I picked up
Sontag because I was beginning to do more work on essays, and one essay in particular, "On Criticism," betrayed a glaring blind-spot. In it, I would note that "Sontag looms as an essential voice in the 20th century critical tradition" and that "an essay on literary criticism is inappropriate when one is not deeply-versed in the history of the critic themselves." While I had been referring to myself in the latter statement, it was clear that an essay on the matter should necessarily include Sontag. And I had not read her, and was thus ill-equipped to reference her in such a way. So I remembered hearing about a new biography of her a while back and decided to check it out, before then moving onto her work, because it might help to put that work in better perspective.
Sontag accomplishes that, and a great deal more.
In the tradition of the biographies of Ernie Banks, Raymond Carver, and Justice William O. Douglas, Susan Sontag's gets added to the pantheon of the Best Books list of Flying Houses. At this rate, there should be a sub-category of "Best Biographies," as such a high percentage of them make the list, and as the list becomes crowded with them. Sontag, however, is singularly great for the same reason that I began to feel it did not quite rise to the level of a Best Book: it was erratic, it was inconsistent, it was repetitive, and it insinuated itself into the psyche of its subject. And ultimately it is this final, imperfect quality which renders it most perfect, and true to its subject matter. For Sontag often wrote about herself rather obtusely. Many of her essays shunned first-person, and she cultivated an air of mystery around her persona. She wrote about herself by writing about her subjects. And so too, Benjamin Moser has done with Sontag, albeit in an objective and nuanced manner. It is only a portrait, and if the work is imperfect, then it also mirrors the imperfections of its subject, who might wince at a great deal of its content. Yet on the whole I think she would find it mostly commendable, even though she abhorred the idea of biographies (and threw water on such efforts), in the sense that it captures her spirit.
I do think one thing is perhaps lost: Susan Sontag has the last laugh. The possibility is not deeply considered that she had a mordant sense of humor or was playing a massive trick on everyone, or that she was on "the spectrum." No, she was putting on a performance, putting forth the image of "Susan Sontag" that befitted one of the most prominent public intellectuals of her time. And so Sontag itself is an image that recognizes its own absurdity, and subverts that into feeling. While it is unsparing, and many may feel derision for her at times, there is ultimately so much love poured into the crafting of this work that one cannot help but be moved, particularly when one finds so many wonderful tidbits and points of validation. The love is palpable, and if appropriately borne out, the reader gains it for the subject, too.
The first such example of this occurs around page 50, in which Susan Sontag and two friends travel to the Pacific Palisades to visit Thomas Mann (1550 San Remo Drive). This is something I considered doing in 2008 (I believe it is a writing retreat/foundation now), so I found this very exciting:
"The encounter was so momentous for Susan that she immediately started to write about it. The effort would not culminate for nearly forty years, when, in 1987, she published 'Pilgrimage,' a story about her adolescent encounter with the elderly 'god in exile,' winner of the Nobel Prize, preeminent symbol of the dignity of German culture. 'Pilgrimage' has come to stand for the whole precocious childhood of Susan Sontag, the girl from the provinces who, by dint of her admiration for her illustrious predecessors, eventually catapulted herself into their ranks. It is one of the few memoirs she wrote. Because it reveals an insecurity few suspected lurked behind the figure of Susan Sontag--by 1987, hardly less intimidating than Thomas Mann himself--it became one of her best-known pieces of writing." (68-69)
She was somewhat disappointed by Mann, and noted that his comments on
The Magic Mountain "betray his book with their banality." Before we depart from this subject, a brief note on what is also the inaugural review of Flying Houses:
"In the story, they also discuss his forthcoming
Doctor Faustus. The novel is filled with the German dialect of the sixteenth century, Mann explains, and he fears it will not be readily understood by an American public. And in fact they did talk about the book, but not in this way, since the book appeared in English in 1948. By setting the meeting in 1947, though, Susan can anticipate a discussion of this work. 'Ten months later, later, within days of the appearance' of the book, she and Merrill were at the Pickwick Bookstore: 'I bought mine and Merrill his.'
Another diary entry, in a long list of childhood memories, tells another story.
