By
James Camp
March
22, 2011 | 7:16 p.m
In 1978,
when People wanted to
interview Susan Sontag, the writer wondered aloud how Samuel Beckett might
respond given the same opportunity. It was not unusual for her to invoke Beckett
in this way. "When she worried she was making too many compromises," Sigrid
Nunez recalls in Sempre Susan: A
Memoir of Susan Sontag (Atlas, 140 pages, $30), "she would say,
'Beckett wouldn't do it,'" There could be little doubt that Beckett ("Every word
is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness") would have skipped the
interview with People.
But in 1978, Sontag went ahead and did it anyway. The mantra of her resolve to
rise above it all—Beckett wouldn't do it—could equally express a sinking feeling
of self-dissatisfaction. Beckett wouldn't do it, but Sontag had.
With the
exceptions of T.S. Eliot and Henry James, no American writer has been more famed
for her Europeanness than Susan Sontag, and very few indeed could have led lives
as persevering in their contradictions. "She was like Woolf's Mr. Ramsay," as
Ms. Nunez sums it up, "stuck at Q, dreaming of Z." A dedicated writer, Sontag
"simply could not bear to be alone." An avowed feminist, "she found most women
wanting." Sontag had disliked her childhood with a bizarre, bad-tempered
intensity, and yet "people close to her often compared her to a child." "She was
a natural mentor ... who hated teaching," Ms. Nunez writes, but by this point
the pattern is so familiar readers can reproduce it on their own. Had Sontag
been born with an innate genius for the drums, she would have become the
hardest-working second violinist of all time.
"In
general," writes Ms. Nunez, "she had contempt for people who didn't do what they
truly wanted to do." Sontag truly wanted to write novels, but she is mostly
remembered, with reason, as an essayist. In one of the most celebrated of her
essays, it seems now, she may have unknowingly glimpsed herself: "In naïve, or
pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails." As
she discussed the Bee Gees with
People, she thought only of Beckett. There was something undeniably
a little camp about Susan Sontag.
Ms. Nunez
writes beautifully, but if her memoir offers the most revealing portrait of
Sontag yet, it may partly be because she has sketched it from an odd angle. Or
rather, several odd angles. For Ms. Nunez, Sontag was a boss, a mentor and a
friend; also an antagonist, a roommate and a prospective in-law. They first met
when Sontag hired Ms. Nunez as an assistant in 1976. Only 43 years old, Sontag
had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer the year before. It had nearly
killed her, and the rigors of survival had maimed her body and disarrayed her
life, leaving her with an accumulation of unanswered letters that she did not
have the stamina, as she recovered, to cope with on her own. Ms. Nunez, a young
writer, was brought in to help her cope. She had already worked at
The New York Review of Books,
and its editors, sensible of Sontag's needs, had suggested the arrangement. Of
its draws, not least was the proximity of Ms. Nunez's apartment to Sontag's
penthouse on Riverside Drive, where "the work" was done—and where Sontag's son,
David Rieff, then a student at Princeton, still lived. "It was exactly the kind
of odd job I was looking for then," Ms. Nunez recalls, "the kind unlikely to
interfere with my writing."
About this
Ms. Nunez was wrong. The mail seems largely to have been ignored as the two
writers gossiped their way to a fast friendship. Ms. Nunez was shy at 25, and
Sontag's charismatic frank attention must have been intoxicating. "I remember
thinking as I walked home how laid-back and open she'd been—much more like
someone my own age than someone of my mother's generation." Within weeks, and
with no small meddling on Sontag's part, Ms. Nunez was dating Mr. Rieff,
whereupon the three, in a decision whose precise rationale the reader would be
fascinated to learn but doesn't, moved in together. "She referred to us as the
duke and duchess and duckling of Riverside drive. I knew that wasn't a good
sign." Proximity was a draw, but a coupledom of three would have its drawbacks.
Soon Ms. Nunez had quit working for Sontag and returned to the
NYRB. But she continued to
see Mr. Rieff, and would not move out until 1977.
Sempre
Susan recounts the saga
of this ménage and of its author's friendship with Sontag, which would hang on,
with waning intensity, until Sontag's death, in 2004. It is also a requiem for
Ms. Nunez's love affair with Mr. Rieff, which ended much earlier, in the winter
of 1978, when they had "one last fight." Ms. Nunez graciously claims that "Susan
could have lived on the moon and David and I would not have worked out," but to
read the book is to awaken to the pain of uncertainty this sentence stoically
denies. The romance Sontag had bearishly encouraged she would frustrate like an
ogre. She was restless, she was lonely, she was insecure, and her tactlessness
could be staggering. At lunch one afternoon with Mr. Rieff, Ms. Nunez and a
fourth, Sontag advised the couple freely: "Why don't you two just sixty-nine?
Then you won't have to worry about birth control."
But Ms.
