A Long and Happy Life New York Times Book Review 1962
Nonfiction
She Made Thinking Exciting: The Life and Work of Susan Sontag
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SONTAG
Her Life and Work
Past Benjamin Moser
A human being who'd been a classmate in class school remembered being accosted i 24-hour interval in the one thousand by Susan Sontag, then effectually the historic period of 12, who wanted to know if he was enrolled in the program for "intellectually gifted children." When he said he was, Sontag asked if she could talk to him, "because the kids in my class are so dumb I can't talk to them." From and then until the terminate of her life, two weeks earlier her 72nd birthday, Sontag felt that every bit long as in that location was an equal with whom she could talk, even if she could no longer practice anything else, life would however be worth living. The operative give-and-take here is "equal."
She was built-in in 1933 in New York but raised in the suburbs of Tucson, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Her begetter died when Susan was 5, leaving her to be brought upward past a distinctly unloving mother: common cold, cute, alcoholic; even worse, hopelessly bourgeois. In Benjamin Moser'due south new biography, "Sontag: Her Life and Piece of work," we learn that very immature, just already in total possession of her trademark talent for scornful judgment, she felt she was "slumming, in my own life." Precocious is hardly the word for what Susan Sontag was. She read at three and wrote at 6; graduated from high school at 15 and married a well-known academic at 17. After many adventures of the mind at the universities of Chicago, Oxford and Paris, she arrived in New York Metropolis in 1959 — now divorced and a single mother — set, at the historic period of 26, to claim a place in a cultural scene primed to receive a young critic intent on ushering in "the new sensibility," the one that would soon be billing itself as a revolution in consciousness.
Much as she adored high culture, Sontag felt compelled to explain this sea modify in the American sensibility to its mandarins. Through the writing that proved her natural métier, the critical essay, she repeatedly explained that the highbrow do of interpreting one abstraction through another had run its course. It was the thing itself, she argued, the thing on its own terms, that must now receive our attention. Serious readers — one of her key words was "serious" — were to take a hint from the new music, the new fine art, the new hunger for direct experience. They were to consult the sensuality within themselves in lodge to run across more, hear more, feel more.
Sontag made thinking exciting — her great gift to the common reader. The essays that informed her early career — the ones written more than l years ago — are alive to this day with the beloved of intellection that was always at the eye of her piece of work. "Against Interpretation," published in 1966, still provides reading pleasure of a rare sort: Non just is the listen at work exhilarating, the book as a whole feels like the testament of a writer at ane with her moment.
By 1968 Sontag had very near go an international symbol of intellectual celebrity at its most accomplished. It mattered besides that she was a beautiful woman in a time when her beauty and her sexual practice qualified her for the exotic position of "the bright exception," e'er a figure held in extravagant regard. Information technology's difficult not to wonder if Sontag'south ascension to fame would have been as swell had she only been a pleasant-looking man.
Oddly enough, with regard to the inborn sensuality she so prized, Sontag herself appears to have been shortchanged. Throughout her life she experienced herself as all mind and no body; she could never tell the departure between what she actually felt and what she was supposed to feel. On this score, she worried endlessly — both nearly her allure to girls and nearly her own sexual coldness. Moser cites a unmarried sail on which she listed the people — women and men akin, I take it — with whom she had slept betwixt the ages of 14 and 17. The number is 36. A certain sign that she felt either little or aught. It is my sincere belief that Sontag drew back from coming out as long as she did not only because she feared existence stigmatized, but because in the matter of her own sexual identity she remained forever a novitiate.
Paradigm
People who do not know what they feel are ofttimes possessed of a capacity for disinhibition that can brand social intercourse unbearable. In the case of Susan Sontag the state of affairs could be deadly. A g stories about Sontag draw her chat as oft beginning with a few mildly insensitive remarks that could quickly escalate to a level of insult that seemed deranged. Moser mentions a 1995 dinner party in California at which, according to the critic Terry Castle, Sontag hectored a homo who had admired a 30-yr-sometime essay of hers. Why was he asking near that, she wanted to know. Hadn't he read any of her other work, she wanted to know. How dumb of him to bring that upwardly, yep dumb. In fact, at present that she's really thinking virtually information technology, how could he say such a dumb thing? "He should never have brought it up. He is behind the times, intellectually dead." And on and on she went. All considering she never felt real to herself and, therefore, others had no reality for her.
