22.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
23.Paul Thek et al., “Please Write!”: Paul Thek and Franz Deckwitz: An Artists’ Friendship, Boijmans Studies (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2015), 13.
24.Sontag, Death Kit, 311.
25.Sontag, Consciousness, 335–36, July 21, 1972.
26.Sontag, Death Kit, 157.
27.Ibid., 177, 179.
28.Sontag, On Photography, 168.
29.Sontag, Death Kit, 209.
30.Ibid., 272.
CHAPTER 18: CONTINENT OF NEUROSIS
1.Author’s interview with Richard Howard.
2.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
3.Ibid.
4.Schreiber, Geist, 119.
5.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
6.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.
7.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
8.Sontag, Reborn, 261, March 20, 1960.
9.Sontag, Consciousness, 137, November 7, 1965.
10.“Thinking Against Oneself,” in Sontag, Styles, 80.
11.Ibid., 74.
12.Ibid.
13.Ibid., 77.
14.Ibid., 78.
15.Ibid., 87.
16.Ibid., 80.
17.Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston, foreword Matei Calinescu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 10.
18.Ibid., 13.
19.Ibid., 102, 93.
20.“Thinking Against Oneself,” in Sontag, Styles, 90.
21.Ibid., 93.
22.Ibid., 94.
23.Quoted in Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 237.
24.“The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Sontag, Styles, 5.
25.Ibid., 6.
26.Ibid., 14, 12.
27.“Bergman’s Persona,” in Sontag, Styles, 124.
28.Ibid., 131.
29.Ibid., 144.
30.“The Pornographic Imagination,” in Sontag, Styles, 37.
31.Ibid., 36.
32.Sontag Papers, December 31, 1948.
33.“The Pornographic Imagination,” in Sontag, Styles, 46.
34.Ibid., 50.
35.Ibid., 47.
36.Ibid., 57.
37.Ibid., 45.
38.Ibid., 55.
39.Ibid., 57.
40.Ibid., 58.
41.Sontag, On Photography, 70.
CHAPTER 19: XU-DAN XÔN-TĂC
1.Lyndon Baines Johnson, “Remarks in Memorial Hall, Akron University,” October 21, 1964, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-memorial-hall-akron-university.
2.“Trip to Hanoi,” in Sontag, Styles, 208, 206.
3.Ibid., 209.
4.James Toback, “Whatever You’d Like Susan Sontag to Think, She Doesn’t,” Esquire, July 1968.
5.Jonathan Cott, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 96.
6.Sontag, Styles, 211.
7.Ibid., 212, 214.
8.Ibid., 213.
9.Ibid., 215.
10.Ibid.
11.Ibid., 216.
12.Ibid., 224.
13.Ibid., 229.
14.Ibid., 224.
15.Ibid., 226.
16.Ibid.
17.Ibid., 234.
18.Ibid., 253.
19.Ibid., 251, 252, 256, 262.
20.Nguyễn Ðức Nam, “Con Ngu’ò’i Viêt-Nam Hiên đai Trong Nhân Thú’c Cua Nhà Văn My˜ Xu-Dan Xôn-Tăc,” trans. Cindy A. Nguyen, Sontag Papers.
21.Evening Standard, July 18, 1967.
22.“What’s Happening in America,” in Sontag, Styles, 195.
23.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.
24.Author’s interview with Minda Rae Amiran.
25.Rieff, preface to Sontag, Consciousness, xi.
26.Sontag, “A Letter from Sweden,” Ramparts, July 1969.
27.Author’s interview with Agneta Ekmanner.
28.Author’s interview with Bo Jonsson.
29.Author’s interview with Peter Hald.
30.Author’s interview with Gösta Ekman.
31.Unpublished screenplay, Sontag Papers.
32.Author’s interview with Gösta Ekman.
33.Sontag Papers, 1984.
34.Author’s interview with Phillip Lopate.
35.“A Century of Cinema,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls.