Nunez is alive to much more in Sontag's character than the flaws. She honors
with new evidence traits we have long ascribed to Sontag, like her vivacity and
gift for friendship, as well as a few traits we are accustomed to denying her,
like a sense of humor. Indeed, Ms. Nunez is so careful of her subject that she
has not divided her story into sections or chapters—the fear being, perhaps,
that Sontag cuts too protean a figure to be rendered by conventional means. The
unconventional result is that her prose is left to follow the eddying currents
of the author's memory.
In
different hands, this could conceivably be the recipe for chaotic failure, but
here the effect is economy, a brisk freedom to note what matters and nothing
more. Also, urgency. The flitting from fragment to fragment has a whiff of
desperation about it, as if the author were laboring under pressures she could
not quite withstand, but this is only fitting. Among the pressures, after all,
is death. As well as a memoir, Ms. Nunez's book is an elegy for a great woman
and the company she kept, the vanished salon where she was the center. "Most of
the people in this memoir," Ms. Nunez notes, "are dead."
Among the
dead is Joseph Brodsky. Sontag briefly dated Brodsky during the first months of
Ms. Nunez's relationship with Mr. Rieff, and the poet features in many of the
book's most diverting sequences. A ribald, talkative presence, prone to
off-color punning (Puerto Rico was "Muerto Rico," and the "young women of Mount
Holyoke, where [Brodsky] taught, were 'Mounties'"), Brodsky could outdo Sontag
both in heedless self-absorption and European-style imperturbability—though of
course Brodsky, a Russian, was hardly more European than his paramour. Late in
the book, Ms. Nunez reflects on something he had said over dinner: "You know in
the end, none of it matters, what happens to you in your life. Not suffering.
Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing." "Now, that's
European," Ms. Nunez concludes.
Sontag
adored Brodsky and all that he embodied. Still, not everyone can accept so
phlegmatically that their lives are as ripples on the water. Ms. Nunez recalls
what Sontag used to say when, deep in her writing, she felt Mr. Rieff and Ms.
Nunez had been neglecting her: "If you won't do it for me, at least you could do
it for Western culture."
April 15, 2011
At Home With Susan Sontag
By LAURA SHAPIRO
SEMPRE SUSAN
A
Memoir of Susan Sontag
By
Sigrid Nunez
140
pp. Atlas & Co.
It’s not easy to pick the most unforgettable image from the many that flutter
through this memoir like snippets from an overturned wastebasket. Susan Sontag
eating a whole package of bacon and calling it dinner? Susan Sontag, passionate
friend of the revolution, berating any clerk or waiter who didn’t treat her with
proper deference? Susan Sontag perched on a sofa in her son’s room late at
night, smoking and soliloquizing about her evening out, while he and his
girlfriend lie silently in bed? Truly an embarrassment of riches, emphasis on
the embarrassment, but here’s a personal favorite: Susan Sontag choosing to
entertain guests in the kitchen.
Many women, of course, entertain guests in the kitchen, but there isn’t much
evidence that Sontag enjoyed basking in the sweet associations that make the
kitchen the heart of the home. Apparently, she did think of herself as a
wonderful mother, and perhaps she was, though as Sigrid Nunez points out, it’s a
rare mom who fondly remembers making her 10-year-old stand at her side and light
cigarettes so she can chain-smoke while she’s madly typing a final draft. Nunez
herself was given a bowl of canned mushroom soup on her first visit, but she
reports little else in the way of traditional hospitality. Sontag appears to
have nestled in the kitchen simply because she was comfortable with the decor,
notably a hulking, broken freezer and streams of roaches.
Nunez, the author of half a dozen well-reviewed novels including, most recently,
“Salvation City,”
describes Sontag as a mentor, a friend and an inspiration. I guess you had to
have been there. In 1976, she was a newly hatched M.F.A. trying to write fiction
when she took a job helping Sontag with her mail. Sontag was living in a big
penthouse apartment at 106th Street and Riverside Drive with her son, David
Rieff, a 24-year-old college dropout who had returned to school as a Princeton
sophomore but was spending most of his time in New York. Soon Nunez began going
out with David, and a few months later she moved in. (A note about the
apartment: nobody ever stepped onto the terrace, because the dog used it as an
outhouse.) The arrangement lasted only a year or so, and Nunez says she wasn’t
keeping a journal at the time; but 35 years later she has assembled all the
tidbits she can remember and given them an Italian title meaning “Always Susan.”
She’s evoking the fact that people always addressed Sontag by her first name,
but why this reference requires Italian for maximum resonance is never
explained.
Very little is explained in this short, baffling book. Much of it reads as
though Nunez had jotted down her thoughts on notecards and simply transferred
them to the page in no particular order. Sontag once advised Nunez to try to
write more elliptically, which may account for the lack of transitions; but it’s
impossible not to keep scribbling “huh?” in the margins. In one remarkable
sequence, Nunez says first that Sontag carried a lifelong wound from her
mother’s persistent neglect and selfishness. Then she says that Sontag had an
asthma attack at age 5, after which her family moved from New York to Tucson for
her health. Then she says that as a child, Susan drank a glass of blood every
day, which her mother brought home from the butcher’s. I like an elliptical
style as well as the next hard-core modernist, but surely a touch of elaboration
would not have been overly Victorian here.
