27.Ibid., 234.
28.Author’s interview with Karen Kennerly.
29.Author’s interview with Jarosław Anders.
30.Author’s interview with Sigrid Nunez.
31.Polukhina, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Joseph Brodsky.”
32.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
33.Carlo Ripa di Meana, “News from the Biennale,” The New York Review of Books, September 15, 1977.
34.Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), 71.
35.Ibid., 72–73.
36.“An Argument About Beauty,” in Sontag, At the Same Time, 12.
37.Ibid., 73.
38.Ibid., 84.
39.“On Style,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 25.
40.Sontag, Conversations, xv.
41.Bernstein and Boyers, “Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture,” in ibid., 59.
42.“A Century of Cinema,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 118.
43.Author’s interview with Edmund White.
44.Ruas, “Susan Sontag: Me, Etcetera,” in Sontag, Conversations, 176.
45.“Fascinating Fascism,” in Sontag, Saturn, 98.
46.Ibid., 77.
47.Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 271.
48.Sontag’s feminist essays were posthumously collected in Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s, published by the Library of America in 2013.
49.Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, dirs., Town Bloody Hall, 1979.
50.“Fascinating Fascism,” in Sontag, Saturn, 84.
51.Adrienne Rich and Sontag, “Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books, March 20, 1975. Tom Luddy, Susan’s friend and the director of the Telluride Film Festival that invited Riefenstahl, confirms Rich’s observation. Author’s interview with Tom Luddy.
52.Rich and Sontag, “Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange.”
53.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
54.Author’s interview with Edmund White.
55.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 92.
56.“Fascinating Fascism,” in Sontag, Saturn, 98.
57.Ibid., 100, 99.
58.Ibid., 101.
59.Ibid., 103.
60.Ibid., 102.
61.Ibid., 98.
62.Ibid., 103.
CHAPTER 25: WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?
1.Acocella, “The Hunger Artist.”
2.“Project for a Trip to China,” in Sontag, I, etcetera, 28.
3.Author’s interview with Steve Wasserman.
4.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.
5.Author’s interview with Paul Brown. The photograph is by Gil Gilbert.
6.Sontag, Illness, 40.
7.Charles Ruas, “Susan Sontag: Past, Present and Future,” New York Times, October 24, 1982.
8.Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” in The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1947).
9.Author’s interview with Miranda Spieler.
10.Mukherjee, Emperor, 169.
11.Author’s interview with Vincent Virga.
12.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
13.Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.
14.Author’s interviews with David Rieff and Sigrid Nunez.
15.Sontag Papers, June 2, 1981.
16.Sontag Papers, January 27, 1977.
17.Author’s interview with Frederic Tuten.
18.Sontag Papers, May 31, 1981.
19.Rieff, Swimming, 140.
20.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
21.Author’s interview with Peggy Miller.
22.Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.
23.Ibid.
24.Author’s interview with Sigrid Nunez.
25.Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.
26.Ibid.
27.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
28.Author’s interview with Gary Indiana.
29.Author’s interviews with Roger Deutsch and Sigrid Nunez.
30.Author’s interview with Peggy Miller.
31.White, City Boy, 279.
32.Author’s interview with Minda Rae Amiran.
33.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
34.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.
35.Sontag, Consciousness, 223, August 10, 1967.
36.Edmund White, Caracole (New York: Dutton, 1985), 93.
37.Sontag, Consciousness, 400, n.d. [early 1970s].
38.Sontag Papers, May 25, 1975.
39.Paul Thek to Sontag, May 29, 1978, Sontag Papers.
40.Author’s interview with Sigrid Nunez.
41.Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.
CHAPTER 26: THE SLAVE OF SERIOUSNESS
1.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 190.
2.“Debriefing,” in Sontag, I, etcetera, 33, 37.
3.Ibid., 38.
4.Ibid., 44–45.
5.“The Dummy,” in ibid., 88.
6.Ibid., 93.
7.“Old Complaints Revisited,” in ibid., 129.
8.“Doctor Jekyll,” in ibid., 230.