'Being caught at the Pickwick Bookstore for stealing Doctor Faustus.' (72)
And so it was, sixty years later, that I bought mine from Nantucket Bookworks, and later began this new venture of critical inquiry, which has led to discoveries like these. Some friends went to go to stalk J.D. Salinger or Kurt Vonnegut in the early 2000's. Had I better sense at the time, I might have stalked Susan Sontag. For we did, briefly, share a geographical center and interwoven community of philosophic thought. Sontag emerged at the fringes of many of my courses, yet stopped just short of the syllabus. In one particular course, which included Camera Lucida (Barthes), This is not a Pipe (Foucault) and Society of the Spectacle (Debord), On Photography certainly would have been appropriate (perhaps our professor felt one text on the captured image was enough). In another course, we read The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse) and On Tyranny (Strauss). Sontag admired and looked up to Arendt, briefly housed Marcuse as he grieved for his late wife, and studied at the University of Chicago during Strauss's tenure. In a course on theater, we studied Artaud and Becket and Robert Wilson, each of whom also show up in Sontag. I did not read Derrida but he did teach at my school:
"But Sontag did not like these postmodern writers, and almost never referred to them by name. Instead, she expressed disapprobation of 'what's called postmodernism,' which she defined as 'making everything equivalent.' ... It was one thing to expand standards to incorporate art excluded by historical injustice, as the feminist and black movements tried to do. It was something else to suggest that all works were equivalent. This was an implication of Sontag's sixties provocations: 'It's very tiny--very tiny, content,' she quoted De Kooning's saying in 'Against Interpretation.' These could seem to convince herself to experience art sensually, like Irene [Fornes] or Paul [Thek]. She never actually believed that content did not exist: like many modernists, including Wittgenstein, she was interested in the philosophical shift from examining what things mean--the classical task of criticism--to examining how they come to mean it. But this idea, popularized, risked suggesting that meaning was a mere construction, and that language, literature, and art were no more than the sum of the biases of a dominant group. Far more than Marxism or Freudianism, postmodernism was the 'revenge of the intellect upon art' of which she had warned in 'Against Interpretation.' (425-426)
So no, I did not read Sontag in college, and this gap muddled my education, and deprived me of the intellectual grounding that I sought during the preparation of my colloquium, which was on politics and writing.
Now Sontag's political writing is routinely criticized in this volume, and it seems clear that Moser greatly prefers her thoughts on art over war, but if I had even been aware of her Three Paragraph 9/11 Takedown, it might have enriched the way I thought about the War on Terror, and refined the perspective that I took in that colloquium. I will not reprint it here (I am reprinting enough) but I highly recommend checking it out for its sheer audacity, particularly if one lived in New York City at the time, and can clearly recall that atmosphere.
My whole way of thinking about literature, in fact, might have been altered by reading Sontag sooner. What is Flying Houses, after all, but "against interpretation?" What are all of the problems that I have had with literary theory, and my inability to thrust myself into that mode of academia? Sontag subsumes it all, and I lament that I did not come to her sooner. It is tremendously difficult to study literature without a sympathetic guide; in the early 2000's, she may have been the best. (Though Harold Bloom also taught at my school at the same time, I did not find his method of analysis nearly as inspirational.)
Thus, as to a first point, Sontag is excellent at fleshing out some of the most complex philosophical thought of the era, which I would argue has not greatly advanced. We studied many of the same ideas in college, and where my professors may have failed to bring me towards a more comprehensive understanding of them, this book succeeds, at least in providing a robust introduction to such. Intellectually, it is peerless. Yet if one also has a certain appetite for gossip, it provides no shortage of such, either.
The book opens with a scene from a movie that Susan's mother, Mildred, filmed in January of 1919-- Auction of Souls, or Ravished Armenia. Mildred, born in March 1906 (along with my grandmother), is analyzed numerous times in this book as the most important figure in Susan's life, and their ongoing love-hate relationship serves as a metaphorical foundation to the other tumultuous relationships in her life. Mildred is alcoholic, she puts on a very pretty face for her friends and society, but privately at home Susan and her younger sister Judith see that facade fall away. She also, amusingly, does not like to be told the truth:
"Rather than seeing this as lying, Mildred saw omitting details as courtesy, tact: a consideration she extended to others and expected them to extend to her. 'Lie to me, I'm weak,' Susan imagined her saying. She was, she insisted, too fragile for the truth, and believed that 'honesty equaled cruelty.' Once, when Susan attacked Judith for speaking honestly to her mother, Mildred seconded the reproach: 'Exactly,' she said." (25)
Her husband, Jack Rosenblatt, Susan's father, died in the late 30's (in his own late 30's), and Mildred later remarried Nathan Sontag, whose surname was adopted for its alliterative and mellifluous quality. Mildred exists throughout the narrative as a kind of innocuous villain--she may have held Susan back in certain regards, but it was no mistake that Susan turned into the icon she became, obsessed as she was with appearances, facades and masks, at least in part due to Mildred's influence. She also became obsessed by the trope of the "fake death," as she was told for many years that her father was not dead, but simply away.
