Verlaine, Paul, 111
Verona, New Jersey, 30
Viardot, Pauline, 247
Vidal, Gore, 217, 249, 433, 546
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 466
Vietnam War, 208, 224, 272–74, 276, 282, 283, 286, 292, 299–307, 309, 396, 492, 608, 671–72
“Trip to Hanoi,” 300–305, 307, 340–41
Village Voice, 235, 398, 463
Virga, Vincent, 529–30, 531
Vogue (magazine), 5, 503–4, 663
Volcano Lover, The, 523, 536–45, 590
publications and reception, 422, 543–45, 592
summary and themes, 74, 536–43
Voltaire, 146, 190, 256
Vonnegut, Kurt, 433, 483, 488, 560–61
Voting Rights Act, 275, 300
vulgarity, 217, 386–87, 388, 390
Wagner, Richard, 141, 232, 421, 601
Wahl, Jean, 160
Waiting for Godot, 14, 573–85
Walcott, Derek, 417
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 257
Warhol, Andy, 226–28, 229, 265, 312, 572, 686
Arbus and, 357
becoming a machine, 228, 237, 290, 297
Cage compared with, 290
camp taste and, 233, 237, 352
celebrity and image, 5, 226, 228
Cornell compared with, 247–48
funeral of, 508
hairstyle of, 403
Johns compared with, 259–60
movies of, 293
Paglia and, 547
Reagan and, 423
Susan’s Screen Test, 227–28, 700
Warhol Factory, 226, 227–28, 242–43
Warhol Superstars, 227, 228, 243
Waring, James, 269
“War on Drugs,” 463
“War on Terrorism,” 670, 685
Warren, Robert Penn, 217
Warsaw Ghetto, 13, 558, 566
Warwick, Dionne, 262, 263
Washington Post, 511, 581
Washington Square (James), 101
Wasserman, Steve, 449, 475, 532, 626
Waters, John, 277
Watkins, Peter, 308
Watts riots, 300
“Way We Live Now, The,” 464–65, 467–73, 475, 519
Weber, Max, 112–13
Weil, Simone, 139, 217, 228, 267, 297, 561
Well of Loneliness, The (Hall), 295
Welty, Eudora, 484
Wenner, Jane, 500, 502
Wenner, Jann, 492–93, 500
West, Mae, 232
West, Rebecca, 625
West End Avenue apartment, 172, 176, 210
West Side Story (musical), 172
“What’s Happening in America,” 274–75, 286, 306–7
Where the Stress Falls, 649–51
White, Edmund, 33, 392, 398–99, 411, 513, 519
Caracole, 413, 434
White, Morton, 135, 145
White House State Dinner, 619–20
Whitman, Walt, 306
“Why Are We in Kosovo?,” 618–19
“Why Can’t ‘We’ Live Happily Ever After, Too?” (Teal), 234
Widener Library, 139
Wieseltier, Leon, 435, 480, 481–82, 489, 597
Wilde, Oscar, 83, 232
Wilder, Billy, 67
Wilson, Ann, 468–69
Wilson, Edmund, 206, 215, 225, 424, 429
Wilson, Robert, 277, 440–41, 444
Wintour, Anna, 663
Witkin, Christian, 529, 664–65
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 288, 292, 426
Woititz, Janet G., 33, 34, 448
Wolfe, Tom, 214–15
Wolfenstein, Sam, 159
“Woman’s Beauty, A: Put-Down or Power Source?,” 394–95
Women (Leibovitz), 620–21
Woodmere, Long Island, 30, 38
Woolf, Virginia, 40, 393, 404, 456, 570, 622, 670
World War I, 107, 670–71
World War II, 41–44, 49–51, 137, 138, 205–6, 212, 213, 331–32
Worms de Romilly, Paul, 332
Wright, Annie, 545
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 212
Wylie, Andrew, 508–11, 535–36, 627–28, 675, 696–97
“X, The Scourge,” 194–95, 447–48
Yale University, 93
Yeats, W. B., 83
Yiddish, 107
Yom Kippur War, 344, 349, 704
Zanes, Dan, 665–66
Zannoni, Giovannella, 318, 320, 439–40
Zelig (film), 482, 649
Ziff, Lloyd, 504, 622
Zionism, 345–47
Photo Section
Mildred and Jack Rosenblatt. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Jack Rosenblatt. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Jack Rosenblatt and Susan. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
In two talismanic films that Susan kept all her life but never was able to view, her parents, Mildred and Jack Rosenblatt, frolic shipboard on their way home from Europe. For Mildred, her short time with Jack was a carefree golden age of adventurous travel and obsequious servants; for Susan, his early death in China was an unassimilable loss. She would only know him as “a set of Photograph,” including these.
