Sontag

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Sontag Page 66

by Benjamin Moser

17.Author’s interview with Sigrid Nunez.

  18.Charles Ruas, “Susan Sontag: Me, Etcetera,” in Sontag, Conversations, 181.

  19.Author’s interview with David Rieff.

  20.Jacob Taubes to Sontag, October 22, 1958, Sontag Papers.

  21.Author’s interview with Norman Podhoretz.

  22.Ibid.

  23.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  24.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.

  25.Author’s interview with Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.

  26.Michelle Memran, dir., The Rest I Make Up, 2018.

  27.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  28.Mary V. Dearborn, Mailer: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), 83.

  29.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.

  30.Stephanie Harrington, “Irene Fornes, Playwright: Alice and the Red Queen,” Village Voice, April 21, 1966, 1, 33–34, quoted in Scott T. Cummings, Maria Irene Fornes: Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists (London: Routledge, 2013).

  31.Sontag Papers, March 4, [1959].

  32.Sontag Papers, February 22, 1959.

  33.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 53.

  34.Sontag Papers.

  35.Sontag Papers, March 2, [1959].

  36.Sontag Papers, March 8, [1959].

  37.Sontag, Reborn, November 11, 1959. As published, the passage is heavily redacted from the original in the Sontag Papers: the references to rape, to fucking oneself, and to Freud (!) are omitted, for example.

  38.Author’s interview with Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.

  39.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  40.Sontag, Consciousness, 169, January 4, 1966.

  41.Suzy Hansen, “Rieff Encounter,” New York Observer, May 2, 2005.

  42.Sontag, Reborn, 219–20, September 1959.

  43.Hansen, “Rieff Encounter.”

  44.Sontag Papers, February 22, 1959.

  45.Sontag Papers, March 4, 1959.

  46.Author’s interview with David Rieff.

  47.Ibid.

  48.Hansen, “Rieff Encounter.”

  49.Sontag to Mildred Sontag, [1960], Sontag Papers.

  50.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  CHAPTER 13: THE COMEDY OF ROLES

  1.“Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 271.

  2.Sontag Papers, Notebook #4, April 20, 1947.

  3.Sontag to Judith Sontag, on Commentary stationery, n.d. [probably summer 1959], Sontag Papers.

  4.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.

  5.Sontag, Consciousness, August 7, 1968, Stockholm.

  6.Sontag Papers, 1947.

  7.“Simone Weil,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 50.

  8.“Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 111.

  9.Sontag, Benefactor, 4–5.

  10.Author’s interview with Evans Chan.

  11.Sontag, Benefactor, 19.

  12.Ibid., 97.

  13.Ibid., 80, 83. Like Artaud, Hippolyte dabbles in film acting.

  14.Ibid., 155.

  15.“Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 269.

  16.Sontag, Benefactor, 261.

  17.Rieff, Moralist, 136, 76, 119.

  18.Sontag, Benefactor, 40, 18.

  19.Ibid., 41.

  20.Ibid., 109.

  21.Ibid., 258.

  22.Ibid., 261.

  23.Sontag, Reborn, 229, January 21, 1960.

  24.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  25.Sontag, Reborn, 274, June 12, 1961.

  26.Ibid., 246, n.d. [February 1960, possibly 1961].

  27.Sontag, Reborn, 255, February 19, [1960, possibly 1961]; February 29, [1960 or 1961].

  28.Sontag, Benefactor, 223.

  29.Ibid., 52, 55.

  30.Ibid., 57–58. “When I began to accompany my friend the writer, I had no opinions about his activities, and even if I had felt licensed to urge him to a less perverse and promiscuous life, I would have held my tongue. Jean-Jacques, however, would not allow my silence. Though I did not attack him, he was resolute and ingenious in his own defense, or rather the defense of the pleasure of disguises, secrecy, entrapments, and being-what-one-is-not.