Susan's youth is difficult to pin down, as the family moved rapidly through vastly different landscapes. She was born in New York City in January 1933, and several months later her family moved to Long Island. In 1939, they briefly moved to Miami, FL before going back to New York in Forest Hills, Queens. In 1943, they moved to Tuscon, AZ, in an ongoing quest to find a climate-cure for the asthma Susan suffered from in her youth. In 1946, they moved to Los Angeles. which Mildred had left 25 years earlier. Susan attended high school at North Hollywood High, and somehow graduated in 1948 at 15. She wanted to go to the University of Chicago, but instead she had to compromise between UCLA and UC-Berkeley. She chose Berkeley, and there she met Harriet Sohmers, her first "companion," who used a great pick-up line on her: "Have you read Nightwood?" (84) Harriet, who had transferred after spending time at NYU and Black Mountain College, introduced her to the gay subculture of San Francisco and led to an embrace of her sexuality. She also created a one page document that itemized every sexual encounter she had between the ages of 14 and 17:
"The list is noteworthy for several reasons. The first is the sheer quantity of people she had managed to sleep with by her second year in college: thirty-six. The second is the number of one-night stands, people with single names, from Yvonne to 'Phil' to the alarming 'Grandma.' But the most remarkable aspect of this list is the pedagogical mind-set its title reveals. 'The Bi's Progress' shows that Susan had taken Gene's advice and was trying to train herself into heterosexuality by increasing the proportion of heterosexual encounters. Perhaps she could master heterosexuality as she mastered vocabulary words: by dint of practice." (90)
In 1950, she transferred to the University of Chicago and took a class from a young professor, Philip Rieff. Rieff would become her husband, and two years later, she would give birth to David, at age 19. David becomes another major figure in the narrative at this point, as Moser begins to paint a picture of a kind of forced-precociousness. Susan regards David not only as her son, but as a brother of sorts, and even a parent (he later became her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He "sleeps on piles of coats" at parties and she reads him Candide as a bedtime story. By contrast, Rieff is a rather incidental figure, and mostly notable for writing a book on Sigmund Freud, The Mind of the Moralist, largely (entirely?) ghostwritten by Susan in her early 20's. He refused to acknowledge this until many years later. I have not read Middlemarch but at one point Susan reflects on that novel and realizes that, "not only was [she] Dorothea, [she] had married Mr. Causabon." (116) (I might only get a reference to Mr. Rochester; Middlemarch is another glaring blind-spot.)
After Rieff's teaching stints at University of Wisconsin and Brandeis University, Susan and David moved with him to Cambridge, and Susan began graduate coursework in English at the University of Connecticut. At 20, she was the "youngest college instructor in the United States." (134). A year or two later, she transferred to Harvard. It is also around this time that she got to know Jacob and Susan Taubes, another professor and his wife, who would prove very influential in the wake of her divorce. Later, Susan sleeps with Jacob, and his wife does not seem to care and remains a close friend (they were morally adventurous, though they later separated and divorced; Susan Taubes committed suicide in 1969, four days after her novel Divorcing was savaged by The New York Times--so yes, some critics do have blood on their hands, but that is another essay for another time...). She then applied to St. Anne's, one of the women's colleges at Oxford, to continue her studies. This is where Part I of the book ends, after 150 pages.
Part II, then, opens in Oxford and Susan finds it rather boring and so she moves to Paris where she meets Annette Michelson, who then introduces her to Sartre and de Beauvoir. This is also where sadomasochism captures her interest, which Moser extrapolates into her view of relationships, which incorporated a Master-Slave dynamic that played out in many, if not all of them. After Paris, she returns to San Francisco, where she hands Philip a letter formalizing their break-up:
"I don't want to be married, at least not on the terms I (and you) have understood marriage. I hate the exclusiveness, the possessiveness of marriage--each couple stewing in its own privacy, guarding its interests against the world...Perhaps if I (I mean, we) had understood marriage different from the start...Perhaps if I (we) weren't so romantic, so in love with the idea of love. Adultery, civilized arrangements, marriages of convenience or comradeship--these happen, and work, all the time. But they're not for you and me, are they? Timid, easily bruised, sentimental as we are..." (168)
She read Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt and worried that Philip would use evidence of her bisexuality as a moralistic pose to secure custody of David. Philip's mental state deteriorated as the divorce became a reality, and perhaps because of that--his craziness outweighed hers--David went with her to New York. It is here that Susan meets the Cuban-American artist Irene Fornes, who was the ex of her own ex, Harriet, who actually moved to New York to be with Susan. Susan threw a homecoming party for her, and met Irene that night. Harriet left for Florida, and Susan began the affair; upon her return, Susan carried it on, and ultimately Irene called Harriet to tell her to move out, because that is what Susan wanted. Harriet complied. In 1959, "happenings," a new medium of performance art, began to pop up. Susan also began work on her first novel, The Benefactor.
