Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  But she also told friends she was sure the book had ruined her, that she even regretted writing it. She knew that to sell well was to inspire jealousy among the struggling polemicists and poets of her set. She also had a capacity for being wounded that belied all the formidable writing on the page. The poet Elizabeth Bishop may have been right about an observation she made after reading a first chapter of The Group, as well as an excerpt from Randall Jarrell’s satirical campus novel Pictures from an Institution, which has a character based on McCarthy:

  Oh poor girl, really. You know, I think she’s never felt very real, and that’s been her trouble. She’s always pretending to be something-or-other and never quite convincing herself or other people. When I knew her well I was always torn between being furious with her and being very touched by her—because in those days her pretensions were so romantic and sad.

  And there was, after all, another novel published by a woman in the fall of 1963 that was getting all the proper intellectual laurels McCarthy had been used to getting herself. This was an avant-garde bit of work, whose resistance to the conventions of plot and character development made it the very antithesis of The Group. Its title was The Benefactor, and its author, fairly new to New York, was a woman named Susan Sontag.

  8

  Sontag

  The very serious young Susan Sontag could not have made a more idiosyncratic debut as a writer. A Times reviewer called The Benefactor “a picaresque anti-novel,” which though meant as a compliment could not have much helped its sales. The book follows a sixty-year-old male narrator, Hippolyte, as he wanders through a kind of bohemian life in Paris. His voice is digressive, self-absorbed. In her notebooks, later, Sontag said she had been trying to depict the “reductio ad absurdum of aesthetic approach to life—i.e. solipsistic consciousness,” but perhaps in depicting solipsism she’d only managed to get too far inside her own head.

  Not all readers can find their way into that kind of mind-set, which was likely the reason that The Benefactor was not a commercial success. Still, when Sontag’s publisher sent it to Arendt to get her impressions, Arendt wrote with high praise:

  I just finished Miss Sonntag’s [sic] novel and I think it is extraordinarily good. My sincere congratulations: you may have discovered there a major writer. Of course, she is quite original and she has learnt to use her originality in the French school. Which is fine. I especially admired her strict consistency, she never lets her fancy go wild, and how she can make a real story out of dreams and thoughts … I really was delighted! And I shall be glad to come to the publication party.

  It’s not clear how much of Arendt’s work Sontag had read by then. She did not list The Origins of Totalitarianism or in fact any of Arendt’s work among the books she intended to read in the notebooks she kept. Still, in the archives Sontag donated to UCLA, there is a marked-up copy of Rahel Varnhagen, the margins full of the penciled exclamation: “HA!” (Sontag was perhaps the only person in history who found Arendt’s prose persona funny.) She had become an admirer of Arendt’s by the time the two met. In fact, by 1967, Mary McCarthy was teasing Arendt about the way Sontag was hoping to drum up a friendship:

  When I last watched her at the Lowells’, it was clear she was going to seek to conquer you. Or that she had fallen in love with you—the same thing. Anyway, did she?

  The observation was playful, but McCarthy and Sontag were destined to be set up as rivals. An oft-repeated story has McCarthy referring to Sontag as “the imitation me.” In its most dramatic form, the tale has McCarthy approaching Sontag at a party in those early years of the sixties, and saying something like: “I hear you’re the new me.” It is not clear whether this ever happened. Sontag wrote of hearing this story herself, but also said she didn’t remember McCarthy saying it to her directly. She told McCarthy’s biographers she never could pin down where or when McCarthy was supposed to have said this.

  In a 1964 entry in her journals, Sontag simply left a neutral sketch of her elder, and not in terms that suggested real antagonism, at least not at first:

  Mary McCarthy’s grin— grey hair— low-fashion red + blue print suit. Clubwoman gossip. She is [her novel] The Group. She’s nice to her husband.

  This first meeting, Sontag said later, must have been at the Lowells’. What she remembered of the encounter was one simple exchange, neither quite complimentary nor quite insulting. McCarthy observed that Sontag was clearly not from New York.

