Susan Sontag, the intellect and the icon (review of Benjamin Moser, Sontag)

Susan Sontag: The intellect and the icon
(Review of Benjamin Moser, Sontag (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), pp. 816.

Benjamin Moser’s new autobiography of Susan Sontag, titled simply “Sontag,” does more than just satisfy the norm of the genre of intellectual and artistic biographies to be so compelling they are hard to put down, though the last book I read that fits that standard was French film scholar Antoine de Baecque’s scandalously still untranslated 2010 book on Godard. Moser’s book may be light on ideas, as some reviewers have complained, or too comfortable with psychology, which after all is always a kind of easy way out, since it is almost inevitably reductive. But this is a book that should engage the attention of both enthusiastic fans and followers, of which she did and does have many, including this sometime writer, as well as serving as an introduction for those who know some of her essays but not her novels and films, or who have wondered what is the sufficient cause or reason of the intense admiration for her among the enormous fan club around her writings and mediagenic public persona, from her first writings published in her name (having ghost written a book on Freud for her professor husband before leaving him, and Harvard, for a life in New York), the remarkable novel “The Benefactor” and the landmark essay “Notes on Camp.” (It must be noted that she is underrated as a novelist, including, in her debut novel, a novelist of ideas, which explores the conceit of a man who chooses, literally, to live out his dreams).

The genre of literary biography calls for a delicate balancing of the personal and the ideational, and not only in order to pose the question how they are related. One may well seek thematic patterns that bridge the life and the art, but these must remain partial and open, as they will at best explain only some things and should do so suggestively but not too tidily. Allowing for this may be one difference between literary biography and history of ideas, though tracing, loosely as he does while keeping to a narrative organization, this theme through various of her works, and perhaps trying to conceptually configure the problematic as express therein, is surely more fruitful than the suggestions of origins in her childhood experiences. I do find it helpful to observe that from her early work on Freud on, themes involving something like a mind/body or thought/affect duality do pervade her work, along with an art/”reality” divide, and that—something Moser might have elucidated more than he does—a problematizing interrogation of such dualisms is in much of her writing also, and may be key to what might be called her moralism, in the good sense of that term that we associate with Camus and Sartre, and others. Something of her importance, especially in the decade in which she emerged as a public figure, the 1960s, may lie in her treatment of related themes, in fact far more effectively than some ostensibly more important and systematic thinkers, like Marcuse; it is now hard to escape the conclusion that she is a much more central and incisive thinker, which, to those who remember Marcuse and his fame at that same time, should be saying something indeed. “The Benefactor” is partly a disturbing critique, of uncertain consequence, of pop Freudianisms and surrealism. The 60s was a decade of avant-garde enthusiasms; she learned about them as much as she could, and wrote about some of them, especially European writers, filmmakers, and critics, but without exactly designing her own new red flag to rally behind while singing beautiful songs. She was certainly on the left, but her sensibility was dry and critical. Yet her essays were declarative without being professorial, and their coldness was sharpness of insight and brilliance of conceptual formulation. She argued in “Against Interpretation” that critics should not tell us what something is, yet she did much of that.

What made her the phenomenon she was? Why was she so famous, and why did that matter to her, her writing, her readers? Moser notes that she had wanted and sought attention and welcomed fame. Being in New York and writing for literary magazines made it possible to occupy the position of popular pariah. Queerness, even closeted as she remained all her life at least nominally, could of course make one an outsider. She became the most well-known of the so-called New York Intellectuals, public intellectuals who wrote in magazines (above all, Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books) rather than scholarly journals, and went to parities like a socialite and films like an art-lover who refused (and helped defeat) the old high vs. low culture distinction. On a smaller scale, more modest though only by comparison, she played something of the kind of role earlier played in France, and to some extent America, by Sartre, whom she admired and wrote critically about. That is, a writer who writes essays on the arts and politics, and is positioned to acquire and use a certain fame. In my generation (I came of age in the 70s when she had been writing for over a decade), Susan Sontag was “the” American intellectual, and of course, the archetypical New York-based American intellectual. Did she blaze a trail? I would like to think so; Moser states but does not argue the opinion that she was the first and the last of this kind. Her gender mattered for some, but she was not exactly known as a feminist. She was queer, and stayed in the closet, partly to avoid losing a child custody battle to her professor husband, a fussy ultra-conservative modeling himself on an English Tory dandy, and not accorded many accolades in this book.

