by Terry Castle
Everyone crowded into their seats: despite the vast size of the room, we were an intime gathering. Yet it wouldn’t be quite right merely to say that everyone ignored me. As a non-artist and non-celebrity, I was so “not there,” it seemed—so cognitively unassimilable—I wasn’t even registered enough to be ignored. I sat at one end of the table like a piece of antimatter. I didn’t exchange a word the whole night with Lou Reed, who sat kitty-corner across from me. He remained silent and surly. Everyone else gabbled happily on, however, about how they loved to trash hotels when they were younger and how incompetent everybody was at the Pompidou. At my show I had to explain things to them a thousand times. They just don’t know how to do a major retrospective.
True, Sontag tried briefly to call the group’s attention to me (with the soul-destroying words, Terry is an English professor); and Abramovic kindly gave me a little place card to write my name on. But otherwise I might as well not have been born. My one conversational gambit failed dismally: when I asked the man from the Guggenheim, to my right, what his books were about, he regarded me disdainfully and began, I am famous for—, then caught himself. He decided to be more circumspect—he was the world’s leading expert on Arte Povera—but then turned his back on me for the next two hours. At one point I thought I saw Laurie Anderson, at the other end of the table, trying to get my attention; she was smiling sweetly in my direction, as if to undo my pathetic isolation. I smiled in gratitude in return and held up my little place card so she would at least know my name. Annoyed, she gestured back impatiently, with a sharp downward flick of her index finger; she wanted me to pass the wine bottle. I was reduced to a pair of disembodied hands, like the ones that come out of the walls and give people drinks in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.
Sontag gave up trying to include me and after a while seemed herself to recede curiously into the background. Maybe she was already starting to get sick again; she seemed oddly undone. Through much of the conversation (dominated by glammy Osric) she looked tired and bored, almost sleepy. She did not react when I finally decided to leave—on my own—just after coffee had been served. I thanked Marina Abramovic, who led me to the grungy metal staircase that went down to the street and back to the world of the Little People. Turning round one last time, I saw Sontag still slumped in her seat, as if she’d fallen into a trance, or somehow just caved in. She’d clearly forgotten all about me.
A fiasco, to be sure, but my final encounter with Sontag was possibly more disastrous, my Waterloo. I had come to New York with Blakey, and Sontag (to whom I wanted proudly to display her) said we could stop by her apartment one afternoon. When we arrived at the appointed time, clutching a large bouquet of orange roses, Sontag was nowhere to be seen. Her young male assistant, padding delicately around in his socks, showed us in, took the roses away, and whispered to us to wait in the living room. We stood in puzzled silence. Half an hour later, somewhat blowsily, Sontag finally emerged from a back room. I introduced her to Blakey, and said rather nervously that I hoped we hadn’t woken her up from a nap. It was as if I had accused her of never having read Proust, or of watching soap operas all day. Her face instantly darkened and she snapped at me violently. Why on earth did I think she’d been having a nap? Didn’t I know she never had naps? Of course she wasn’t having a nap! She would never have a nap! Never in a million years! What a stupid remark to make! How had I gotten so stupid? A nap—for God’s sake!
She calmed down after a bit and became vaguely nice to Blakey—Blakey had just read her latest piece on photography in The New Yorker and was complimenting her effusively on it—but it was clear I couldn’t repair the damage I’d done. Indeed, I made it worse. Sontag asked B. if she had read The Volcano Lover and started in on a monologue (one I’d heard before) about her literary reputation. It had fallen slightly over the past decade, she allowed—foolishly, people had yet to grasp the greatness of her fiction—but of course it would rise again dramatically, as soon as I am dead. The same thing had happened, after all, to Virginia Woolf, and didn’t we agree Woolf was a great genius? In a weak-minded attempt at levity, I asked her if she “really” thought Orlando a work of genius. She then exploded. Of course not! she shouted, hands flailing and face white with rage. Of course not! You don’t judge a writer by her worst work! You judge her by her best work! I reeled backwards as if I’d been struck; Blakey looked embarrassed. The assistant peeked out from another room to see what was going on. Sontag went on muttering for a while, then grimly said she had to go. With awkward thanks, we bundled ourselves hurriedly into the elevator and out onto West 24th Street—Blakey agog, me all nervy and smarting. When I sent Sontag a copy of my lesbian anthology a few months later, a thousand pages long and complete with juicy Highsmith excerpt, I knew she would never acknowledge it, nor did she.