  “No, actually I’m not. Although I’ve always wanted to live here, I feel very much I’m not from here. But how did you know?” Sontag said she replied.

  “Because you smile too much,” McCarthy said.

  One can only imagine this remark brought an end to the subject. “Mary McCarthy can do anything with her smile,” Sontag wrote in a notebook. “She can even smile with it.” But she was, at least at the beginning, somewhat kind to Sontag. In 1964, McCarthy wrote to her friends, including Sonia Orwell, to introduce Sontag to intellectual sorts in Europe. She frequently had Sontag over for dinner in New York; extending further social niceties must have seemed only natural to McCarthy. Still, after one such dinner she included a postscript that must have lightly reminded Sontag that in the world of New York intellectuals, a world Sontag had long wanted to join, she was still an upstart:

  P.S. I realize I misspelled your name in the letter I wrote Sonia [Orwell]. With two n’s. So please ask for Sonntag too at American Express.

  McCarthy had been partly wrong about Sontag’s origins, as it happened. Sontag was born in New York in 1933, and as a child lived on Long Island for some time with her grandparents. Her mother, Mildred Rosenblatt, had been staying with them when she gave birth to Sontag because she did not want to give birth in China, where her husband, Jack Rosenblatt, was working.

  Like Dorothy Parker’s father, Jack Rosenblatt worked in furs. He had a moderately successful manufacturing partnership in Shanghai. As a young man, however, he had caught tuberculosis, a disease that would kill him before Sontag was five. It took a year before Mildred Rosenblatt could bring herself to tell Sontag and her sister, Judith, that their father was dead. He consequently became a figure of great pathos to Sontag, so much so that in a short story she confessed, “I still weep in any movie with a scene in which a father returns home after a long desperate absence, at the moment when he hugs his child. Or children.” Mildred, on the other hand, was if anything a suffocating presence. At some point, she became an alcoholic, one who was heavily dependent on her elder daughter for validation and support. One of Sontag’s early journal entries catches her, at fifteen, preoccupied with her mother’s happiness to an exorbitant degree: “All I can think of is Mother, how pretty she is, what smooth skin she has, how she loves me.”

  By then her mother was married again, this time to a decorated army pilot named Nathan Sontag. Both Sontag and her sister, Judith, took on his name, though he did not adopt them. The family lived first in Tucson and then in Los Angeles, where Sontag attended North Hollywood High School. It is fair to say that Susan Sontag, even as an adolescent, did not feel cut out for the wide spaces and long idling hours of the West. In almost every autobiographical fragment she left behind, published or unpublished, her restlessness is apparent. “I felt I was slumming in my own life,” she once wrote. She did not fit in.

  In Los Angeles, she sought out the one reasonable bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, the Pickwick bookshop. Reading was her first means of escape. In her prose she would often give books the qualities of travel. She sometimes called books “spaceships.” The comfort she took in reading quickly bloomed into pride, and then into a kind of self-defeating superiority: all her reading gradually alienated her from the people she had to deal with daily, her classmates and even her family. In “Pilgrimage,” her one straightforward autobiographical essay, she says that Nathan Sontag often told her: “Sue, if you read so much, you’ll never find a husband.”

  I thought, “This idiot doesn’t know there are intelligent men out in the w
orld. He thinks they’re all like him.” Because isolated as I was, it never occurred to me that there weren’t lots of people like me out there, somewhere.

  But the wider world, too, held disappointments. In “Pilgrimage” even a visit to the great Thomas Mann, whom Sontag deeply admired and who was then living in the Pacific Palisades, had “the color of shame.” He liked Hemingway, a writer she could not really admire. He “talked like a book review.” She was looking for ever higher states of exaltation and had trouble finding them. For Sontag, this would become a theme.

