A principis de 2016 vaig intentar llegir aquesta biografia, publicada en castellà per l'editorial Circe. Vaig aturar-me
a la meitat. Els motius de la meva renúncia a continuar la lectura està
plasmada en la recensió del llibre que Daphne Merkin va escriure per al The New
York Times. Busquem companys de viatge per allò que ens agrada,
però també per allò que rebutgem. Qui més, qui menys, necessita una confirmació
raonada de les seves intuicions, dels seus sentiments, dels seus pensaments.
Aquí n'hi he trobat una per a l'ocasió.
October 29, 2000
The Dark Lady of the
Intellectuals
Unquestionably
she is very smart, but Susan Sontag's biographers attribute her fame to the art
of being famous.
By DAPHNE MERKIN
 |
As literary culture continues
on its downhill trajectory -- sliding from the heights of serious thinking to
the crass demands of the bottom line -- it becomes ever harder to believe in
that not too distant past where intellectuals qualified as contenders for
something other than dusty symposiums and the mingy rewards of academic
prestige. We suppose it to be so; certainly the nostalgic history of American
letters has it so. For a brief period from the 40's to the 60's, that is, you
could publish an essay in small-circulation journals like Partisan Review,
Commentary or Dissent and become an overnight sensation, the talk of the town.
Nowadays, no one is sure
whether Partisan Review still exists (it does), and it is impossible to imagine
that anyone once rushed to read the latest issue so as to be able to discuss it
at the the Trillings' next cocktail party. Indeed, it was Diana Trilling who at
the close of her memoir, ''The Beginning of the Journey,'' wrote elegiacally of
''the life of significant contention,'' which that cranky, opinion-toting group
known as the New York Intellectuals specialized in. It's unclear that their
moment was ever as auspicious or luminous as later accounts depicted, but there
is no doubt that it was drawing to an end by the time the Beatles arrived on
the scene. It was the groovy 60's, after all, and there was scant interest in
ideological debates conducted by unmediagenic eggheads. In their place a hipper
type of thinker was emerging, one who made an engagement with ideas seem like the
epitome of cool -- a teasing erotics of the mind for a brain-addled,
sensation-seeking generation.
Enter Susan Sontag, who almost
single-handedly imbued the sober, increasingly disregarded disciplines of close
reading and intense brooding with a very contemporary glamour. From the start,
Sontag was different from Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt and the other
bluestockings who preceded her, in part because of the oracular, aphoristic
quality of her prose, and in part because of her ability to strike a camera-friendly
pose. It didn't hurt that she was darkly beautiful, with a sensuous mouth, a
thick helmet of hair and a direct, wide-set gaze. Or that well before the Age
of Prada she outfitted herself in chicly underdesigned clothes and shades of
black. (Elizabeth Hardwick, in her introduction to ''A Susan Sontag Reader,''
suggests that Sontag ''is herself a sort of pictorial object, as the many
arresting photographs of her show.'')
Then there was the mystique of
her self-creation, the lack of prosaic data -- whether in the form of
biographical clues or personal revelations. One was familiar, of course, with
the rapid ascent of her cultural star, as precipitous in its way as the fabled
discovery of Lana Turner at a drugstore counter. But for the longest while, Sontag's
background remained hazy, giving her an aura of impenetrability; it was as
though she had sprung, fully formed and discoursing on Godard, from the head of
a moody French existentialist. This image of fearless, almost masculine
self-invention was carefully polished in interviews, where she gave the
impression of having followed her own wunderkind inclinations without any
grown-up encouragement. One magazine profile had her explaining that she liked
to read encyclopedias as a 10-year-old, only to move on to the classics -- all
the classics. Of her early mental prowess, she once said dismissively, ''It was
such a given.'' I remember coming upon Sontag in the mid-70's, after she was
already established as America's pre-eminent woman of letters, and wondering
not so much who her parents were but whether in fact she had any.
Sontag burst into panoramic
view with the publication of ''Notes on 'Camp' ''in Partisan Review in the fall
of 1964. The huzzahs that greeted this essay, prescient as it was, are inconceivable
from the vantage point of the present day, when polemical writing in
prestigious journals generally gets treated, as the writer David Brooks has
observed, ''as just another scrap in the media confetti.'' Sontag was 31, and
had already written a slim and stylized novel, ''The Benefactor,'' as well as a
bunch of essays, including one on Simone Weil for the inaugural issue of The
New York Review of Books. Her formidable brain and dramatic physical presence
had been causing a stir in cerebral circles for several years, but with this
piece her audience widened to include the masses who read Time, which took up
both Sontag and her bold conception of the camp sensibility with wild
enthusiasm.