  “Several times that summer, he tried to overturn my unspoken objections. ‘Don’t be so solemn, Hippolyte. You are worse than a moralist.’ While I could not help regarding this world of illicit lust as a dream, skillful but also weighty and dangerous, he saw it simply as theatre. ‘Why should we all not exchange our masks—once a night, once a month, once a year?’ he said. ‘The masks of one’s job, one’s class, one’s citizenship, one’s opinions. The masks of husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave. Even the masks of the body—male and female, ugly and beautiful, old and young. Most men, without resisting, put them on and wear them all their lives. But the men around you in this café do not. Homosexuality, you see, is a kind of playfulness with masks. Try it and you will see how it induces a welcome detachment from yourself.’

  “But I did not want to be detached from myself, but rather in myself.

  “‘What is a revolutionary act in our time?’ he asked me, rhetorically, at another meeting. ‘To overturn a convention is like answering a question. He who asks a question already excludes so much that he may be said to give the answer at the same time. At least he marks off a zone, the zone of legitimate answers to his question. You understand?’

  “‘Yes, I understand. But not what bearing it has—’

  “‘Look, Hippolyte. You know how little audacity is required today to be unconventional. The sexual and social conventions of our time prescribe the homosexual parody.’”

  31.Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America: 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 104.

  CHAPTER 14: ALL JOY OR ALL RAGE

  1.Sontag Papers.

  2.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  3.“Report—7th Meeting,” March 7, 1961, Sontag Papers.

  4.Author’s interview with Frederic Tuten.

  5.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  6.Author’s interview with Norman Podhoretz.

  7.Ira S. Youdovin, “Recent Resignations Reveal Decentralization Problems,” Columbia Daily Spectator CV, no. 81 (March 9, 1961), http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/columbia?a=d&d=cs19610309-01.2.4.

  8.Quoted in Ilana Abramovitch and Seán Galvin, eds., Jews of Brooklyn: Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 303.

  9.Author’s interview with Edward Field.

  10.Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 309.

  11.Ibid., 40.

  12.Ibid., 110. The term was originally Murray Kempton’s.

  13.Mark Greif, “What’s Wrong with Public Intellectuals?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2015, http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-With-Public/189921/.

  14.Quoted in Greif, Age of the Crisis of Man, 17.

  15.Greif, “What’s Wrong with Public Intellectuals?”

  16.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  17.Sontag, Reborn, 160, November 4, 1957.

  18.Ibid., 163, December 29, 1958.

  19.Podhoretz, Making It, 161.

  20.Ibid., 268.

  21.Alfred Albelli, “Prof: Gotta Be Sneak to See My Son,” New York Daily News, December 15, 1961, Sontag Papers.

  22.Sontag, Reborn, 223, December 24, 1959.

  23.Albelli, “Prof: Gotta Be Sneak.”

  24.“Prof Wins 1st Round on Son,” undated clipping, Sontag Papers.

  25.Sontag to Zoë Pagnamenta, e-mail, July 20, 2001, Sontag Papers.

  26.Author’s interview with Allen Glicksman. Jonathan Imber tells a similar story: “On a visit he made to Boston . . . he insisted I drive him to Cambridge, in particular along those streets he had walked while living the
re with Sontag and their young son. We drove around a specific block five or six times, slowing down again and again as we passed the house in which they had lived together. Here was an occasion, literally driving in circles, of heartfelt regret that explains best of all to me why he dedicated the last book published in his lifetime to ‘Susan Sontag in remembrance.’” (Imber, “Philip Rieff: A Personal Remembrance.”)

  27.Boris Kachka, Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 48, 51.

  28.Author’s interview with Jonathan Galassi.

  29.Kachka, Hothouse, 147.

  30.Author’s interview with Peggy Miller.

  31.Author’s interview with Greg Chandler.

  32.Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Roger W. Straus Jr., Book Publisher from the Age of the Independents, Dies at 87,” New York Times, May 27, 2004.

  33.Author’s interview with Jonathan Galassi.

  34.Kachka, Hothouse, 130.

  35.Ibid.

  36.Author’s interview with Jonathan Galassi.

  37.Kachka, Hothouse, 147.

  38.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 66.

  39.Sontag, “Demons and Dreams,” Partisan Review, Summer 1962, 460–63.

  40.Podhoretz, Making It, 170.

  41.Sontag, Reborn, 223, December 28, 1959.