  In search of the mecca where people spoke only of ideas and high art, Sontag began to read the Partisan Review. As the child of people who’d never been much interested in those subjects, Sontag had to go about learning a second language. A friend of Sontag’s told a biographer that Sontag hadn’t understood any of the essays in the first issue she purchased. In her later life Sontag was often characterized as intimidating or, as some people called it, pretentious. (Her friend the scholar Terry Castle recorded her as prone to bragging about loving the “lesser-known Handel operas.”) But she had worked hard to acquire the fluency she would later have in avant-garde art. It had not come to her naturally, and perhaps that was the reason she prized it so highly. Her experience suggested that anyone who read enough could become enlightened.

  Asked later to name people whose work had made her the kind of writer she was, she’d always name Lionel Trilling. Other inspirations would pile up later: Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Roland Barthes. All Sontag’s heroes wrote prose thick with allusions and references, every essay stuffed with proof of prior study. Their style entailed the projection of scholarship.

  Perhaps, given all that, it isn’t surprising that the single person Sontag always insisted she wasn’t influenced by at all was Mary McCarthy. On this point Sontag was frequently emphatic: McCarthy was “a writer who had never mattered to me.” One can imagine why. McCarthy’s writing was rarely about exaltation; it was usually tethered to social realities, social realities that Sontag never seemed to feel very comfortable either living with or writing about. But also, without quite saying it directly, Sontag was flagging that in the world of intelligent men she was seeking to join, she wasn’t particularly worried about her status as a woman. In fact, she never seemed to worry much, in those early years, about how those serious intellectual men might receive her. She had traveled far enough already.

  University would be the first chance she’d get to step out of her “slumming” life. She planned it carefully, graduating from high school early to get out as soon as possible. Sontag had wanted to attend the University of Chicago from an early age; it had a Great Books program that fitted her budding self-image as an intellectual. But her mother, perhaps not ready to cut the cord, insisted instead that for a transitional semester she try Berkeley, where sixteen-year-old Sontag arrived on campus in 1949. There, at the textbook exchange, Sontag met a tall young woman named Harriet Sohmers who would become a key figure in Sontag’s young life. And Sohmers’s pickup line was the kind of thing that would attract any young woman of pretension: “Have you read Nightwood?”

  Shortly before she left high school Sontag had begun to worry that she was attracted to women. She had worked to suppress this impulse, dating men, professing attractions where she didn’t feel them. It would be Sohmers who would introduce her to the active lesbian scene in San Francisco in those few short months at Berkeley, and Sohmers who would be the first woman she would really sleep with. She recorded the experience as nothing less than a liberation:

  My concept of sexuality is so altered—Thank god!—bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual—and an honest rejection of the—yes—perversion which limits sexual experience, attempts to de-physicalize it, in such concepts as the idealization of chastity until the “right person” comes along—the whole ban on pure physical sensation without love, on promiscuity.

  Opening herself up to sensuality, Sontag had a long affair with Sohmers, then one with another woman. She scrawled in the pages of the journal that she felt reborn. She reproached herself for having hesitated at her mother’s suggestion of Berkeley, thinking she would have gone without these experiences had she not come to San Francisco.

  For the rest of her life Sontag would date women and men, sometimes being coy about the precise label for her sexuality even though most of her important relationships were with women. This was a personal mode of liberation, a private one. She was always a private person, writing few memoirs. Even the “I” of her work, her recognizable voice, is not fleshed out as a person, the way Rebecca West’s was. Her voice is a force of nature but one without any specifically personal experiences to report. There was much disappointment with Sontag for never coming out publicly as bisexual, or as a lesbian. But her reluctance to do so may never have wholly been about concealing queerness. She simply didn’t share much in her public-facing work.

  Eventually an acceptance letter from the University of Chicago came to Sontag at Berkeley, complete with the promise of a scholarship. Sontag was still determined to try out its rigorous program and arrived there in the fall of 1949. There were many professors Sontag admired at Chicago. She fell for Kenneth Burke, who as a literary young man had once shared an apartment in Paris with Hart Crane and Djuna Barnes. (“You can imagine what that did to me,” Sontag told an interviewer.) But it was a man she’d meet in her second year there, Philip Rieff, whom she’d marry, just days after their first date.

