Sigrid Nunez - Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag

ALSO BY SIGRID NUNEZ

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A Feather on the Breath of God

For Rouenna

Naked Sleeper

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

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Copyright 2011 by Sigrid Nunez

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Previously published by Atlas & Co. Publishers in 2011

First Riverhead trade paperback edition: October 2014

ISBN: 978-0-698-17280-7

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I T WAS MY first time ever going to a writers colony, and, for some reason I no longer recall, I had to postpone the date on which I was supposed to arrive. I was concerned that arriving late would be frowned on. But Susan insisted this was not a bad thing. Its always good to start off anything by breaking a rule. For her, arriving late was the rule. The only time I worry about being late is for a plane or for the opera. When people complained about always having to wait for her, she was unapologetic. I figure, if people arent smart enough to bring along something to read... (But when certain people wised up and she ended up having to wait for them, she was not pleased.)

My own fastidious punctuality could get on her nerves. Out to lunch with her one day, realizing I was going to be late getting back to work, I jumped up from the table, and she scoffed, Sit down! You dont have to be there on the dot. Dont be so servile. Servile was one of her favorite words.

Exceptionalism. Was it really a good idea for the three of usSusan, her son, myselfto share the same household? Shouldnt David and I get a place of our own? She said she saw no reason why we couldnt all go on living together, even if David and I were to have a child. Shed gladly support us all if she had to, she said. And when I expressed doubts: Dont be so conventional. Who says we have to live like everyone else?

(Once, on St. Marks Place, she pointed out two eccentric-looking women, one middle-aged, the other elderly, both dressed like gypsies and with long, flowing gray hair. Old bohemians, she said. And she added, jokingly, Us in thirty years.

More than thirty years have passed, and she is dead, and there is no bohemia anymore.)

She was forty-three when we met, but she seemed very old to me. This was partly because I was twenty-five, and at that age anyone over forty seemed old to me. But it was also because she was recuperating from a radical mastectomy. (Break a rule: when hospital staff scolded her for refusing to do the recommended rehabilitation exercises, a sympathetic nurse whispered in her ear, Happy Rockefeller wouldnt do them, either.) Her skin was sallow, and her hairit would always bewilder me that so many people thought she bleached the white streak in her hair when it should have been obvious the streak was the only part that was its true color. (A hairdresser suggested that leaving one section undyed would look less artificial.) Chemotherapy had thinned much but not all of her extraordinarily thick, black hair, but the hair that grew back was mostly white or gray.

So, an odd thing: when we first met, she looked older than she would as I got to know her. As her health returned, she looked younger and younger, and when she decided to color her hair she looked younger still.

It was spring, 1976, almost a year after Id finished my MFA at Columbia, and I was living on West 106th Street. Susan, who lived at the corner of 106th Street and Riverside Drive, had a pile of unanswered correspondence she had let accumulate during her illness and which she now wanted to get through. She asked some friends, the editors of The New York Review of Books, to recommend someone who might help her. I had worked as an editorial assistant at the Review between college and grad school. The editors knew that I could type and that I lived nearby, so they suggested that she call me. It was exactly the kind of odd job I was looking for then: the kind unlikely to interfere with my writing.

The first day I went to 340 Riverside Drive, it was sunny, and the apartmenta penthouse with many large windowswas blindingly bright. We worked in Susans bedroom, I at her desk, typing on her massive IBM Selectric while she dictated, either pacing the room or lying on her bed. The room, like the rest of the apartment, was austerely furnished; the walls were white and bare. As she later explained, because this was where she worked, she wanted as much white space around her as possible, and she tried to keep the room as free as possible of books. I dont remember any pictures of family or friends (in fact, I can recall no such pictures on display anywhere in that apartment); instead, there were a few black-and-white photos (like the kind that came in publishers publicity packets) of some of her literary heroes: Proust, Wilde, Artaud (a volume of whose selected writings she had just finished editing), Walter Benjamin. Elsewhere in the apartment there were a number of photographs of old movie stars, and stills from famous old black-and-white films. (These, as I recall, had previously decorated the lobby of the New Yorker Theater, the revival house at 88th Street and Broadway.)

She was wearing a loose turtleneck shirt, jeans, and Ho Chi Minh tire flip-flops, which I believe she had brought back from one of her trips to North Vietnam. Because of the cancer, she was trying to quit smoking (she would try and fail and try again, time after time). She went through a whole jar of corn nuts, washing them down with swigs from a plastic gallon jug of water.

The pile of letters was daunting; it would take many hours to get through, but what made our progress absurdly slow was that the phone kept ringing, and each time it rang she would pick up and chat (in some cases for quite some time) while I sat there, waiting, and, of course, listening, sometimes petting her sons large, attention-seeking malamute dog. Most of the callers were people whose names I knew. I gathered she was appalled at the way many people were responding to the news of her cancer. (Though I didnt know it yet, she was already working out ideas for what would become her essay Illness as Metaphor.) I remember her describing cancer to one of her callers as the imperial disease. I heard her say to several people that the recent deaths of Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt had left her feeling orphaned. Fierce indignation as she reported someone saying of Trilling that it was no wonder hed gotten cancer since he probably hadnt fucked his wife in years. (And this was an