Susan and Mildred Jacobson. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Susan and her beautiful mother, Mildred Jacobson. All her life, Susan would be fascinated by this unattainable figure, who grew up in the shadow of Hollywood and whom Susan alternately worshipped and loathed.
Judith, Nat Sontag, and Susan. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
To treat Susan’s asthma, Mildred moved Susan (right) and her sister, Judith (left), to Arizona, where she met her second husband, the wounded flying ace Nat Sontag.
Thomas Mann. Photograph from ullstein bild—Thomas-Mann-Archiv.
Marie Curie. Photograph from the Library of Congress.
Marie Curie gave generations of brainy girls one of their only role models and instilled in Susan the desire to win the Nobel Prize. Richard Halliburton’s thrilling tales of true-life adventure inspired her to see the world (below); and through Thomas Mann (above), whom she met during his California exile, “all of Europe fell into my head.”
Gene Marum and Merrill Rodin. Photograph courtesy of Merrill Rodin.
With Gene Marum (left) and Merrill Rodin (right), Susan visited Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades and began to explore the gay subculture of Los Angeles, including venues like Club Flamingo, where tourists went to see the “fairies.” They were in constant danger of raids by cops in search of undesirables. Club Flamingo was closed in 1951.
Djuna Barnes. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries.
Kenneth Anger. Photograph from Prod DB © Puck Film Productions/DR SCORPIO RISING de Kenneth Anger 1964 USA. TCD/Prod DB/Alamy Stock Photo.
Maya Deren. Photograph from Archive PL/Alamy Stock Photo.
The underground gay world was intertwined with the avant-garde works of artists like Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Anger, and Maya Deren, who gave Susan an alternative to the suburban world of baseball and barbecue in which she had been brought up. And in Robert Hutchins (above), just thirty when made president of the University of Chicago, she found a notion of learning as a tool to remake self and society.
Harriet Sohmers. Photograph courtesy of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.
Susan met her first great love, Harriet Sohmers, at Berkeley. For a while their affair banished “the incipient guilt I have always felt about my lesbianism—making me ugly to myself—I know the truth now—I know how good and right it is to love.”
Susan and Philip Rieff. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library
Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Mind of the Moralist. Photograph by and courtesy of Melissa Goldstein.
Susan and David Rieff. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
At Chicago, Susan, age seventeen, got engaged to a professor named Philip Rieff after knowing him for little more than a week; the marriage was celebrated at the Big Boy in Glendale, California. At nineteen, she had her only child, David, and began writing a landmark book about Freud that Philip would publish under his own name.
Sketch. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Susan sketched a problem that would beset her all her life: “Head separate from body.”
Both body and head fit awkwardly into the traditional heterosexual family Philip expected; and when, eighteen months after David’s birth, Mildred (left) finally met him, she exclaimed: “Oh, he’s charming. And you know I don’t like children, Susan.”
Mildred, Susan, and David. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Jacob and Susan Taubes. Photograph courtesy of Ethan and Tanaquil Taubes.
In Jacob and Susan Taubes (above), a charismatic guru and his doomed wife, Sontag discovered new ways of thinking about living “among the ruins,” including about marriage in the shadow of war and Holocaust.
Harriet Sohmers in Greece. Photograph courtesy of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.
In 1957, Susan (below, in Spain) left her husband and young child and sailed to Europe. There, during a year of intellectual and sexual exploration, she reencountered Harriet (above, in Greece) and girded herself to leave her husband.
Susan in Spain. Photograph courtesy of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.
Article from the New York Daily News.
Cartoon. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Irene Fornés. Photograph courtesy of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling.
Back home, Susan filed for divorce, and a “maddened” Philip stalked her, dragging her and her young son into the tabloids. The experience left deep wounds on Susan, who soon entered a relationship with Harriet’s ex, María Irene Fornés. Irene had never read anything but “the newspaper, Little Women, and Hedda Gabler” but was, in Susan’s opinion, a genius, and sexually volcanic: “She could make a rock come,” Harriet said. Susan caricatured her own neediness in a cartoon in her journals.
“Happening.” Photograph © Julian Wasser.
Freshly arrived in New York, Susan was fascinated by the emerging new art scene. She was filmed by Andy Warhol for a “Screen Test,” spurring reflections on how the camera reduces a person to an image of a person. And she wrote an essay about “happenings,” a new non-commercial form pioneered by Allan Kaprow (second from left), part of a movement that rejected a society too in thrall to money, trashy celebrity, and glib fame: the commodification Warhol celebrated.
Alfred Chester and his boyfriend. Photograph courtesy of Edward Field.
Brilliant, unlucky Alfred Chester (shown here with his Moroccan boyfriend) was the first to include a portrait of Sontag, whom he called “Mary Monday,” in fiction. In the fall of 1963, she published her first novel, The Benefactor, at Farrar, Straus, whose publisher, Roger Straus, would become her own most enduring benefactor; his favorite author was Susan Sontag. A year later, she became notorious when “Notes on ‘Camp’” appeared in Partisan Review, the house organ of the New York intellectuals.