Moser does talk a fair about her gayness, starting with discovering downtown gay nightclubs in late 40s los Angeles. That actually turns out to be almost but not quite the most important personal motive driving her work. In fact, Moser clearly thinks this was caused partly by Susan’s unrequited love of her domineering and alcoholic mother, whom she was left, in a childhood he calls unhappy (some of us would readily trade ours for it, though; she began to develop an erudition that was not separated from more personal desires in high school, including in the inaugural event for her of meeting Thomas Mann, which living in Los Angeles where he and other exiles from Hitler’s Europe resided, did facilitate).

The most important feature in her life according to Moser seems to have been a kind aesthetic idealism. This is a position that sees life and art as separate but intertwined, at least for all who are part fo the world of the arts somehow or would be. It was also a feature of Mann’s fiction, clearly the object of one of her earliest artistic and intellectual passions. Mann, Nobel laureate and key figure in the canon of European literary modernism, was gay. So is much of “camp,” the aesthetic style or set of styles that she explored in the landmark essay that first made her famous. Moser traces this theme, lightly but clearly, throughout a number of her key writings. The problem is that of an idealism of the Platonic sort: what is the true or proper relationship between forms and representations and the manner of being of the things or people represented in themselves? Does nature “need” art or art nature? Camp asserts the independence of art and valorizes artifice.

But we also expect our “intellectuals” to be political as well as aesthetic. We want them to tell us what the things are, which ones matter, and why, and what they mean. A line of thinking that connects her writings on photography and suffering considered politically and also includes her work on illness (cancer and later AIDS), which argued against what Moser calls simply metaphor. It turns out that Sontag was something of a realist, and became more so over time in confronting certain political problems that also figured as aesthetic ones. Cancer and illness generally, she famously argued in Illness as Metaphor, deserves no metaphors that work a displacement between physical illness and states of the mind or soul. In the case of the AIDS epidemic, many people died for a metaphor enforced by others, lacking any of the more prosaic compassion and solidarity that were needed. Certainly, she never abandoned all faith in art and literature, which interested her vitally throughout her life. Rather, it seems she saw this as a problematic that art and criticism had to take account of.

Moser treats us to a few observations about her writings, and seemingly everything that might fit to print about her life. A shy person who claimed, believably, to be naive about people and not easily empathetic, controlling in her relationships as well as falling under another’s sway quite easily, she nonetheless managed, it would seem, to know everyone in New York at least who was anybody in the world of the arts and ideas, and whom she had not had an affair with or other cause to fall out with. She was a socialite. She clearly wanted from the beginning to play the role of a publishing writer on works of art and literature, and historical and theoretical studies like the ones on photography and illness. Moser never supports the claim that no one could fill that role anymore.

When I first heard about her, I was a New York Review of Books fan starting college and studying sociology. It was the late 60s. I left and came back to the university, this time to Berkeley (where she had spent a year in 1948), and suddenly I realized that something had happened in departments of English, French, and Comparative Literature, and was spreading elsewhere. It was called French theory. What it really did was to professionalize social and cultural criticism applied to literary texts and artworks. And that was part of its purpose and the thinly concealed alibi for its occulted character and the fact that now it was becoming clear to people with my interests (or hers) that you really had to be in the academy. And so I like many people chose to pursue an academic career, sometimes moving the other direction from hers. The claim that academia, or scholarly writing and study, are fated to disappear and already vanishing must be placed on the same level as the alarms being sounded now for more than a couple of decades that the art of film is disappearing. Well, it isn’t.

What is unique about Sontag is her singularity. There have been other people, then and know, who write perceptively in some venues or others, with just as much intellectual seriousness, and as little need to compromise. The comparison to Sartre is overstated not just because of the extent of his genius, but because he really did exercise a dominance over French popular intellectual culture (there is such a thing, certainly there, but here also) in so singular a fashion. The only thing for any of us to worry about is not whether anyone is available to serve as icon and monument, but whether or not with the things being written and that can be read, the role is taken up by any person or, perhaps better, some number of persons. The Internet notwithstanding, I see no evidence that the critical mind and the texts and discourse that exercise and feed it, is disappearing. Monumental personal icons are charming to have available because of the way in which they seem (passionately and so enthusiastically) authorizing. This is a function of the author.