Most mysterious of all is Nunez’s own attitude toward Sontag. We’ve seen
outright revenge memoirs (like Joyce Maynard on J. D. Salinger), but this is
something else: revenge laced with worship. Nunez is so unremitting on Sontag’s
appalling traits that we can’t understand why she admires her and misses her so
much. The elegiac tone, the nostalgia — they don’t seem to be merited by
anything we’re reading. It reminds me of Lillian Ross in “Here But Not Here,”
going on and on about the nobility of William Shawn’s suffering throughout their
long extramarital life together, because the poor soul couldn’t bring himself to
divorce his wife.
Not until I discovered Terry Castle’s essay “Desperately Seeking Susan” did
Nunez’s book start to make sense. Castle was teaching at Stanford when she met
Sontag, whom she had long worshiped as a writer and feminist; and they were
friends, more or less, for a decade. The essay (in Castle’s recent collection,
“The Professor”)
zings right to the heart of a relationship built on the mutual neediness of the
worshiper and the worshiped, in part because she’s able to step back and
recognize the inanity. “Desperately Seeking Susan” is hilarious — her
description of Sontag re-enacting on a Palo Alto street how she dodged sniper
fire in Sarajevo could have come straight from Thurber. At the same time, a
credible part of Castle’s psyche still idolizes the glorious braininess of
Sontag’s feminism back in the ’70s. “She was our very own Great Man,” she writes
— a perspective that sums up Sontag’s role in Nunez’s growing up better than
Nunez does herself.
Full disclosure: I met Sontag once myself in the ’70s, interviewing her while
she was on a book tour, and came away bewitched. She was the smartest woman in
the world! Just as Castle suggests, if you were a would-be intellectual feminist
in those days, you had to idolize Sontag; it was the cost of doing business. But
you didn’t have to sign on for years of fealty the way she and Nunez did. In my
case, I switched to Barbara Pym — who spent her life among high-minded
narcissists and learned to skewer them so deftly they barely noticed — and I’ve
never been sorry.
Laura Shapiro’s most recent book is “Julia Child.”
the PARIS
REVIEW
April 4, 2011
Sigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag
by Thessaly la Force
Read this article,
here
| |
Tablet |
A
NEW READ
ON JEWISH LIFE |
|
April 7, 2011
Role Model
Sigrid Nunez’s memoir of Susan
Sontag in the 1970s shows the polarizing thinker in a rarely seen light—as
mentor, hero, and muse
By Rachel Shteir
Two things you will not find in Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez’s slim, elegant
memoir of Susan Sontag in the 1970s:
-a
predictable rehashing of the notorious writer’s political gaffes and personal
foibles—her apparent insensitivity to the American victims of 9/11 and her
refusal to talk openly about her sexual identity (she was gay) being two of the
best-known, and
-dish
about Nunez’s two-year affair with Sontag’s son, David Rieff, the book’s
ostensible raison d’etre.
Sempre Susan presents something else altogether, something I think the 20th
century’s most famous and prolific female intellectual herself might have
appreciated: a lament for not just a person but a lost era; an elegy for the
woman whose “influence on how I write and think,” as Nunez puts it, “was
profound.”
On the surface, the story the book tells is deceptively simple: In 1976, Nunez,
then a 25-year-old aspiring writer, arrives at Sontag’s Manhattan apartment to
work as her assistant. (Sontag by then had already written four well-received
books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, and two novels.)
Nunez begins dating Rieff, falls in love with him, and moves in. Two years
later, she moves out. She and Sontag remain friends, albeit uneasily.
But beneath Nunez’s discreet girl-meets-boy story lies a revisionist, even
radical, achievement: the most sympathetic portrait of Sontag to date. In
considering Sontag through the story of her own coming of age as a writer—Nunez
is now an accomplished novelist—she recasts a villain as a role model, hero,
and muse. Sontag, Nunez writes, took reading and writing seriously and, in so
doing, gave Nunez “permission” to do the same. Sontag’s seriousness, one of the
things that so many others mocked her for, served here as inspiration.
This is not to say that Sempre Susan makes the Sontag whose critics have
variously described her as an elitist, a hypocrite, a traitor, and a Leninist,
disappear. The sleight of hand here is that Nunez presents her subject as a
woman who is those things and a touching, human figure. “One of her … first
thoughts when she’d been told she had cancer,” Nunez recalls, “was ‘Did I not
have enough sex?’ ”
Some readers are no doubt going to feel that Sempre Susan protests too much,
that Nunez has an answer for every one of Sontag’s offenses. Sontag’s legendary
lack of humor? She “laughed easily” and one of her stories is in The New
Yorker humor anthology Fierce Pajamas; Sontag’s insistence that she was
primarily an artist, not a critic? Her novel The Volcano Lover was a
best-seller, and her In America won the National Book Award. Her well-known
hatred of teaching and the academy? She was a perennial student. Besides, Nunez
suggests, there’s a lot to hate.
