Paddock Lisa Olson - Susan Sontag: the making of an icon

SUSAN SONTAG

SUSAN SONTAG

The Making of an Icon

Revised and Updated

Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright 2016 by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rollyson, Carl E. (Carl Edmund) author. | Paddock, Lisa Olson author.

Title: Susan Sontag : the making of an icon / Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock.

Description: Revised and updated edition. | Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016003042 (print) | LCCN 2016013843 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628462371 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781496808462 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496808479 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496808486 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496808493 (pdf institutional)

Subjects: LCSH: Sontag, Susan, 19332004. | Authors, American20th centuryBiography. | Women and literatureUnited StatesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC PS3569.O6547 Z876 2016 (print) | LCC PS3569.O6547 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5409dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003042

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Carol Klein, Marion Meade, and Anne Waldron

Sed quid agas? Sic vivitur.

What would you have me do? This is the way we live now.

Cicero

CONTENTS

PREFACE

After we proposed this biography in 1996, we wrote to Susan Sontag asking for an interview, although it seemed unlikely that she would cooperate with our project. She had spent a lifetime creating herself. The very idea of others proposing to tell her story would seem presumptuous to her. In fact, as a later chapter of this book relates, she was outraged that anyone would write her life without obtaining her permission. Still worse, how could a decent book result from the efforts of writers who did not know her? And what good is a biography of a subject who is still alive, anyway?

Some reviewers of our biography also objected to our approach, pointing out our lack of access to Sontag and decrying our treatment of Sontag as not only a writer, but also an icon. They resisted the notion that her prominence came from anything other than her writingor they dismissed as unimportant her own image building. It did not matter to them that we had access to several archives, most notably the one Farrar, Straus & Giroux deposited at the New York Public Library. It did not matter that we had interviewed key figures in her life, many of which have now passed on and can never be consulted by other biographers. We had more than enough evidence of Sontags rise in the literary ranks to write the kind of biographya first biographythat would stand out no matter how many books were written after her death. But then, biography is often misunderstood by critics, who busy themselves with fiction and poetry, and do not see the relevance of biography to their studies.

We saw no point in awaiting our subjects demiselike so many undertakers of her life, who have now emerged in various memoirsand wanted to give her a sporting chance, so to speak, to comment on our work. We were disappointed, as the penultimate chapter of this book will show, that all Sontag could think to do was vilify her biographers, demonstrating a remarkable lack of sophistication when it came to understanding how biographers operate and why they write at all. This crude understanding of biography was aided and abetted by her friends, who invented all sorts of fanciful stories about our work. Some of these fabrications appear in this narrative, because they illuminate the kind of cocoon Sontag enclosed herself in.

Now, with access to Sontags letters and diaries, we are in a position to enhance the texture of our narrative, adding a sense of immediacy that is due largely to getting closer not only to Sontags voice, but to the voices of her friendsincluding the one found in the remarkable diaries and stories of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling. But this new evidence also confirms what we already knew about Sontag. In his introduction to her diaries, Sontags son, David Rieff, admitted, One of the principal dilemmas in all this has been that, at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person. This was exactly how we saw her in the 1990s. We did not believe that she disclosed a hidden self to a select fewor even, perhaps, to herself, except possibly in psychotherapy. She could not afford to level with herself. Her guardedness, however, should not necessarily be viewed as deceit. Some successful people fare better when they refrain from examining their own motives closely, which may explain why they cannot bear the thought of writing an autobiography. Consequently, biographers go to work on them. Sontag herself found reading biographies of her favorite authors a trial and knew exactly why she did not want to see her own life in print. What a painful demystification of S.[imone] W.[eil] this biography is! she wrote in her diary after reading Simone Petrements two-volume work about the French philosopher.

What did Sontag not want to talk about? Her sexuality, for one thing, and her ambition for another. Again, David Rieff bears witness to what we learned from our research: In particular, she avoided to the extent she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality or any acknowledgment of her ambition. Rieff goes on to say that his decision to publish his mothers diaries is a violation of her privacy. So what seemed so awful to some in the 1990s is now pronounced, however regretfully, as revelation Sontags son cannot avoid. It is lamentable that he should be the one to edit her diaries, but given his bond with his mother and her desire to see him as a projection of her desires and ambitions, his decision to out her seems inevitable.

In fact, although Rieff could not be expected to admit as much, Sontag was questioned about her sexuality only after the publication of our biography. Interviewers wanted to broach the subject with her, but she had been successful in branding anyone who asked personal questions as vulgar. Even the boldest interrogators desisted. For her, biography was the ultimate vulgarity, and she had plenty of friends who enjoyed playing to her prejudice.

With our access to the behind-the-scenes Sontag, we can hear her private voice. This book is now, therefore, a more intimate biography, but it is also the kind of biography it would have been if she had spoken with us and said directly what she was saying to others and to herself. We dont feel we got Sontag wrong in the earlier version of this work. What follows is an amplified and augmented portrait of an iconic and paradoxical personality never content to be just a writer, who nonetheless passionately wanted to be seen as a writer and a performer on the worlds literary stage.

SUSAN SONTAG

MY DESERT CHILDHOOD

193345

One of her earliest memoriesshe is about fouris set in a park. She listens to her Irish nanny, Rosie, talking to another giant in a starched white uniform: Susan is very high-strung. Susan thinks, Thats an interesting word. Is it true?

She is remembering an event that occurred c. 1937, an event she describes in her Paris Review interview of 1995. The park is in New York City. The nannys name is Rose McNulty, and she is illiterate. Rosie was like a character from a book, wrote one observer. She was a large woman with freckled skin and fading red hair. She even had a cape to go with her white uniform. It was Susans impression that Rosie did not know what to make of her temperamental charge. Later, Susan would describe Rosie as a freckled elephant who took me to Mass every Sunday and read me aloud stories in the evening paper about car accidents.