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P E R S P E C T I V E : B o o k R e v i e w
Susan Sontag, Seriously
The late Susan Sontag died in 2004 at age 71.
BY SUSIE DAY
Susan Sontag. She was a
brand long before most writers
knew they needed one.
Even if you’ve never read
a Sontag book, you can still engage
with her seriousness by studying her
darkly handsome, scathingly sensible
face, as photographed by Richard
Avedon or Diane Arbus or Annie Leibovitz.
A major 20th-century cultural
critic, as well as novelist and fi lmmaker,
Sontag was all about interrogating
Western art and literature
to discover their embedded morality
(or lack thereof): “The wisdom that
becomes available over deep, lifelong
engagement with the aesthetic,” she
wrote, “cannot be duplicated by any
other kind of seriousness.”
Decades ago, Susan Sontag —
who died in 2004 at age 71 — meant
the world to me. My pals and I were,
to use the 1970s label, “lesbian
feminists.” We were also insecure,
angry, unformed, and uninformed.
Then, like a Genius-IQ Wonder
Woman, Sontag landed, wielding
game-changing books like “Notes
on ‘Camp,'” “Against Interpretation,”
“Trip to Hanoi,” “AIDS and Its
Metaphors,” “The Volcano Lover” …
Some were great; some not; all demanded
rethinking lots of your life.
The fact that this drop-dead brilliant
woman was also beautiful and famous
seemed to us 20-somethings
RICHARD AVEDON
like simple moral justice; we couldn’t
have asked for more. Looking back,
though, we probably should have.
Recently, Benjamin Moser published
“Sontag: Her Life and Work,”
his 800-page biography of Sontag,
which is brilliantly comprehensive
and, in terms of Sontag’s personal
life, possibly the most engaging outlay
of too-much-information I’ve ever
read. Moser frames Sontag’s confl icted,
sexually ambivalent life by studying
it through her preoccupation with
metaphor: a thing itself in play with
its image.
“Sontag’s real importance increasingly
lay in what she represented,”
summarizes Moser. “The metaphor of
‘Susan Sontag’ was a great original
creation.”
Moser’s biography is the story of a
woman who craved, even as a child,
becoming part of the liberal wing of
Western culture’s literary establishment.
By her early thirties she was
securely ensconced in what pundit
Norman Podhoretz called “the Family,”
a predominantly New York Jewish
intellectual lineage, shaped in the
1940s around Partisan Review and
extending through The New York Review
of Books. Though she grew up as
a ferociously intelligent female in the
mid-20th century and had to fi ght for
every ounce of intellectual independence,
Sontag didn’t denounce the
patriarchy; she deeply knew and appreciated
its aesthetic power.
Sontag began life in 1933 as Susan
Rosenblatt. After her father died
when she was fi ve, Susan and her sister
were raised in the more culturally
stultifying parts of Tucson and Los
Angeles by an alcoholic mother who,
when Susan was 12, married WWII
pilot Nathan Sontag. Other than
giving her a more euphonious surname,
Nat wasn’t too useful, warning
his book-addicted stepdaughter
that men don’t marry girls who read
all the time. But at the age of 17, Susan,
precocious in all things, married
her university professor, Philip Rieff,
and at 19, gave birth to a son, David.
Finding the relationship increasingly
suffocating, Sontag spent most of her
marriage breaking away and gaining
child custody, while her work garnered
critical attention.
Nat Sontag, however, may have
been on to something. Susan, who
kept a diary from childhood, wrote as
a teenager, “My desire to write is connected
to my homosexuality. I need
the identity as a weapon to match
the weapon society has against me.”
Sontag’s tortured lesbian identity is
in fact the central nervous system
of Moser’s book. Though her affairs
with men were relatively short and
less complicated, Sontag pursued,
throughout her life, a series of passionate,
unhappy, sometimes abusive
relationships with women — María
Irene Fornés, Lucinda Childs, Annie
Leibovitz, among others — which
were open secrets in the art world.
Reading Sontag’s biography, you’re
sadly aware of the paralyzed horror
this woman would feel at seeing
this rendition of her life. Moser devotes
a chapter to the likelihood that
Sontag’s closetedness — long after
it was remotely necessary — was
largely responsible for her signature
lack of self-awareness and empathy,
her occasional homophobia, her reliance
for selfhood on the opinions of
others.
Having conducted a phenomenal
amount of interviews and research,
Moser connects as many psychosexual,
interpersonal, and historical
dots as he can to present Susan
Sontag as an epically accomplished
and complicated woman. It’s an authoritative
book and, as such, can
presume too much, judge too easily,
and evade the mystery that lies at the
heart of any human being. It can also
focus on the personal at the expense
of the political.
➤ SONTAG, continued on p.19
April 22 - May 5,18 2021 | GayCityNews.com
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