I found many of Nunez’s explanations convincing, perhaps most of all her retort
to those who accused Sontag of elitism. “She was not a class snob,” Nunez
writes. “She was the kind of person who noticed that the uneducated young woman
who cleaned her house for a time ‘had beautiful, naturally aristocratic
manners.’ On the other hand, she never pretended that a person’s success did
not depend . . . on being connected.”
Even more striking, though, is Nunez’s sympathetic treatment of how gender
warped Sontag’s work and life. For Nunez, Sontag’s not being a man left her
vulnerable to public ridicule—and perhaps even made her into the
tantrum-thrower she was. “Was it because she was a woman that people felt they
could address her like this,” Nunez asks after yet another audience member has
viciously harangued her.
Nunez describes Sontag’s many efforts to keep up with the boys; she never
carried a purse, for example, and ridiculed Nunez for putting Tampax in hers.
Back then, it seems, playing a man in drag was the only thing a woman in the
all-male world of the New York Jewish intellectuals could do.
Still, Nunez is too shrewd an observer to blame gender politics (or any other
kind) entirely for her idol’s bad behavior and vicious takedowns. As she puts
it, turning a literal fact from Sontag’s childhood bout with anemia into a
metaphor, whenever the writer would indulge in a tantrum, “I’d flash on the
image of her as a girl drinking those glasses of blood.”
If Nunez teases out Sontag’s gender bending, she seems less interested in the
writer’s equally complex relationship to her Jewishness. Born and raised a
secular Jew in California and Arizona, Sontag supposedly never went to
synagogue until she was in her 20s. She lacked interest in Philip Roth’s
novels, but she described herself as “a wandering Jew” and early on wrote
sentences like, “Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities
in contemporary urban culture.” Her obsession with ideas approaches the
Talmudic, and yet, writing about the Vietnamese, she expressed distaste for
“Jews’ more wasteful and more brilliant style.” Two famous projects from 1974,
Promised Lands, her film about the Yom Kippur War, and “Fascinating Fascism,”
an essay on Leni Riefenstahl, reflect obliquely upon her identity but never
confront it.
Sempre Susan limits itself to quoting Sontag as understanding Jews as “people
who liked to touch and be touched, and who were voluble and confessional.” And
funny. Her favorite joke, Nunez explains, was a Jewish one, which Sontag told
with a Yiddish accent. “ ‘A mother. A neurotic child. Doctor, Doctor, vot
should I do? Every time my little boy sees kreplach, he starts to scream.’ The
punch line required that Susan, as the mother, clutch her head between her
hands, and with an expression of stark fear, scream, “Aaahh! Kreplaaaaach!”
These snapshots make Sontag seem more like a caricature and less like the
complex woman that Nunez has given us elsewhere.
This more-nuanced Sontag conjures a Hopper painting as she slips into her son’s
bedroom to talk as Rieff and Nunez fall asleep on the futon—or something more
sinister still in a scene where she’s trying to finish a book and her then
10-year-old son stands by, lighting her cigarette.
Nunez’s point is that her mentor, however flawed, taught her about life and art.
On the final page, she recounts her indifference upon first seeing the luminous
film Tokyo Story. Sontag’s response: Someday, you’ll get it.
Nunez reports: “Actually, it didn’t take years and I didn’t have to see the
movie again.” Nunez quotes one character, Yoko, asking, “Isn’t life
disappointing?” A second, Noriko, replies: “Yes, it is.”
Sontag, according to Nunez, unlike most everything else, rarely disappointed.
Rachel Shteir, a professor at the Theatre School of DePaul University, is the
author of three books, including, most recently, The Steal: A Cultural History
of Shoplifting.
THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE
MAGAZINE
February
25, 2011, 12:39 pm
Suddenly Susan
By
SIGRID NUNEZ
When the author shacked up with Susan Sontag’s son, and his brainy mom, in 1976,
three was not company.
I first met Susan Sontag in spring, 1976, when she was recovering from cancer
surgery and needed someone to help type her correspondence. I had been
recommended by the editors of The New York Review of Books, where I’d worked as
an editorial assistant. I had recently finished graduate school at Columbia and
was living on West 106th Street, not far from Susan’s apartment at 340 Riverside
Drive.
We worked in her bedroom, I at her desk, typing on her massive I.B.M. Selectric
while she dictated, either pacing the room or lying on her bed. I remember being
surprised at how laid-back and chatty she was, much more like someone my own age
than someone of my mother’s generation. But she was always this way with young
people, and I would discover there wasn’t the usual generational distance
between her and her son, either. A year younger than I, David, who’d dropped out
of Amherst, had recently returned to school and was now a sophomore at
Princeton. He had a place to stay in Princeton, but most of the week he lived
with his mother. His (soon to be our) bedroom was right next to hers.