  42.Ibid., 232, January 1960.

  43.Ibid., 258, February 29, 1960.

  44.Sontag, Consciousness, 98–99, n.d. [1962].

  45.Ibid., 214, n.d. [1967].

  46.Sontag, Reborn, 241, February 18, 1960.

  47.Michelle Memran, a young filmmaker, befriended Irene toward the end of her life, as she was sliding toward dementia, and conducted extensive interviews with her over a period of several years. The resulting film, The Rest I Make Up, features many of these interviews.

  48.Cummings, Maria Irene Fornes, 8.

  49.Fornés won a total of eleven times, from 1965 to 2000. http://www.obieawards.com/?s=fornes.

  50.Ross Wetzsteon, “Irene Fornes: The Elements of Style,” Village Voice, April 29, 1986, 42–45.

  51.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  52.Memran, The Rest I Make Up.

  CHAPTER 15: FUNSVILLE

  1.John Wain, “Song of Myself, 1963,” The New Republic, September 21, 1963.

  2.“Identifiable as Prose,” Time, September 14, 1963.

  3.Hannah Arendt to Roger Straus, August 20, 1963, Sontag Papers.

  4.Sontag, Benefactor, 6.

  5.Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York: Praeger, 1973), 140.

  6.Ibid., xi.

  7.Ibid., 5.

  8.Ibid., 6, 7.

  9.Dana Heller, “Absolute Seriousness: Susan Sontag in American Popular Culture,” in Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, The Scandal of Susan Sontag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 32ff.

  10.Koch, Stargazer, 22–23.

  11.Author’s interview with Norman Podhoretz.

  12.“Not Good Taste, Not Bad Taste—It’s ‘Camp,’” New York Times, March 31, 1965.

  13.Atlas, “The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.”

  14.“On Roland Barthes,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 80.

  15.Sontag Papers, July 19–July 24, 1958, Ydra.

  16.Quoted in Seligman, Sontag & Kael, 116.

  17.Robert Trumbull, “Homosexuals Proud of Deviancy, Medical Academy Study Finds,” New York Times, May 19, 1964.

  18.Donn Teal (as “Ronald Forsythe”), “Why Can’t ‘We’ Live Happily Ever After, Too?” New York Times, February 23, 1969, quoted in David W. Dunlap, “Looking Back: 1964 | ‘Homosexuals Proud of Deviancy,’” New York Times, June 9, 2015.

  19.Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 79.

  20.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  21.“Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 226.

  22.“Pornography Is Undefined at Film-Critic Mekas’ Trial,” Village Voice, June 18, 1964. The conviction was later reversed by an appeals court.

  23.Terry Castle, “Some Notes on ‘Notes on Camp,’” in Ching and Wagner-Lawlor, Scandal, 21–31.

  24.“Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 276.

  25.Koch, Stargazer, 22, 15.

  26.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  27.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  28.Ibid.

  29.Ephron, “Not Even a Critic Can Choose Her Audience.”

  30.“Not Good Taste, Not Bad Taste—It’s ‘Camp.’”

  31.Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), xxiv.

  32.Eliot Fremont-Smith, “After the Ticker Tape Parade,” New York Times, January 31, 1966.

  33.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  34.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  35.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  36.Author’s interview with David Rieff.

  37.Author’s interview with Martie Edelheit.

  38.Koch, Stargazer, 13.

  39.Author’s interview with Greg Chandler.

  40.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  41.Author’s interview with Gary Indiana.

  42.Author’s interview with Camille Paglia.

  CHAPTER 16: WHERE YOU LEAVE OFF AND THE CAMERA BEGINS

  1.Sontag, Reborn, 262, December 18, 1960.

  2.Ibid., 266, April 14, 1961; April 23, 1961.

  3.Sontag, Consciousness, 72, January 16, 1965.

  4.Sontag, Reborn, 312, March 26, 1963.

  5.Sontag quotes on Cornell from transcript of interview with Robert McNab, broadcast on BBC, December 9, 1991, Sontag Papers.

  6.Koch, Stargazer, 6.

  7.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 111.

  8.Diana Athill, Stet: A Memoir (London: Granta Books, 2000), 202.

