Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  Fornés joined them there. One day the couple were sitting in Le Figaro Café in Greenwich Village, where they both discussed how they wished to write, but could not figure out how to begin. In Sontag’s telling—there are a few versions of this story—Fornés said to her: “Well, why don’t you start your novel right now?”

  I replied, “Yes, I’m going to.” And she said, “No, I mean right now.”

  That apparently motivated Sontag to leave the café, go home, and write the first three pages of what became The Benefactor. It was, she said later, a kind of “blank check.” She typed for the next four years, she’d say, often with David in her lap. The composition process would long outlast the relationship with Fornés. By the end, David was ten, and Sontag liked to boast that he would stand by her and light her cigarettes as she typed.

  Though it did not bring her riches, or even really good reviews—one of the odder compliments was that the book exhibited a “shrewd, serene, housewifely confidence”—merely publishing a novel made Sontag more confident in New York. At a party, she met one of the Partisan Review’s two editors, William Phillips. She asked him if she could write for the magazine. He asked her if she would like to write a theater column. “You know, Mary used to do it,” he apparently said. Sontag had no interest in the theater, but she had a great interest in being published in the Partisan Review, so she said yes. She wrote two reviews, both of which digressed from their stated subject into her actual passion, the movies, before she found she couldn’t continue. She really wanted to be a novelist, she told people. But the writing was on the wall. Dwight Macdonald told her that “no one’s interested in fiction, Susan.”

  But people very quickly became interested in Sontag’s essays. Her first big success was “Notes on ‘Camp,’” originally published in the Partisan Review in the fall of 1964. “Many things in the world have not been named,” it began. “And many things, if they have been named, have never been described.” Camp, she argued, was a sensibility devoted to artifice, where style was slyly valued over content. The insouciant, winning tone of the essay matched the subject matter perfectly, and it caught on. Sontag had managed to define a trend, and that trend would in turn come to define Sontag.

  Her star had been on the rise since The Benefactor: she had won a merit award from Mademoiselle, had published a short story in Harper’s, and had been suddenly asked to write book reviews for the New York Times Book Review. But nothing had attracted the sort of attention the essay did. Sontag was elevated to the status of pop-cultural soothsayer. The notion of camp became so widely discussed it inspired a backlash. By spring, a writer for the New York Times had even managed to find an anonymous professional willing to denounce the phenomenon:

  “Basically, Camp is a form of regression, a rather sentimental and adolescent way of flying in the face of authority,” an anti-Camp psychiatrist told a friend recently. “In short Camp is a way of running from life and its real responsibilities. Thus, in a sense, it’s not only extremely childish but also potentially dangerous to society— it’s sick and decadent.”

  This sense of threat seems quaint now. The notion of camp has now become so mainstream and commercialized it is difficult to capture the radicalism of speaking of it outright in 1964. The New York intellectuals, for all their Communist politics, had made little room in their ranks for serious cultural outlaws. They were not fans of the beats; they had little to say about Allen Ginsberg. Queer culture was just about invisible to them. All that resistance was probably best summed up in a letter Philip Rahv sent to Mary McCarthy in April 1965, after Time magazine had favorably summarized the “Camp” essay, giving it a currency almost no little-magazine piece ever enjoys:

  Susan Sontag’s “Camp” style is very much in fashion, and every kind of perversion is regarded as avant-garde. The homosexuals and the pornographers, male and female, dominate the scene. But Susan herself, who is she?—In my opinion, above the girdle the girl is a square. The faggots love her because she is providing an intellectual rational for their frivolity. She, in turn, calls me a conventional moralist, or so I am told.

  “Notes on ‘Camp’” was a reckoning with popular culture the likes of which had rarely been seen before. All the phenomena Sontag lists therein as “part of the canon of Camp” are high pop items: King Kong, Flash Gordon comics. The spirit of the essay was essentially democratic, liberating people from having to classify their own taste as either good or bad. Camp allowed for bad taste to be good, or in other words, it allowed people to have fun. “It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp,” Sontag writes. “One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.”

  The coyness there now is plainly calculated, but it’s easy to forget that this younger Sontag was not the imperious, officious writer of her later essays. She was still figuring out her specific style, and in fact, put next to later pieces on Walter Benjamin or Elias Canetti, or to the book-length works of cultural criticism she’d later produce, “Notes on ‘Camp’” doesn’t sound like her at all. Perhaps that is one reason why, as her friend Terry Castle would remark, Sontag came to dislike the essay. Castle argues for deeper reasons, too: that Sontag’s affinity for camp was too obviously queer, too revealing of her sexuality, for the later Sontag to be comfortable with it. And this concealment was something of a puzzle to the gay and lesbian people who read “Camp” in 1964, and could see what she saw in their community, for she wasn’t truly fooling anyone.