I’m pretty sure it was the third time I went to “340” that I first met David. I
was leaving just as he was coming home, and Susan briefly introduced us. I was
surprised when, a day or so later, she called to ask me to come back — not the
following week, as we’d planned, but rather that same afternoon. I said yes, of
course, no problem. She’d sounded urgent. I didn’t want to let her down. But the
truth was, I was in bad shape. I had just discovered that my boyfriend, with
whom I’d been living for about two years, had started seeing someone else. At
the time, both he and the new girlfriend were working at The New York Review,
where the affair was an open secret. I didn’t want Susan to hear about it. What
I didn’t know was that she’d already heard about it. That was why she’d called.
It turned out that the last time I’d been to 340, after Susan had introduced
David and me and I had gone home, he had asked her if I had a boyfriend and
she’d told him yes. But then almost immediately she heard from one of her
friends at the Review that that relationship was probably over. She encouraged
David to call me. He was shy. She was not. Instead of working that day, she took
us out for a pizza.
My boyfriend and I broke up, and I rented a room in the apartment of a couple of
students nearby. My plan was to stay there just for the summer and then find a
place of my own. Meanwhile, David and I started dating. He was almost shockingly
smart — at times he could seem even smarter than Susan — but, even more
appealing, he was relentlessly, brilliantly funny. Like me, he wanted to be a
writer. That summer, during most of which Susan was away in Paris, David and I
spent more and more time together.
By September, I had moved in with him.
At that time, partly because of her highly regarded and popular series of essays
on photography, and partly because of her outspokenness about having cancer,
Susan was riding a second wave of celebrity (the first, of course, having
crested in the ’60s, with the appearance of her first critical essays, most
famously “Notes on ‘Camp’ ”). The phone rang all day long, and Susan had no
desire to get an answering machine or service. I had heard before I ever saw it
that Susan’s apartment was a famous crash pad. While I lived at 340, there was
often someone sleeping in the living room, and there was a steady stream of
visitors. Susan loved to go out, but she also loved to have people, including
those she was meeting for the first time, come to her. It seemed to me I was
forever opening the door to some stranger, or coming home to find someone
waiting for her (sometimes for up to an hour) in the kitchen, where, though it
was the smallest room in the house, she tended to receive guests.
David, of course, was used to his mother’s busy, people-filled life. As she
liked to say, he had grown up “on coats,” meaning she had dragged him along to
the many parties and “happenings” and other events she had not wanted to miss
just because she had a young child. (She would also take him to the movies and
let him sleep in his seat while she watched a double feature.) In fact, though
he had a much stronger sense of privacy than Susan did, like her he grew bored
and restless when things were too quiet. Both he and she disapproved of the
monkish streak in me; in their eyes it showed a certain lack of vitality and
curiosity — very bad in a would-be writer! To David it suggested a kind of
weakness; a weakness that, if indulged, would make me boring. Susan believed
that the reclusive type was, at heart, cold and selfish. I should change.
And I did try to change. For a time, I tried very hard to keep up. After all, it
wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy going out, too. And of course I was excited to meet
the many brilliant writers and artists that Susan knew.
But, when you’re in love, what is it that you want more than anything else in
the world? Looking back, I can hardly remember times when David and I were
alone. Once or twice I went and stayed with him for a night in the room he
rented in Princeton, and I remember wishing dolefully that we could be there all
the time.
Susan used to say how much easier it was for her to work in her room if she knew
there were other people elsewhere in the apartment. But the only time I could
work seemed to be when the apartment was empty.
For a while I tried getting up very early, before I had to go to my job, and
locking myself in the former maid’s room that I used for a study. But as soon as
Susan was awake she would knock and ask me to join her in the kitchen. She
couldn’t bear to have her morning coffee or read the newspaper alone. In fact,
fresh out of bed she seemed especially in need of an ear. She would talk
nonstop, about whatever came into her head, and for some reason at that hour she
was often roiling with indignation. Something about her life that was bothering
her, or maybe something she saw on the front page of The Times, would set her
off. David found this morning Susan difficult. He’d sit at the kitchen counter
with his back turned, deep in the paper, face curtained by his long dark hair.
She had always hated being alone. For her, having to do certain things, such as
eat a meal, without company was like a punishment. She would rather have gone
out to dinner with someone she didn’t even much care for than eat in alone.
It wasn’t enough that she had spent the evening out with friends. When she came
home, though it was late, though David and I might be already in bed, she would
knock. “May I come in?” (The shyness in her voice through that closed door was
heartbreaking.) David and I slept on a mattress on the floor. A small sofa stood
near it. She would settle on the sofa, light a cigarette and begin telling us
about her evening. I sometimes fell asleep while she was still talking.
But in fact, there had probably never been a time in her life when she feared
being alone as much as she did then. Not only had she been diagnosed with Stage
4 breast cancer; she was also slowly breaking up with the woman who’d been her
companion for many years. She made no attempt to hide how devastating it would
be for her if David were to move out. But she always insisted that it was not
primarily neediness but rather love that made her want to keep her son with her
forever. Theirs had never been an ordinary mother-son relationship, she said. In
fact, she told me she had never really wanted David to think of her as his
mother. “I’d rather he see me as — oh, I don’t know — his goofy big sister.”
