Lobstergirl's Full Review: Carl Rollyson and Lisa Olson Paddock - Susan Sonta...
Susan Sontag may be known, even more than for her status as one of America's premier intellectuals, for that shock of white hair at her temple, a dramatic physical flourish as distinctive and identifying as Jennifer Lopez's booty, the gap between David Letterman's teeth, Geraldo Rivera's nasty moustache, Karl Malden's nose, Jay Leno's chin, Dolly Parton's boobies, or Tony Blair's manhood. The streak appeared naturally in middle age, but Sontag accentuated it with hair dye, particularly after her locks grew back in with heavy gray flecks subsequent to a first round of chemotherapy. It is now iconic enough that although the New Yorker rejected several pieces of her fiction (after she had become an established writer), it printed at least one cartoon that paid homage to the streak.
Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon is the first Sontag biography, but it certainly won't be the last, or the most definitive. It is entertaining in the gossipy way that unauthorized biographies tend to be (Sontag's lawyers put the publisher, Norton, "on notice", and many of those interviewed did not allow their names to be used), particularly beginning at about midpoint. The authors met Sontag in person at a 1980 conference, and Paddock was fascinated by her Amazonian qualities; it seems that not only is she tall, but she also has hips.
A Brief Biographical Overview
Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan in 1933. Her father owned a fur trading business and spent most of his time in China along with Susan's mother Mildred. Susan was raised by her grandparents and other relatives until age five, when her father died of tuberculosis. Mildred returned from China and shortly thereafter moved with Susan and her younger sister Judith to Tucson (this is one of the very few mentions of Judith, but not for lack of authorial research -- it seems Sontag hardly ever mentioned her). Sontag would later describe her mother as vain and self-absorbed, even telling Susan not to call her "Mother" in public so that people wouldn't assume she was old enough to have a child. Sontag remembers Mildred being away from home for long periods and being deposited with relatives.
Susan had a natural intelligence that flourished in spite of her mother's hands-off parenting, getting straight A's and reading voraciously. Her mother remarried a former Air Force pilot, Nathan Sontag, and the family moved to California where Susan attended North Hollywood High. Shortly after she turned sixteen, the school decided there was nothing else they could teach her. After one semester at Berkeley, she enrolled at the University of Chicago, where entering students could place out of undergraduate courses by passing entrance exams. Susan took mostly graduate courses and obtained her degree in less than two years. Along the way, she acted in school plays directed by fellow student Mike Nichols.
Sontag audited instructor Philip Rieff's Social Science class one semester. Rieff was stern and authoritarian, demanding close, almost Talmudic readings of the texts. He was twenty-eight but looked and acted older. Sontag rarely spoke in his class, but she was dramatic looking enough to draw attention, and at the end of one class Rieff grabbed her arm and asked her name. She insisted she was only auditing the class, but Rieff asked her out to lunch. Ten days later, they were married. She was seventeen. (There are two photos printed in the book of Sontag at age 25, and they certainly explain why any man would have found her captivating. Her hair is thick and dark, her brows perfect, her mouth full and sensuous, her eyes knowing. Quite simply, she is stunning.)
Sontag's son David Rieff was born in 1952 when she was nineteen. Philip accepted a teaching position at Brandeis, and in 1955 Susan enrolled in the graduate philosophy program at Harvard, receiving her master's degree two years later at age 24. She was awarded a fellowship at Oxford, at the same time that Philip received one at Stanford. Little David Rieff would accompany neither parent, but would be cared for by Philip's family. It was the beginning of the end of their marriage. Like her mother Mildred, Susan found herself temperamentally unsuited for conventional family life or traditional parenting. She wanted to be able to, and did, leave her husband and/or child for long periods to pursue her own aims.
Oxford and England were not to Sontag's liking. After four months she left for the Sorbonne and began (or reignited) a lesbian relationship with Harriet Sohmers, a close friend from her Berkeley days. Sontag returned to the U.S. without getting her doctorate and divorced Rieff, who was devastated. She moved with David to New York and, determined not to accept any alimony or child support from Philip, took an editorial job at Commentary, followed by teaching positions as Sarah Lawrence and City College. Harriet Sohmers introduced her to the Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes, who had been Harriet's lover in Paris. Sontag and Fornes began a love affair that had the depth and commitment of a marriage until it ended in 1963.