  9.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 107.

  10.Athill, Stet, 185.

  11.Sontag in The New York Times Book Review, May 31, 1964.

  12.Sontag, Consciousness, 108, August 29, 1965.

  13.Ibid., 110, August 28, 1965.

  14.Edward Field, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag: And Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

  15.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 107.

  16.Blake Bailey, “Beloved Monster,” Vice, March 1, 2008.

  17.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 106.

  18.Sontag, Consciousness, 117, September 6, 1965.

  19.Ibid., 108, August 29, 1965, Tangier.

  20.Ibid., 107, August 29, 1965.

  21.Author’s interview with Michael Krüger.

  22.Yoram Kaniuk quoted in Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 163.

  23.Sontag, Consciousness, 134, October 17, 1965.

  24.Author’s interview with Eva Kollisch.

  25.Sontag to Rogers Albritton, May 14, 1966, Sontag Papers.

  26.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  27.Author’s interview with Eva Kollisch.

  28.Sontag, Consciousness, 115, September 6, 1965.

  29.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  30.Author’s interview with David Rieff.

  31.Sontag, Consciousness, 105, September 3, 1964.

  32.Ibid., 104, August 28, 1965.

  33.Ibid., 69, January 5, 1965.

  34.Sontag, Reborn, 300, March 3, 1962.

  35.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  36.Sontag, Consciousness, 97, August 24, 1965.

  37.Author’s interview with Leon Wieseltier.

  38.D’Antonio, “Little David, Happy at Last,” 128.

  39.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 89.

  40.Author’s interview with Frederic Tuten.

  41.Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.

  42.Author’s interview with Ethan Tau
bes.

  43.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  44.Sontag Papers.

  45.Author’s interview with David Rieff.

  46.Author’s interview with Peggy Miller.

  47.Sontag to Judith Sontag Cohen, May 27, 1968, Sontag Papers.

  48.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  49.Sontag, Reborn, 223, December 28, 1959.

  50.Jill Johnston, Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 50.

  51.Ibid., 64.

  52.Ibid., 55.

  53.Sontag, Consciousness, 144, November 20, 1965.

  54.Johnston, Privileged Information, 134.

  55.Author’s interview with Jasper Johns.

  56.Sontag, Consciousness, 78, March 26, 1965.

  57.Sontag, Against Interpretation, 303.

  58.Benjamin DeMott, “Lady on the Scene,” The New York Times Book Review, January 23, 1966.

  59.Larry McMurtry, Times Literary Supplement, June 7, 1992.

  60.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  61.Author’s interview with Don Levine.

  62.Ibid.

  CHAPTER 17: GOD BLESS AMERICA

  1.Sontag, Conversations, 258.

  2.Annie De Clerck, “Susan Sontag” (interview), http://cobra.canvas.be/cm/cobra/videozone/rubriek/boek-videozone/1.676237.

  3.Paul Thek, notebook dated November 30, 1978–12.11.78, Alexander and Bonin, New York.

  4.Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” Dissent, October 1, 1969.

  5.Peter Brooks, “Parti pris,” Partisan Review, Summer 1966.

  6.Quoted in Seligman, Sontag & Kael, 23.

  7.“Media Man’s Mascot,” Guardian, September 28, 1967.

  8.Sontag, Against Interpretation, 301.

  9.Ibid., 298.

  10.Ibid., 297.

  11.Ibid., 295.

  12.Ibid.

  13.“Thirty Years Later,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador U.S.A., 2001), 311.

  14.Ibid., 309.

  15.Quoted in Robert R. Tomes, Apocalypse Then: American Intellectuals and the Vietnam War, 1954–1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

  16.Ibid., 70.

  17.Paul L. Montgomery, “Detective Interrupts Vietnam Read-In,” New York Times, February 21, 1966.

  18.“Robert Mayer in New York: Dr. Spock’s Breakfast Club,” Newsday, December 6, 1967.

  19.“Susan Sontag’s Statement to the Press, Wednesday, March 16, 1966,” Sontag Papers.

  20.“What’s Happening in America” was originally published in Partisan Review, Winter 1967.

  21.Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 1956).

 

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