Near the end, as she lay on her deathbed, Susan Sontag received a visit from her agent, Andrew Wylie. Sontag had suffered through a lengthy, painful, and ultimately failed attempt to subdue a second bout with cancer, including a failed bone marrow transplant. But it was apparently crucial to her in that moment to be seen to her peers as somebody who was fine, just fine. “I’m working!” she cried to Wylie. “I’m working!”
This anecdote, tucked in a footnote of Benjamin Moser’s enlightening and finely tuned biography, is devastating in all sorts of ways. It isn’t just that her cry so efficiently and agonizingly conflates the first four stages of grief — denial, guilt, anger, depression. It isn’t just that it’s a climactic battle cry of a supreme polymath, the writer and critic who as a teenager was “sipping from a thousand straws” and made high and low culture accessible and meaningful to a mass audience. It is, most tragically of all, the lament of a woman who, until her death on December 28, 2004, clung to the assortment of masks she had collected through her life. The lesbian who insisted she wasn’t. The feminist who, partly out of careerist expediency, soft-pedaled her feminism. The author who let her husband take the credit. The invalid who insisted she was working. The public skeptic of metaphor who privately constructed a host of them.
Alert to Sontag’s contradictions, Moser structures his book around them; they provide Sontag with its narrative tension and central theme. As he points out early on, Sontag was “America’s last great literary star, a flashback to a time when writers could be, more than simply respected or well-regarded, famous.” The list of accomplishments is fearsome: a set of masterful writings on camp (read: gay) culture, photography, and AIDS; a pair of late bravura novels, The Volcano Lover and In America; and a nervy willingness to step into the political arena, whether it was embedding herself in Sarajevo during the early 90s genocide there, staging Waiting for Godot as a balm and echo of its victims’ isolation, or calling out 9/11 as a consequence of American foreign policy, a statement that got her pilloried in the moment but now reads as so commonsensical it hardly merits debate.
Yet for every defiant statement of purpose, there was a closet; for every confident assertion, a private fear. The acclaim and friendships she accrued for her accomplishments were so sizable they eclipsed her missteps, intellectual dead ends and, especially in her later years, detestable private behavior. Her early novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, are all but unreadable, though Moser gamely fits them into Sontag’s lifelong obsession with lines between dream and reality. A better critic than journalist, she delivered credulous dispatches about the North Vietnamese government. And as her celebrity grew, she increasingly succumbed to don’t-you-know-who-I-am-ism, abrasive if not downright abusive to those closest to her, up to and including her son, David Reiff, and her longtime partner, photographer Annie Liebowitz.
Fake it till you make it, they say. For Sontag, Moser suggests, this wasn’t just a bit of T-shirt wisdom — it was essential to her existence. He makes much of the fact that Sontag was the child of an alcoholic mother; the isolation and fear of abandonment that role thrust upon her, was exacerbated by a childhood that made her feel adrift, and as a teenager in Tucson, Arizona, her closest companions seemed to be the Modern Library books she stumbled across. Her mental state and physical location put her “in an adversarial position to her entire culture,” he writes.
Still, Moser is careful not to fall into the biographer’s trap of extrapolating an entire life from a childhood. Besides, any Grand Unified Theory of Sontag is doomed to failure. How does one reconcile her hard-charging intellectual precocity with whatever led her to marry at 17 and have a child at 19? Or reconcile her confident grasp of Freud with her willingness to all but ghostwrite her husband’s first book, The Mind of the Moralist? Or reconcile her openness to human expression with her status as a closeted lesbian, long past the point when coming out would do her career any harm? Or reconcile her learnedness about the human condition with her oblivousness to human behavior? She carried a child to term without consulting with an obstetrician, had to remind herself to bathe, and wrote about empathy in her journals as if it were foreign species to explore. “Absent native empathy, no amount of metaphor can help, and no about of literary knowledge — who had more that she? — can substitute for an ability to see others,” Moser writes. This is a book to thrust into the hands of any reader who enjoys parroting that business about how reading makes us more empathetic or something.
So it’s easier for Moser to demystify Sontag’s thought — his studies of “Notes on Camp,” On Photography, and even the dire early fiction are graceful and well-contextualized — than her actions. But because his tone is so reserved, so disinterested in passing judgement, none of what he writes about comes off as dishy or inappropriate. More to the point, his critical distance from his subject makes him an echo of Sontag herself, who was determined to craft a beloved public figure that would subsume the anxious and fearful child within. (“My ‘I’ is puny, cautious, too sane,” she wrote in her journal in 1957, crafting her persona. “Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity.”) As a result, Sontag feels like a curiously warm biography despite its subject’s (public) sangfroid; she and Moser share a common cause in looking at a subject plainly, without too much emotional interference.
But Moser’s equipoise leaves a lingering question: How much did Susan Sontag need a persona, a “Susan Sontag,” to succeed? In her early years, her skill at coding her work in ways that wouldn’t shake the establishment too much was a career asset — her homosexuality gave her entree to a subculture that allowed her to write “Notes on Camp,” even while the piece cannily disowns her complicity in what she was writing about. A fierce public attack on Adrienne Rich — following Sontag’s undefended accusation that feminists resurrected Leni Riefenstahl’s reputation — allowed Sontag to preserve intellectual bona fides, keep feminism at arm’s length, and push Rich to the margins. Much of this smacks of unfortunate careerism; Sontag craved both popularity and intellect, and saw various self-denials as necessary for both. In the 50s, and even through the 70s, this wasn’t necessarily a bad bet. But to see it curdle her inner self at the end of the 20th century is just one of multiple tragic notes that mark her death.
It seems bizarre, now. Today, the “I” is central to the work of a cultural writer, practically critical. Consider, for instance, Jia Tolentino, whose new collection, Trick Mirror, echoes the cover designs of the 70s, Sontag’s heyday. And the book itself inherits Sontag’s search for meaning in images, in popular culture; Tolentino’s work doesn’t exist without Sontag first suggesting, decades earlier, that it’s worth doing. But Sontag would never consider the kind of first-person candor Tolentino’s writing exemplifies; it would require merging two parts of herself that only made sense when kept separate.
“Belief in the image she had created — of the woman who listened to nobody, who was always right — was an increasingly vital lie,” Moser writes. Sontag pioneered an era when a woman critic could be famous for her intellect. And while we’re by no means distant from the era when a writer thrives on image, it may be that Sontag’s most important legacy is that she cleared a path for writers who could claim their intelligence without fear, without shame, without closets. The lie of the writer’s persona may still be there, but now it’s not so vital as it was back then.
[Published by Ecco on September 17, 2019, 832 pages, $39.99 hardcover]