Enfin—la fin. I heard she was dead as Bev and I were driving back from my mother’s after Christmas. Blakey called on the cell phone from Chicago to say she had just read about it online; it would be on the front page of The New York Times the next day. It was, but news of the Asian tsunami crowded it out. (The catty thing to say here would be that Sontag would have been annoyed at being upstaged; the honest thing to say is that she wouldn’t have been.) The Times did another piece a few days later, a somewhat dreary set of passages from her books, entitled “No Hard Books, or Easy Deaths.” (An odd title: her death wasn’t easy, but she was all about hard books.) And in the weeks since, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and various other highbrow mags have kicked in with the predictable tributes.
But I’ve had the feeling the real reckoning has yet to begin. The reaction, to my mind, has been a bit perfunctory and stilted. A good part of her characteristic “effect”—what one might call her novelistic charm—has not yet been put into words. Among other things, Sontag was a great comic character; Dickens or Flaubert or James would have had a field day with her. The carefully cultivated moral seriousness—strenuousness might be a better word—coexisted with a fantastical, Mrs. Jellyby–like absurdity. Sontag’s complicated and charismatic sexuality was part of this comic side of her life. The high-mindedness, the high-handedness, commingled with a love of gossip, drollery, and seductive acting out—and, when she was in a benign and unthreatened mood, a fair amount of ironic self-knowledge.
I think she was fully conscious of, and took great pride and pleasure in, the erotic spell she exerted over other women. I would be curious to know how men found her in this regard; the few times I saw her with men around, they seemed to relate to her as a kind of intellectually supercharged eunuch. The famed “Natalie Wood” looks of her early years notwithstanding, she seemed uninterested in being an object of heterosexual desire, and males responded accordingly. It was not the same with women, and least of all with her lesbian fans. Among the susceptible, she never lost her sexual majesty. She was quite fabulously butch—perhaps the Butchest One of All. She knew it and basked in it, like a big lady she-cat in the sun.
Perhaps at some point there will be, too, a better and less routine accounting of her extraordinary cultural significance. Granted, Great Man (or Great Woman) theories of history have been out of fashion for some time now. No single person, it’s usually argued, has that much effect on how things eventually turn out. Yet it is hard for me to think about the history of modern feminism, say—especially as it evolved in the United States in the 1970s—without Sontag in the absolutely central, catalytic role. Simone de Beauvoir was floating around too, of course, but for intellectually ambitious American women of my generation, women born in the 1940s and ’50s, the Frenchwoman seemed both culturally unfamiliar and emotionally removed. Sontag, on the contrary, was there: on one’s own college campus, lecturing on Barthes or Canetti or Benjamin or Tsvetaeva or Leni Riefenstahl. (And who were they? One pretended to know, then scuttled around to find out.) She was our very own Great Man. If there was ever going to be a Smart Woman Team then Sontag would have to be both Captain and Most Valuable Player. She was the one already out there
doing the job, even as we were laboring painfully to get up off the floor and match wits with her.
