Sontag was not, by far, the only American journalist to make such a trip and find herself stymied. In fact, just two years before Sontag landed in Hanoi, Mary McCarthy had done it and published the results in the New York Review of Books. Her analysis of the situation was somewhat more direct than Sontag’s, the resulting book a less reflective document altogether:
I confess that when I went to Vietnam early last February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest and that I found it, though often by accident or in the process of being briefed by an official.
McCarthy’s directness worked against her, because in being so direct she was seen to be credulous regarding the claims of the North Vietnamese. McCarthy was also thought to have slipped up factually: FitzGerald, in her New York Review essay, delicately referred to McCarthy’s failure to “do the work of a careful ethnologist, by keeping close watch over her evidence.” Neither book was considered a triumph at the time. Sontag later seemed embarrassed by her book, saying, “I was really dumb in those days.”
Still, McCarthy wrote to Sontag when her book was published, eager somehow to highlight the parallels in their thinking. “Interesting that you too were driven to an examination of conscience,” McCarthy wrote, “Possibly feminine egotism …”
You will certainly be censured for writing about Susan Sontag, rather than about schools, hospitals, etc. But you are right, and more right, I think, than I in that you carried it further, made no bones about saying “This book is about me.”
The elder writer really did put her finger on something about Sontag’s evolving style. In a notebook, ten years before, a younger Sontag had reproached herself. “My ‘I’ is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity.” The Hanoi essay was an experiment for a writer who’d barely ever used the first person before. There was a new type of confidence in it. Even the critics who didn’t like her—one New York Times writer, Herbert Mitgang, called her “last year’s literary pin-up” in opening his review—had to admit she’d delivered a thoughtful piece of work.
McCarthy, for her part, seemed to recognize it. She added an uncharacteristically sheepish postscript to her three-page letter: “I’m assuming you’ve read mine. In case you haven’t, the last chapter is where the stock-taking goes on.” It wasn’t an unfriendly letter but there was some air of light incredulity to it, an unspoken question: how is it that we keep meeting, in prose, like this?
In the meantime, Sontag was growing frustrated with her public reputation as an essayist. “I don’t write essays anymore,” Sontag told an interviewer in October 1970.
That’s something in the past for me. For two years I have been making movies. And it’s somewhat of a burden to be thought of primarily as an essayist. I’m sure that Norman Mailer didn’t like being known for 20 years as the author of The Naked and the Dead when he had done a lot of other things. It’s like referring to Frank Sinatra in terms of the “Frankie” of 1943.
But Sontag couldn’t get away from her “Frankie,” either. The films she was making were savaged by critics. They were abstract, boring. What was more, they impoverished Sontag, who worked with small budgets overseas and rarely made any money doing them. Instead she went into debt, and within a few short years, she had to get back out again. Her self-confidence had taken a battering, she wrote in her notebooks, from the terrible reception of her movies. As a matter of making money she proposed books to Farrar, Straus and Giroux that she never finished: one on China, for example, that she told people would read like a cross between Hannah Arendt and Donald Barthelme.
She also began to speak more freely, suddenly, of feminism and the women’s movement. Sontag’s career had only just begun when the second-wave feminist movement began to get under way in the late 1960s. As an organized movement, feminism had been dormant nearly forty years. The energy of the suffragette had gotten squelched under the heel of the flapper, as historians came to see it—once the women’s vote was secured, younger women in particular had difficulty relating to the struggles of their forebears. This meant that a woman writer wasn’t asked, as she would be almost routinely nowadays, whether or not she was a “feminist.” Parker and West had each declared sympathies with the suffragette movement, but feminists made few demands on them. For McCarthy and Arendt, there had been little question of involving themselves, as writers, in any kind of organized feminist movement. It simply didn’t exist, for much of their careers.
But by the early 1970s, when Sontag was ascendant as America’s most visible woman intellectual, the women’s movement was in full, fervent swing, with marches and rallies and women’s collectives springing up everywhere, especially in New York City. New York Radical Women, a collective formed by among others the critic and journalist Ellen Willis, was coming into prominence in New York itself. Consciousness-raising circles were the rage. And gradually, as those debates came to dominate the media, Sontag was expected to declare some kind of fealty.
In large part the New York intellectuals looked on the teeming, chaotic energy of the movement with disgust. They could not understand it. They mostly seemed to find it vulgar. And here Sontag began to show a streak of contrarianism not unlike that of the writer who was “never important to her,” Mary McCarthy. She embraced it more fully and freely than almost any other member of the Partisan Review and New York Review of Books set.