In the decades since, Sontag
has voiced shifting, sometimes contradictory opinions on matters political,
intellectual and literary. These have included incendiary manifestoes (on the
''pornographic imagination'' and the unredeemable malignity of America, which
she once called ''a doomed country . . . founded on a genocide''); arrogant
miscalculations (about the politics of North Vietnam and Cuba); thoughtful
reconsiderations (of the nature of Communism and of the filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl); and unabashedly esoteric artistic judgments (favoring foreign
over home-grown writers, and form over content). If consistency is truly the
hobgoblin of little minds, Sontag's mind must be very large, for she has never
been stopped by her own last pronouncement. In the past decade, for instance,
while continuing to champion the kind of elliptical European fiction that meets
her much elaborated and stringent critical standards, she began writing
best-selling, plot-heavy novels. But whatever the position or wherever the
situation, Sontag has managed to hold the limelight as few of her kind have
done.
Carl Rollyson and Lisa
Paddock's unauthorized, gossipy account of the life and times of Susan Sontag
is built around two reductive suppositions: that the real source of their
subject's cultural influence is her keen insight into ''the machinery of
self-promotion which she could have patented,'' and that she rules over the
house of intellect like a highbrow Lucrezia Borgia, by fear and intimidation.
Their biography broadcasts its debunking intentions right up front, in the resolute
wording of its subtitle: ''The Making of an Icon.'' In their chatty
introduction, the authors describe their first encounter with Sontag, at an
academic conference in Poland in 1980. ''We approached her,'' they write,
''with a proper sense of awe, yet Carl found it remarkably easy to sit next to
her at a table and talk for 15 minutes about contemporary literature.'' One can
only conclude that behind every fan is a detractor struggling to get out, for
somewhere along the way the pair's admiration soured -- helped along, no doubt,
by Sontag's refusal to cooperate and by her effort to keep others from talking.
Having decided to take a closer look at the woman they once idolized from afar,
Rollyson and Paddock found her to be just another flawed mortal: ''So Susan
Sontag as the world now knows her is a dream of Susan Sontag.'' Quelle
surprise.
Sontag was born on Jan. 16,
1933, in Manhattan; her mother had a second daughter, Judith, three years
later. The circumstances of Sontag's young life, although financially
comfortable, weren't particularly charmed: her parents spent much of their time
in China, where Sontag's father, Jack Rosenblatt, had a fur trading business,
while she lived with her grandparents in New York. When she was 5 her father
died, and her mother, Mildred, moved the family to Miami and then Tucson in
search of a hospitable climate to relieve her older daughter's asthma. Sontag
is described as a classic writer-in-the-making, a lonely and bookish child who
identified early on with professionally driven women like Marie Curie. When she
was 12, her mother married Capt. Nathan Sontag, a decorated war hero, and the
family moved to California. Sontag seems to have been preternaturally poised
from the start, buoyed by an unshakable belief in her own august destiny. The
authors quote a classmate from North Hollywood High whose memories of Sontag
are of an awe-inspiring creature: ''She was so focused -- even austere, if you
can call a 15-year-old austere. Susan -- no one ever called her Susie -- was never
frivolous. She had no time for small talk.'' While still in high school, Sontag
and one of her chosen pals visited Thomas Mann; never one to be overly
impressed, she later recalled that the great novelist talked like a book
review.
After attending Berkeley for a
semester, Sontag, at 16, went to the University of Chicago, where her scores on
the placement exams enabled her to take graduate courses. She studied with Leo
Strauss and Kenneth Burke; the latter apparently recognized the attractive,
contained young woman as ''a genius in the making.'' In her sophomore year, a
mere 10 days after meeting him, Sontag married a sociology instructor, the
28-year-old Philip Rieff, whose class she had drifted into. Within two years,
she and Rieff had moved to Boston, where Rieff taught at Brandeis, and became
the parents of a son, David. Sontag took English classes at Harvard and went on
to receive her master's degree in philosophy, ranking first among the
department's doctoral candidates and attracting such powerful mentors as the
theologian Paul Tillich. She contributed significantly to the book that would
make Rieff's academic reputation, ''Freud: The Mind of the Moralist'' (the
biographers point out that ''although Sontag was not officially a co-author,
the work had become their baby every bit as much as little David''), and in
1957 won a fellowship to pursue her Ph.D. studies at Oxford. (Her proposed
dissertation, which she never finished, was on the ''metaphysical
presuppositions of ethics.'') Sontag took off for Europe, leaving her husband
and son behind, and four months into her British stay transplanted herself to
Paris. There she became friendly with Alfred Chester, a gifted, openly gay
writer who became obsessed with Sontag (to the point of considering marrying
her) and introduced her to the reigning New York literati. Just as important
for her future career, Sontag discovered the dense, boundary-blurring mode of
French thought -- which embraced popular culture with the same intensity it
applied to lofty critical theories.
The 26-year old Sontag
returned to America in 1959 and asked Rieff for a divorce on the way home from
the airport. She reclaimed the 6-year-old David from Rieff's parents, who had
been looking after him, and moved to a West End Avenue apartment in Manhattan.