In my own case, Sontag’s death brings with it mixed emotions. God, she could be insulting to people. At the end—as I enjoyed blubbering to friends—she was weally weally mean to me! But her death also leaves me now with a profound sense of imploding fantasies, of huge convulsions in the underground psychic plates. Not once, unfortunately, on any of her California trips did Sontag ever come to my house, though I often sat around scheming how to get her to accept such an invitation. If only she would come, I thought, I would be truly happy. It’s hard to admit how long—and how abjectly, like a Victorian monomaniac—I carried this fantasy around. (It long antedated my actual meeting with her.) It is still quite palpable in the rooms in which I spend most of my time. Just about every book, every picture, every object in my living room, for example, I now see all too plainly, has been placed there strategically in the hope of capturing her attention, of pleasing her mind and heart, of winning her love, esteem, intellectual respect, etc., etc. It’s all baited and set up: a room-sized Venus flytrap, courtesy of T-Ball/Narcissism Productions.
There are her books, of course: the vintage paperbacks of Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, the quite-wonderful-despite-what-everybody-says The Volcano Lover. There’s AIDS and Its Metaphors, On Photography, Where the Stress Falls. The now valedictory Regarding the Pain of Others. And then there are some of my own productions, to remind her, passive-aggressively I guess, that she’s not the only damned person who writes. (Caveat lector: Lilliputian on the rampage!) But yet heaps of other things are also on view, I’m embarrassed to say, the sole purpose of which is—was—to impress her or some facsimile version of her. A pile of “tasteful” art books: Popova, The History of Japanese Photography, Cy Twombly, Nadar, Bronzino, Hannah Hoch, Jeff Wall, Piranesi, Sol LeWitt and Jasper Johns, the big Bellocq volume (with her introduction). My 1930s picture of Lucienne Boyer. My Valentine Hugo photo of Breton and Aragon. The crammed CD cabinet, with the six different versions of Pelléas (will I really listen to any of them all the way through again before I die?). My little nineteenth-century optical toy from Paris: you crank a tiny lever and see a clown head, painted on glass, change expressions as if by magic.
Yet now the longed-for visitor—or victim—is never going to arrive. Who will come in her stead? At the moment it’s hard to imagine anyone ever possessing the same symbolic weight, the same adamantine hardness, or having the same casual imperial hold over such a large chunk of my brain. I am starting to think in any case that she was part of a certain neural development that, purely physiologically speaking, can never be repeated. All those years ago one evolved a hallucination about what mental life could be and she was it. She’s still in there, enfolded somehow in the deepest layers of the gray matter. Yes: Susan Sontag was sibylline and hokey and often a great bore. She was a troubled and brilliant American and never as good a friend as I wanted her to be. But now the lady’s kicked it and I’m trying to keep one of the big lessons in view: judge her by her best work, not her worst.
Home Alone
Elsie de Wolfe, the “First Lady of Interior Decoration,” in rococo costume, ca. 1900
THE LATE MARIO PRAZ—DANDY, scholar, eccentric chronicler of interior-decorating styles through the ages—once observed that human beings could be divided into those who cared about such things and those who didn’t. An avid, even ensorcelled member of the first group, he confessed to finding people who were indifferent to décor baffling and somewhat sinister. To discover that a friend was content to dwell in “fundamental and systematic ugliness,” he wrote in An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: From Pompeii to Art Nouveau, was as disturbing as “turning over one of those ivory figurines carved by the German artificers of the Renaissance, which show a lovely woman on one side and a worm-ridden corpse on the other.” All the more macabre was it when the friend was otherwise refined:
A venerated master of mine at the University of Florence used to say, from his lectern, many learned things about the Provençal poets. I hung on his every word. But it was a grim day when I first crossed the threshold of his house. As soon as the door was opened, I was confronted by a loathsome oleograph of a Neapolitan shepherdess (that same oleograph used to turn up often in the shops where unclaimed objects from the state pawnshop, the Monte di Pietà, are sold). The shepherdess, shading her eyes with her hand, affected a simpering smile, while Vesuvius smoked in the background.