  “Against Interpretation,” the other of Sontag’s major first essays, would appear in the Evergreen Review some months later. At first glance it reads like a refutation of the task Sontag would spend the rest of her life working out. “Interpretation,” it claims, “is the revenge of the intellect on art.” This sounds like simply another way of phrasing an old idea, that critics criticize because they can’t make good art. But the phrasing has a more palatable seductiveness to it, insisting finally that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

  Many draw a false conclusion from this, believing that Sontag meant to attack all writing about art. But certainly she did not quit writing about art herself in an attempt to live up to such a principle. The argument, she would say later, that she was trying to make was about the interaction of form and content in art, the way the rules of any given medium also impinge on “what it means.” A simpler way of putting this might have been to say that for Susan Sontag, the acts of thinking and writing were erotic, sensual experiences in and of themselves. She tried to convey this by writing sentences that layered back on themselves, and she could make use of high-flying terms like “antitheses” and “ineffable” with alacrity, making them seem accessible, even beautiful. This was her chosen substitute for the chumminess of an “I” more willing to take a personal tone.

  After both “Notes on ‘Camp’” and “Against Interpretation” made waves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which had published The Benefactor, saw an opportunity and collected these critical essays into a book, published in 1966. The book, Against Interpretation, took its title from Sontag’s celebrated essay. It was far more widely reviewed than her novel and gave the mainstream press a new opportunity to marvel at her. As an unsigned Vogue item put it, her work was “bickered over” as “either history-making or a daring sham.” In the mainstream press, most of the reviewers felt that Sontag was a sham. One reviewer called Sontag “a sharp girl, a kind of undergraduate Mary McCarthy clawing her way through contemporary culture,” just before panning the book. Another offered the following observation in the Washington Post:

  As the author of these essays, Susan Sontag is hardly a likable person. Her voice rasps and is rude and strident. And there is nothing in this book to indicate that she cares very much what we think of her tone or her manners.

  Not all the reviews were like that; in the Los Angeles Times and the New Leader, the critics rather appreciated Sontag. But these personal comments were rarely mere asides. More often than not, the
critic’s entire opinion would be predicated on his or her personal image of Sontag. And as a result, from then on, Sontag’s personality would become as much an issue as what she wrote. That vague property, her “image,” would become as much a part of her literary reputation as her writing. Her publishers were often shrewd about this, making what they could of Sontag’s undeniable, dark-eyed attractiveness. On the mass-market paperback cover for Against Interpretation—which had become an unlikely bestseller—the image was simply a photograph of Sontag, by the photographer Harry Hess. She is looking over her shoulder, off to the side.

  It is difficult to overstate how much writing about Sontag is concerned with her appearance. Even in the most serious essays about her there is usually some remark about her looks. The mountains of ink may be summed up as follows: she was exceptionally good-looking. But I think she had a more complicated relationship to beauty than the raptures of bystanders and the fineness of her photographs suggested. Her notebooks are filled with self-exhortations to bathe more; contemporaries observed that she often looked unkempt, her hair usually swept away from her face but otherwise unstyled, flyaway. This was true even in media appearances; in one interview, her uncombed hair and lack of makeup contrast strikingly with the film director Agnès Varda’s sleek bob.

  Sontag also dressed exclusively in black, the standard strategy of those who don’t want to have to think about what they are wearing. In later years, she was known to lift her shirt and show people her surgical scars. Though attractive people often have the privilege of not thinking about what they look like, there was something about Sontag’s indifference that was genuine, unstudied. She liked that her looks got her places, but that was about as far as it went.

  From the beginning, too, she worried about the image her publicists were trying to project. The photographs began to overwhelm the person. A British publisher offered to put out a limited edition of Against Interpretation featuring reproductions of Rauschenberg photographs, but Sontag nixed the idea:

  Is this the kind of ultra-chic occasion—me and Rauschenberg— that’s bound to be written up in LIFE and TIME + will confirm that image of me as the “with it” girl, new Mary McCarthy, queen of McLuhanism + camp, that I’m trying to kill?

  Fortunately or unfortunately, Sontag’s resistance to It Girl status didn’t win out. Her interviews repeated someone’s quip that she had become “the Natalie Wood of the U.S. avant-garde.” She would publish a second novel, Death Kit, but its reception wouldn’t manage to eclipse her growing fame as an essayist. Like The Benefactor, Death Kit has very little by way of plot; a Pennsylvania businessman spends much of the novel wondering if his memory of killing a railroad worker is true or false. The book is densely allusive, following a style then fashionable in France. Gore Vidal, reviewing the book for the Chicago Tribune, put his finger on exactly why it didn’t work:

  In a strange way, Miss Sontag has been undone as a novelist by the very thing that makes her unique and valuable among American writers: her vast reading in what English Departments refer to as comparative literature … This acquired culture sets her apart from the majority of American novelists, good and bad, who read almost nothing, if one is to admit as evidence the meager texture of their works and the idleness of their occasional commentaries.