I see this review is turning into a makeshift biography, a distillation of the information in Sontag. If the purpose of criticism is to imbue art with meaning, simply reciting the plot points of a book does little justice to it. Suffice to say, Part II concerns the emergence of Susan Sontag, public intellectual, essayist and amateur novelist.
It seems clear that Moser would rank Sontag's novels in the following order:
(1) The Volcano Lover
(2) In America
(3) The Benefactor
(4) Death Kit
He routinely criticizes her longer fiction, and perhaps rightly so, but of course I can't really tell you if he is wrong, only that her first two novels do sound rather theoretical, allegorical, absurdist, existential, outre and ripe for misinterpretation. She also writes "Notes on Camp," and it is given its rightful share of space as befits a breakout piece of its notoriety. Owing to the statements above, it is inappropriate for me to summarize the gravamen of her essays; I will only make a pledge to read Against Interpretation as an introduction to her oeuvre, and formulate such ideas later.
Part II ends in the late 1970's, as Susan deals with her first cancer diagnosis (breast cancer), having ascended to the ranks of the literati "Family" of the Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Roger Straus instrumental in securing her contracts to write books), having written a controversial essay about Vietnam after traveling to Hanoi, having gone to Sweden on government invitation to make an experimental film (Duet for Cannibals), and then another (Brother Carl), having become involved with Carlotta del Pezzo, Duchess of Caianello, "a Neapolitan aristocrat whose only concern was being," who was "notably indolent even by the standards of her milieu":
"'Carlotta might not even get out of bed,' Cavalli explained. 'It was impossible to make any plans with her.' In 1970, their friend Giovannella Zannoni explained this to Susan: 'She gets at times very vague about time and its meaning and seems totally incapable of understanding that other people may take dates and make appointments as something precise.' Cavalli added: 'I don't think she ever read a book in her life.' And she only ever made two things in her life, said Don Levine: 'her fat dark brown paper joints, which she rolled every morning, and her very spicy pasta sauce for breakfast." (338)
She had also gotten involved with the French actress Nicole Stephane, who helped her recover from this bout with cancer, and flew her on the Concorde to New York for her first public speech post-recovery, at Bobst Library, where she was regarded as one that had come back from the dead.
Moser mentions at several points that this first bout with cancer intensified Sontag's passion for life, made her cherish her days and attempt to cram 48 hours into 24. She rarely slept, and when someone accused her of napping, she would insist that had not been the case--even after they had actually seen her asleep, and informed her of such.
A brief digression: I happened to read a chapter of Why We Sleep today, which persuasively and scientifically argues that cancer is more likely to arise in adults that sleep too little. More generally, the less you sleep, the earlier you die. I do believe that Sontag is, perhaps, the greatest (worst?) example of this unfortunate result. She died at 71. She was about two months older than Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I am unaware of what Ginsburg's sleeping habits were, but I believe they were also similarly short (4-6 hours). She beat cancer numerous times; perhaps she lived so much longer because the rest of her lifestyle was healthier than Susan's (lifelong smoker). In any case, what Ginsburg is to attorneys (a heroine), Sontag is to writers.
Part III then, catalogs the prime of her life, opening as it does with the publication of On Photography. In here, her rift with Leni Riefenstahl is mentioned, and this is the only point of reference I had, from watching The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl 15 years ago, and hearing an interview during that film when Riefenstahl is asked some particular question and shakes her head and says, "Oh that Susan Sontag thing...." I wondered what it was she wrote, and it appears that it is basically a take-down essay, which appeared in her book Under the Sign of Saturn. So that mystery at least, is apparently solved.