9.Sontag Papers, May 31, 1981. In Nietzsche contra Wagner, Nietzsche had written: “Richard Wagner wanted a different kind of movement; he overthrew the physiological presuppositions of previous music. Swimming, floating—no longer walking and dancing” (III, 1).
10.Sontag Papers, May 31, 1981.
11.Author’s interview with Norman Podhoretz.
12.Ibid.; Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking Press, 1950), preface.
13.Steven R. Weisman, “The Hollow Man,” New York Times, October 10, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/10/reviews/991010.10weismat.html.
14.Joan Didion, Political Fictions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 112.
15.Ibid., 99.
16.Evans Chan, “Against Postmodernism, etcetera—A Conversation with Susan Sontag,” Postmodern Culture 12, no. 1 (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2001).
17.Seligman, Sontag & Kael, 116.
18.Author’s interview with Norman Podhoretz.
19.Chan, “Against Postmodernism.”
20.“One Year After,” 120.
21.Chan, “Against Postmodernism.”
22.Fernando Pessoa, Heróstrato e a busca da imortalidade, trans. Manuela Rocha, ed. Richard Zenith, Obras de Fernando Pessoa, Vol. 14 (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000).
23.Stefan Jonsson, “One Must Defend Seriousness: A Talk with Susan Sontag,” Bonniers Litterära Magasin 58, no. 2 (April 1989): 84–93; in Sontag, Conversations, 244.
24.Atlas, “The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.”
25.Ibid.
26.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.
27.Mary Breasted, “Discipline for a Wayward Writer,” Village Voice, November 5–11, 1971.
28.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.
29.Author’s interview with Jarosław Anders.
30.Christopher Hitchens, “Party Talk,” Observer, June 20, 1982.
31.Ralph Schoenman, “Susan Sontag and the Left,” Village Voice, March 2, 1982.
32.“Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism,” New York Times, February 27, 1982.
33.James Brady, “Town Hall,” Page Six, New York Post, April 17, 1982; author’s interview with Helen Graves.
34.“Tempest on the Left,” Across the Board: The Conference Board Magazine XIX, no. 5 (May 1982).
35.Sontag to Octavio Paz, March 2, 1982, Sontag Papers.
36.Author’s interview with Eva Kollisch.
37.Author’s interview with Robert Silvers.
38.White, Caracole, 265.
39.Author’s interview with Leon Wieseltier.
40.Phillip Lopate, Notes on Sontag (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 171–72.
CHAPTER 27: THINGS THAT GO RIGHT
1.From the journals of Kimble James Greenwood, December 8, 1981, Seattle, Washington.
Provided to author.
2.Sontag, “Unguided Tour.”
3.Author’s interview with Lucinda Childs.
4.Around the time of its premiere, said Roger Deutsch, there was much discussion among Susan and her friends “about whether Einstein on the Beach was actually something that was great or something that was just a folly.” Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.
5.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
6.Author’s interview with Peter Sellars.
7.“The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Sontag, Styles, 4.
8.“A Lexicon for Available Light,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 162–63.
9.Ibid., 168–69.
10.Sontag Papers, August 20, 1983.
11.Author’s interview with Lucinda Childs.
12.Ibid. Sontag planned a book about Japan, and even signed a contract for it. But this became one of the many projects that she never completed in these years.
13.Author’s interview with David Rieff.
14.Sontag Papers, March 24, 1984.
15.Sontag to Lucinda Childs, November 9, [1984?], Sontag Papers.
16.Sontag Papers, December 30, 1986, Paris.
17.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
18.Author’s interview with Lucinda Childs.
19.Author’s interview with Darryl Pinckney.
20.Sontag to Lucinda Childs, June 7, 1987, Sontag Papers.
21.Author’s interview with Lucinda Childs.
22.Sontag to Lucinda Childs, August 12, 1997, Sontag Papers.
23.This was Robert J. Ackerman’s Children of Alcoholics (Holmes Beach, FL: Learning Publications, 1978).