Granted, in place of the “loathsome oleograph” (which now sounds enchantingly campy) one might want to substitute any number of contemporary abominations: fur-covered kitty condos placed nonchalantly in the living room, embroidered sofa pillows that say things like “She Who Must Be Obeyed” or “Bless This Mess,” Southwestern-style bent-willow furniture (barf), neoclassical wall sconces made out of glued and gilded polyurethane, monstrous sleigh beds from Restoration Hardware, Monet water-lily refrigerator magnets, fake “bistro” clocks, and just about any item of domestic ornament with an angel or a dolphin or a picture of Frida Kahlo on it. Yet even without a tchotchke update we can all sympathize with Praz’s baffled revulsion: “It’s curious, the squalor, the unnecessary and even deliberate squalor in which people who profess a sensitivity to the fine arts choose to live, or manage to adapt themselves.”
Or at least some of us can. I think Praz is right: you either have the “interiors” thing going on or you don’t. Sherlock Holmes would have no difficulty determining into which of Praz’s categories I fall: a quick riffle through the contents of my mailbox, engorged each day to the point of overflowing, makes it comically clear.
The surreal monthly haul, I’m embarrassed to say, includes just about every shelter magazine known to man or woman, from House and Garden, Elle Decor (not to be confused with Elle Decoration, a British mag that I also get), Metropolitan Home, House Beautiful, and Architectural Digest to Dwell, Wallpaper, Veranda, the British Homes and Gardens, and—holy of holies—the epicene and intoxicating World of Interiors, a UK shelter mag so farcically upscale and eccentric that it might have been conceived by P. G. Wodehouse. (Until its recent demise I also subscribed to nest. More on that dark Manhattan cult mag later.) Add to these the innumerable glossy catalogues—from Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Room and Board, Design Within Reach, Ikea, West Elm, Home Decorators Collection, Williams-Sonoma, Wisteria, Ballard Designs, Plow & Hearth, NapaStyle, Eddie Bauer Home, and the like—that regularly deluge anyone who has ever made the mistake (as I have) of ordering a distressed-teak milking stool or a kilim-covered ottoman online, and any residual doubt about my propensities will be removed.
The obsession, I confess, has its autoerotic dimension. At times, despite the ever-renewing bounty on hand, I still mooch down to an insalubrious foreign newsstand near where I live in San Francisco and peruse Maison Française, Maisons Côté Sud, or Résidences Décoration—just to practice my French, of course. (Though rather more arduous linguistically, the German Elle Decoration also sometimes beckons.) Paging through the offerings on display, I am aware of bearing a discomfiting resemblance to various male regulars furtively examining the dirty magazines across the aisle. An ex-girlfriend (we split up in part over closet space) informs me I am a “house-porn addict,” and although the term is exactly the sort of metrosexual-hipster cliché, cheeky yet dull, that one finds every Thursday in the New York Times Home & Garden section, it does get at the curious feelings of guilt, titillation, and flooding bourgeois pleasure—relief delivered through hands and eyeballs—that such publications provide.
Yet more and more people, I’ve come to decide, must share my vice to some degree. The sheer ubiquitousness of interiors magazines—in airport terminals, supermarket checkout lines, big-box bookstores, doctors’ offices, and other quintessentially modern (and often stressful) locations—suggests I am not the only person, female or male, gay or straight, experiencing such cravings. (Though hardly one of the more so
igné publications, Better Homes and Gardens, owned by ABC Magazines, has an annual circulation of 7.6 million and generates nearly $173 million in revenue a year.) And lately the oddest people have started to confess to me their shelter-mag obsessions, including, a couple of weeks ago, a scary-looking young ’zine writer with a metal bolt through her tongue and Goth-style tattoos all over her neck, arms, legs, and back. Crystal meth would seem to have nothing on House Beautiful—and the latter won’t turn your teeth into pulpy little black stumps.
How to understand such collective absorption? One might moralize, of course, and simply write off the phenomenon as yet another example of life in obscene America—home of the fat, spoiled, and imbecilic. How dare to broach such a subject when more than 2.6 billion people, or “more than 40 percent of the world’s population,” according to The New York Times, “lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water”? Easy enough to say that shelter mags are silly and odious—not worth even talking about—and leave it at that.