THE INNER LIFE OF A CRITIC

CURIOUS CONTRADICTIONS OF SUSAN SONTAG

‘Iam only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1971. Aptly, it’s Sontag’s own talent for metamorphosis that fascinates Benjamin Moser in his authorized biography of one of the 20th century’s most towering intellects.

Susan Lee Rosenblatt was born to Jewish parents in New York City in 1933. Aged 11, she changed her name to Susan Sontag (on the occasion of her mother’s remarriage, Sontag’s father having died in 1939), gladly swapping a surname she’d come to regard as “ugly and foreign” for one she considered more palatable. She felt like a “misfit;” a bookworm already cleverer than the other kids at school, and unhappy at home (her mother was an alcoholic). Thus, at the same time, she also resolved to be more popular. Both were explicit decisions, Moser argues, “to shed her outsider status, the first recorded instances in a life that would be full of them, of a canny reinvention.”

The most significant transformation in Sontag’s life, though, came 15 years later, when she was 26. By this point, she’d been married to the academic Philip Rieff for nine years, was the mother of their seven-year-old son David, and was no innocent (between losing her virginity at 14, and getting married at 17, she counted 36 sexual partners — both male and female — and she hadn’t been faithful to Rieff), but she had never had an orgasm.

Her first — experienced with the Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes (who, incidentally, was the ex-girlfriend of Harriet Sohmers, the first woman Sontag slept with, as a 16-year-old student back at Berkeley) — marked an all-round “revolution” in her life. “I feel for the first time the living possibility of being a writer,” Sontag wrote in her journal shortly thereafter. “The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego. For me to write, I must find my ego. The only kind of writer I could be is one who exposes himself.” Moser sees Fornes — whom Sohmers describes as so sexual “she could make a rock come” — as having “catalyzed the persona soon to be known as Susan Sontag.”

Sontag had already written Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), but this had been published under her husband’s name and passed off as his work (a detail that isn’t as scoop-worthy as the coverage of Moser’s biography has made it sound, since it turns out to have been pretty much common knowledge). In subsequently writing under her own name (and cutting herself off from Rieff when she divorced him), Sontag was exposing herself in a different way.

Her first novel, The Benefactor, appeared in 1963, but it was Notes on Camp the following year that established her “critical genius,” and with it, Susan Sontag became “Susan Sontag.” She was “a symbol of New York,” someone who was filmed by Andy Warhol and hung out with Jackie Kennedy. By the time her first essay collection, Against Interpretation, was published in 1966, The New York Times was able to call her “easily the most controversial critic writing in America today.”

But what of the Susan Sontag behind the symbol and beneath the persona? As an insecure child, Moser argues, she’d attempted to flee the unpleasantness of reality for “the safety of her mind.” It’s here, he claims, that we find the origins of what the teenage Sontag described as her “greatest unhappiness, the agonized dichotomy between the body and the mind.” At Berkeley, she believed that her sexual relationship with Sohmers would overcome this, but it wasn’t so simple.

Take her lifelong inability to come out as gay. She refused to make her 1989 work Aids and its Metaphors personal, nor name the disease killing her male character in The Way We Live Now, a story Moser thus decries as “thin, dainty, detached: forgettable because lacking the sense of what Aids meant to my friends, my lovers, my body.” Despite that early ambition, Sontag actually failed to fully “expose” herself.

On a more base level, this alienation from her body — “I have always liked to pretend my body isn’t there,” she wrote in her journal in 1960 — manifested in remarkable ways. She had no idea, until she actually went into labour with David, that childbirth was painful, and her personal hygiene left something to be desired (she often had to be reminded to wash).

“If Sontag could be said to have a life project,” Moser surmises, “it was to escape the feeling of fakeness she had identified in herself as a teenager. She wanted to become an authentic person, more physical, less cerebral. She wanted ‘to see more, to hear more, to feel more.’” He then traces this through her polemical writings. Sontag recognized, he explains, “the difference between the person, on the one hand, and the person’s appearance, on the other: the self-as-image, as photograph, as metaphor.”

Moser’s primary concern is Sontag’s intellectual development — “it is the mind’s progression that gives a narrative to a writer’s life,” he claims (unwittingly reinforcing his subject’s mind-body dichotomy) — and indeed, he writes in a way that’s assessing like a critic rather than narrating like a storyteller. His scene-setting, for example, relies on dates and facts — not evoked textures or moods.

This isn’t to say the book is dull — Sontag is too intriguing a character — but it is dry. Despite being a formidable work of scholarship, Moser’s biography offers us only a dim, flickering illumination of Sontag’s inner life.

The Daily Telegraph

Susan Sontag