This book should be received and read as being timely now partly because of the political problems that were well-formed already in the last years of her life (she staged Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” fittingly, and with great personal enthusiasm and courage, in Sarajevo under fire during the war; she discussed torture; she spoke eloquently against the dismissal of AIDS as a true public concern, rather than grounds for moral prevarications, and she promptly wrote after 9/11 a short text that, suffice it to say, was critical enough to cause outrage—towards a writer who was afraid to “come out” but would never have been intimidated by hostile critics or contrary opinions, even in one of the most awkwardly conformist moments in our recent history ). For some women, reports Moser, the femininity if not the gayness of this great writer and thinker was an inspiration. I never thought of her as a woman writer who writes as a woman, and I cannot see how such an argument would be made. But of course in saying this I am only making my own bid to be part of the family of acolytes: icons belong to us all, let me squeeze into this seat, if you don’t mind. She was a model, and models are imitated, at greater or lesser distance and degree of sought mimesis. Today, the Internet seems as problematic a medium as any that we have known, while the universities, especially in the humanities, are not growing but shrinking or shutting down, as people are pushed, PhD in hand, into essentially untenable teaching posts not allowing time for research and writing; or, of course, outside the university system altogether. Sontag’s life was singular, and, let’s admit, whether in Warhol’s devalorized sense or some other, she was a star. And while we have expectations for our stars to be celebrated, if they meet them and have style and cool, they are loved at least by a crowd. Moser does save us from supposing she might be nearly perfect, as a discussion only of her published writings (she also left 100 volumes, 3 now published, of personal journals!) might suggest.

The simple truth about the causes that lay behind the particular ideas that Sontag, preeminent writer on the left starting in an environment very conducive to her politics, seems to be given in Moser’s unsurprising observation that we was insecure (due to childhood family relationships, including her mother’s alcoholism). Moser is artful in suggesting that this, for whatever reason, including reading Thomas Mann’s novels and meeting him at an impressionable age, and an apparently enormous erudition, is what drove her to struggle with the idealist/realist art/life (and also mind/body) paradigm, as well as her fraught relationships and surely too-long concealed homosexuality. I found the stories of her behavior with family, friends, acquaintances, and lovers to be not very outlandish and only rare a bit shocking or humorous. I felt I had acquired, in the less than 3 days it took me in half-day sessions to impatiently read it through, a clearer sense of some of her concerns as a thinker and writer.

The deeper question about that art/life paradigm or problematic is a matter not for psychology and biography but intellectual history. What gave it such relevance in this period, including all of the efforts of minimalism and abstraction, as in the 60s, which sought some way out of it? Moser notes casually that the origin is the philosophy of Plato, a point that seems uncontroversial enough. French philosopher Alain Badiou has written about absolutist and negative tendencies in 20th century art and poetry. One could well trace such ideas through much of modernism, the avant-garde (Peter Burger’s short treatise “Theory of the Avant-Garde” seems telling also), and postmodernism, or the plurality of things that each of these were. To discuss Sontag as woman and writer, it is probably enough to note the problematic and its development in her works.

This led me to decide that I must finish reading and re-reading her various writings. And if the biographies (but not hagiographies) of icons do make us fans want to strengthen or renew our vows and ties, include me in.

In discussions of art, literature, and social theory and so (in the widest and most useful sense) politics, the challenge for my generation and those writing after roughly 1989 is to freely make use of “theory” without losing not just the text but something like a sense of perspective, rooted in something like or close to everyday language. Opting to be a public intellectual as Sontag did necessitated that; what makes it possible is to find a way to maintain a certain distance not only from academia’s necessary specializations (producing many of the proverbial hedgehogs and not many foxes unless they read outside their specialty when others are raising kids or having fun), and from the tendency in theoretical discourses toward the jargon of professional in-speak. Always drawn heavily to Europe and much more slightly the culture of America at least outside of New York (another reason I loved her, though it must be said that a Eurocentrism at least in literary and artistic tastes (including film) has long been a feature of the intellectual culture of New York), she helped introduce a number of European thinkers into more common milieux. These included Barthes, Benjamin, Elias Canetti, and others. As she aged she thought of herself increasing as a novelist, and not the essayist she was better known as. Of course, all these works should be read together as illuminating each other. I don’t know where the world of critical discourse and public intellectuals is headed today, but I know that rumors of imminent demise have a surprising tendency to prove wrong.

I don’t know if she is a monument, and doubt we need any. I would call her a model. She is a model of prose style and so of thinking because she developed and expressed a sensibility. It mattered. It still does.

William HeidbrederSeptember 22, 2019Comment