36.“Godard,” in Sontag, Styles, 148, 150.
37.Ibid., 151.
38.Ibid., 154.
39.Ibid., 155.
40.Sontag, Duet for Cannibals: A Screenplay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 16.
41.Koch, Stargazer, 63.
42.Klas Gustafson, Gösta Ekman: Farbrorn som inte vill va’ stor (Stockholm: Leopard Förlag, 2010), 202.
43.Sontag, “Letter from Sweden,” 32.
44.Ibid., 28.
45.Ibid., 29.
46.Ibid., 31.
47.Ibid.
48.Ibid., 32.
49.Ibid., 35.
50.Ibid., 27.
51.Ibid., 38.
52.“Trip to Hanoi,” in Sontag, Styles, 249.
53.Sontag, “Letters from Sweden,” 38.
CHAPTER 20: FOUR HUNDRED LESBIANS
1.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
2.Author’s interview with Marilù Eustachio.
3.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
4.Author’s interview with Patrizia Cavalli.
5.Giovannella Zannoni to Sontag, March 7, 1970, Sontag Papers.
6.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
7.Author’s interviews with David Rieff and Don Levine.
8.Bernstein and Boyers, “Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture, in Sontag, Conversations, 60.
9.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
10.Sontag, Consciousness, 386, May 25, 1975.
11.Sontag, Reborn, 193, February 25, 1958.
12.Sontag, Consciousness, 313, January 1971.
13.Sontag Papers, July 27, [1958], Ydra.
14.Sontag, Consciousness, 138, November 8, 1965.
15.“Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 279, 286.
16.“Greta Garbo, 84, Screen Icon Who Fled Her Stardom, Dies,” New York Times, April 16, 1990.
17.“Novelist Drowns Herself,” East Hampton Star, November 13, 1969.
18.Hugh Kenner, “Divorcing,” The New York Times Book Review, November 2, 1969.
19.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
20.Author’s interview with Ethan Taubes.
21.Sontag, Consciousness, 384–85, May 25, 1975.
22.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.
23.Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,” Ramparts, April 1969, 6.
24.Sontag and Dugald Stermer, The Art of Revolution: Ninety-Six Posters from Cuba (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970).
25.Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Literacy,” Our World in Data, September 20, 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/.
26.Jonathan Lerner, “Whorehouse of the Caribbean,” Salon, January 4, 2001, http://www.salon.com/2001/01/04/havana/.
27.Author’s interview with Florence Malraux.
28.Sontag, Brother Carl (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), x.
29.Ibid., xv, xi.
30.Author’s interview with Edgardo Cozarinsky.
31.Author’s interview with Peter Hald.
32.Sontag, Consciousness, 261, February 4, 1970.
CHAPTER 21: CHINA, WOMEN, FREAKS
1.Jean-Luc Douin, “Nicole Stéphane,” Le Monde, March 17, 2003; Gérard Leford, “Nicole Stéphane, la mort d’une enfant terrible,” Libération, March 15, 2007.
2.Monique de Rothschild, Si j’ai bonne mémoire . . . (Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau: Éditions Monelle Hayot, 2001).
3.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
&
nbsp; 4.Sontag, Consciousness, 318, April 27, 1971.
5.Victoria Schultz, “Susan Sontag on Film,” from Changes (May 1, 1972), in Sontag, Conversations, 33.
6.One part of Proust was eventually made, Swann in Love, directed by Volker Schlöndorff, in 1984.
7.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
8.Ibid.
9.Ibid.
10.Maria Adele Teodori, “Un’americana a Parigi,” Il Messaggero, May 26, 1973. “Perché non voglio vivere negli Stati Uniti. Non potevo pensare a un luogo più logico come scelta, non ha bisogno di ragioni e l’amo molto. . . . Restare in America oggi significa diventare pazzo, finire, sparire, disintegrarsi, in un qualsiasi modo. E se stai fuori, capisci cos’è quel paese e anche come è difficile tornarci a vivere.”