24.Author’s interview with Jasper Johns. Her French publisher, Dominique Bourgois, remembered her bitter disappointment when, a little more than a year before her death, J. M. Coetzee won the prize. The award to a fellow English-language writer, she knew, almost surely meant she would never get it. But the need to prove herself never left her: when her bone-marrow transplant—her last hope for surviving her final cancer—failed, her agent came to the hospital and found her curled up, asleep. When she realized who it was, she sprang to life: “I’m working!” the dying woman insisted. “I’m working!” Author’s interviews with Andrew Wylie and Dominique Bourgois.
25.Woititz, Adult Children of Alcoholics, 27. She added that adult children of alcoholics “carry with them the experience of come close, go away—the inconsistency of a loving parent-child relationship. They feel loved one day and rejected the next. The fear of being abandoned is a terrible fear. . . . As a result of the fear of abandonment, you don’t feel confident about yourself. You don’t feel good about yourself or believe you are lovable. So you look to others for what it is that you cannot give yourself in order to feel okay” (68). This is a perfect description of most of Susan’s relationships.
26.Ruas, “Susan Sontag: Past, Present and Future.”
27.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
28.Author’s interview with Roger Deutsch.
29.Author’s interviews with Steve Wasserman and Stephen Koch.
30.Author’s interviews with Jamaica Kincaid, Todd Gitlin, Lucinda Childs, and David Rieff.
31.Author’s interview with Jamaica Kincaid.
32.Ibid.
33.Author’s interview with Helen Graves.
34.Author’s interviews with Robert Boyers and David Rieff.
35.Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (New York: Atlas, 2011), 117.
36.“Mind as Passion,” in Sontag, Saturn, 201.
37.“Sartre’s Abdication,” unpublished essay, Sontag Papers.
38.Ibid.
39.Sontag to Roger Straus, Paris, May 13, 1973, Sontag Papers.
40.Nunez, Sempre Susan.
41.The first mention of speed in the diaries is on March 12, 1960. According to David Rieff and Helen Graves, she would still be using it at least until the mid-eighties. Sontag Papers; author’s interviews with David Rieff and Helen Graves.
42.Robert Silvers to Sontag, August 24, 1984, Sontag Papers.
CHAPTER 28: THE WORD WON’T GO AWAY
1.Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” New York Times, July 3, 1981.
2.Author’s interview with Joseph Sonnabend.
3.Mukherjee, Emperor, 27.
4.“The AIDS Era: Life During Wartime,” July 31, 1990, in Michael Musto, La Dolce Musto (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 246–47.
5.Sontag, Illness, 6.
6.Ibid., 13.
7.Michelangelo Signorile, Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power (New York: Random House, 1993), 68.
8.Sontag, “The Way We Live Now,” The New Yorker, November 24, 1986.
9.Ibid.
10.Sontag, Illness, 3.
11.Sontag, “The Way We Live Now.”
12.Ibid.
13.Ibid.
14.Paul Thek to Sontag, May 29, 1978, Sontag Papers.
15.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.
16.Author’s interview with Frederic Tuten.
17.Rachel Pastan, “Remembering Paul Thek: A Conversation with Ann Wilson and Peter Harvey,” Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, http://icaphila.org/miranda/6114/remembering-paul-thek-a-conversation-with-ann-wilson-and-peter-harvey.
18.Paul Thek to Sontag, January 15, 1987, Sontag Papers.
19.These notes are preserved in the Sontag Papers.
20.Author’s interview with Howard Hodgkin.
21.Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose: 1979–1985 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 215.
22.Author’s interview with Michael Shnayerson.
23.Ben Cosgrove, “Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll,” Life, June 27, 1969, http://time.com/3485726/faces-of-the-american-dead-in-vietnam-one-weeks-toll-june-1969/.
24.Author’s interview with Michelangelo Signorile.
CHAPTER 29: WHY DON’T YOU GO BACK TO THE HOTEL?
1.Author’s interview with Steve Wasserman.