She also took down Adrienne Rich, who wrote a letter criticizing Sontag's essay on Riefensthal, and made some very provocative statements about modern feminism:
"Sontag's furious response suggested that Rich had touched a nerve. She accused Rich of resorting to 'the infantile leftism of the 1960's' that verged into 'sheer demagogy' from 'that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind ("intellectual exercise") and emotion ("felt reality").' This was of thinking was 'one of the roots of fascism.' Rich, an intellectual of the first rank, was subjected to the charge of of illustrating 'a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric: anti-intellectualism.' Sontag's attack on Rich alienated many feminists, who would never consider her one of their own: a breach that may explain why Sontag's own feminist writing were mothballed." (397)
Moser clearly feels that Sontag was wrong on this score, but I wonder how much application it might have in today's world, when so much feminist rhetoric shows up on Twitter in bite-sized morsels of rage. Such "anti-feminist" attitudes are no longer in accord with contemporary culture. J.K. Rowling is cancelled and called a TERF for the suggestion that children may be confused about their sexuality, or gender; or for a foolish retweet, or "like," that is interpreted as monstrous. Camille Paglia has taken a somewhat similar pose to Sontag of late. Indeed, she shows up at a couple points in this book, and tried to start a rivalry with Sontag on Page 6 of the Times. Sontag brushed her off and swiftly denounced her. While Paglia is still one of the more redoubtable intellectuals in the public sphere, her influence pales in comparison due to her more "problematic" recent writings. Perhaps Susan Sontag would be cancelled today (perhaps she already is); I have to believe she would embrace it.
In one interview with Moser, he mentioned that he had to leave out 90% of the material he compiled, and so it is with this review, I will need to leave out 90% of my thoughts on this book, I will not be able to excerpt everything that amused me, I will need to paraphrase faster, and reflect more generally on the work as a whole. Yet I cannot move onto Part IV without mentioning Annie Leibowitz.
Part III is the best part of the book. I'll just put that out there and say it was the case for me. "This Susan Sontag Thing" and "Taking Hostages," back-to-back chapters, comprise the best 40 pages of the book. They largely center around the AIDS crisis and what Susan did (or didn't do) from her lofty perch. But it was not a lofty perch. After a fire in 1985, Sontag slept only covered by a tarp while her roof was repaired, because she did not have the money for a hotel. She met Annie in 1989 when she needed a photographer for the publication of AIDS and Its Metaphors. Annie had a reputation for bringing out "casual intimacy" in her subjects, sometimes after sleeping with them. This was no different with Susan, and as they fell in love with different parts of one another, and their relationship became more obvious, Susan deflected, only wanted Annie to be known as a "friend," and abhorred the idea of being labeled a lesbian.
From here, Moser goes into an extended take-down of AIDS and Its Metaphors ("for a movement that had moved far beyond polite critique, the book was most remarkable for its irrelevance.") (521) and Sontag's form of "activism" during the AIDS crisis. For me, at least, this is one of the most compelling moments of the book, because it juxtaposes her bisexuality in private with her public image, and calls her out for lacking the courage to "come out." But that would be a crass simplification, as Moser generally remains empathetic to his subject.
There is much less empathy in the discussion of her relationship with Annie. Quite frankly, Sontag comes off worse than she does at any other moment in the book during these scenes. Now then, I too am wary of labels, and do not like using the term "toxic" unless it applies to a chemical compound. Relationships are generally difficult, and the Master-Slave dynamic does play out in certain facets of life for everyone, but I do think Susan's apparent lack of gratitude for Annie's generosity is disgraceful, akin to the child of fabulously wealthy parents that takes the largess and privileges bestowed on them for granted, and becomes a worse person because of it. I do find it amusing when Susan is so casually cruel to Annie, but it seems clear that Annie did not feel that way, and it is heartbreaking to consider how she felt after she had given so much:
"And Annie was not only supporting Susan. Directly but more often indirectly, she was supporting everyone around Susan. She paid all of Susan's assistants. And through Susan, quite a lot Annie's money found its way to David, 'down to buying Susan's Christmas present to him of Navajo bracelets every year.' Annie supported Nicole, impoverished following the death of her spendthrift father in 1984: 'I would just call Annie and say 'Nicole needs some money,' and she would send it,' Carla said. One duty of Susan's next assistant, Greg Chandler, was depositing Annie's checks. After the MacArthur ran out, these amounted to fifteen thousand dollars per week. Their accountant estimated that over the course of their relationship Annie gave Susan at least eight million dollars." (526-527)
Even so, it is not entirely true that Susan became a worse person after obtaining the trappings of wealth via Annie. Had that been the case, her work in Serbia, several years later, would never have been done. And that is where Sontag goes in Part IV: Sarajevo, where Sontag famously staged Waiting for Godot in 1993. The opening of this final part, which delves into the history of Yugoslavia and Croatia, is perhaps more difficult and confusing than anything in Parts I or II, discussing the philosophical precepts of her work and those of her predecessors. Moser understands this, and while he seems to admire Sontag greatly for her work there, it is contrasted with her trip to Hanoi (and her essay on the matter), which he criticizes at multiple points. Generally, she is not good on politics, she took a rather superficial view of Vietnam, and she didn't do enough for AIDS activism, but here, finally, she finds redemption.