  Critics as interested in the avant-garde as Sontag were few and far between. Instead, the press coverage stuck to the easier subjects. “If there were any justice in this world, Susan Sontag would be ugly, or at least plain,” a female Washington Post reviewer remarked. “No girl that good-looking has any right to have all those brains.” The feminist academic Carolyn Heilbrun, commissioned by the New York Times to interview Sontag, was so overcome that she produced an article without a single quote in it—”I must not quote her, for those words, too, crystalized, wrenched from the conversation which evoked them, become simplified, false.” In theory this was flattering. The interview became a kind of prose poem about what Sontag was like, in the heightened rhetoric more appropriate to a celebrity profile than a books piece:

  When I first began reading about Susan Sontag I thought: My God, she is Marilyn Monroe, beautiful, successful, doomed, needing (it is Arthur Miller’s best phrase) a blessing. We have heard there are no second acts in American lives. Death kit indeed. And the reviewers will look for Miss Sontag in her new novel. (But she isn’t there. It isn’t her book anymore, except in the sense that it’s my book, your book. She knows it’s no longer the sort of book she would like to read.)

  At the height of her fame Sontag agreed to be profiled by an Esquire writer, to whom she remarked: “A legend is like a tail … it follows you around mercilessly, awkward, useless, essentially unrelated to the self.” There is always a bit of self-dramatizing in modesty of course, and the only sort of person who can easily reject a legend is one who knows she already has one to give away. But you can see pretty easily that she was right: the persona of Susan Sontag, by the late 1960s, had less to do with her work than could possibly have been comfortable for her.

  Nonetheless, Sontag’s celebrity had its uses. Many of the male intellectuals of the time became intimidated by Sontag’s image in the press. In early 1969, for example, out of the blue, she received a letter from Philip Roth, the author of a new novel called Portnoy’s Complaint. He had just been profiled by New York magazine. In the opening pages of the article, he’d referred to Sontag as “Sue. Suzy Q. Suzy Q. Sontag.” Apparently upon seeing his words in print, Roth was seized with remorse and dashed off a letter:

  Since, as you may or may not know, I’ve always been touched by your personal charm, and admiring of the integrity of your work, I’m appalled at the reporter’s complete misunderstanding and misreporting of what I remember saying, and the spirit in which it was said.

  It was a gracious apology for what could only have been considered a very lightly insulting, erroneously reported, mention. But it gave a sense of how large a figure Sontag had begun to cut, despite the middling critical reviews of her actual work. She commanded enormous respect as a thinker and as a public intellectual. She could cow Philip Roth, who was not exactly known to apologize for himself on a regular basis.

  As her star rose, Sontag was determined to move away from criticism and essay writing. She started a third novel instead. She took up film, after receiving an offer from Sweden to make art films on a minuscule budget there. And she dropped abstract criticism in favor of writing directly about current events. In 1967, the Partisan Review hosted the written symposium “What’s Happening in America.” Sontag’s response to the questionnaire was a screed against the state of the country she’d never quite felt she belonged to, anyway; in insulting it she drew on metaphors straight from her California childhood:

  Today’s America, with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chewing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing.

  Never one for rote recitations of patriotic values, Sontag went on to point out that if indeed America was the “culmination of Western white civilization … Then there must be something wrong with Western white civilization.” The white race, she writes, is “the cancer of human history.”

  Once again, an essay in a little magazine was suddenly news. William F. Buckley, the conservative writer and founder of the National Review, lifted these and other phrases from Sontag’s piece for a thunderous editorial. Sontag, a “sweet young thing,” he wrote sarcastically, was simply pro-Communist. A horrified sociology professor at the University of Toronto could not even bring himself to print the name of the “Alienated Intellectual” who had written such a phrase out of her “self-destructive” impulses. The “cancer of human history” remark would follow her for almost the rest of her life.

  But her work was then already beginning to travel beyond the pages of small magazines. In late 1968 Sontag traveled to Vietnam to have a look around on assignment for Esquire, which was then under the editorship of Harold Hayes. Hayes was eager to el
evate the magazine from a men’s fashion magazine to a literary force, and Sontag could help with that.

  It was not precisely an independent trip. Sontag was the guest of the North Vietnamese, who were then in the habit of inviting prominent antiwar writers and activists to come see what was happening as a kind of propaganda effort. While Sontag disclosed that she had not really been able to see the country independently of her North Vietnamese guides, she did not meditate on the ethical quandary this might cause for her reporting. That said, she was careful to present the article not as an authoritative account of the current situation of Vietnam, but rather as a personal experience. For once, there was open confession of her direct experience of something:

  Made miserable and angry for four years by knowledge of the excruciating suffering of the Vietnamese people at the hands of my government, now that I was actually there and being plied with gifts and flowers and rhetoric and tea and seemingly exaggerated kindness, I didn’t feel any more than I already had ten thousand miles away.

  As this suggests, the resulting piece of writing—at the rough length of a novella, it was later published as a stand-alone book—was not so much about the Vietnamese as it was about how Sontag apprehended and reacted to them. Reviewing the book for the New York Review of Books, the journalist Frances FitzGerald likened the approach to being a patient in psychoanalysis. Sontag wasn’t hoping to better understand the country so much as she was hoping to better understand the empire in which she already lived. She found herself, even amid what she found to be the goodness of the Vietnamese people, longing for the “astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures” that her “unethical” home country possessed. “In the end, of course,” she finished, “an American has no way of incorporating Vietnam into his consciousness.”