(“More like my brother” and “my best friend” was how she said she usually
thought of him.) After all, she had been just 19 when he was born.
To David she became “Susan” while he was still a boy, and his father, the
sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff, was “Philip”; David told me he
could not imagine calling them Mom and Dad. And whenever Susan spoke to David
about his father, whom she had divorced when David was 6, she referred to him as
Philip as well. David rarely said “my mother” when speaking of her, and I would
have felt strange saying “your mother.”
It was
sempre Susan.
There was nothing wrong with the three of us sharing a roof, she said. Indeed,
in other cultures an arrangement like ours would have been common. And, tell
her, please: What was so terrific about the nuclear family? Hadn’t she publicly
pronounced it “a disaster”? (She also frequently railed against couples: no
matter how interesting one or both people might be when you saw them separately,
when you saw them together they were invariably boring.)
“Don’t be so conventional,” she said when I expressed doubts about the three of
us always being together. “Who says we have to live like everyone else?” (The
truth was, I had grown up in a very unconventional household, and ordinary
bourgeois existence was, I confess, not only attractive but frankly exotic to
me.)
What did it matter what other people said?
She was right: I should not have cared what other people said. But I did care.
And what they said was shocking. People felt free to say things to me they would
never have dared say to her. That there was feverish prurient interest swirling
around 340 was something I already knew. Before I ever met Susan or David, I’d
heard the talk. Now people came straight out and asked the absurd: Was it true?
Had they had sex together? Sometimes, rather than being asked, I was told: They
must have had sex together. My presence in the household seemed to intensify
speculation, bringing the pot to a boil. (The fact of Susan’s bisexuality was,
of course, highly pertinent.) What was going on up there?
I found it difficult that Susan wanted to talk so much about her and David’s
history, and that that history was filled with so much conflict and resentment.
She would tick off all the things she had done for David, her face flushed, her
voice rising. With great bitterness she would bring up her own mother: a cold,
narcissistic brute of a woman who Susan said had totally neglected her. Susan’s
father had died when she was 5. Because she barely knew him, she had had to
invent him. Naturally, she idealized him. She imagined him, though he had not
been highly educated, endowed with a good mind and other qualities she could
admire. She liked to think that, had he lived, he would have been a good father
to her. Her husband, of course, had been a terrible father. But she believed
that her son would make not just a good but a
great
father. This was something she said all the time — as she said all the time that
she believed that she had been a great mother.
When she asked me once if I thought I’d make a good mother and I told the truth
— I didn’t know — she was put off. “How can you say such a thing about
yourself?” It was as if I’d just confessed to being a bad person. She said she
had never had any doubts about herself in this regard. In fact, not having had
more children was one of her biggest regrets. She spoke of the “criminal”
feeling she experienced every time she saw a baby or a young child. “I want to
kidnap them!” Even the sight of a baby animal could wrench her. She once saw a
baby elephant up close, she said, and was so overwhelmed “I sobbed and sobbed.”
But she always spoke of her own childhood as a time of complete boredom, a
misery she could not wait to be over. I have always had trouble understanding
this (how could anyone’s childhood, even a less than happy one, be described as
“a total waste”?), but she had wanted David’s childhood to be over as quickly as
possible, too. (And as it turned out, he too would look back on his childhood as
a miserable time, using the very phrase Susan often used in describing her own:
a prison sentence.) It was as if somehow she didn’t really believe — or,
perhaps, better to say, she saw no value — in childhood.
And for all her pride in her motherhood, and for all her laments about not
having had more kids, she was not maternal. From the time she learned she was
pregnant till the day she went into labor, she never saw a doctor. (“I didn’t
know you were supposed to.”) And she told this story: “When I was writing the
last pages of ‘The Benefactor,’ I didn’t eat or sleep or change clothes for
days. At the very end, I couldn’t even stop to light my own cigarettes. I had
David stand by and light them for me while I kept typing.” When she was writing
the last pages of “The Benefactor” it was 1962, and David was 10.
She was not a mom. Every once in a while, noticing how dirty David’s glasses
were, she’d pluck them from his face and wash them at the kitchen sink. I
remember thinking how it was the only momish thing I ever saw her do.
People who’d known Susan for years, who’d watched David grow up, said they
didn’t believe she would ever let him go. It had nothing to do with cancer, they
said; she would never let another person come first in her son’s life. She
herself said that, because of the intense, complicated nature of their
relationship, “David and I have always needed to have a third person around.”
She didn’t like the word “girlfriend” much; she preferred “friend,” though she
sometimes referred to me jovially as David’s consort. She referred to the three
of us as the duke and duchess and duckling of Riverside Drive. I knew that
wasn’t good. It didn’t help, either, that whatever fun thing David wanted to do
she wanted to do with him: tennis lessons;
motorcycle
lessons. And although she kept telling me she would be happy to support not just
David and me but any child of ours as well, she also said that for David to
become a father anytime soon would ruin his life.