11.Sontag, Consciousness, 351, January 7, 1973.
12.Eliot Fremont-Smith, “Diddy Did It—Or Did He?” New York Times, August 18, 1967.
13.H. Michael Levenson, “The Avant-Garde and the Avant-Guardian: Brother Carl New England Premiere at the Brattle,” Harvard Crimson, July 27, 1973.
14.Author’s interview with Noël Burch.
15.“On Paul Goodman,” in Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 3.
16.Ibid., 8–9.
17.Sontag, Consciousness, 342, October 21, 1972.
18.Ibid., 348, November 6, 1972.
19.“Project for a Trip to China,” in Sontag, I, etcetera, 18–19.
20.Sontag, Consciousness, 361, July 31, 1973.
21.Sontag Papers.
22.Ibid.
23.Helga Dudman, “From Camp to Campfire,” Jerusalem Post Weekly, November 27, 1973.
24.Teodori, “Un’americana a Parigi.”
25.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
26.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
27.Sontag, Reborn, 115, January 1957.
28.Ibid., 139, late February or early March 1957.
29.Ibid., 299, “Week of Feb. 12, 1962.”
30.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.
31.Camille Paglia, “Sontag, Bloody Sontag,” in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (New York: Vintage, 1994), 344.
32.Ibid., 347.
33.Camille Paglia, letter to Gail Thain Parker, September 27, 1973, Administrative Records, 1972–1975, Bennington College Archive, Bennington, VT, http://hdl.handle.net/11209/8827.
34.Paglia, “Sontag, Bloody Sontag,” 350, 351.
35.Ibid., 352.
36.Dudman, “From Camp to Campfire.”
37.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
38.Dudman, “From Camp to Campfire.”
39.Ibid.
40.Yoram Kaniuk in Sontag, dir., Promised Lands, New Yorker Films, 1974.
41.An undated document in the Sontag Papers includes this “‘structural’ analysis of my own work
The theme of death (fake) in my fiction, films:
Death of Frau Anders in The Benefactor
Death of Incardona in Death Kit
Deaths of Bauer’s wife and Bauer in Duet for Cannibals
In each of these cases someone who was thought to be dead wasn’t—and came back
Death starts getting real, since 1973
Death of Julia in ‘Debriefing’
Deaths, deaths, deaths in Promised Lands.”
CHAPTER 22: THE VERY NATURE OF THINKING
1.Schreiber, Geist, 175. According to Stephen Koch, Hujar was offended that he was not mentioned in the book, believing that Susan did not find him famous enough to include; and that Susan was arguing that photography was not a real art. “This opinion was fatal in Peter’s eyes. And he told me, probably in a discussion about the book, that Richard Avedon once said to him, ‘You know, Peter—sometimes I think that Susan may be the enemy.’” Koch added that “Peter’s idol, Lisette Model, (‘one of the greats’) said of On Photography: ‘This is a book by a woman who knows everything and understands nothing.’” Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
2.Colin L. Westerbeck Jr., “On Sontag,” Artforum, April 1978, 58, quoted in Seligman, Sontag & Kael, 130.
3.Neal Ascherson, “How Images Fail to Convey War’s Horror,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2003.
4.Sontag, Consciousness, 401, February 1976.
5.Sontag, On Photography, 3.
6.Ibid., 21, 15.
7.Ibid., 7.
8.Rieff, Moralist, 115.
9.Jonathan Cott, “Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview,” in Sontag, Conversations, 121.
10.Sontag, On Photography, 70.
11.Robin Muir, “Women’s Studies,” Independent, October 18, 1997.
12.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 176.
13.Later, she admitted to her French publisher that she had been too hard on Arbus. Author’s interview with Dominique Bourgois.
14.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 176.
15.Sontag, On Photography, 29.
16.Ibid., 32.
17.Sontag, Consciousness, 104, August 28, 1965.
18.Sontag Papers, November 1972.
19.Sontag, On Photography, 38.
20.Ibid., 58.