  If this seems an unlikely plot twist coming after those queer affairs in San Francisco, it was one Sontag tried to claim she’d chosen freely, out of love. There were plainly other motivations, though. In her first months in Chicago she had been reading a treatise by one of Freud’s pupils, which in its opening pages claimed:

  Our investigations thus far have repeatedly shown us that in the case of homosexuals the heterosexual path is merely blocked, but that it would be incorrect to hold that the pathway is altogether absent.

  And in a letter she tucked among her journals, Sontag told a high school friend that her mother’s money from her father had run out, her uncle having squandered the business. “He needs all his money to keep from going to jail—there is no more for us.” She was also likely to have to go to work unless she could find some other way to financially sustain herself as a college student.

  Philip Rieff was eleven years older than his new wife. He had trained as a sociologist, and was working on a dissertation about Freud. He was said to be an enchanting lecturer, but he had a melancholy cast of mind. Sontag never said much about whatever degree of physical attraction struck up between them. But the intellectual bond was transformative. When first he asked her to marry him, she would tell an interviewer, she replied, “You must be joking!” He wasn’t. The force of his desire led her to agree. “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness,” she wrote in her notebooks. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing written by a typical young bride, but then the whole thing was obviously a compromise.

  At first, the partnership worked. The Rieffs simply “talked for seven years.” Conversations continued through the day and into the night, out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. They began working together on his Freud book; Sontag would eventually claim that she had written every word of it. Meanwhile she completed her bachelor’s degree and followed Rieff to Boston, where he had a job at Brandeis. She began a master’s degree in philosophy, first at the University of Connecticut. Then she went on to doctoral studies at Harvard. She also gave birth to a son, David, in 1952, before she’d even turned twenty.

  In a reversal of the situation between Rebecca West and H. G. Wells—whose son was also born when his mother was merely nineteen years old, and just getting her sea legs—the marriage to Rieff was good for Sontag, at least at first. She was on track to academic stardom. Her professors raved about her brilliance. She was ranked first in her class at Harvard. And a few years into what appeared on the ou
tside to be a kind of intellectual idyll, the American Association of University Women offered her a fellowship to Oxford for the academic year of 1957 to 1958, which she accepted with Rieff’s blessings—at first.

  By then, the stability of life with Rieff had begun to chafe Sontag. She published virtually nothing when she was with him, just a limp review of a new edition of Ezra Pound’s translations for the New Leader. Later, in her novel In America, Sontag’s narrator would describe her realization, at eighteen, that she’d married a simulacrum of Edward Casaubon. Casaubon was a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the elderly husband of the novel’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke, and her life is hobbled by her early attachment to him.

  “Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor,” Sontag wrote in her journal in 1956. “It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.” What had once seemed a marriage of true minds now became a kind of prison. Rieff himself was possessive, in her estimation, an “emotional totalitarian.” Sontag felt she’d lost herself. To Joan Acocella, Sontag recounted one lonely memory of going to a movie theater to see Rock Around the Clock, a schlocky, enjoyable commercial film made to capitalize on the success of the song of the same name, a hit in 1956. She loved it, but she suddenly realized she had no one to talk to about it.

  “It took me nine years to decide that I had the right, the moral right, to divorce Mr. Casaubon,” the narrator of In America reports. The year at Oxford was the end for the Rieffs. Sontag went alone; David was sent to his grandparents. After four months at Oxford, Sontag threw in the towel on academia and went to Paris instead to study at the Sorbonne and to experience French culture. There she met and took up with Harriet again, and through her met the Cuban playwright María Irene Fornés. By the time Sontag returned to Boston in 1958, her sense of self was sufficiently fortified to let her tell Philip Rieff at the airport that she wanted a divorce. She retrieved David from his grandparents, and moved to New York.