphors that seemed quite obvious. And later she came to me, the next time we met, with a copy of Genet in French, she said, You know, you’re right! I’ve just been going through Genet! And there are five or six metaphors per page! Look, I’ve underlined them. And handed it to me, a proud student. And I thought, this woman is one of the best-known critics in English. And it didn’t make me despise her, by the way. It’s sort of touching.”
26.Zwerling, Abroad, 270–71, April 3, 1958, Seville.
27.Author’s interview with Joanna Robertson.
28.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
29.Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 271.
30.Author’s interview with Noël Burch.
31.Sontag, Reborn, 182, January 12, 1958.
32.Ibid., 184, February 5, 1958.
33.Ibid., 193, July 14, 1958.
34.Zwerling, Abroad, 266, January 13, 1958.
35.Author’s interview with Edward Field.
36.Author’s interview with Bernard Donoughue.
37.Sontag, Reborn, 202, May 31, 1958.
38.Kaplan, Dreaming in French, 110ff.
39.Quoted in ibid., 97.
40.Sontag, Reborn, 166, December 31, 1957.
41.Ibid., 164, December 31, 1957.
42.Sontag Papers, December 29, 1958.
43.“A Poet’s Prose,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 8.
44.David Rieff, preface to Sontag, Reborn, xiii.
CHAPTER 12: THE PRICE OF SALT
1.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, Athens, n.d. (“Monday night”), Sontag Papers.
2.Quoted in Kaplan, Dreaming in French, 111.
3.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
4.Philip Rieff to Joyce Farber, March 27, 1959, Sontag Papers.
5.Draft dated February 26, 1958, Paris, Sontag Papers.
6.Entry undated, in notebook labeled September 1, 1958–January 2, 1959, Sontag Papers.
7.Author’s interview with Sigrid Nunez.
8.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
9.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.
10.Entry undated, in notebook labeled September 1, 1958–January 2, 1959, Sontag Papers.
11.This novel is the basis for Todd Haynes’s film Carol (2015).
12.Sontag, Reborn, 181, January 16, 1958.
13.Author’s interview with Darryl Pinckney.
14.Jacob Taubes to Sontag, November 10, 1958, Sontag Papers.
15.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
16.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.
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