21.Ibid., 34. The full quotation reads, “Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get into it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.” From Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1972).
22.Sontag, On Photography, 36.
23.Ibid., 23.
24.Ibid., 40.
25.Ibid., 41.
26.Rieff, Swimming, 150.
27.Cathleen McGuigan, “An Exclusive Look at Annie Leibovitz’s Compelling—and Surprisingly Personal—New Book,” Newsweek, October 2, 2006, 56.
28.Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xiv.
29.Ibid., 4.
30.Ibid., 120.
31.Ibid., 160.
32.Ibid., 172–73.
33.Ibid., 39, 19.
CHAPTER 23: QUITE UNSEDUCED
1.Sontag, Consciousness, 400, n.d. [early 1970s].
2.Sontag, Reborn, 207, July 14, 1958.
3.Sontag to Judith Sontag, July 27, 1954, Sontag Papers.
4.Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.
5.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 161.
6.Paul Thek to Sontag, May 29, 1978, Sontag Papers.
7.http://infed.org/mobi/ivan-illich-deschooling-conviviality-and-lifelong-learning/.
8.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
9.Author’s interviews with Tom Luddy and Stephen Koch.
10.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
11.Rieff, Swimming, 38.
12.Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (London: Fourth Estate, 2011), 60ff.
13.Rieff, Swimming, 25, 40–41.
14.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 172.
15.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
16.Peter Hujar, Portraits in Life and Death, preface by Susan Sontag (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976).
17.Rieff, Swimming, 36, 73.
18.Ibid., 35.
19.Sontag, Consciousness, 386, May 25, 1975.
&n
bsp; 20.Author’s interview with Minda Rae Amiran.
21.Sontag Papers, April 8, [1984].
22.Author’s interview with John Burns.
23.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers. Silvers’s partner, Grace, Countess of Dudley, helped Nicole locate Dr. Israël.
24.Author’s interview with Stephen Donadio.
25.Sontag, Illness, 100.
26.Ibid., 6, 8.
27.Ibid., 21, 22.
28.Ibid., 102.
29.Ibid., 53.
30.Ibid., 57.
31.Ibid., 40, 23.
32.Ibid., 59.
33.Ibid., 102.
34.Ibid., 100.
35.Ibid., 21.
36.Ibid., 51.
37.Ibid., 52, 55.
38.Rieff, Swimming, 36.
39.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
40.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
41.Sontag, Illness, 70.
42.Rieff, Swimming, 31, 41.
43.Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.
44.Rieff, Swimming, 91.
45.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
46.Author’s interview with Siddhartha Mukherjee.
47.Marithelma Costa and Adelaida López, “Susan Sontag: The Passion for Words,” in Sontag, Conversations, 230.
CHAPTER 24: TOUJOURS FIDÈLE
1.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
2.“Under the Sign of Saturn,” in Sontag, Saturn, 117.
3.Ibid., 124.
4.Ibid., 121.
5.Ibid., 119.
6.Ibid., 124.
7.Ibid., 126.
8.Ibid., 127.
9.Ibid., 129.
10.Ibid., 128.
11.The essay on Artaud had been published in The New Yorker.
12.In Swimming, David wrote that this was “an essay about him that I found to be as much disguised autobiography as it was one writer describing another’s work.”
13.“Mind as Passion,” in Sontag, Saturn, 181.
14.Ibid., 203.
15.Lev Loseff, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, trans. Jane Ann Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 69.
16.Ibid., 72, 82.
17.Ibid., 116.
18.Ibid., 58.
19.Ibid., 189.
20.Author’s interviews with David Rieff and Judith Cohen.
21.Author’s interview with Marilù Eustachio.
22.Loseff, Brodsky, 219.
23.Valentina Polukhina, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Joseph Brodsky,” Words Without Borders, June 2008, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-joseph-brodsky.
24.“Joseph Brodsky,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 331.
25.Loseff, Brodsky, 163.
26.Ibid., 235.
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