Roger Straus. Photograph © Estate of David Gahr.
Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein. Photograph © Gert Berliner.
Susan and Jasper Johns. Photograph © Bob Adelman Estate.
In 1963, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein started The New York Review of Books, with which Sontag would be associated for the rest of her life. Soon after, she began a brief rela-tionship with Jasper Johns, who said, “I don’t think I could have easily connected my feelings about my work to the Supremes. Her ability to make such connections was very attractive.”
Handwritten letter. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Joseph Cornell gifts. Photograph by Benjamin Moser.
The artist Joseph Cornell, who loved divas, discovered one in Sontag, and sent her little gifts: a feather, a quotation from John Donne, a nineteenth-century letter in a calligraphic Greek hand. They only met once, in his house on Utopia Parkway in Queens. “He was fascinated by photography,” she said. “He was fascinated by stars, he was fascinated by the romance of the performer.”
Mark Rothko. Photograph by Kate Rothko/Apic/Getty Images.
Silence: Lectures and Writings. Photograph by and courtesy of Lauren Miller Walsh.
Many artists replied to the bombast and cruelty of the world in works united by what Sontag called “the aesthetics of silence”: the nearly empty canvases of Mark Rothko; the silent musical compositions of John Cage; or the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, in whose Persona one character went mute in response to the atrocities of the modern world—Auschwitz and Vietnam.
Susan arrested in New York. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images.
Susan in Sweden. Photograph courtesy of Florence Malraux.
The excitement of the early sixties soon gave way to a generation’s nightmare, the Vietnam War, which laid bare the brutality of the American empire. Susan was arrested protesting the draft in New York and traveled to Sweden to make a film about American deserters from Vietnam. She ended up making two Bergmanesque films that sought to avoid the mystifications of narrative but only succeeded in mystifying viewers, and even the actors who played in them: “We kept asking each other, out of the corner of our mouth: ‘What is this about?’”
Susan Sontag and her son on bench, N.Y.C. 1965 © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
In 1965, Diane Arbus photographed Susan and David; perhaps no picture conveyed their symbiosis as well as this one. Following Arbus’s suicide in 1971, her retro-spective at the Museum of Modern Art become the most visited photography exhibition in history. Among the seven million visitors was Sontag, who was fascinated and repulsed by what she saw as people displayed as freaks. Her highly ambivalent reactions to Arbus extended to Arbus’s medium itself and resulted, in 1977, in her great collection On Photography.
Diane Arbus show at MoMA. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
Paul Goodman. Photograph by Sam Falk/The New York Times/Redux.
Susan and Carlotta del Pezzo. Photograph courtesy of Patrizia Cavalli.
When Paul Goodman died in 1972, Sontag called him “quite simply the most important American writer.” She sympathized with his ambition: “There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.” When he died, she was recovering from her breakup with the indolent Neapolitan duchess Carlotta del Pezzo, one of the “four hundred lesbians” of European high society (shown here with Susan a decade later).
Nicole Stéphane. Photograph from ITV/Shutterstock.
Depressed about the loss of Carlotta, Susan traveled to Cannes, where she attended the festival and met another member of the “four hundred,” the Rothschild heiress and Resistance heroine Nicole Stéphane (above). At Cannes, the former “Miss Librarian” found herself hobnobbing with (below, from left) Louis Malle, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Jeanne Moreau.
Susan at Cannes. Photograph from Leemage/Bridgeman Images.
Photo-booth strip. Susan Sontag Papers (Collection 612). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Sontag identified “the obsessive theme of fake death” in her work. Through her friendship with Peter Hujar (above), one of the great photographers of the era, she began to move away from it. In Palermo, Hujar photographed his boyfriend, Paul Thek, in a crypt full of desicca
ted bodies: “Bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers,” Thek marveled. Susan and Nicole went to Israel during the Yom Kippur War; her third film, Promised Lands, was full of the bodies, the physical evidence of suffering, that she had skirted in her previous work.
Thek in the Palermo Catacombs (II), 1963. Reproduced from the original negative 2010 Peter Hujar; © 1987 Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Susan makeover. Photograph by and courtesy of Gil Gilbert.
Susan at FSG offices. Photograph by William Sauro/The New York Times/Redux.
In 1975, just forty-two years old, Susan was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer; she was not expected to survive. After the grueling treatment, she flew to her mother in Honolulu. Her hair had gone completely white, and her mother sent her to a hairdresser, who gave her a makeover. The resulting hairstyle—all black but for a streak of white—became one of the most iconic of the age. Back home in 1978, she wrote Illness as Metaphor, a reflection on cancer; when it was published, she was photographed in FSG’s offices.
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