The most important man in Sontag's life may have been Roger Straus of the publishing house Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Sontag had written a novel that would eventually be called The Benefactor which Random House had turned down. (The New Yorker also declined to publish a section of it.) Straus accepted the novel and became, if not the architect, at least the engineer of Sontag's career. He made sure that her novels were always in print, and that even her most insignificant writings were translated and marketed abroad. A former friend of Sontag wrote to the novelist Paul Bowles, "Susan is going to be terribly famous soon because Roger…..is mad about her (he is very hot for lesbians) and is going to make a big thing of her very boring novel." Straus strenuously promoted the unknown Sontag with publicity, press releases, and personal appearances. He helped her craft an image, which is not necessarily to say that there is anything fake about the image, just that it is supported by an awful lot of buttressing. Already in the early 1960s Sontag had an entourage. Once she showed up at a party with her posse and reportedly ground out her cigarette on the living room carpet.
Sontag's first novel received very mixed reviews, but she hit the big time with her 1964 Partisan Review essay Notes on Camp, followed in 1968 by Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will (1969). (After her poorly received 1967 novel Death Kit, Sontag confessed that she had lost confidence in herself as a novelist. Her next novel would be the bestselling The Volcano Lover in 1992). Articles in glossy magazines like Vogue, Mademoiselle and Playboy helped pay the bills, and Sontag almost never turned down a speaking engagement, but interestingly given her willingness to be the subject of glamorous photos, she made no effort to become a TV personality the way Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal had. In 1977 she published On Photography, and her 1976 bout with breast cancer let her to write Illness as Metaphor. (With no medical insurance, she was left with $150,000 in medical bills. Her friends and fellow writers at PEN and the New York Review of Books raised funds among themselves to help her pay them.) AIDS and Its Metaphors was published in 1988.
The bright little David Rieff was reading War and Peace at age eleven and hanging out with Warren Beatty, Jasper Johns, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, yet all was not well. Philip was suing Susan for custody, alleging she was an unfit mother. Sontag had to pass a Rorschach test, among other things, to maintain custody. By age 14, David recalled, he was spending much of his time alone; at age 15 he was traveling through Europe and the Middle East on his own. He would remain estranged from his father for more than twenty years.
Sontag's mothering skills still vacillated between attentiveness and neglect. One friend remembers a dinner party Susan threw in New York when David was home from Princeton. He had an allergic reaction to lobster and began to choke. The friend became alarmed and looked to Sontag for help, but she didn't seem to notice David's physical condition. The friend took David out of the room and sat with him while he recovered, but Sontag never joined them or mentioned the incident.
Sontag was happy to push her son's writing career along, helping him get a story published in the Paris Review. David was a haughty and supercilious critic in a creative writing class at Princeton, brutalizing the other students' writing but never turning in his own work. The students finally threatened to protest to the administration if David didn't pass out something of his own. David produced the story that was about to be published in the Paris Review, and his classmates unsympathetically tore it to shreds. (Later Sontag would choose one of David's pieces for a Best American Essays collection that she edited, without indicating that he was her son.)
Public vs. Private
The biographers spend a lot of space discussing the private vs. the public Sontag. She is clearly a lesbian, or at least bisexual (at one point she went public on the issue of an abortion she had had, and of course there was her ex-husband) -- in private, and neither she nor photographer Annie Leibovitz attempted to hide their relationship that began in the 80's. But she never made an issue of her own sexuality, to the dismay of a fair number of gay and lesbian writers and critics, some of whom tried to "out" her.