I am sure many people, myself included, have somewhat vague memories of that period. I do remember Zlata's Diary, which many of my classmates read in 5th or 6th grade. I do remember Slobodan Milosevic, and the genocide of the Albanians, and the war in Kosovo. As to the details, I have zero practical knowledge. Moser at least attempts to help:
"The largest ethnic group was the Serbs, for example, who were often coextensive with--but nonetheless distinct from--the Serbians, who are the citizens of Serbia, not all of whom are Serbs: they could be Albanians, Hungarians, Jews, or even Chinese. Serbs, in contrast, are an ethnic group of Eastern Orthodox Christians who may be found anywhere from Moscow to Miami; and there were furthermore Bosnian Serbs, Kosovo Serbs, and Croatian Serbs--by no means to be confused with the Serbian Croats--all of whom had their own histories, though all spoke the same language, which was generally known as Serbo-Croatian, but which was also, depending on the place, called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, or simply, with a shrug, 'our language.'"
So basically the situation there was like a powder keg, a hornet's nest, or a clusterf***. The Siege on Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days. People outside cared, but not really that much. The United Nations could have ended the fracas in a matter of days, yet they avoided intervention until the situation became untenable. Susan Sontag did not initiate American intervention in Sarajevo, but she was one of the very few that traveled to the region, on numerous occasions, and took a personal interest in the people and its culture and the forces bearing down upon them. She did not escape every night to her fancy hotel room, she dug into the trenches with her theater troupe. Unlike with the AIDS crisis, her activism was strident and and aggressive. She denounced all of her fellow artists that did nothing. Even Salman Rushdie, whom she had been instrumental in helping protect after the fatwa was issued upon him, remarked that there were "two Susans"--one of which could be "brilliant and funny and loyal and rather grand," while the other would be a "bullying monster." (590) It seems that near the end of her life, many of her friends abandoned her. Many of them still "loved" her, they just did not "like" the way she had become.
Part IV also details some the writing and reception of In America, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1999. Moser does not seem to like it as much as The Volcano Lover, but acknowledges it as a decent book that probably could have been better. Apart from that, the major narrative of Part IV is the recurrence of her cancer, and the efforts she took to fight it, including a very dangerous bone marrow transplant procedure. In contrast to many people in the final stages of life, when they are on their deathbed, Susan continued weighing experimental treatment options and never finally "gave in" or "resolved" to let herself die.
That is an appropriate ending to this story about a woman that never had enough time to read and write everything she wanted. Of course, she left her mark on this world, but from this biography it appears that Susan Sontag the person left more of a mark than Susan Sontag's collected writings. Perhaps it was like this in the 1970s and 1980s, when writers, like Kurt Vonnegut for example, could be fabulously well-to-do, get written up in Page Six, and appear in cameos in movies (Sontag has a brief scene in Zelig, which I should watch whenever I am able to move onto reviewing Apropos of Nothing). People cared about what she thought, and what she had to say. She wrote about a "diva" in her final novel, and she ultimately was one, in her own way. If anyone has serious designs on being a writer, it would behoove them to read this book. It opened me up to her world in a way I don't think anything else could have, as she wrote about herself obtusely and engaged in personal mythology. She is one of the great inspirational artists of the latter half of the 20th century, and Moser has captured (nearly?) everything essential about her in this volume. In one interview, he said he did not know what he wanted to do next, already having done two biographies. If he does nothing else, at least there is this (it did win the Pulitzer Prize). Sontag dreamed of winning the Nobel Prize, like Thomas Mann, but J.M. Coetzee won it in 2003, and her hopes were dashed. She may not have been as acclaimed as she felt she deserved, and she may not have wanted biographies written about her, but she will be remembered, and more people will come to her work, largely now because of the work Moser has done. A fantastic movie could be made from it. For all the inspiration Sontag personally conjured over the course of her life, this book will do the same for everyone that never got the opportunity to meet her, or live in her time.
Grade: A