Why don’t we two just stick to oral sex? she suggested. “Then you won’t have to
worry about birth control.” There was a fourth person at the lunch table the day
Susan said this, and it was he who broke the silence. “Looks like Susan doesn’t
want to be a grandmother.”
She took a deep breath before she spoke. “David tells me you’re thinking of
moving out and that it’s because of me.” It was a year and a half later, and we
were where it all began: in her room, I sitting on her desk chair, she on her
bed. “I’m sorry,” she said, modulating her voice and hitting her consonants as
she did when she wished to sound in control, “but I cannot take that
responsibility.”
There really wasn’t much I could say to that.
She said, “My dear, you haven’t thought this through. You don’t go from being a
couple that lives together to a couple that lives apart. You’re making a huge
mistake.”
I’d have only myself to blame if we broke up.
We would have broken up anyway. We would have lasted longer, definitely. But in
the end, things would not have worked out. Susan could have lived on the moon,
and David and I would not have worked out. I’ve known this for a long time. What
I don’t know is how we managed to stagger on for another year and a half after I
moved out.
When I was packing, Susan told me I could take anything I wanted. I took two
toys I had found in the depths of David’s closet: a Raggedy Andy doll and a
small brown bear with one eye missing. (Years later, Susan would laugh off an
interviewer’s comment regarding David’s complaints about his unhappy childhood,
saying she remembered his room being full of toys, and claiming: “I still have
his teddy bear.”)
In the years after David and I broke up, I had more contact with Susan than I
had with him, though it never amounted to much. Once, not long after David had
finally moved into a place of his own, she talked to me about being in therapy —
a huge surprise, for I remembered how much disdain she once had for people who
resorted to therapy, or, worse, took antidepressants. Among people she knew, the
ones she seemed to respect most were the ones who, no matter how unhappy they
were, had resisted therapy. But, in her early 50s, her own chronic irritability
and discontent shaded into something darker. She found herself crawling back
into bed soon after getting up, and her memory and concentration were at times
so poor that, she said, “I really thought I might have had a mini stroke.” She
consulted a neurologist who set her straight: no stroke, just your typical
midlife clinical depression. She’d started seeing a psychiatrist; for a while
she’d even taken Elavil.
And now, psychotherapy had become one of her enthusiasms.
She talked at length about her sessions, in her open, confiding way, sharing
what she’d told the therapist and what the therapist had told her — among other
things, that one of Susan’s problems was that she was surrounded by narcissists
whom she didn’t understand because she was not a narcissist herself. (“What
about you?” she asked me earnestly. “Are you a narcissist?”)
The therapist also wondered: Why did you try to make a father out of your son?
At first when she heard this, Susan said, she was shocked. She didn’t know
where
the therapist could have come up with
that!
But then it hit her, she said: she
had
tried to do that. And we both started to cry.
Adapted from ‘‘Sempre Susan,’’ to be published in April by Atlas & Co.
November 5, 2013
The Intellectual
Susan Sontag’s 1978 Rolling
Stone interview
in all its brilliant, self-assured, ridiculous glory.
By Mark O'Connell
Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by
Jonathan Cott. Yale University Press.
In her
journal in the mid-1960s, Susan Sontag vowed “to give no interviews until I can
sound as clear + authoritative + direct as Lillian Hellman in Paris Review.”
Sontag’s ongoing investment in the development and definition of herself always
seemed less like self-obsession than a kind of existential industriousness.
Reading through the odds and ends that have been published since her death
almost 10 years ago—the two
volumes of her
journals,
in particular—you get the sense of a person who was always working toward an
ideal version of herself. The ideal changed in its particulars over time, but
the ideal of change remained constant. She’s often a reassuringly
pretentious figure in the early diaries, which are themselves a useful reminder
that being a pseudo-intellectual is a necessary stage on the way to being a
nonpseudo-intellectual, and that the two classifications aren’t necessarily
mutually exclusive. Being an intellectual is often, after all, a matter of
getting away with trying to be seen as one.
In his
introduction to Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, Jonathan
Cott—whose 1978 interview with Sontag got chopped down by the magazine to
one-third of its length—remembers that journal entry, and writes that “as I
listened to her clear, authoritative, and direct responses to my questions, it
was obvious that she had attained the conversational goal that she had set for
herself many years before.” The idea of this persuasive fluency of speech as
something constructed, something striven for and achieved, reveals the extent to
which Sontag’s position as one of the most public of 20th-century public
intellectuals was one she had always wanted to arrive at. As brilliant an
essayist as she was, talking brilliantly was almost as significant a part of her
job.