The first time Sontag spoke openly as a feminist fellow traveler was in 1971. She appeared at a Town Hall feminist panel set to confront Norman Mailer over a disdainful essay he’d published in Harper’s about the women’s movement, titled “The Prisoner of Sex.” Like a schoolboy, the forty-eight-year-old Mailer was still intent on attracting feminine attention by lobbing insults at women. The essay took Mailer on a tour of many of the major figures of the feminist movement, whose level of attractiveness he never failed to measure as he insulted and dismissed their ideas. During his travels he called Kate Millett, a prominent feminist critic and the author of the polemic Sexual Politics, a “dull cow.” Bella Abzug, a lawyer and eventual congresswoman, was a “battle-ax.”
Sontag was not on the panel but in the audience that night. She rose with a question for Mailer. “Norman, it is true that women find that, with the best of will, the way you talk to them [is] patronizing,” she said in a calm, almost bemused tone of clear authority. “One of the things is your use of the word ‘lady,’” she continued. “I don’t like being called a ‘lady writer,’ Norman. I know it seems like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us. It’s a little better to be called a woman writer. I don’t know why, but you know words count, we’re writers who know that.”
Later, too, Sontag gave a long interview to Vogue in which she insisted she had herself felt the effects of discrimination in her life as a writer. The interviewer tried to say she had been under the impression, until that night, that Sontag “shared Mailer’s contempt for women as intellectuals.”
Where did you get that idea? At least half of the intelligent people I’ve known have been women. I couldn’t be more sympathetic to women’s problems or more angry about women’s condition. But the anger is so old that in the day-to-day sense I don’t feel it. It seems to me the oldest story in the world.
As though to drive the point home, Sontag promptly published an essay in the Partisan Review, originally meant for then fledgling Ms. magazine. But Gloria Steinem’s new venture found Sontag’s essay too didactic, so it went to the “boys” instead. They titled it “The Third World of Women.” Among the recommendations in the essay was that women should engage in outright revolt against patriarchy: “They should whistle at men in the streets, raid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizable numbers to militant lesbianism, provide feminist divorce counseling, establish make-up withdrawal centers, adopt their mothers’ family names.” But she seemed to blow out her steam in that one essay; it would be the only full, direct address of feminism she’d make in her
intellectual writing.
The essay project that stuck instead was something Sontag dreamed up over lunch with Barbara Epstein in 1972. She’d just been to see an exhibit of Diane Arbus photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. She found herself ranting about them, and Epstein suggested she write a piece about the show for the New York Review of Books. Over the course of the next five years, Sontag would write six of them, the essays that would eventually be collected into On Photography.
One critic suggested that On Photography should have been called Against Photography, because at times Sontag seemed to be questioning the very practice of photography itself. “They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing,” she wrote of photographs. And often Sontag did not see much to recommend in those ethics. Photographs often presented themselves as reality, she remarked, but there were always motives hidden in the way they were framed. The widespread popularity of taking photographs, too, came under fire: “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”
To keep money coming in she also began to write regularly for Vogue, essays she would never include in her later collections. One piece, coauthored with then twenty-three-year-old David Rieff, counseled readers on “how to be an optimist” in 1975. Amid the advice: “Assume that we are born to die, that we suffer uselessly, and that somewhere, we are always afraid.” A piece titled “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?” urged readers of America’s most popular fashion magazine to consider that “the way women are taught to be involved with beauty encourages narcissism, reinforces dependence and immaturity.” She continues:
What is accepted by most women as a flattering idealization of their sex is a way of making women feel inferior to what they actually are—or normally grow to be. For the ideal of beauty is administered as a form of self-oppression.
Whenever her feminist principles were challenged, Sontag had a habit of firing back tenfold at the person who dared challenge them. One such person was the poet Adrienne Rich, who had become deeply involved in the women’s movement by the time she sat down to read Sontag’s essay on Leni Riefenstahl, “Fascinating Fascism,” in a February 1975 issue of the New York Review of Books. Rich noticed in the essay Sontag’s claim that Riefenstahl was included in so many film festivals because “feminists would feel a pang at having to sacrifice the one woman who made films that everybody acknowledges to be first-rate.” She wrote in to question why feminists were being blamed.
Sontag, taking clear offense, responded in the pages of the New York Review with nearly two thousand words about Rich’s “flattering, censorious letter.” She pointed out that her essay was not in fact about feminism, but about Fascist aesthetics, and Rich’s willingness to point out only the part that bothered her was emblematic of the kind of blunt thinking in the women’s movement that she abhorred. “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded,” Sontag argued.
The two would make up later, by letter, agreeing they had some common ground worth exploring. “Your mind has interested mine for a number of years—though we often come from very different places,” Rich wrote to Sontag. But Sontag would find herself defending the words of her exchange with Rich in later interviews. Most seemed to see in it proof positive that Sontag was against feminism, a belief that persisted despite what she had written about gender politics and feminism. At some point, she simply began snapping at interviewers. “Since I’m a feminist too, the situation can hardly be described as a difficulty between me and ‘them,’” she told one.