As a graduate student at Bennington, Camille Paglia idolized Sontag, and succeeded in procuring her to speak. In an essay ("Sontag Bloody Sontag", in Vamps and Tramps), Paglia detailed how the faculty reluctantly agreed to bring Sontag to campus after Paglia had built her up extensively. Sontag was late arriving, making the audience sit and wait, then stood up and read from some deadly boring fiction she was writing instead of the scintillating talk they had been expecting. (The biography is sprinkled with details of how Sontag made people wait, made an ass of herself, sent peons scurrying on errands and then disappeared.) Paglia later complained that Random House lawyers had excised about a third of "Sontag Bloody Sontag", including a passage in which Paglia "excoriated Sontag" and her publicity machine for "publicizing her early relationship with a man [Philip Rieff] to the exclusion of all her subsequent relationships with women, including …[Leibovitz]." Paglia frequently badmouthed Sontag in the press, then ballyhooed Sontag's disingenuousness in pretending not to know who Paglia was. Sontag eventually made her opinion of Paglia known in the Sunday Times in 1995:
She should go join a rock band. Are people impressed by this shamelessness? We used to think Norman Mailer was bad, but she makes Mailer look like Jane Austen. The vindictiveness, the vulgarity, the aggression -- she is repulsive to me.
(To observers, this must have seemed like a pretty hot bout of girl-on-girl mud wrestling.)
Other gays and lesbians, however, came to Sontag's defense, among them Fran Lebowitz and gay activist Larry Kramer: Kramer opined:
Susan is....beyond being a lesbian. I know I'm probably saying something very politically incorrect, but, except for the fact that she has affairs with women, she doesn't really fit into that category…....What she is more than anything else is an Intellectual, with a capital I…....
Writer Edmund White, who would later have a falling out with Sontag, thought he understood why she would not want to come out. She identified strongly with the French universalist tradition, in which "one is first and foremost a citizen, and to put any finer point on it is to lose the freedom to define oneself…....[White] viewed Sontag as political, but wishing to remove herself as far as possible from the arena of identity politics, which she deemed provincial." Even openly gay French writers refused the limitations of the label "gay writer", White noted.
The authors suggest that "her combination of sexiness and braininess made it easier for a generation of men to cope with the increased intellectual assertiveness of women in the 1970s. It was in this context that she and Straus were so concerned about her sexual orientation becoming known to her mass audience -- concerned perhaps that it would destroy the illusion of sexual availability to men that made her intellect acceptable."
Style vs. Substance
The authors' other main theme, along with the public vs. private personae, is the issue of style vs. substance. Sontag was hip, she was cool, she was fabulously photogenic; in her black pants, black boots and turtlenecks she radiated the kind of smart sexiness that attracted men and women alike. "Virtually everyone interviewed for this biography prefaced their remarks with some comment about her handsomeness," the authors note. But to paraphrase another famous lesbian, how much "there" was there?
Critic Walter Kendrick, writing in the Nation 1982, admitted, "...…I must confess, I don't know anyone who looks to Sontag for aesthetic guidance. But she takes herself so seriously, and her publisher treats her with such awe, that I can only presume the existence of a vast, anonymous readership, hungry for Sontag's pearls. If these readers exist, their reverence is Sontag's only real achievement, a notable achievement, to be sure, but a far more trenchant criticism of the world of American letters than any essay she ever wrote."
Leslie Hanscome of Newsday described her as "…...mistress of the art of saying nothing in particular, but saying it with such gravity that the listener feels like writing it down and taking it home for study."
Edmund White observed that in person, Sontag's intellect didn't always impress. White relates how she once told him, "You know my essays are much more intelligent than I am. Do you know why? It's because I rewrite them so many times, and slowly, slowly, I nudge them up the hill from my natural state of medium intelligence to a high state of intelligence." In conversations or even in seminars, White did not find her particularly enlightening, clever, or witty; nor did she think on her feet especially well.
Rollyson and Paddock sum up things nicely:
[Sontag's] claim that she has never considered how her "market", her "image" and her physical attractiveness have shaped her career seems disingenuous or self-deceiving. She confronted an apparently insoluble problem: if she acknowledged the power of her beauty, she feared she would not be taken seriously. Yet she was taken seriously, in part, precisely because of her striking presence and her ability to court the public glance. ...….she knew the power of her looks, and she knew how to use it, but she also recognized the dangers of relying on her image to promote her work, an image that had the potential to subvert her goal to become one of the century's leading intellectuals.
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