2.According to Judith Cohen, Susan “did not know until very late in life” that her mother was an alcoholic. David Rieff contested this: “It was impossible not to know.” But Susan often did not know things that were obvious to everyone else. In her journals, there is but a single mention, ambiguous, of alcoholism: “My mother lay in bed until four every afternoon in an alcoholic stupor, the blinds on the bedroom window firmly closed,” she wrote on August 14, 1973 (Sontag, Reborn, 362). Hawaiian friends say that, until the last few years, when her health had badly deteriorated, it would have been easy not to know. “She was an alcoholic, as Susan found out many years later, from Judith,” Joan Acocella wrote in a profile published in 2000 in The New Yorker. Her source was Susan. Yet Don Levine remembered, when Mildred went on a cruise, Susan’s remark that it was interesting that there were AA groups even on cruise ships, implying that she had learned this from Mildred. David Rieff also recalls that Susan attended AA meetings with her mother in Honolulu. Perhaps it is another case of her knowing something intellectually that she had not fully absorbed emotionally.
3.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.
4.Sontag Papers, December 30, 1986, Paris.
5.Ibid.
6.Author’s interview with Lucinda Childs.
7.Author’s interview with Steve Wasserman.
8.Author’s interview with Jeff Kissel.
9.Sontag Papers, March 25, 1987.
10.Author’s interview with Leon Wieseltier.
11.Author’s interview with Jeff Seroy.
12.Author’s interview with Leon Wieseltier.
13.Sontag, Consciousness, 7, August 6, 1964.
14.Author’s interview with Meredith Tax.
15.Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012), 75–76.
16.Ibid., 76.
17.Rhoda Koenig, “At Play in the Fields of the Word,” New York, February 3, 1986, 40–
47.
18.Walter Goodman, “Norman Mailer Offers a PEN Post-Mortem,” New York Times, January 27, 1986.
19.Author’s interview with Karen Kennerly.
20.Koenig, “At Play in the Fields of the Word.”
21.Author’s interview with Meredith Tax.
22.Author’s interview with Karen Kennerly.
23.Ibid.
24.Digby Diehl, “PEN and Sword in Seoul,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1988.
25.“Park Sang-mi’s Empathetic Storytelling: The Drum Sounds That Beat the Consciousness of the Silent,” trans. Hyosun Lee, Kyunghyang Shinmun, October 13, 2015.
26.Yongbeon Kim, “‘The Poetry I Risked My Life to Write Has Finally Been “Restored” 16 Years Later’: Poet Lee San-ha,” trans. Mia You, Munhwa Ilbo, June 16, 2003, published online by Naver News, http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=103&oid=021&aid=0000033892.
27.“Park Sang-mi’s Empathetic Storytelling.”
28.Rachel Donadio, “Fighting Words on Sir Salman,” New York Times, July 15, 2007.
29.Paul Elie, “A Fundamental Fight,” Vanity Fair, May 2014.
30.Author’s interview with Karen Kennerly.
31.Author’s interview with Salman Rushdie.
32.Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 150. For an alternative view, see John R. MacArthur, “The Friends Rushdie Forgot,” https://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/09/the-friends-rushdie-forgot/.
CHAPTER 30: CASUAL INTIMACY
1.Letter to a potential surrogate mother, Sontag Papers.
2.Author’s interview with Karen Mullarkey.
3.Annie Leibovitz, At Work (New York: Random House, 2008).
4.Ibid., 13.
5.Author’s interview with Roger Black.
6.Rolling Stone, no. 254, Tenth Anniversary Issue, December 15, 1977, 62.
7.Leibovitz, At Work, 44.
8.Author’s interview with Kathy Ryan.
9.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqpK9lUTVXs.
10.Author’s interview with Andrew Eccles.
11.Author’s interview with Timothy Crouse.
12.Author’s interview with Andrew Eccles.
13.Annie Leibovitz, Photograph (New York: Pantheon/Rolling Stone Press, 1983).
14.Author’s interview with Karen Mullarkey.
15.Author’s interview with Max Aguilera-Hellweg.
16.Author’s interview with Andrew Eccles.
17.Author’s interviews with Sarah Lazin and Roger Black.
18.Author’s interview with Roger Black.
19.Ronstadt’s attitude toward Leibovitz pictures: http://www.ronstadt-linda.com/gold03.htm, http://www.ronstadt-linda.com/artnt77.htm.
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