Pulitzer-winner Moser talks ‘Sontag’
Benjamin Moser spent seven years researching the 71 years Susan Sontag lived. He says his 800page biography, “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” represents just a small portion of his research into the life of the essayist, novelist, activist and public figure.
Moser spent thousands of hours talking to hundreds of friends, and he dug through Sontag’s computer, parsing writings and correspondence for data worthy of a definitive biography.
“This computer I’m speaking to you from has enough material for 20 more volumes about Susan Sontag,” Moser says via Zoom from his home in the Netherlands.
Published last year, the book already ran through its promotional cycle. But eight months after it was published, “Sontag” still has some degree of hold on Moser’s day-to-day. A paperback edition is due in September. And earlier this month, the Houston native received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. And deservedly so. “Sontag” is a formidable literary juggling act in which the author had to thread together biographical as well as interpretive content about his subject and her work.
Further complicating his task, Moser had to navigate muddied waters because his subject was a striking mix of the iconic and mysterious. “She definitely had a private self and a public self,” Moser says. “And they’re very different selves. She’s not the same person in every situation, but then none of us are.
“We’re not the same person at different times in our lives. Certain relationships and things we’re interested in, they can be radically different after 10 years. Intellectually and culturally and artistically and politically, she was always on her toes. Because of that, this book always feels short to me. I had to move with her through so many phases.”
In the 21st century, Sontag remains more familiar as a name than for any single piece of work. But Moser’s book proved a great entry point into her work, as it contextualized her writing with connections to her life. Sontag died in 2004. Nearly 10 years later, Moser started his research, which included quite a bit of travel and interviews with nearly 600 people who knew her.
Moser worried some of her friends would be reticent. But as with his 2009 book, “Why This World” about Brazilian novelist
Clarice Lispector, Moser found many of them eager to discuss Sontag.
“I learned that with my last book,” he says. “You don’t know how little people around them have discussed this person until you talk to them. And the silence becomes greater over time. Kids don’t want to hear about the Vietnam War. Grandkids don’t care. That sort of thing. But sometimes people just feel important because someone listens to them.”
In Sontag, he found a person who projected grand ambitions and confidence, which took root despite a childhood largely absent of nurturing.
“She had a pretty unhappy youth,” Moser says. “It starts with her mother, who was totally not present for her. And she was raised basically by a servant. Her father died when she was 5. She moved, so there wasn’t a stable family place, no school or friends. And she was brilliant and felt like a freak.
“You can feel that sadness come into her life.”
The book also delves deep into the idea that Sontag was the sole author of “Freud: The Mind of the Moralist,” a book published under the name of her husband at the time, Philip Rieff. That portion of the book has come under some scrutiny recently as the Los Angeles Review of Books found fault with Moser’s research and assertions and also questioned some appropriations in his book.
Moser’s biography deftly covers both the content of Sontag’s work and the biographical stimuli that informed it. The book is both informative and interpretive, always following a path cut by its subject. So it is full of contemplation and conflict.
Moser grew up in Houston surrounded by books, so there’s little surprise his first two works would concern themselves with authors. His mother ran Stop, Look &
Learn, a book and toy shop in Rice Village, and she also spent time as a manager at Brazos Bookstore.
These days he lives in the Netherlands. He was back in Texas last year on his book tour for “Sontag.” On that visit, he may have found the subject for his next book, which would bring him back home. Someone asked him if he thought Sontag could have thrived artistically and intellectually in Dallas, the same way she did in New York.
“I simply said, ‘No,’ ” he says. “I have dear friends in Dallas. But somebody like Susan Sontag was attracted to a place like New York and couldn’t envision living anywhere else.”
But the query got Moser thinking about his hometown. He was born in Houston in the mid-1970s. He grew up hearing stories from his father and grandfather about what the city looked like decades earlier.
“My dad would talk about the Galleria area when it was the countryside,” he says. “This was a time when a lot of places were smaller and didn’t have the same opportunities as today, so people who were ambitious went to other cities.
“There’s something there that
I’d like to write about next.”