Frequenting literary parties all the while, she taught, worked as an editorial
assistant at Commentary and began work on the -- according to Chester -- very
boring'' novel that would become ''The Benefactor.'' In 1961, after her
manuscript was accepted for publication by Robert Giroux of Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, Sontag met the firm's publisher, Roger Straus, who would become
her devoted literary impresario. Her biographers describe Straus's commitment
as an ''all-encompassing care'' of Sontag's needs. ''It is not an exaggeration
to say that Straus engineered Sontag's career,'' they observe, ''making certain
that the novels, for example, were always in print, that even the most
insignificant Sontag piece was translated and marketed abroad. No detail was
too trivial.''
As it turns out, Rollyson and
Paddock's book raises more questions than it answers, a prime one being whether
it is possible to write a serious biography of a serious person while the
subject is still alive. Biographies contemporaneous with the lives of show-biz
folk and other celebrities sidestep the question most of the time, mainly
because there isn't anything all that weighty hanging on the issues involved:
the childhood, the first professional break, the spouse(s), the lovers, the
personal demons, the heartbreaks, etc. But unless one wants to give her
radically less than her due and characterize Susan Sontag as a ''personality''
along the lines of Diana Ross or Barbara Walters, a more rigorous standard of
inquiry and more muscular criterion of assessment is required than is offered
here. For one thing, it is impossible much of the time to figure out how the
authors have obtained their information; many of the quotations are
unattributed, culled from other sources and treated as definitive, or taken out
of context entirely. One also wonders how the authors could have discovered
what Sontag told intimate confidants, like Silvers and Straus, if they didn't
consent to being interviewed for the book, or why they chose to rely on the spotlight-craving
Camille Paglia (whom they refer to as an ''open lesbian,'' which is one of the
few things she has been ambiguous about) for insight into Sontag's
self-marketing tactics. (Paglia, it emerges, originally worshiped Sontag, only
to turn against her when Sontag rebuffed her stalkerlike tactics, demanding to
know: ''What is it you want from me?'') And too often their writing, which is
lackluster, is marred by simple sloppiness, as when they refer to themselves in
the third person as ''Sontag's biographers'' or carelessly repeat information.
Too many of the questions the
book does set out to answer -- What is Sontag's relationship with her son? How
much behind-the-scenes power does she really wield? Is she gay? -- are handled
on a Page Six level, in alternatingly snippy or breathless tones. The issue of
Sontag's sexuality is not nearly as riveting or potentially illuminating as the
authors seem to think, but in any case it is a subject that deserves to be
linked up with other aspects of her -- including the gay aesthetic underlying
her fascination with camp and with issues of dominance and enslavement --
rather than mined for its salacious appeal. Her liaisons, passing or long-term,
are faithfully recorded, as though they added up to an overall indictment of
her disingenuous presentation of her public image. In fact, one could as easily
argue that Sontag's refusal to use lesbianism as a trendy lifestyle accessory
speaks to her credit, and that her silence on gay issues, rather than adding to
her ''iconic power,'' as the authors claim, actually detracts from it.
Sontag is, finally, too
faceted and elusive a creature to be caught in the flash of a paparazzo's lens.
Whatever is wrong with her is not easily waved away by her fans, and whatever
is right about her is not easily dismissed by her critics: she is difficult to
categorize, much less analyze. One particularly problematic aspect of her
writing for me is her insistently antipsychological stance, which has led to a
kind of moral obtuseness about the subtler implications of political events as
well as to a convenient opacity about her own motivations. There is also her
unsettling tendency to see the world in terms of a hierarchy of intellect, in
which basic human concerns are given short shrift. But no one would deny
Sontag's enduring romance with the world of ideas, or her ability to translate
that romance into an urgent, if occasionally wrongheaded, conversation with the
reader. I will never forget the thrill I felt upon coming to the conclusion of
her piece ''Fascinating Fascism,'' when it first appeared in The New York
Review of Books in 1975. I was 20, a literature-besotted senior at Barnard, and
here was evidence of a woman with the intellectual stamina equal to that of the
male critics I studied. The essay's final paragraph connects the erotic theater
of sadomasochism -- severed from personhood, from relationships, from love'' --
with the visual allure of Nazi imagery. ''The color is black,'' she writes,
''the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is
honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.'' In its violent yoking
together of disparate emotional and aesthetic references, Sontag's thesis is an
uncanny presentiment of cultural preoccupations to come.
Precisely because Susan Sontag
is an influential, even paradigmatic figure, for both good and bad, gaining a
fuller understanding of her would help us to understand the times we live in
better. From this perspective, ''Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon'' falls
woefully short, for it delivers the dish, but not much more. If you're looking
for the sort of bitchy nuggets that go to prove that people of achievement --
and intellectuals in particular -- are invariably miserable characters, this
will suit you just fine. Meanwhile, the real Sontag has eluded us -- and will
undoubtedly continue to do so until such time as she gets the smart, serious
biography she deserves.
Daphne Merkin, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is
the author of ''Dreaming of Hitler,'' an essay collection.