But everything came to a halt when, in the fall of 1975, Sontag was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctors told David Rieff that she was not expected to live. It was a stage 4 tumor, and though Sontag was not directly told she was dying, she seemed to know the risks. She opted for a radical form of mastectomy in the hope that by removing more tissue than was required she might survive. It worked. Her cancer went into remission. The experience, however, changed her profoundly. The treatment, she wrote, left her feeling shell-shocked and worn, as if she’d been through the Vietnam War all by herself.
My body is invasive, colonizing. They’re using chemical weapons on me. I have to cheer.
She felt, at the time, “flattened,” noted that she’d become “opaque to myself.” She worried, too, that in fact some of her repression—of her anger at her mother, of her lesbianism, of her feelings of artistic despair—had caused the cancer. She plainly knew such thoughts were irrational. But she emerged from the illness feeling the only thing to do was to purge herself of them totally.
The purging process was the writing of Illness as Metaphor. This long essay, published in book form in 1975, is not technically a memoir. Sontag discussed the way humanity had aestheticized tuberculosis and cancer entirely in the abstract, making no specific reference to her own treatments or to any personal experiences of sentimentality or cruelty from her doctors. But if asked, she would be quite clear that she thought of the text as a cri de coeur:
I wasn’t in the slightest detached. It was a book written in the heat of rage, fear, anguish, terror, indignation—at a time when I was very ill and my progress was poor … But I didn’t become an idiot just because I had cancer.
Illness as Metaphor became the vehicle of complaint. Chiefly, Sontag’s problem with the metaphors novelists and writers had attached to disease was that they tended to blame the victim, as she had, briefly, in her sickbed. She directed anger at “cancerphobes” like Norman Mailer, who recently explained that had he not stabbed his wife (and acted out “a murderous nest of feeling”) he would have gotten cancer and “been dead in a few years himself.” She writes of Alice James, younger sister of the novelist Henry James, dying in bed of breast cancer, some hundred years before. In those moments, though it does not employ the first person at all, the text is clearly personal, the anger palpable.
Many reviewers, the eventual New York Times book critic John Leonard among them, took Sontag to task for having used a cancer metaphor in the essay about the state of America. (Remember: the white race was “the cancer of human history” for Sontag back in 1967.) But they all saw the anger animating the writing, and even if they had reservations about the execution of the book, were compelled by it. In the New York Times, the Irish critic Denis Donoghue remarked:
I have found Illness as Metaphor a disturbing book. I have read it three times, and I still find her accusations unproved. But the book has some extraordinarily perceptive things about our attitudes: how we view insanity, for instance, or heart disease.
Donoghue goes on to say that he finds Sontag’s style blunt, that to her “writing is combat.” This is meant, one thinks, as a criticism. But in terms of where Sontag started out, with her cerebral style and detached sensibility, it was an improvement. She still wasn’t, for the most part, able to write in the first person. But she got mad. And people heard, behind all the layers of intellection, all the references to works of art and philosophers with which they might not have been familiar until she introduced them, the record of a very frightening and threatening human experience.
The serious style of Illness as Metaphor was in line with how Sontag always wanted to see herself: as a serious thinker. But always, always, it was “Notes on ‘Camp’” that would follow her around, “Notes on ‘Camp’” that married her name to popular culture. She didn’t like that. Sontag’s friend Terry Castle told a story of being with Sontag at a party in the late 1990s when a guest had the misfortune to tell Sontag he loved that essay.
Nostrils flaring, Sontag instantly fixes him with a basilisk stare. How can he say such a dumb thing? She has no interest in discussing that essay and never will. He should never have brought it up. He is behind the times, intellectually dead. Hasn’t he ever read any of her other works? Doesn’t he keep up? As she slips down a dark tunnel of rage—one to become all-too familiar to us over the next two
weeks—the rest of us watch, horrified and transfixed.
The frustration with the way “Notes” dogged her was partly about wanting to get away from her youthful work. But she was also, evidently, genuinely disturbed by the way it had been read. In the eighties and nineties, she would witness a surge in intellectual interest in pop culture while high art began to struggle. She felt some responsibility, but of course it wasn’t all hers. She had had fellow travelers in the advocacy of pop culture, not the least of them a film critic named Pauline Kael.
9
Kael
Pauline Kael had been waiting a long time for a break when Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, reached out to her in August 1963. It was a last-minute request, but would she mind reviewing a novel for the paper? The novel in question was Mary McCarthy’s The Group.
Kael, only seven years younger than McCarthy, had long been a fan. She was just twenty-three when The Company She Keeps appeared—the perfect age to appreciate its sexual frankness. And by the time the enormous success of The Group rolled around, Kael had long been working as a McCarthy-like, gimlet-eyed movie critic, without the mainstream success or recognition. She was also, by then, forty-four, and clearly beginning to wonder if any ship from the East Coast intellectuals would ever come in. Nothing seemed to come easily to her, by then.
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