The anecdote fabricated me want to laugh and weep. At such times, as painful as this kind of behavior was for those who were her immediate target, I imagine Sontag oblivious, encased in a cold, hard isolation surrounding a heart that despairs of connexion. The very definition of spiritual exile.
The question of what was real and what unreal — philosophically or on the basis — lay behind almost everything Sontag ever wrote about, whether it was writers or philosophers, politics or aesthetics, illness or photography. During periods of political activism that landed her in actual war zones — Vietnam or Sarajevo — she did feel right upwardly against herself and could make mutual cause with all around her who felt the same. Still, nothing could induce her — neither war nor new love nor her 30 years' battle with cancer — to frame a slice through the employ of her ain immediate experience. Although it was ever the abstract rather than the physical that sparked her writing imagination — the political theorist Herbert Marcuse once said disparagingly, "She can make a theory out of a potato peel" — it was this very passion for experience in the abstract that gave her the subjects out of which she made glorious a course that had long been neglected.
Simply the generative power of the intellectual essay deserted Sontag in midlife and so, drastic to rejuvenate her work, she took (in the stance of this reviewer) a decidedly wrong turn. In her youth she had written two abstract novels, and then let novel-writing go. Now, in the 1990s, she determined on returning to fiction, and produced two historical novels — "The Volcano Lover" and "In America." The writing in each of these books is elegant and original, at times fifty-fifty glittering, merely at the last it fails to put felt life on the folio. The i affair she longed all the years to do — make fine art — lay beyond her powers.
Benjamin Moser'due south biography is a skilled, lively, prodigiously researched book that, in the master, neither whitewashes nor rebukes its discipline: It works difficult to make the reader see Sontag as the severely complex person she was. But Moser doesn't dear her, and this absence of emotional connection poses a serious problem for his book. A strong, vibrant, even mysterious flow of sympathy must exist betwixt the writer and the subject — however unlovable that subject might be — in order that a remarkable biography be written. And this, I'g afraid, "Sontag" is non.
During the course of its 800-plus pages, Moser (who has besides written a biography of Clarice Lispector) describes in detail every beloved affair of Sontag's, every intellectual position she took, every famous acquaintance she fabricated, every prize and award she received. He praises her for what is praiseworthy and, more or less, holds her accountable for what is not. But it strikes me that considering he doesn't trust his own feelings, he often fails to probe equally far every bit we'd like him to. In that location are times when this timidity twists his paragraphs into distinctly odd shapes. For case, in her famous essay on pornography Sontag weaves theoretical constructions for so long that they often seem to fall far from anything that resembles verifiable feel. Hither'due south how Moser deals with this difficulty:
In a single paragraph, he tells u.s.a. that Sontag writes, "What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex activity but death." Moser and so writes, "This seems questionable: Pornography, at least for near people, actually is nearly sexual practice." Merely come to call up of it, he says, "etymology relates pornography to the broader themes in Sontag's work. In Greek, pornografia ways a 'depiction of prostitutes.' And it is not prostitutes merely the depiction of them that relates pornography to decease. Depictions — images — prove lives bound toward their undoing." Huh?
If I accept any other complaint about the volume, it is that it is somewhat psychologically reductive. Repeatedly, it returns to the negative influence of the alcoholic mother — as though growing up the kid of an alcoholic could explain a Susan Sontag — and repeatedly, it dwells on the fame that assaulted rather than gratified her, certainly never put her demons to rest. Somehow, neither of these explorations allows Moser to dive deep. On the other hand, he writes vividly of a woman of parts determined to get out a marking on her fourth dimension; and makes us feel viscerally how large those parts were — the arrogance, the anxiety, the reach! No mean achievement.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/books/review/sontag-her-life-and-work-benjamin-moser.html
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