Jean-Paul Sartre. Photograph from © AGIP/Bridgeman Images.
Hannah Arendt. Photograph courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust.
In an unpublished essay, Sontag criticized Jean-Paul Sartre, whose mind she called “one of the most fertile, lavishly gifted of the century,” for destroying that mind with amphetamines; she never mentioned her own decades-long use of the same drug. She also attacked Hitler’s filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl (above, center); in turn, Sontag, like one of her heroines, Hannah Arendt would be criticized by feminists as an “exceptional woman,” exempted from the social and economic barriers that held other women back.
Lucinda Childs, 1983. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.
Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet and Nobel laureate: “I was always impressed by how he enjoyed impressing people, enjoyed knowing more than they did, enjoyed having higher standards than they had,” Susan said. In his favorite city, Venice, Susan met the dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs, who starred in her last film, Unguided Tour. She would love Lucinda (photographed above by Robert Mapplethorpe), for the rest of her life, and would speak of Brodsky on her deathbed.
Susan on 1982 panel. Photograph © Nancy Crampton.
As a public intellectual, Sontag participated in countless panel discussions, including this one (above), in 1982, when she said that “Communism is Fascism with a human face.” The next year, in Woody Allen’s fake documentary Zelig, Susan Sontag played the role of the ubiquitous commentator “Susan Sontag” (below).
Susan, Gay Talese, E. L. Doctorow, and Norman Mailer. Photograph by Sara Krulwich/New York Times Co./Getty Images.
Later, as president of PEN, Sontag was involved in supporting Salman Rushdie, under attack from Islamic fundamentalists, by organizing readings like this one, alongside (above, left to right) Gay Talese, E. L. Doctorow, and Norman Mailer.
Susan and Annie Leibovitz. Photograph courtesy of Antony Peattie.
She largely abdicated that role during the revolution sparked by AIDS, which demanded that gay public figures eschew metaphor, and speak about themselves more directly (below). She never acknowledged her enduring—and enduringly fraught—relationship with Annie Leibovitz (above, right). “You’re good, but you could be better,” Susan told her. “I would have done anything,” Annie said, to please Susan.
ACT UP rally. Photograph by Frances Roberts/Alamy Stock Photo.
Photograph by and courtesy of Paul Lowe.
The siege of Sarajevo, the longest in modern history, began in 1992. At great personal risk, Susan (with David [above, center] and the director Haris Pašović [above, left]) traveled there and put on a play, Waiting for Godot, without electricity and lit only by candles (below).
Photograph by and courtesy of Paul Lowe.
Photograph by and courtesy of Paul Lowe.
They worked with starving actors to whom she smuggled precious rolls of bread (above). It was art-as-bullfight, played in “the world of plague victims which Artaud invokes as the true subject of modern dramaturgy.”
Photograph by and courtesy of Paul Lowe.
Susan with the cast of Godot. (Top row, left to right:) Milijana Zirojević, Nada Đurevska, Susan, Admir Glamočak, Izudin Bajrović. (Second row:) Irena Mulamuhić, Ines Fančović, Velibor Topić. (Foreground:) Sead Bejtović. “You couldn’t fool the audience,” said Topić. “You don’t know if you’re going to be alive in five minutes or ten or the next day. So you can’t fool them. I’ve played in front of wounded people, I’ve played in front of blind children, in the hospital, on the second floor, while people were having their legs cut off on the ground floor, people who were literally losing their lives, screaming, while I was playing.”
Susan in 1999. Photograph by Francesco Gattoni.
In 1998, after twenty-five years of being free of cancer, Susan relapsed; by 1999, when this photograph was taken, she had recovered, but would never be entirely well again.
In 2000, she published her final novel, In America, and on September 11, 2001, she was in Berlin, transfixed by images of horror on CNN. She wrote a short piece for The New Yorker that violated her own principle: “You have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there.” The three paragraphs about 9/11 became the most controversial she ever wrote.
Susan and Nadine Gordimer. Photograph by Jon Hrusa/EPA/Shutterstock.
On her final trip abroad, in March 2004, Susan visited South Africa with Nadine Gordimer, who said, “Wherever Susan was, the walls seemed to expand.” Weeks later, she would be diagnosed with the cancer that would kill her.
Sarajevo theater. Photograph by Benjamin Moser.
After her death, the square in front of the theater in Sarajevo was renamed in her honor.
Antietam. Photograph from Library of Congress.
Sontag wrote searchingly of the history of fake or staged Photograph, including these images of war—taken at Antietam, Berlin, and Iwo Jima—and how knowledge that they are staged obliterates their authority, and the authority of all photography.
Iwo Jima. Photograph by Joe Rosenthal/AP Photo.
Fleeing Vietnamese villagers. Photograph by Nick Ut/AP Photo.
In her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag explored themes she had pursued all her life, about the obscenity, and the necessity, of looking. She traced the history of images of suffering from Goya through the modern day and showed how authentic pictures of horror, like a Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalmed village or a Cambodian woman and her infant child about to be murdered, could create a moral context for putting a stop to those horrors.
Abu Ghraib. Photograph from AP Photo.
In 2004, already undergoing treatment for her terminal cancer, Sontag wrote her final essay, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” in response to images emerging from Abu Ghraib of Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners—and photographing themselves doing it. Like all her writing on photography, the essay showed how a subject that might have seemed intellectual or abstract—the separation of the person from the image of the person, of the thing from its metaphors—could break people’s bodies, and make them scream.
About the Author
BENJAMIN MOSER is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, Moser received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He has published translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. A former books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, he has also written for The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books.
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Also by Benjamin Moser
Why This World:
A Biography of Clarice Lispector
Copyright
SONTAG. Copyright © 2019 by Benjamin Moser. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph: Susan Sontag, New York, April 10, 1978
Photograph by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moser, Benjamin, author.
Title: Sontag / Benjamin Moser.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ecco, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018044760 (print)
| LCCN 2018050255 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062896414 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062896391 | ISBN 9780062896407
Subjects: LCSH: Sontag, Susan, 1933–2004. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Women authors, American—20th century—Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3569.O6547 (ebook) | LCC PS3569.O6547 Z767 2019 (print) | DDC 818/.5409 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044760
* * *
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-289641-4
Version 08262019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-289639-1
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