And so the
Sontag colloquy shares certain key qualities with the Sontag essay—in particular
the magnetic mixture of intellectual self-assurance and relaxed inclusivity. She
was a virtuoso of the literary sit-down, working the form into an occasion for
informal self-portrait. There’s no one topic that particularly dominates in this
138-page interview, but there are certain themes and preoccupations that assert
themselves throughout: the ideal of personal autonomy, the complexities of love
and friendship and sexuality, the historical constitution of ideas and behaviors
we tend to think of as natural. The interview is from around the time of the
publication of Illness
as Metaphor,
and so there’s a fair amount of talk about mortality, and the personal
experience of being a cancer patient which informed that book. “We’re all,” she
says at one point, “going to die—that’s a very difficult thing to take in—and we
all experience this process. It feels as if there’s this person—in your head,
mainly—trapped in this physiological stock that can only survive seventy- or
eighty-plus years normally, in any kind of decent condition. It starts
deteriorating at a certain point, and then for half of your life, if not more,
you watch this material begin to fray. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
You’re trapped inside it, and when it goes, you go.”
But it’s
Sontag the reader who gets most airtime here—which is to say the critic rather
than the novelist (although she would probably have argued the distinction could
never hold up). There’s always the sense, with Sontag, of reading as a process
of acquisition and assimilation, as a kind of territorial expansionism of the
self. All those itemized resolutions in the journals, all those lists of things
to be read and absorbed; her project was, as she put it, “taking all of
knowledge as my province.” And this is one of the most striking things about
her, this conquistadorial spirit brought to bear on a basically democratic
sensibility—the famous imperative to be interested in everything. She seems to
have read all of Western literature, and to have learned from it everything that
might be worth knowing.
This, of
course, is exactly the impression you’d be well advised to start giving off if
you wanted to make any kind of impact as a public intellectual. But with Sontag,
you suspect that she really has read everything—and not in the Harold
Bloom way, either, where encyclopedic erudition starts to look like a kind of
petrification, where the critic manifests himself as the canon made flesh.
Change is, for her, the end of reading; what she prizes in literature is its
capacity to bring otherness into the self—the paradoxical way in which books
take us outside the limits of ourselves while pushing those limits outward.
“It’s exciting to me to subscribe to something that’s foreign to my earlier
taste,” she says. “Not in an unfriendly spirit with respect to the earlier
work—but just because I need new blood and new nourishment and new inspiration.
And because I like what I’m not, I like to try to learn what isn’t me or what I
don’t know. I’m curious.”
And that’s
one of the more inspiring things about Sontag: the way in which she positions
curiosity as not just a primary critical value, but a primary human value. To be
curious is, in the most vital sense, to be serious. There’s another wonderful
moment, later on, when Cott mentions phoning her to ask about completing the
interview, to which she replied that “We should do it soon because I may change
too much.” Sontag sees nothing very unusual about this; it’s simply good
practice to move on from being the person you’ve already established yourself as
being:
I feel I’m
changing all the time, and that’s something that’s hard to explain to people,
because a writer is generally thought to be someone who’s either engaging in
self-expression or else doing work to convince or change people along the lines
of his or her views. And I don’t feel that either of those models makes much
sense for me. I mean, I write partly in order to change myself so that
once I write about something I don’t have to think about it anymore. And when I
write, it actually is to get rid of those ideas. That may sound
contemptuous of the public, because obviously when I’ve gotten rid of those
ideas, I’ve passed them on as things that I believe— and I do believe
them when I write them— but I don’t believe them after I’ve written them
because I’ve moved on to some other view of things, and it’s become still more
complicated ... or perhaps more simple.
Intense
seriousness, of course, always has a tendency to verge on the comic. Sontag was
the Platonic ideal of the intellectual, and so she could also come across as a
not-too-subtle parody of the very idea of such a person. At one point, she tells
Cott that the first book that really thrilled her was a biography of Marie Curie
by Curie’s daughter Eve, which she recalls reading at age 6. The interviewer is
impressed that a child of that age would go in for material of such relative
heft. “I started reading when I was 3,” she expands, “and the first novel that
affected me was Les Misérables—I cried and sobbed and wailed. When you’re
a reading child, you just read the books that are around the house. When I was
about 13, it was Mann and Joyce and Eliot and Kafka and Gide—mostly Europeans. I
didn’t discover American literature until much later.” What to do with such a
claim but both laugh at it and marvel at it? I thought of how my mother likes to
remind me of my own alleged precocity by mentioning how she once came across me,
age about 5, peering into a Jeffrey Archer blockbuster as though it contained
the secret of life. By that age, Sontag would have been rolling up her sleeves
and getting into Cervantes.
But this
long and largely genial portrait of the (not always quite so genial)
intellectual in middle age also amounts to a strong and deeply personal argument
about what it means to be cultured—an argument for why a middle-aged
intellectual might be something worth being in the first place. Part of what is
so appealing about Sontag’s thinking is the absence of any heavy intellectual
machinery being brought to bear on whatever topic she happens to be considering;
there is rarely very much in the way of dogma to be contended with. But there is
a kind of personal dialectic at work in her attitude toward herself, toward her
writing and reading and thinking and speaking. “The most awful thing,” as she
puts it in the book’s final lines, “would be to feel that I’d agree with the
things I’ve already said and written—that is what would make me most
uncomfortable because that would mean that I had stopped thinking.”
